‘ “What am I here for?” she would ask, plaintively, if one stared out of the window. But she was also proud of them, and if one didn’t look, and kept one’s eyes in the boat, so to speak, she would grow restive and say: “You’ve not looked at the garden. But then you’re not interested in gardens.” One never quite knew where one was with her.
‘How invulnerable she was, or seemed to be! And as one sat, listening to her unpredictable malice, which always had the note of collusion in it, one was almost aware of the subject’s accessories strewn about the floor, as in a picture by Velasquez: the shield, the breastplate, the gauntlets—all the apparatus of defence. And as one by one the idols were thrown down, by hints at this or that little weakness, laughable and belittling, so, piece by piece, one put on the whole armour—not of righteousness, for Lady Porteous was too mundane to clothe herself in that—but of ridicule, which in some circumstances is a defence hardly less strong. I always left her feeling twice the man I was, for she had established the fallibility of mankind on such a firm foundation that with her one could laugh at anything, even at death itself. Indeed, I remember once writing an imaginary dialogue in which Death called at Lady Porteous’s palazzo and was told he could not be received as he lacked the necessary social qualifications—he was in fact too common. So, snubbed, he turned away, leaving her immortal. I used to wonder whether I could show her this, for in certain moods she enjoyed a joke against herself, though she preferred that she should tell it.
‘But I found that in my absence he had called, and had not been turned away; indeed, he had called twice and of the two it was the frail Sir Hilary who had put up the stiffer fight. The joke had been turned against Lady Porteous at last.
‘And it had been turned against me, for I had boasted, not quite truthfully, that she was always at home to me. Perhaps her spirit enjoyed the joke, for she never liked one to call without having rung up first. “I might be out if you didn’t ring up,” she threatened. But Death hadn’t been civil enough to make an appointment with her: she died of a stroke, I was told.
‘I left the palace to its alien occupants,’ my friend said, ‘and got home somehow, feeling half the man I was. I hadn’t counted on the weakening effect of my illness, and the long walk, punctuated by disappointments, was too much for me. I seemed to see “No Admittance” written on every door I passed. Closed doors, closed shutters, iron grilles, cats grimacing at me from behind the grilles: Venice on a wet day is barred like a fortress. I took to my bed again and was too much discouraged to write to my other friends who, in any case, didn’t conjure up the real meaning of the word. But the expedition had created in me a hunger which I couldn’t assuage. The idea of death haunted me as it sometimes does in Venice: the churches, the bells, the beauty, the overwhelming vitality of the people: all this insistence on what the senses can give one, on life: if one cannot accept it, what remains but its opposite, death? In Northern countries there are so many degrees of living: one can turn life down, like a gas-fire, and live by its dull glow: but Italy is a land of contrasts, not of half-tones. I felt that time was pressing and I had a legacy to give someone: myself.
‘For my second convalescence I returned to my first window and when I looked out it wasn’t in the spirit of a railway passenger, finding something in everything, pleased with just seeing: I had a particular object in view. Only the object was not in view. The palace had twenty-seven windows visible from my flat: it was not exactly opposite, it stood at a slight angle and the windows on the nearer side of the deep courtyard were hidden from me. Those I could see, and from which I could be seen, were of many shapes and sizes, some as tall as a modest-sized house, some squat and longitudinal. I scanned them all, and from time to time I would get up and lean out of my window and wave; and then, dazzled by the glare outside, turn back blinking into what seemed the darkness of my own room. But there was never an answering gesture.
‘My month in Venice was running out and I had nothing to show for it. I had scarcely written a word. I had been ill and got better, I had been ill and got better, and I had made one expedition into Venice; otherwise my existence had been as pointless and unfruitful as the Lady of Shalott’s, and far less decorative: you could not have made a poem out of it, you could not have made anything. All I had to show was the money I had ear-marked for Antonio’s wages. On this I could live beyond the time-limit I had prescribed for myself. It was the fruit—the very tangible fruit—of my quarrel with Antonio, and as such had a bitter taste. A sense of utter futility and failure possessed me. It was both personal and moral. Moral for the feeling of time wasted that haunts every unproductive artist: that I was used to. And personally I was a failure: I hadn’t made any contacts. I was used to that, too. But I was not so used to the idea of having let myself down by letting someone else down. La signorina sconosciuta who had found my appearance so interesting and who was so sure that I was interested in her: yielding to a small, spiteful impulse, I had snubbed her, I had rebuffed her, I had taken the line that my privacy was sacrosanct, I had behaved as if a chorus of admirers was egging me on.
‘I had treated her as a nuisance, not as a human being, with feelings to be wounded or consoled.
‘How brutal I had been, in my self-sufficiency, brushing her aside! Just because, in my life, a certain good fortune had attended me, I felt I could afford to treat her letter as an un-welcome item in a fan-mail.
‘How good it was of her, I now thought, to single me out for her attention, how good of her to stay in Venice and wait for me, instead of going away, as Denys and Miranda had, or dying, as Lady Porteous had! In all this great city of Venice, which I had once known so well, she was the only human being left who seemed to care for me, and she was a stranger! She possessed the precious, the sacred gift of sympathy! She had pretended to know something about me, but what could she know? The truth was she had felt the impulse to communicate, and she had acted on it, at whatever cost to pride.
‘My visits to the window grew so frequent that in the end I had to ration them to one per quarter of an hour; but I made up for this self-denying ordinance by waving so frantically when I did go that passers-by might well have thought me mad.
‘Several days went by like this, and then the second letter came. Shall I read it to you?’ my friend asked. ‘No, you won’t want to hear it, and in any case it’s unpardonable, undressing myself like this in front of you, and undressing——No, it isn’t decent. You should have stopped me long ago. I can’t think why you let me go on.’
He was quite ready to be angry with me.
‘Yes, please read it,’ I said.
He took out his pocket-book but didn’t open it.
‘I could just give you the gist of it,’ he said, eyeing me doubtfully.
‘No, let me hear it.’
He cleared his throat and read rather loudly, in a voice that was quite unlike his own:
‘ “Carissimo,—At first I thought that you were angry with me, for what I had written, and then I saw your signals, and knew that you were not. But now you will be really angry for I must say no, no, no. I should never have written to you—it was madness. What possessed me I cannot think: it was something plus fort que moi. I have regretted it ever since: I have shed the bitterest tears. Do not think about me, do not ask about me, above all do not try to find me. But no, think about me a little, as someone who wishes you well but must be forever unknown to you.” ’
Without looking at me my friend replaced the letter in his note-case and the note-case in his pocket; and for a moment hardly seemed to know where he was. He made one or two false starts and then said, ‘I asked Giuseppina who had brought the letter. She said she did not know; she had found it in the letter-box. She managed to suggest I had reproached her, both with knowing and not knowing; she was a past-master of reproach.