The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  Leaving her companion behind, she hastened back to the gondola. Mr. Kolynopulo was asleep, sprawled across the cushions, his head over-weighting the hand that sought to sustain it. Emilio, also, was resting, but as she came he threw himself across the poop into an attitude that absurdly caricatured his fare’s. Lavinia laughed and clapped her hands; gone was her sense of isolation, gone her wish to re-create herself by a sentimental communion with the past. The darkness, palpable and unnerving in the cloister, fell into its place, dwindled into a time of day, was absorbed by Emilio and forgotten. Something that had stirred and asserted itself at the back of her mind fell asleep, seemed to die, leaving her spirits free. She resolved to avail herself of a security, a superiority to circumstance, that might vanish as suddenly as it came.

  ‘Mrs. Kolynopulo,’ she said, pronouncing the ridiculous name more seriously than ever before, ‘you said I might ask you a question: do you remember?’

  ‘No, dear; I can’t say that I do.’

  ‘It was about the gondoliers.’ Lavinia’s buoyancy remained, though she detected a wobble in her flight.

  ‘What about them, dear?’ Mrs. Kolynopulo enquired.

  Lavinia realized then that her difficulty in putting the question was in itself a partial answer to it; but she had gone too far to draw back.

  ‘You said that married people did not—had not . . . . certain . . . . dealings with the gondoliers that unmarried people had. I wondered what you meant.’

  ‘Why, you’ve got it, my dear,’ Mrs. Kolynopulo chuckled. ‘You’ve said it yourself.’

  A sensation of nausea came over Lavinia. She felt degraded and shown up, as though, in a first effort to steal, she had been caught red-handed by a pickpocket of older standing.

  ‘What have I said?’ she muttered. ‘I haven’t said anything.’

  ‘Oh yes, you have,’ her mentor rejoined. ‘You said that certain people had dealings with gondoliers. “Well, they do. Relations, it’s generally called.’

  ‘Why do they?’ Lavinia murmured stupidly.

  ‘Who, dear? The people, or the gondoliers?’

  Oh, the agony of answering that question, the effort of bringing her mind to bear upon it. She turned the alternatives over and over, as though playing heads and tails with herself. The words began to have no meaning for her. At last she said:

  ‘The gondoliers.’

  ‘Well,’ Mrs. Kolynopulo answered in a tone of considerable relief, ‘you may be sure they don’t do it for nothing.’

  Lavinia said not a word on the way home, and when she went to bed her diary remained unopened. She seemed to have become inarticulate, even to herself.

  13

  The following evening, however, she resumed her record. ‘I wish I could have left yesterday out of my life, as I left it out of my diary. I didn’t mean to refer to it; indeed I didn’t mean to add another word to this confession. It is false; it is a sham; there is a lie in every line of it. So, at least, I thought this morning. I have always been, and always shall be, the kind of character the last few days have proved me to be: I am the Lavinia who was cruel to Stephen, who snapped the head off a poor hairdresser, who shocked her mother with an indecent word, and imperilled her health with a lie, who worried two boon companions into disclosing a scandal as untrue as it was vile. This is the house Lavinia has built, and a proper pigsty it is; but real, quite real, unlike the decorous edifice whose pleasing lines are discernible in the pages of this diary and which is a fake, a fallacious façade with nothing behind it. I have lost the power to regulate my life; I feel as though it had suddenly grown too big for me; it fits only where it touches, and it touches only to hurt. I feel that all appeals that are made to me are sent to the wrong address. Lavinia Johnstone passed away early in the week and the person who wears her semblance is a very different creature, who would as soon spit in your eye as speak to you. It is a relief to talk of myself in the third person, I get rid of myself that way: if only I could isolate the new me, and enclose the intruder in a coffin of wax, as bees do! What distressed me in reading Elizabeth’s letter this morning was to find that, already, I had ceased to respond to the touches which were meant for me as she knew me; they fell on a dead place. But it will be a long time before my friends notice the change, before I become as strange to them as I am already to myself! And, meanwhile, I can feed their affections with the embalmed Lavinia. It is not a disgusting thought: Mummy was once merchandise—Mizraim cured wounds—Pharaoh was sold for balsams. No doubt many people before me have had to meet the public demand for versions of themselves which, though out of date and superseded, please better than their contemporary personalities could hope to do.’

  14

  At last the Kolynopulos had gone; gone without leaving Lavinia the reversion of their gondolier. All day she had struggled to put her plea before them; a hundred times she had changed the wording of her request. Elaborately casual it would have to be; she would breathe it as a random gust flutters a flower. It must seem the most natural thing in the world; she would slide it into a sentence without damaging a comma. It must be a favour; well, she would only ask them one. It must be a command; but had she not always commanded them? ‘He will be a bond,’ Lavinia rehearsed it—’a visible—a sensible—a tangible memento of your kindness.’ But, however she phrased it, she could imagine only one response: Mrs. Kolynopulo’s coarse laugh and her husband’s complementary wink.

  They went before breakfast. Lavinia had no time to lose. The concierges hung about together, in twos, even in threes. She must get one by himself. She must not be haughty with him, she must not let him think her afraid of him. The first one scarcely listened to her and then told her what she wanted was impossible. She withdrew to her bedroom in great agitation. The room looked as if it had slept out all night, and she could not bear to stay in it. The newspapers in the lounge were torn and dog-eared, and three days old. Envelopes, envelopes everywhere, and not a sheet of writing paper. She tried to light a cigarette, but the matches were damp, and the box, though it sprang open as if by magic and revealed a quotation from Spinoza, declined to strike them. One after another she tried, holding each close to the head, wearing a sore place on her finger which the flame, when it at last arrived, immediately cauterized. She gave a little cry which made everyone look at her. She hurried from the room, conscious of everything she did—the pace at which she walked, the way she held her hands, the feel of her clothes. She tried to give her movements an air of resolution; she dropped into a chair as though utterly worn out, she rose the next moment as though a thought had struck her. Then she asked another concierge, only to be told that she must wait until the gondolier came to the hotel and arrange matters with him herself. ‘He will never come.’ she thought. ‘If he does come, someone will snap him up, and if they don’t I can never make him understand.’ She pictured herself conducting the negotiation, shouting to Emilio across the intervening water, while the servants and the visitors looked on. ‘Oh for five minutes of Mamma,’ she thought. ‘How she would chivvy them! How she would send them about her business! I try to treat them as human beings; there’s nothing they hate so much. They are like dogs; they know when one’s afraid of them, it’s the only intelligence they have.’ At that moment she heard a sound at her elbow and looked up; a concierge, a tall melancholy-looking man she had not noticed before, was setting an ash-tray at her side. The simple attention confounded Lavinia; she thanked him through a mist of tears. He still hovered, gravely solicitous. Lavinia cast her line once more. Yes, he would get Emilio for her, he would telephone to the traghetto; there was no difficulty at all.

  But there was a difficulty. Emilio had not returned to his station and could not be found. Throughout the day Lavinia’s spirits underwent a painful alternation, rising with each effort to trace Emilio, falling when the effort proved vain. A boy was despatched to his home; even that did not bring him. He is having an orgy on the bounty of the Kolynopulos, thought Lavinia; or perhaps he has given up being a gondolie
r and decided to retire. No hypothesis so absurd that she could not entertain it. The explanation of his absence she never knew, but in the evening she heard he had been found and was coming to the hotel to see her.

  He came. Lavinia met him in the vestibule. He was talking to the porter who, she thought, should have stood at attention or betrayed by some uneasiness his appreciation of this singular honour. But he went on arranging keys, and talking over his shoulder to Emilio, who stood just inside the street door, as though an imaginary line drawn across the matting forbade him to come further.

  Through the glow of her emotion Lavinia realized, for the first time, that he was a poor man. The qualities she had endowed him with had transcended wealth and yet included it. Here, under the electric light, with the gold wall-paper behind his head and the rose-coloured rug at his feet, his poverty became a positive thing. His rings did not disguise it, and the bunch of charms and seals, supported by a gold chain and worn high up on his chest, only emphasized it. He was dressed in his every-day clothes, a sign that his term of private employment was over; they had no shape except the one he gave them. He got them because they were likely to wear well, Lavinia thought. Such a reason for choosing clothes had never occurred to her: suddenly she felt sorry for everyone who had to buy a suit because it was serviceable. But Emilio did not invite pity. He stood a little uneasily, his arms hanging loosely at his sides; he seemed anxious to subdue in himself the electric quality that leaped and glistened and vibrated. But diffidence and deference found a precarious lodging in his face: shrouded and shaded as it was, Lavinia could only glance at it and look away.

  She wanted to engage him?

  Why, yes, of course.

  For how long?

  For six days.

  And when should he come?

  To-night?

  No, not to-night. He shook his head as if that was asking too much.

  Did she want the gondola de luxe?

  Yes, she did.

  ‘Domani, alle dieci e mezzo?

  ‘Si, signorina. Buona sera.’

  Lavinia had to let him go at that. She would have given anything to keep him. Now that he was gone, oddly enough, she could see him much more clearly. The eye of her mind had its hesitations but, it was not intimidated so readily as her physical eye. The vestibule had lost its enchantment, the hotel had reclaimed it; but she would still recall the lustre of his presence, still remember how, as he stood before her, the building at her back, civilization’s plaything, had faded from her consciousness, and the tremors and disappointments of the past days had receded with it. The hotel had grown habitable again, the servants were back in their normal stature. She passed the man who had been so helpful to her and hardly recognized him—not out of ingratitude, but because the excitement of meeting Emilio had blotted out her recollection of what went before. But the voice of disillusion whispered to her, the calendar assured her, that her time of exaltation would be short. Could she prolong it? If anyone was a judge of what was practicable, Elizabeth Templeman was she. She addressed an envelope to Miss Templeman, Hotel Excelsior et Beau Site, Rome.

  ‘My dear Elizabeth,’ she wrote,

  ‘I was enchanted to get your letter. What have I to set beside your sick-room adventures? I believe that if you were at the North Pole you could cause jealousy and heart-burning among the very bears. My sickroom experiences (for I have them too) are much more prosaic than yours; poor Mamma is in bed, can’t get up for several days, by doctor’s orders, and I have to look after her. But strange things happen even in Venice, though not (as you will readily believe) to me. My friend Simonetta Perkins (I don’t think you know her—she was recommended to Mamma, who didn’t like her, so she devolved upon me) has formed a kind of romantic attachment with a gondolier. She is not in love with him, of course, but she very strongly feels she doesn’t want to lose sight of him. Not to see him from time to time would be the death of her, she says. She passionately desires to do him a good turn, but as she has never done one before she doesn’t know how to set about it. (She is rather selfish, between ourselves). She has confided her plan to me, and I am passing it on to you to have the benefit of your wordly wisdom, which is renowned in two continents. She meditates transplanting him to America and setting him up near her home, in some attractive occupation, either as a baker, or clerk to a dry goods store, or something like that. She would like it still better if she could get her mother (who is very indulgent) to engage him as footman or chauffeur, or gardener or even furnaceman, if he didn’t think that beneath him; then she could look after him, as it were, herself, and see that he wasn’t home-sick. She knows a little Italian (very little considering the time she has been here), and is very rich—she could easily transplant St. Mark’s, stone by stone, she told me, if the Italian Government would consent to let it go. I said she could do that equally well and at less expense by the exercise of faith; and she replied, quite seriously, that faith only availed to remove inanimate objects like mountains, but it couldn’t bring her her gondolier—not a lock of him, not a hair.

  ‘What do you advise her to do? Of course Italians do emigrate, and it would be nicer for him to go as a private servant than settle in the Italian quarter at New York—a most horrible place. I was taken to see it once, with detectives all round me, pointing revolvers.

  ‘I do hope you are better.

  Affectionately,

  Lavinia Johnstone.’

  Lavinia paused, thought for some time, then added a postscript.

  ‘Rome will soon be too hot to hold you; couldn’t you flee from the wrath to come and relieve my loneliness in Venice? I am staying till Friday, it is tedious with Mother in bed and no companion but Simonetta and her obsession.’

  All the same, Lavinia thought, as she walked upstairs to her mother’s room, I hope she won’t come.

  15

  The mid-day gun boomed, but Lavinia did not hear it.

  ‘You mean he won’t come after all,’ she said.

  The melancholy-looking concierge shook his head.

  ‘He came this morning at seven o’clock and said that he was very sorry, but he could not serve you. He could not hire himself to two families in turn; it would be unfair to the other gondoliers. They must have a chance.’

  ‘I am not a family,’ said Lavinia, with a touch of her old spirit.

  ‘No, mademoiselle,’ replied the concierge, looking so gravely at her that she wished she had been; her singularity sat heavily upon her. She returned to the terrace where she had been waiting the last two hours. Emilio, too, had arrived; more, he had found a fare. A woman was boarding the gondola. The gangway lurched a little as she crossed it and she turned, giving the man who followed her a smile full of apprehension and affection. She was as lovely as the day. Her companion lengthened his stride and caught her hand, and they stumbled into the gondola together, laughing at their awkwardness. The cluster of servants smiled; Emilio smiled; and Lavinia, charmed out of her wretchedness, smiled too. Into her mind came the Embarkation of St. Ursula; a vision of high hopes, adventure, beauty, pomp, in the morning of the world. Her smile grew wan as it lighted upon Emilio; she did not mean to recognize him, but he spread out his hands so disarmingly that the smile found its way back, flickered up again like a lamp that will burn a moment longer if you shake it.

  ‘Who is that?’ she asked at random of the servants who were still congratulating each other in a mysterious, vicarious way.

  ‘Lord Henry de Winton,’ someone said. ‘They are just married.’

  Lavinia went up to her mother’s bedroom and stood in front of a pier-glass, studying her reflection.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs. Johnstone from the bed. ‘Am I not to see your face?’

  ‘I thought I would look at it myself,’ replied Lavinia.

  ‘Shall I tell you what you see there?’ asked her mother.

  ‘No,’ Lavinia answered, and added, ‘you can if you like.’

  ‘Tears,’ said Mrs. Johnstone.

  ‘I c
ry very easily,’ Lavinia excused herself.

  ‘As easily as a stone,’ her mother rejoined.

  That, alas, was only too true. Jack-the-Giant-Killer made the cheese cry by a trick, but the pressure by which the giant squeezed tears out of his stone was genuine and Lavinia could still feel the clasp of his fingers. Emilio had deserted her; he had an instinct for what was gay, what was care-free, what was splendid; a kind of ethical snobbery, she reflected, fingering the pearls that reached to her waist. She was secretive, she wore a hang-dog air, she moved stealthily in her orbit; no wonder people avoided her. She was a liar and a cheat; scratch her and you would find not blood, but a mixture of private toxins. Whereas they went blithely on their way, wearing their happiness in public, anxious that everyone they met should share it. And they had taken Emilio from her—Emilio for whose sake, or at least on whose account, she had foregone her high ironical attitude, the attitude she had spent years in acquiring, which had preserved her from so much if it had given her so little. Her detachment, that had been the marvel of her friends, how could she hope to find it now, its porcelain fragments befouled by slime? Miserably she walked up and down, her inward unrest so intense that the malign or disturbing aspects of what she saw around her contributed nothing to it. Over and over again she traced the stages of her degradation. It began with the hunt for the smelling-bottle; it was still going on: the monster inherited from the Kolynopulos had not done growing yet. ‘Still,’ thought Lavinia, ‘if only I had engaged Emilio the first evening, I should have got what I wanted and been satisfied.’ She evoked the incident a dozen times, each time saying ‘yes,’ where before she had said ‘no,’ almost cheating herself into the belief that she could alter the past. Why had he not told her last night that a trades’ union scruple forbade him to enter her service? He must have thought it over, weighed her in the balance and found her wanting. How? Lavinia did not flinch from the mortification of this enquiry. She had overheard someone say she was not really beautiful. But how did her appearance affect the case? His appearance had affected it, but then, he was not hiring her. She did not look magnificent, not, like so many Americans, as if she was the principal visitor at Venice. The Johnstones never tried to look like that. He must have taken her meanness over the note at its face value, imagined she would always haggle over a lira. The irrelevance of this consideration, and its ironical inadequacy as the foundation of her sufferings, almost made her scream. But why, she thought, be so cynical? Emilio may not be a liar, if I am. Perhaps he did want to give the other gondoliers a chance. The benison of the thought stole through her, reinstating Emilio, reconciling her to herself. The reverie refreshed her like a sleep.