2

 

'I must work the garden - I must work the garden,' I said to myself five minutes later and while I waited, upstairs, in the long, dusky sala, where the bare scagliola floor gleamed vaguely in a chink of the closed shutters.  The place was impressive, yet looked somehow cold and cautious.  Mrs Prest had floated away, giving me a rendezvous at the end of half an hour by some neighbouring watersteps; and I had been let into the house, after pulling the rusty bellwire, by a small red-headed and white-faced maidservant, who was very young and not ugly and wore clicking patterns and a shawl in the fashion of a hood.  She had not contented herself with opening the door from above by the usual arrangement of a creaking pulley, though she had looked down at me from an upper window, dropping the cautious challenge which in Italy precedes the act of admission.  I was irritated as a general thing by this survival of medieval manners, though as so fond, if you so special, an antiquarian I suppose I ought to have liked it; but, with my resolve to be genial from the threshold at any price, I took my false card out of my pocket and held it up to her, smiling as if it were a magic token.  It had the effect of one indeed, for it brought her, as I say, all the way down.  I begged her to hand it to her mistress, having first written on it in Italian the words: 'Could you very kindly see a gentleman, a travelling American, for a moment?'  The little maid wasn't hostile - even that was perhaps something gained.  She coloured, she smiled and looked both frightened and pleased.  I could see that my arrival was a great affair, that visits in such a house were rare and that she was a person who would have liked a bustling place.  When she pushed forward the heavy door behind me I felt my foot in the citadel and promised myself ever so firmly to keep it there.  She pattered across the damp stony lower hall and I followed her up the high staircase - stonier still, as it seemed - without an invitation.  I think she had meant that I should wait for her below, but such was not my idea, and I took up my station in the sala.  She flitted, at the far end of it, into impenetrable regions, and I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in dentists' parlours.  It had a gloomy grandeur, but owed its character almost all to its noble shape and to the fine architectural doors, as high as those of grand frontages, which, leading into the various rooms, repeated themselves on either side at intervals.  They were surmounted with old faded painted escutcheons, and here and there in the spaces between them hung brown pictures, which I noted as speciously bad, in battered and tarnished frames that were yet more desirable than the canvases themselves.  With the exception of several straw-bottomed chairs that kept their backs to the wall the grand obscure vista contained little else to minister to effect.  It was evidently never used save as a passage, and scantily even as that.  I may add that by the time the door through which the maidservant had escaped opened again my eyes had grown used to the want of light.

      I hadn't meanwhile meant by my private ejaculation that I must myself cultivate the soil of the tangled enclosure which lay beneath the windows, but the lady who came toward me from the distance over the hard shining floor might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I went rapidly to meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian: 'The garden, the garden - do me the pleasure to tell me if it's yours!'

      She stopped short, looking at me with wonder; and then, 'Nothing here is mine,' she answered in English, coldly and sadly.

      'Oh you're English; how delightful!' I ingenuously cried.  'But surely the garden belongs to the house?'

      'Yes, but the house doesn't belong to me.'  She was a long lean pale person, habited apparently in a dull-coloured dressing gown, and she spoke very simply and mildly.  She didn't ask me to sit down, any more than years before - if she were the niece - she had asked Mrs Prest, and we stood face to face in the empty pompous hall.

      'Well then, would you kindly tell me to whom I must address myself?  I'm afraid you'll think me horribly intrusive, but you know I must have a garden - upon my honour I must!'

      Her face was not young, but it was candid; it was not fresh, but it was clear.  She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not 'dressed', and long fine hands which were - possibly - not clean.  She clasped these members almost convulsively as, with a confused alarmed look, she broke out: 'Oh don't take it away from us; we like it ourselves!'

      'You have the use of it then?'

      'Oh yes.  If it wasn't for that -!'  And she gave a wan vague smile.

      'Isn't it a luxury, precisely?  That's why, intending to be in Venice some weeks, possibly all summer, and having some literary work, some reading and writing to do, so that I must be quiet and yet if possible a great deal in the open air - that's why I've felt a garden to be really indispensable.  I appeal to your own experience,' I went on with as sociable a smile as I could risk.  'Now can't I look at yours?'

      'I don't know, I don't understand,' the poor woman murmured, planted there and letting her weak wonder deal - helplessly enough, as I felt - with my strangeness.

      'I mean only from one of those windows - such grand ones as you have here - if you'll let me open the shutters.'  And I walked toward the back of the house.  When I had advanced halfway I stopped and waited as in the belief she would accompany me.  I had been of necessity quite abrupt, but I strove at the same time to give her the impression of extreme courtesy.  'I've looked at furnished rooms all over the place, and it seems impossible to find any with a garden attached.  Naturally in a place like Venice gardens are rare.  It's absurd, if you like, for a man, but I can't live without flowers.'

      'There are none to speak of down there.'  She came nearer, as if, though she mistrusted me, I had drawn her by an invisible thread.  I went on again, and she continued as she followed me: 'We've a few, but they're very common.  It costs too much to cultivate them; one has to have a man.'

      'Why shouldn't I be the man?' I asked.  'I'll work without wages; or rather I'll put in a gardener.  You shall have the sweetest flowers in Venice.'

      She protested against this with a small quaver of sound that might have been at the same time a gush of rapture for my free sketch.  Then she gasped: 'We don't know you - we don't know you.'

      'You know me as much as I know you; or rather much more, because you know my name.  And if you're English I'm almost a countryman.'

      'We're not English,' said my companion, watching me in practical submission while I threw open the shutters of one of the divisions of the wide high window.

      'You speak the language so beautifully: might I ask what you are?'  Seen from above the garden was in truth shabby, yet I felt at a glance that it had great capabilities.  She made no rejoinder, she was so lost in her blankness and gentleness, and I exclaimed: 'You don't mean to say you're also by chance American?'

      'I don't know.  We used to be.'

      'Used to be?  Surely you haven't changed?'

      'It's so many years ago.  We don't seem to be anything now.'

      'So many years that you've been living here?  Well, I don't wonder at that' it's a grand old house.  I suppose you all use the garden,' I went on, 'but I assure you I shouldn't be in your way.  I'd be very quiet and stay quite in one corner.'

      'We all use it?' she repeated after me vaguely, not coming close to the window but looking at my shoes.  She appeared to think me capable of throwing her out.

      'I mean all your family - as many as you are.'

      'There's only one other than me.  She's very old.  She never goes down.'

      I feel again my thrill at this close identification of Juliana; in spite of which, however, I kept my head. 'Only one other in this great house!'  I feigned to be not only amazed but almost scandalised.  'Dear lady, you must have space then to spare!'

      'To spare?' she repeated - almost as for the rich unwonted joy to her of spoken words.

      'Why, you surely don't live (two quiet women - I see you are quiet, at any rate) in fifty rooms!'  Then with a burst of hope and cheer I put the question straight.  'Couldn't you for a good rent let me two or three?  That would set me up!'

      I had now struck the note that translated my purpose, and I needn't reproduce the whole of the tune I played.  I ended by making my entertainer believe me an undesigning person, though of course I didn't even attempt to persuade her I was not an eccentric one.  I repeated that I had studies to pursue; that I wanted quiet; that I delighted in a garden and had vainly sought one up and down the city: that I would undertake that before another month was over the dear old house should be smothered in flowers.  I think it was the flowers that won my suit, for I afterwards found that Miss Tina -  for such the name of this high tremulous spinster proved somewhat incongruously to be - had an insatiable appetite for them.  When I speak of my suit as won I mean that before I left her she had promised me she would refer the question to her aunt.  I invited information as to who her aunt might be and she answered, 'Why, Miss Bordereau!' with an air of surprise, as if I might have been expected to know.  There were contradictions like this in Miss Tina which, as I observed later, contributed to making her rather pleasingly incalculable and interesting.  It was the study of the two ladies to live so that the world shouldn't talk of them or touch them, and yet they had never altogether accepted the idea that it didn't hear of them.  In Miss Tina at any rate a graceful susceptibility to human contact had not died out, and contact of a limited order there would be if I should come to live in the house.

      'We've never done anything of the sort; we've never had a lodger or any kind of inmate.'  So much as this she made a point of saying to me.  'We're very poor, we live very badly - almost on nothing.  The rooms are very bare - those you might take; they've nothing at all in them.  I don't know how you'd sleep, how you'd eat.'

      'With your permission I could easily put in a bed and a few tables and chairs.  C'est la moindre des choses and the affair of an hour or two.  I know a little man from whom I can hire for a trifle what I should so briefly want, what I should use; my gondolier can bring the things round in his boat.  Of course in this great house you must have a second kitchen, and my servant, who's a wonderfully handy fellow' - this personage was an evocation of the moment - 'can easily cook me a chop there.  My tastes and habits are of the simplest: I live on flowers!'  And then I ventured to add that if they were very poor it was all the more reason they should let their rooms.  They were bad economists - I had never heard of such a waste of material.

      I saw in a moment my good lady had never before been spoken to in any such fashion - with a humorous firmness that didn't exclude sympathy, that was quite founded on it.  She might easily have told me that my sympathy was impertinent, but this by good fortune didn't occur to her.  I left her with the understanding that she would submit the question to her aunt and that I might come back the next day for their decision.

      'The aunt will refuse; she'll think the whole proceeding very louche!' Mrs Prest declared shortly after this, when I had resumed my place in her gondola.  She had put the idea into my head and now - so little are women to be counted on - she appeared to take a despondent view of it.  Her pessimism provoked me and I pretended to have the best hopes; I went so far as to boast of a distinct prevision of success.  Upon this Mrs Prest broke out: 'Oh I see what's in your head!  You fancy you've made such an impression in five minutes that she's dying for you to come and can be depended on to bring the old one round.  If you do get in you'll count it as a triumph.'

      I did count it as a triumph, but only for the commentator - in the last analysis - not for the man, who had not the tradition of personal conquest.  When I went back on the morrow the little maidservant conducted me straight through the long sala - it opened there as before in large perspective and was lighter now, which I thought a good omen - into the apartment from which the recipient of my former visit had emerged on that occasion.  It was a spacious shabby parlour with a fine old painted ceiling under which a strange figure sat alone at one of the windows.  They come back to me now almost with the palpitation they caused, the successive states marking my consciousness that as the door of the room closed behind me I was really face to face with the Juliana of some of Aspen's most exquisite and most renowned lyrics.  I grew used to her afterwards, though never completely; but as she sat there before me my heart beat as fast as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place for my benefit.  Her presence seemed somehow to contain and express his own, and I felt nearer to him at that first moment of seeing her than I ever had been before or ever have been since.  Yes, I remember my emotions in their order, even including a curious little tremor which took me when I saw the niece not to be there.  With her, the day before, I had become sufficiently familiar, but it almost exceeded my courage - much as I had longed for the event - to be left alone with so terrible a relic as the aunt.  She was too strange, too literally resurgent.  Then came a check from the perception that we weren't really face to face, inasmuch as she had over her eyes a horrible green shade which served for her almost as a mask.  I believed for the instant that she had put it on expressly, so that from underneath it she might take me all in without my getting at herself.  At the same time it created a presumption of some ghastly death's-head lurking behind it.  The divine Juliana as a grinning skull - the vision hung there until it passed.  Then it came to me that she was tremendously old - so old that death might take her at any moment, before I should have time to compass my end.  The next thought was a correction to that; it lighted up the situation.  She would die next week, she would die tomorrow - then I could pounce on her possessions and ransack her drawers.  Meanwhile she sat there neither moving nor speaking.  She was very small and shrunken, bent forward with her hands in her lap.  She was dressed in black and her head was wrapped in a piece of old black lace which showed no hair.

      My emotion keeping me silent she spoke first, and the remark she made was exactly the most unexpected.