4

 

Perhaps it did, but all the same, six weeks later, towards the middle of June, the moment when Mrs Prest undertook her annual migration, I had made no measurable advance.  I was obliged to confess to her that I had no results to speak of.  My first step had been unexpected rapid, but there was no appearance it would be followed by a second.  I was a thousand miles from taking tea with my hostesses - that privilege of which, as I reminded my good friend, we both had had a vision.  She reproached me with lacking boldness and I answered that even to be bold you must have an opportunity: you may push on through a breach, but you can't batter down a dead wall.  She returned that the breach I had already made was big enough to admit an army, and accused me of wasting precious hours in whimpering in her salon when I ought to have been carrying on the struggle in the field.  It is true that I went to see her very often - all on the theory that it would console me (I freely expressed my discouragement) for my want of success on my own premises.  But I began to feel that it didn't console me to be perpetually chaffed for my scruples, especially since I was really so vigilant; and I was rather glad when my ironic friend closed her house for the summer.  She had expected to draw amusement from the drama of my intercourse with the Misses Bordereau, and was disappointed that the intercourse, and consequently the drama, had not come off.  'They'll lead you on to your ruin,' she said before she left Venice.  'They'll get all your money without showing you a scrap.'  I think I settled down to my business with more concentration after her departure.

      It was a fact that up to that time I had not, save on a single brief occasion, had even a moment's contact with my queer hostess.  The exception had occurred when I carried them according to my promise the terrible three thousand francs.  Then I found Miss Tina awaiting me in the hall, and she took the money from my hand with a promptitude that prevented my seeing her aunt.  The old lady had promised to receive me, yet apparently thought nothing of breaking that vow.  The money was contained in a bag of chamois leather, of respectable dimensions, which my banker had given me, and Miss Tina had to make a big fist to receive it.  This she did with extreme solemnity, though I tried to treat the affair a little as a joke.  It was in no jocular strain, yet it was with a clearness akin to a brightness that she inquired, weighing the money in her two palms: 'Don't you think it's too much?'  To which I replied that this would depend on the amount of pleasure I should get for it.  Hereupon she turned away from me quickly, as she had done the day before, murmuring in a tone different from any she had used hitherto: 'Oh pleasure, pleasure - there's no pleasure in this house!'

      After that, for a long time, I never saw her, and I wondered the common chances of the day shouldn't have helped us to meet.  It could only be evident that she was immensely on her guard against them; and in addition to this the house was so big that for each other we were lost in it.  I used to look out for her hopefully as I crossed the sala in my comings and goings, but I was not rewarded with a glimpse of the tail of her dress.  It was as if she never peeped out of her aunt's apartment.  I used to wonder what she did there week after week and year after year.  I had never met so stiff a policy of seclusion; it was more than keeping quiet - it was like hunted creatures feigning death.  The two ladies appeared to have no visitors whatever and no sort of contact with the world.  I judged at least that people couldn't have come to the house and that Miss Tina couldn't have gone out without my catching some view of it.  I did what I disliked myself for doing - considering it but as once in a way: I questioned my servant about their habits and let him infer that I should be interested in any information he might glean.  But he gleaned amazingly little for a knowing Venetian: it must be added that where there is a perpetual fast there are very few crumbs on the floor.  His ability in other ways was sufficient, if not quite all I had attributed to him on the occasion of my first interview with Miss Tina.  He had helped my gondolier to bring me round a boatload of furniture; and when these articles had been carried to the top of the palace and distributed according to our associated wisdom he organised my household with such dignity as answered to its being composed exclusively of himself.  He made me in short as comfortable as I could be with my indifferent prospects.  I should have been glad if he had fallen in love with Miss Bordereau's maid, or, failing this, had taken her in aversion: either event might have brought about some catastrophe, and a catastrophe might have led to some parley.  It was my idea that should would have been sociable, and I myself on various occasions saw her flit to and fro on domestic errands, so that I was sure she was accessible.  But I tasted of no gossip from that fountain, and I afterwards learned that Pasquale's affections were fixed upon an object that made him heedless of other women.  This was a young lady with a powdered face, a yellow cotton gown and much leisure, who used often to come to see him.  She practised, at her convenience, the art of a stringer of beads - these ornaments are made in Venice to profusion; she had her pocket full of them and I used to find them on the floor of my apartment - and kept an eye on the possible rival in the house.  It was not for me of course to make the domestics tattle, and I never said a word to Miss Bordereau's cook.

      It struck me as a proof of the old woman's resolve to have nothing to do with me that she should never have sent me a receipt for my three months' rent.  For some days I looked out for it and then, when I had given it up, wasted a good deal of time in wondering what her reason had been for neglecting so indispensable and familiar a form.  At first I was tempted to send her a reminder; after which I put by the idea - against my judgement as to what was right in the particular case - on the general ground of wishing to keep quiet.  If Miss Bordereau suspected me of ulterior aims she would suspect me less if I should be businesslike, and yet I consented not to be.  It was possible she intended her omission as an impertinence, a visible irony, to show how she could overreach people who attempted to overreach her.  On that hypothesis it was well to let her see that one didn't notice her little tricks.  The real reading of the matter, I afterwards gathered, was simply the poor lady's desire to emphasise the fact that I was in the enjoyment of a favour as rigidly limited as it had been liberally bestowed.  She had given me part of her house, but she wouldn't add to that so much as a morsel of paper with her name on it.  Let me say that even at first it didn't make me too miserable, for the whole situation had the charm of its oddity.  I foresaw that I should have a summer after my own literary heart, and the sense of playing with my opportunity was much greater after all than any sense of being played with.  There could be no Venetian business without patience, and since I adored the place I was much more in the spirit of it for having laid in a large provision.  That spirit kept me perpetual company and seemed to look out at me from the revived immortal face - in which all his genius shone - of the great poet who was my prompter.  I had invoked him and he had come; he hovered before me half the time; it was as if his bright ghost had returned to earth to assure me he regarded the affair as his own no less than as mine and that we should see it fraternally and fondly to a conclusion.  It was as if he had said: 'Poor dear, be easy with her; she has some natural prejudices; only give her time.  Strange as it may appear to you she was very attractive in 1820.  Meanwhile, aren't we in Venice together, and what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends?  See how it glows with the advancing summer; how the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together.'  My eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the general glory - I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity with all those who in the past had been in the service of art.  They had worked for beauty, for a devotion; and what else was I doing?  That element was in everything that Jeffery Aspern had written, and I was only bringing it to light.

      I lingered in the sala when I went to and fro; I used to watch - as long as I thought decent - the door that led to Miss Bordereau's part of the house.  A person observing me might have supposed I was trying to cast a spell on it or attempting some odd experiment in hypnotism.  But I was only praying it might open or thinking what treasure probably lurked behind it.  I hold it singular, as I look back, that I should never have doubted for a moment that the sacred relics were there; never have failed to know the joy of being beneath the same roof with them.  After all they were under my hand - they had not escaped me yet - and they made my life continuous, in a fashion, with the illustrious life they had touched at the other end.  I lost myself in this satisfaction to the point of assuming - in my quiet extravagance - that poor Miss Tina also went back, and still went back, as I used to phrase it.  She did indeed, the gentle spinster, but not quite so far as Jeffery Aspern, who was simple hearsay to her quite as he was to me.  Only she had lived for years with Juliana, she had seen and handled all momentoes and - even though she was stupid - some esoteric knowledge had rubbed off on her.  That was what the old woman represented - esoteric knowledge; and this was the idea with which my critical heart used to thrill.  It literally beat faster often of an evening when I had been out, as I stopped with my candle in the re-echoing hall on my way up to bed.  It was as if at such a moment as that, in the stillness and after the long contradiction of the day, Miss Bordereau's secrets were in the air, the wonder of her survival more vivid.  These were the acute impressions.  I had them in another form, with more of a certain shade of reciprocity, during the hours I sat in the garden looking up over the top of my book at the closed windows of my hostess.  In these windows no sign of life ever appeared; it was as if, for fear of my catching a glimpse of them, the two ladies passed their days in the dark.  But this only emphasised their having matters to conceal; which was what I had wished to prove.  Their motionless shutters became as expressive as eyes consciously closed, and I took comfort in the probability that, though invisible themselves, they kept me in view between lashes.

      I made a point of spending as much time as possible in the garden, to justify the picture I had originally given of my horticultural passion.  And I not only spent time, but (hang it! as I said) spent precious money.  As soon as I had got my rooms arranged and could give the question proper thought I surveyed the place with a clever expert and made terms for having it put in order.  I was sorry to do this, for personally I liked it better as it was, with its weeds and its wild rich tangle, its sweet characteristic Venetian shabbiness.  I had to be consistent, to keep my promise that I would smother the house in flowers.  Moreover I clung to the fond fancy that by flowers I should make my way - I should succeed by big nosegays.  I would batter the old women with lilies - I would bombard their citadel with roses.  Their door would have to yield to the pressure when a mound of fragrance should be heaped against it.  The place in truth had been brutally neglected.  The Venetian capacity for dawdling is of the largest, and for a good many days unlimited litter was all my gardener had to show for his ministrations.  There was a great digging of holes and carting about of earth, and after a while I grew so impatient that I had thoughts of sending for my 'results' to the nearest stand.  But I felt sure my friends would see though the chinks of their shutters where such tribute couldn't have been gathered, and might so make up their minds against my veracity.  I possessed my soul, and finally, though the delay was long, perceived some appearances of bloom.  This encouraged me, and I waited serenely enough till they multiplied.  Meanwhile the real summer days arrived and began to pass, and as I look back upon them they seem to me almost the happiest of my life.  I took more and more care to be in the garden whenever it was not too hot.  I had an arbour arranged and a low table and an armchair put into it; and I carried out books and portfolios - I had always some business of writing in hand - and worked and waited and mused and hoped, while the garden hours elapsed and the plants drank in the light and the inscrutable old palace turned pale and then, as the day waned, began to recover and flush and my papers rustled in the wandering breeze of the Adriatic.

      Considering how little satisfaction I got from it at first it is wonderful I shouldn't have grown more tired of trying to guess what mystic rites of ennui the Misses Bordereau celebrated in their darkened rooms; whether this had always been the tenor of their life and how in previous years they had escaped elbowing their neighbours.  It was supposable they had then had other habits, forms and resources; that they must once have been young or at least middle-aged.  There was no end to the questions it was possible to ask about them and no end to the answers it was not possible to frame.  I had known many of my country-people in Europe and was familiar with the strange ways they were liable to take up there; but the Misses Bordereau formed altogether a new type of the American absentee.  Indeed it was clear the American name had ceased to have any application to them - I had seen this in the ten minutes I spent in the old woman's room.  You could never have said whence they came from the appearance of either of them; wherever it was they had long ago shed and unlearned all native marks and notes.  There was nothing in them one recognised or fitted, and, putting the question of speech aside, they might have been Norwegians or Spaniards.  Miss Bordereau after all had been in Europe nearly three-quarters of a century; it appeared by some verses addressed to her by Aspern on the occasion of his own second absence from America - verses of which Cumnor and I had after infinite conjecture established solidly enough the date - that she was even then, as a girl of twenty, on the foreign side of the sea.  There was a profession in the poem - I hope not just for the phrase - that he had come back for her sake.  We had no real light on her circumstances at that moment, any more than we had upon her origin, which we believed to be of the sort usually spoken of as modest.  Cumnor had a theory that she had been a governess in some family in which the poet visited and that, in consequence of her position, there was from the first something unavowed, or rather something quite clandestine, in their relations.  I on the other hand had hatched a little romance according to which she was the daughter of an artist, a painter or a sculptor, who had left the Western world, when the century was fresh, to study in the ancient schools.  It was essential to my hypothesis that this amiable man should have lost his wife, should have been poor and unsuccessful, and should have had a second daughter of a disposition quite different from Juliana's.  It was also indispensable that he should have been accompanied to Europe by these young ladies and should have established himself there for the remainder of a struggling saddened life.  There was a further implication that Miss Bordereau had had in her youth a perverse and reckless, albeit a generous and fascinating character, and that she had braved some wondrous chances.  By what passions had she been ravaged, by what adventures and sufferings had she been blanched, what store of memories had she laid away for the monotonous future?

      I asked myself these things as I sat spinning theories about her in my arbour and the bees droned in the flowers.  It was incontestable that, whether for right or for wrong, most readers of certain of Aspern's poems (poems not as ambiguous as the sonnets - scarcely more divine, I think - of Shakespeare) had taken for granted that Juliana had not always adhered to the steep footway of renunciation.  There hovered about her name a perfume of impenitent passion, an intimation that she had not been exactly as the respectable young person in general.  Was this a sign that her singer had betrayed her, had given her away, as we say nowadays, to posterity?  Certain it is that it would have been difficult to put one's finger on the passage in which her fair name suffered injury.  Moreover was not any fame fair enough that was so sure of duration and was associated with works immortal through their beauty?  It was a part of my idea that the young lady had had a foreign lover - and say an unedifying tragical rupture - before her meeting with Jeffery Aspern.  She had lived with her father and sister in a queer old-fashioned expatriated artistic Bohemia of the days when the aesthetic was only the academic and the painters who knew the best models for contadina and pifferaro wore peaked hats and long hair.  It was a society less awake than the coteries of today - in its ignorance of the wonderful chances, the opportunities of the early bird, with which its path was strewn - to tatters of old stuff and fragments of old crockery; so that Miss Bordereau appeared not to have picked up or have inherited many objects of importance.  There was no enviable bric-à-brac, with its provoking legend of cheapness, in the room in which I had seen her.  Such a fact as that suggested bareness, but nonetheless it worked happily into the sentimental interest I had always taken in the early movements of my countrymen as visitors to Europe.  When Americans went abroad in 1820 there was something romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with the perpetual ferryings of the present hour, the hour at which photography and other conveniences have annihilated surprise.  Miss Bordereau had sailed with her family on a tossing brig in the days of long voyages and sharp differences; she had had her emotions on the top of yellow diligences, passed the night at inns where she dreamed of travellers' tales, and was most struck, on reaching the Eternal City, with the elegance of Roman pearls and scarfs and mosaic brooches.  There was something touching to me in all that, and my imagination frequently went back to the period.  If Miss Bordereau carried it there of course Jeffery Aspern had at other times done so with greater force.  It was a much more important fact, if one was looking at his genius critically, that he had lived in the days before the general transfusion.  It had happened to me to regret that he had known Europe at all; I should have liked to see what he would have written without that experience, by which he had incontestably been enriched.  But as his fate had ruled otherwise I went with him - I tried to judge how the general old order would have struck him.  It was not only there, however, I watched him; the relations he had entertained with the special new had even a livelier interest.  His own country after all had had most of his life, and his muse, as they said at that time, was essentially American.  That was originally what I had prized him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form almost impossible, he had found means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand and express everything.