Andreas (7 page)

“But one thing,” she went on, looking at him with a charming expression of gravity and importance, “if you get mixed up in disputes, misunderstandings, quarrels, and so on, get your own way. Don’t let anybody, man or woman, get round you with tears. That’s a silly weakness and I can’t bear it. But I’m not speaking about Nina’s tears. Nina’s tears are as real as gold. When she cries she’s like a little child. Nobody has the heart to refuse her what she wants, for she’s ten times kinder than I am, although she is twenty-one, and I’m not sixteen yet. But how can it interest you,” she added, with an arch look, as she busied herself about the bird in the cage, “to hear me talking about myself? You didn’t come to Venice for that. Go downstairs. Zorzi will be waiting for you down there.”

Andreas was already on the stairs when she came after him. “One thing more—it just occurred to me. You look good-natured, and a good man must be warned at the first step. Don’t let anybody inveigle you into accepting his bills, even though he should offer you at the same time others to cover them which are due before his. Never. Do you understand me?” For an instant her hand rested lightly on Andreas’s arm. It was exactly the same gesture as her father had made before, yet how much truth there is in the saying that if two do the same thing the result is worlds apart. The little hand was so charming and the motherly, womanly gesture enchanting. She was already back in the house, and as Andreas went downstairs he heard her calling to Zorzi on the other side through the window.

“Isn’t she a lovely little thing?” said Zorzi, who was standing below, as if he had guessed what was busying Andreas’s thoughts.

“But what is all this about the lottery?” asked Andreas, after a few steps. “Who distributes the prizes and what has the family got to do with it? It looks as if they were organizing it themselves.”

The artist did not reply at once. “And so they are,” he said, slackening his pace at a street corner to let Andreas catch up with him. “Why shouldn’t I tell you? The lottery is being arranged in a circle of rich
and distinguished gentlemen, and the first prize is the girl herself.”

“How do you mean—the girl herself?”

“Well, her virginity, if you want another word for it. She’s a good girl, and has taken it into her head to rescue her family from their poverty. You ought to hear how nicely she speaks about it, and how much trouble she has taken with the subscription list. For whatever she does must be done properly. A great gentleman, a friend of the family, has taken over the patronage.” Here he lowered his voice. “He is the patrician, Signor Sacramozo, who was lately Governor of Corfu. A ticket costs no less than twenty-four sequins, and not a name has been put on the subscription list that has not been approved by Signor Sacramozo.”

Andreas had suddenly blushed with such violence that a haze blurred his eyesight, and he nearly slipped on a squashed pomegranate lying in his way. The other looked at him sidelong as he walked. “An affair of this kind,” he went on, “can be arranged in a circle of men of breeding who have the decency not to let it get abroad, otherwise the authorities would intervene. So the gentlemen of the town would be rather unwilling to let a foreigner into an arrangement of the kind. But if you really care about it, I’ll do what I can for you, and perhaps I could get
a ticket for you indirectly. I mean in this way, that one of the ticket-holders, for a consideration, which won’t be small, might hand over his chance to you without your name being mentioned.” Andreas did not know what to answer, and quickly changed the subject by saying how astonished he was that the elder daughter should know no better way of coming to her family’s help, and leave it to the little sister to sacrifice herself in so unusual a fashion.

“Well, it isn’t really so unusual, what she’s doing,” returned the other, “and there’s nothing much to be hoped for from Nina. The little one knows that better than anybody. Nina can’t manage money, and what you give her today melts between her fingers tomorrow. She’s a beauty, but she’s no match for Zustina in brains. I’ll give you an instance: once I wanted to present to her a rich and noble gentleman from Vienna, Count Grassalkowicz—you’ll know the name. And you’ll know what it means to make the acquaintance of a man who, as you know, has two palaces in Vienna and one in Prague, and whose estates in Croatia are as big as all the possessions of the Republic. ‘What’s the man’s name?’ says she, drawing up her nose, and when she does that there’s no more to be got out of her than out of a shying horse. ‘The name,’ she says, ‘sounds like a common oath, and the man will be like it. Take him where you
like. I won’t have anything to do with him.’ That’s Nina all over.”

Andreas thought that it was no such extraordinary distinction as he had imagined to be introduced to Signorina Nina, and by this friend, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

They had reached an open square with wooden tables and wicker chairs in front of a little coffee-stall. At one of them a man dressed all in black was writing letters. At another a coarse middle-aged man with a blue chin, wearing an odd kind of long frogged coat, sat at his ease, listening unmoved to the pleadings of a young man who did not venture to draw up his chair to the table, and hardly even dared to sit down, so that Andreas could not look at him without a feeling of pity and distress.

“Look at those two,” said Zorzi, taking possession of the chocolate Andreas had ordered for him. “That’s a rich Greek and his nephew. The old man is a millionaire, and the poor lad is his only relation. But he isn’t pleased with him because the young man married against his will, and he won’t let him into his house. The young man can hardly keep his head above water. He’s in the hands of moneylenders, Jews and Christians, and is always running after his uncle. Take a quiet look at them: the old man will hardly deign to see him, let alone give him an
answer. He goes on smoking and lets him talk—look how the miserable beggar is wriggling for fear of getting so much as the smell of his smoke. And after a while, you’ll see, he’ll pay for his coffee and go away, and in the end the young man will fall on his knees before him, and the old man will take no more notice of him than if he were a dog. He’ll hang on his coat, and the old man will shake him off and go on his way as if he were alone. You can see the same show several times a day, in the morning in front of the Exchange here, and in the evening on the Riva. Isn’t it amusing to see what beasts people can be to each other, and how obstinate they can be in their spite?”

Andreas was hardly listening, so preoccupied was he by the appearance of the man writing. He had an inordinately long, narrow body, which, as he wrote, stooped over the table, under which his long legs could only find room as it were by apology, inordinately long arms which could, at a pinch, find room, and inordinately long fingers which held the bad, squeaking pen. His posture was uncomfortable and even ridiculous, but nothing could have more finely revealed the essence of the man than this discomfort, and the way he bore it, overcame it, was unaware of it. He wrote hurriedly, the breeze tugged at the page, he ought to have lost his temper, and
yet there was self-command in all his limbs, a—so strange as the word may seem—courtesy towards all the lifeless objects which rendered him such sorry service, a superiority to the discomfort of the situation which was incomparable. A strong gust blew one of the sheets over to Andreas. Andreas started up, and hastened to return it to the stranger, who, turning quietly round, took the proffered sheet with a slight bow. Andreas met his dark eyes; he thought them beautiful, although they were set in a face that nobody could call handsome. The head was far too small for the figure, and the sallow, rather sickly face so strangely awry that the absurd image of the shrunken face of a dead toad flashed through Andreas’s mind.

He would have liked to know a great deal about the man, but he did not want to learn it from Zorzi, who bent towards him and whispered: “I’ll tell you who that is as soon as he’s gone. I don’t want to mention his name now. He’s the brother—well, the brother of the great gentleman whom I told you was the protector of the family you’re living with. You know whom I mean—the one under whose aegis the lottery is being arranged. He is a Knight of Malta,” he went on, but at once paused as the writer raised his head, “but as you see, he doesn’t wear on his cloak the cross which it is not only his right, but his duty
to wear. He has travelled a great deal, they say; he has been far into the interior of India, and even at the Great Wall of China, and some say he is in the service of the Jesuits, but others say he is no more than a freemason.”

The rich Greek and his beggarly nephew stood up—the gross callousness of the one, the bestial servility of the other, were revolting. In both, human nature seemed to have lost its dignity. For Andreas it was past understanding that so vile a spectacle could take place in the neighbourhood of a being such as he imagined the Knight to be. When the two raised their voices, the one spitting like a cat, the other in a kind of whimper, he even felt he must rush between them and silence them with his stick. The Knight of Malta raised his eyes for a moment, but looked away over the two, as if they were not there, and, closing his letter as he rose, nodded to a lad who now ran up, took the letter with a bow, and went off with it, while the Knight walked away in the other direction.

When he had disappeared round the corner the square seemed desolate to Andreas. Zorzi bent and picked up a folded sheet of notepaper from under the table. “The wind has blown some of Knight Sacramozo’s correspondence under our feet,” he said. “Excuse me a moment. I’ll go and take it to him.”

“Let me take it,” came from Andreas’s mouth: his tongue seemed to say it of its own will. The fulfilment of his wish meant infinitely much to him; he snatched the paper out of the other’s hand and ran after the Knight down a narrow alley.

There was more than grace, there was a really inimitable distinction in the way the Knight listened to him and took the paper, and Andreas thought he had never experienced so wonderful a harmony between the bearing of a human being and the sound of his voice. “You are very kind, sir,” came from his lips in German, in the best pronunciation. His genial, and at the same time spiritual face seemed to express a profound kindliness arising from his soul. In the space of a moment Andreas felt himself received with benevolence, caught up into an atmosphere which elevated every fibre of his being, and then dismissed. He stood before the stranger as if inanimate, his body felt clumsy, his attitude uncouth. But every limb of his body was aware of every other, and, as flame quivers on flame, imprinted deep within him was the image of the tall figure which, in easy assurance, in gracious civility, bent slightly towards him.

He went back, already striving dully within himself to retain the expression of those eyes, the sound of that voice, as though he had lost them for ever—
wondering, “have I ever seen him before? How else could his image have been impressed on me in one moment? I can learn about him from myself!” But great was his astonishment when he felt, rather than heard, swift and light steps hurrying after him, which could belong to nobody but the Knight, when he saw him catch up with him and, in the same winning voice, with the most perfect courtesy, assure him that he must have made a mistake. “The letter you were so kind as to give me, sir, is neither written by my hand nor addressed to me. It must belong to you—in any case, I must beg you to dispose of it!”

Andreas was embarrassed and confused. A few hazy thoughts crossed his mind, the fear of seeming to intrude stabbed him like a hot needle. In his predicament, he felt it at any rate easier to say something definite than to make some vague reply, for which he would never have found the words. He reddened at a sudden movement of his hands, which had already stretched out for the letter, but all the more definitely he averred that the letter most certainly did not belong to him, that it was in no way his to dispose of. The look with which the Knight at once acquiesced was rather the look of a man who will on no account insist than of one persuaded of error, and the faint shimmer of a smile played across his face, or only his eyes, as he again bowed
courteously and turned away.

“It is time,” said Zorzi, “if you want to meet our lovely Nina today. She will be up, and if we are lucky will have no visitors yet. Later she drives out, or dines with her friends. Well?” he asked, as they walked, “did you make the acquaintance of the Knight, and give him back his letter? Think—the fool writes two or three such letters a day, ten pages at a time to one and the same person, though he sees her every day, and so far as I know he isn’t even her lover. For she is half crazy, and is either lying ill in bed, or on her knees in some church. She has no husband, nor any other relation. The Knight is her only visitor, and as she does not go out he hasn’t even the fun of passing for her cavalier. But he hides the affair from everybody, as if she were a girl or a nun.”

“How do you contrive to know everybody’s secrets?” asked Andreas, wondering.

“Oh, you hear all kinds of things,” returned the other, with the smile Andreas had already so much disliked. “But here’s the house. We’ll just go up—or rather, wait here a minute. I’ll run up and see how things stand and whether she will receive you.”

Andreas could not be sure how long a time now passed. Perhaps the artist only stayed away as long as, in the ordinary way, he needed to go upstairs, have himself announced, and announce a visitor: perhaps
he had had to wait upstairs, and a much longer time passed.

Andreas moved a few steps from the house door through which Zorzi had vanished, and went to the end of the rather narrow street. It ended in an archway, but, strangely enough, under the archway a bridge led over a canal to a little
egg-shaped
square with a chapel standing in it. Andreas returned, and was annoyed that he could not, after those few minutes, recognize the right house in the row of somewhat simple and uniform house fronts. The door of one, dark green, with a door-knocker in the shape of a dolphin, seemed to be the one through which Zorzi had vanished, yet the door was shut, and Andreas thought he could still see Zorzi as he stepped into a passage through an open door. Still, there was no danger of their missing each other if Andreas went back to the bridge again to have a look at the little square with the church. The street and the square were completely deserted; a step would be audible, let alone a call, or repeated calls, if Zorzi were looking for him, so he crossed the bridge. Below, on the dark water, a little boat was moored to it; not a human being was to be seen or heard; the little square had a forlorn, abandoned look.