Eustace and Hilda (70 page)

‘More than their strong ones?'

‘Um—well, yes. Oh, look, isn't that John Webster? I met him once, too, but he didn't speak to me.'

‘He's not very talkative. But what a good playwright. When I saw his “White Devil” I just threw down my pen.'

‘I don't wonder. I'd give anything to have a word with him.'

‘You shall. I'll introduce you—now, if you like.'

‘
Thank
you—but first, isn't that Peele? We used to play together as children. What a joy his “Arraignment of Paris” is. Didn't he once write something rather rude about you?'

‘No, that was Greene. Don't tell anyone, but they've both been dead for some years. You have missed an experience and so have they, if you see what I mean.'

‘I'm not sure I do see. But what luck to have you with me! You're such a wonderful guide to the dramatic world.'

‘Always glad to be of use [bowing]. Now that Webster's fortified himself with another tankard, shall I take you over to him?'

‘Oh, do. It will be the most marvellous moment of my life.'

Stung by mortification into wakefulness, Eustace looked up. They were following a serpentine channel marked by rough wooden posts tipped with pitch, visible, if one stood up, as a dark blue streak in the paler water of the lagoon. Already, to Eustace's distress —for he disliked estuaries—the mud flats were peeping through in places. Soon they were crossing a much wider channel, too deep for posts, almost a river; he could hear the current gurgling against the boat, carrying it out of its course. Then the posts wound into view again, and the gondola followed under the long wall of the Arsenal, a huge pink rampart stained white with salty sweat. Other islands appeared on their right—Burano, to whose inhabitants Silvestro made some slighting reference, and far away, high in the haze, Torcello and the pine trees of San Francesco del Deserto. Silvestro stopped rowing to announce them, as though they were celebrities arriving at a party. Straight ahead a long garden wall stretched into the lagoon, trees overhung it; a water-gate gave the impression of depths of green within, restful to the eye besieged with pink and blue.

Suddenly, where no opening in the left-hand bastion seemed possible, an opening appeared; into it they swung, leaving the lagoon behind them. Eustace stood up to take a last look at it, framed in the aperture. By comparison the canal seemed lightless and confined and noisy; washing hung out in festoons; long window boxes sported innumerable aspidistras (the patron plant of Venice, Lady Nelly had called it) in somewhat garish pots; canaries lustily gave tongue, and the people on the pavement greeted or admonished each other raucously across great distances.

Another turn brought two huge palaces, standing cornerwise to each other. Both had pitifully come down in the world: one had shutters painted on its walls with curtains and fashionable people peering through; faded as it was, the mural deceit took Eustace in for a moment and shocked his northern sense of architectural straight dealing. Now the houses, to his relief (for Eustace felt a shrinking, akin to terror, from anything shabby or neglected), were more presentable, though the campanile of the big church on the left was leaning almost perilously over the canal. Eustace looked forward to the moment when they should have passed it.

Soon his eye was drawn by the sunlight at the end of the canal. Above and below the slender bridge that spanned it, the sunshine was at its glorious and exciting game, playing with the blue and white in the water and the blue and white in the sky, gathering into itself and giving out again all the confused movement of the two elements. The moment before they reached the bridge was tense with the radiance waiting to receive them, and when they shot through it into the sparkling water of the great basin, heaving under them with a deep-sea strength of purpose, Eustace felt the illumination pierce him like a pang.

Relaxed and happy Eustace had only a casual eye for the man-made splendours of the Grand Canal, exhibiting themselves with serene self-confidence, an epic procession, but a pageant without drama.

They had tea in the lower gallery, now known to Eustace as the salone. It had the distinction, unique in Venice, of being L-shaped, the L being made structurally possible by a column supporting an arch.

Eustace had not lost the sense of borrowed glory which he had always felt when in the presence of a record; and he gazed at the column with an awe disproportionate to its intrinsic interest. When tea was over Lady Nelly dismissed him to his work. She was firm about it.

“You must work and I must rest,” she said. “That is what the world expects of us. Remember we start for Jasper Bentwich's at eight-fifteen. Don't be late, or I shall send a deputation for you.” She smiled. “But I was forgetting you had that lovely watch. Couldn't you give it me now? I don't want you to die, and still more I don't want to have to wait until you die—oh, and Eustace,” she called after him, “don't forget that you were terribly tired after the journey yesterday.”

“Was I?” said Eustace.

“Well, I told Jasper you were, so that we could get out of dining with him. Does that shock you?”

“Oh no, Lady Nelly.”

“Then remember you were absolutely dead-beat. Perhaps you'd better say you had a slight heart attack.”

“I won't quite say that,” said Eustace, fearing Fate might somehow contrive to take him at his word. “But I can honestly say I was tired.”

“Be honest, then. Only, just a word of warning. You
must
manage to like Jasper. He'll never forgive you if you don't.”

“I'm sure I shall,” said Eustace with confidence, as he took his leave.

Instead of working, however, he wrote a letter to Hilda. The letter would be in time to catch her before she went to Anchorstone, and he wanted to give her some advice. But the advice would not take shape in his mind. Twinkling with plus and minus signs, black spots before the mind's eye, it kept cancelling itself out, and he began to wonder if he really knew what he meant to say. In any case it would probably be unwise to say it, for Hilda's reactions to his suggestions were nearly always contrary, and the expedient of saying the opposite of what he meant (a logical ruse, but one that seldom worked) depended upon knowing what he meant to say. So he embarked on a description of his first day in Venice, hoping that would lead naturally to a discussion of Hilda's rôle at Dick's birthday-party.

But even here he was handicapped, for Hilda did not care for the sight or smell of flesh-pots, and what had the day been but a succession of flesh-pots, some indeed grosser than others, but all tainted with luxury and self-indulgence. He would describe the buildings of Venice, for whose sumptuousness, after all, he was in no way to blame. Moreover, some of them were very shabby and probably unhygienic, housing children with rickets, whose strength had all gone into their lungs. How they shouted!

So far, Eustace reflected, his letter might have been written by a sanitary inspector or a representative of the N.S.P.C.C. detailed to spy on child welfare in Italy. Surely he could do better than that. If only he could be a little ironical, many fresh topics would be thrown open to him. But Hilda did not like irony; to her it was a form of shirking, and writing to her Eustace was often conscious of being a shirker. He was apt to slip from one sorry pose to another, which was unfair between two people who loved each other, and strange, because he did not feel self-conscious when he was with her. But his pen created a literary personality with whom he felt she was out of sympathy. He would turn to something practical.

Eustace looked at his watch, in which he now held only a life interest. With the reproachful look of a tried servant promised to someone else, it said, seven o'clock. There was a knock at the door and Giacinto came in.

“Permesso, signore?” he asked softly, a secret smile under his sleek silky eyebrows.

“Oh yes,” said Eustace, always ready to let anybody do anything. Giacinto brought out his dress clothes from the serpentine-fronted walnut chest of drawers and laid them on the bed; then put his dressing-gown on the chair and his bedroom slippers and evening shoes beside them. Delightful ritual; Eustace felt that he was being stroked.

“Desidera altro, signore?” asked Giacinto, his voice honeyed with solicitude. “Do you require anything else?”

For the second time that day Eustace had been directly asked whether he needed anything to complete his happiness, but for the fiftieth he felt that the cup was already full.

While he was in his bath he had an afterthought, and coming back he found there was still time to act on it. Clad only in his bath-towel, for the golden heat seemed to eliminate all risk of chill, he wrote a postscript to his letter to Hilda.

Just as he was finishing the postscript a tremendous clangour of bells began. Eustace looked out and saw that the light was fading from the sky; the uproar was a farewell to the day, a welcome to the night.

His twilit journey with Lady Nelly through the little canals was resonant with it, a jangle sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholy, not easy to talk through, impossible to think against.

Dominated by this background, as exciting to the nerves as it was deadening to the mind, the clatter of footsteps and the ring of voices on the pavement above them sounded subdued. Street lights began to come out, as yet hardly visible in the evening glow. The bells seemed to hold the last energy of daylight; when they stopped the night was already there.

The Bentwich palace was unimpressive outside: it seemed to belong to the slum from which it rose. In spite of Lady Nelly's encomiums Eustace felt he was dropping a tier in the architectural hierarchy. They walked up a long rather narrow flight of stairs to find themselves in a dim but splendid vestibule which had, Eustace at once saw, achieved a more personal and considered perfection than the much larger rooms in Lady Nelly's palace. He stood behind her while she, with her air of finding every-thing arranged to suit her, confronted herself for a moment in a long mirror from which all the brighter tones of quicksilver had long since vanished, and Eustace saw a Lady Nelly painted by an old master, simplified and meant for the centuries, not for the moment.

“This looking-glass is too tactful,” she said, “too kind to my shortcomings. You'd better take it in with you, Eustace, and I'll stay behind.”