Eustace and Hilda (71 page)

With her head a little bent she passed through the double doors that had been opened for her, but before Eustace had time to feel he was in the room, a voice like none that he had ever heard, except on a concert platform, cried from the far end “Cara!” Along the vibrations of the sound he cautiously advanced, to see a rather small woman with jet-black hair and an intensely imperious manner sweeping towards them.

“Cara Nelly!” she exclaimed, slightly moderating the volume but not the authority of her voice. “You are here! Welcome!” Immense, involved embraces followed; Lady Nelly bent to the impact; but before she had time to disengage herself she was almost thrust away by the gesture of repudiation with which the dark lady, not scrupling to use both hands, launched upon her. “Cattiva!” she cried, her eyes flashing. “Cattivissima! You have been here seven, eight days, and never told me! Do not speak,” she added, as Lady Nelly, still staggering from the assault, was beginning to say something. “I will accept no excuses. My heart is broken, quite broken—and who is this?” she demanded, turning from Lady Nelly and bending on Eustace all the energy of her hundred horse-power eyes. “He came with you, n'est-ce-pas? He is of your party?”

Transfixed where he stood, several paces behind Lady Nelly, Eustace neither looked nor felt as though he belonged to any party.

Jasper Bentwich had now joined the group.

“Now do let me say something, Laura; let me get a word in.”

“But you say nothing,” exclaimed the dark lady indignantly. “It is I—I, who must make the introductions, and I do not even know his name—I have never—come si dice? turned my eyes on him before.”

In every fibre of him Eustace knew that this was true.

“Nor have I, for that matter,” said Jasper, with his air of elegant exasperation. “But I can tell you his name, if you'll let me. Mr. Eustace Cherrington—Countess Loredan.”

“Why didn't you say so before?” exclaimed the Countess, advancing upon Eustace with the swoop of a tigress whose appetite had been whetted by learning the menu of its meal. “Cherrington. Then he must be the great tennis player.”

“No, no,” cried Eustace. More than once he had been mistaken for the famous Wimbledon star. “I'm not that Cherrington.”

Countess Loredan's face fell.

“
Not
that Cherrington?” she demanded tragically, her outraged gaze sweeping the faces of the others as though they were to blame for her disappointment. “Who are you, then?”

“He's a literary friend of mine,” said Lady Nelly, and Eustace had never been more glad to hear her voice. “He's come to Venice to write a book.” She glanced at Eustace as she spoke.

“A book!” Suspicion leapt into the Countess's voice. “Of what subject does it treat? Our dear Venice, perhaps?”

“I believe Venice comes into it,” said Lady Nelly smoothly. “But you must never ask an author what he is writing, Laura dear. I am very curious too. But Eustace hasn't told me, and I shan't ask him.”

“Surely he does something else besides write?” said the Countess. “That would be very dull. It would be dull for him and dull for you, Nelly, if I may say so. Does he play bridge?”

“He hardly plays at all,” said Eustace, falling automatically into the third person.

“Hardly at all! That's no good. I cannot invite him unless he plays well. Does he dance?”

“Not very much,” said Lady Nelly. “He's recovering from a long illness and gets rather easily tired.”

Eustace gave her a look of mingled gratitude and reproach.

“He's an invalid, then?” exclaimed the Countess remorselessly. “He is suffering from a crise-de-nerfs, perhaps?”

He will be in a moment, thought Eustace, but did not want the Countess to form such a pallid impression of him. “Oh no, I'm very well, really,” he said.

“Got over your fatigue of last night?” Jasper Bentwich inquired.

“Oh yes, that was nothing.”

Jasper's monocle fell out as he turned to Lady Nelly.

“You hear that, Nelly?”

“Yes, Jasper, but no one knows himself how tired he is, and I had strict orders from Eustace's relations not to let him over-exert himself. His sister, whose name is a household word in medical and philanthropic circles, was adamant about it.”

“Ah well, these authors,” said Jasper negligently. “By the way,” he added, “we haven't finished introducing ourselves yet. I know your name, Cherrington, but I'm sure you don't know mine. Nelly won't have remembered to tell you.”

“Oh yes, she has,” protested Eustace. “She told me almost the moment I arrived.”

“What is it?”

“Bentwich—Jasper Bentwich.”

“You may call me Jasper if you like,” said Eustace's host, his features rallying irritably to his eye-glass. “I never cared for the name Bentwich. It suggests to me a twisted personality in one of the Five Towns.”

“What nonsense he talks,” said the Countess to Lady Nelly in a loud aside. “And he is keeping us from our excellent dinner. It renders me un poco nervosa, sa, to wait for my food.”

For the first time, as it seemed to Eustace, his eyes were released from the group, and he saw at the other end of the room, indistinct in the candlelight, a servant in a white coat standing beside an open door.

There was a decorous skirmish between the two ladies as to who should go first.

“Lead the way, Laura,” said their host.

“I will not,” said the Countess, pushing Lady Nelly in front of her. “I will not. To be last is not to be least. All Venice is my house. I was born Contarini and married a Loredan. I can claim the privilege of going last into any assembly.”

“But you rarely exercise it, cara Laura,” said Jasper, gently shepherding Eustace into the space in front of him.

“Well, what did you think of that?” said Lady Nelly.

They were back in the gondola, smoothly skimming along one of the small canals. The tiny street lights, a relic of war-time blackout regulations, served only to emphasise the darkness. Except for an occasional foot-fall, and Silvestro's warning bellow at the corners, there was no sound save the plash of oars. Every now and then they passed the dark shell of a boat moored to the side, stripped of all its daytime furnishings—asleep.

“What did you think of that?” Lady Nelly repeated.

Eustace started.

“I'm so sorry, Lady Nelly. I was in a day-dream. I loved the evening, it was perfect. But I still feel guilty about the gaffe I made.”

“What gaffe?”

“Telling Jasper I wasn't tired last night.”

“Oh, that was nothing. Didn't you see what a good temper it put him in, to have caught me out? You played up to him nobly—I never saw him more continuously gracious.”

“Isn't he always?”

“Oh no, sometimes he's rather crusty. It isn't just a pose. He thinks that to be pleasant is the same as turning the other cheek. Who was the old boy in the Inferno who told Dante something simply in order to give him pain? Jasper can be like that, and he's a great reader of Dante. But he took to you—you played up to him nobly.”

“I wasn't meaning to,” said Eustace defensively.

“Don't apologise, my dear, I asked you to. And Laura, what did you make of her?”

“I was a little frightened of her, of course,” said Eustace. “But I think I could get to like her, if she liked me. Only I haven't the right qualifications.”

“Nonsense, my dear, every man has. And she was thrilled to meet an author.”

“Oh yes,” said Eustace uneasily. “I'd forgotten that.”

“You mustn't. After all, it's safer than being a tennis player. Some time we shall have to decide what your book's about.”

“Who is this Professor Zanotto she's going to ask me to meet?”

“A great authority on the history of Venice,” said Lady Nelly. “You'll be able to pick his brains.”

Eustace was silent for a moment, thinking of the complications this Jekyll and Hyde existence might involve him in.

“You don't think it would be simpler if I was just myself?”

“For me, certainly,” said Lady Nelly, “and I ask nothing better. But in Venice—you know that in Venice, among the popolo, a man often has a ‘detto'—a nickname given him for some oddity he has. For instance, I used to have a gondolier known as ‘Acquastanca,' ‘tired water,' because he always took things easily. It's better to choose your own nickname than to have one chosen for you.”

Eustace considered this.

“But couldn't I just be known as your guest?”

Lady Nelly chuckled a little.

“I think you ought to have an independent personality as well,” she said. “Something to represent you when I'm not there.”

Again Eustace found himself looking forward to this double life with some misgiving; but when, on the threshold of the salone, they took their separate ways, Lady Nelly said:

“To-morrow you must sit down and begin to write that book.”

O
N THE
day of the birthday-party Eustace and Lady Nelly sent a joint telegram of loving congratulations to Dick, and Eustace felt that this message somehow marked an advance in the drama unfolding itself petal by petal beyond his view. During the next few days he did a good deal of desultory sight-seeing, sometimes with Lady Nelly, sometimes alone, sometimes with the gondola, sometimes on foot. He learned to take the traghetto, the ferry across the Grand Canal, but could not resist the temptation of leaving a lira in the boat instead of the twenty centesimi which was the fixed tariff for the crossing. He thought it would be a pleasant surprise for the gondolier on traghetto-duty to find the large bright coin among the small dull copper ones. He could not understand how, when there were nine or ten people in the boat, the ferryman knew whether he had been paid or not, so confusing did the array of ‘chicken food' look, scattered carelessly on the gunwale (as one might call it, no doubt wrongly) of the boat. But he always seemed to know; and soon a gondolier called Eustace back and offered him change for his lira. Eustace waved it aside and thereafter, he fancied, his appearance on the frail wooden landing-stage—that seemed to dip and heave and sway with the moving water—was greeted with special smiles, and sometimes when the gondola was already under way, swinging round in mid-canal, the gondolier with curious pump-handle motions of his oar would come back and fetch him, and take pains to see him safely off the boat the other side. Such attentions pleased Eustace very much.

He had not forgotten Stephen's injunction to distribute a little largesse among the servants before the moment of parting came. He looked forward to it. But which of them? And how much was a little? Rather cravenly Eustace decided that as Silvestro's demeanour was the most variable and his capacity for enhancing or reducing one's self-respect much the strongest, he should be the first recipient of the bonus, and of course Erminio could not be left out. A hundred lire to Silvestro, fifty to Erminio—that, with the exchange as it was, would be just over a pound, a mere nothing.

It needed some manœuvring to catch the gondoliers apart and yet make the gift simultaneous enough to prevent either feeling he had been preferred to the other, but in the end Eustace succeeded. Erminio made a tremendous display of surprise and gratitude: Eustace had never been so often and so deeply bowed over. The glow of benefaction ran through him like wine. Silvestro's acceptance of the gratuity was startlingly and painfully different. He looked at the note as if it was a bribe or the first instalment of a woefully inadequate system of blackmail, and his features stiffened with disapproval. Eustace was just about to take the money back when Silvestro, with the air of one soiling his clothing, put it in his pocket, murmuring in a repressive voice, “Grazie, signore.”

Eustace felt he had blundered badly and would never be allowed in the gondola again. At their next encounter he dared not meet the gondolier's eye. But surprisingly Silvestro was all graciousness. He greeted Eustace with the smile he usually kept for Lady Nelly, and when Erminio could be silenced, took to giving him Italian lessons which Eustace, busy with his Hugo, found very useful.

That was several days ago; this morning he had pressed Eustace to let him take him to the Piazza in the gondola, although Lady Nelly was not coming out; she had some correspondence to attend to. Thus in splendid isolation and enveloped in the nimbus of glory with which Silvestro always managed to invest the gondola, moving or at rest, Eustace shot down the Grand Canal, the envy of all eyes, and, like a god on a Tiepolo ceiling blown from a wreath of cloud, dismounted at the Luna.

Lady Nelly was to meet him in the Piazza at midday for their morning glass of vermouth.

Hitherto Eustace had been a systematic sight-seer, choosing his quarry beforehand and going straight to it. But privately he felt that this method was touristy and crude: as the book said, one should be a wanderer in Venice, one should drift, one should take the object of one's search by surprise, not antagonise it by a vulgar frontal attack. Left alone, not hunted and cornered, the church would just ‘occur'; against shock-tactics it would surely erect all its defences and withhold its message. Eustace determined that his discovery of the church of San Salvatore, which housed two important Titians, should be utterly unpremeditated. He would just look round and find himself there, and the picture, surprised out of a day-dream, would tell him something it would never have told in answer to a direct question. He knew the church's general direction, and crossing the Piazza, which was still in curl-papers before the midday reception, he passed under the blue clock and plunged into the Merceria.

On each side were small shops, some with leather-work to sell, some with silken shawls, some with highly coloured and thickly gilded glass, some with knick-knacks such as knives and inkpots fashioned in the shape of gondolas and lions, some with men's and women's attire. Many had notices in English or near English, or in French. ‘Très modeste' ran the legend above a flimsy garment of pink chiffon. Eustace could not decide whether it meant that the price was very moderate or that the garment was very decent, or again that it was very much in the fashion. All the goods wooed the eye with a touching, fragile smartness which, Eustace felt, would wear off the moment he got them out of the shop. At some of the doors stood shop assistants who gave him encouraging looks or actually invited him to come in; their disappointed faces when rebuffed distressed him, and he went into a shawl shop where, after some cogitation, he bought a heavily fringed scarlet silk shawl for Hilda. In every way modeste, it cost but two hundred lire, less than £1 10s. Stephen himself would have applauded such a purchase.