17

‘Comandi, Signorina?’ Emilio asked. Lavinia started. ‘Alla musica,’ she said, ‘e poi, al Canal grande Mia Giudecca.’

They drifted slowly towards the swaying lanterns, and drew up alongside another gondola. The Toreador’s song blared across the water; a man was singing it also, at the second barge, the serenata of St. Mark, only a few hundred feet away. The unfortunate coincidence gave Lavinia a feeling of insanity. The song became a kind of canon; each singer paused to hear where the other had got; the little orchestra hesitated, scraped, decided to go on. Lavinia could not endure it. ‘Alla Giudecca,’ she said.

‘Va bene, Signorina.’

The canal opened out, very black and very still. They passed under the shadow of a trawler.

‘Ferma qui,’ said Lavinia suddenly.

The gondola stopped.

‘Emilio,’ Lavinia said, ‘Ti amo.’

‘Comandi, Signorina?’ murmured the gondolier, absently.

‘I shall have to say it again,’ thought Lavinia.

This time he heard, and understood.

At what time would she like to be home?

At eleven.

‘Impossibile.’

At half-past eleven?

‘Si, Signorina.’

Rapidly the gondola pressed its way alongside the Fondamenta delle Zattere. With each stroke it shivered and thrilled. They turned into a little canal, turned again into a smaller one, almost a ditch. The V-shaped ripple of the gondola clucked and sucked at the walls of crumbling tenements. Ever and again the prow slapped the water with a clopping sound that, each time she heard it, stung Lavinia’s nerves like a box on the ear. She was afraid to look back, but in her mind’s eye she could see, repeated again and again, the arrested rocking movement of the gondolier. The alternation of stroke and recovery became dreadful to her, suggesting no more what was useful or romantic, but proclaiming a crude physical sufficiency, at once relentless and unwilling. It came to her overwhelmingly that physical energy was dangerous and cruel, just in so far as it was free; there flashed across her mind the straining bodies in Tiepolo and Tintoretto, one wielding an axe, another tugging at a rope, a third heaving the Cross aloft, a fourth turning his sword upon the Innocents. And Emilio with his hands clasping the oar was such another; a minister at her martyrdom.

She strove to rid her mind of symbols. ‘The oar is just a lever,’ she thought. ‘ “We have the long arm of the lever over here. The long arm of the lever—the long arm of the lever”.’ The silly words stuck in her head like a refrain. Still, with unabated pace, the gondola pushed on. Which side would it stop? ‘It’ll be this one,’ she thought, catching sight of some steps dully outlined against the darkness. ‘No, not that, this.’ A dozen times apprehension was succeeded by relief. ‘I’m having a run of luck,’ she told herself, her mind confusedly adverting to the gaming tables: ‘perhaps I shall get off after all.’ But let the red turn up as often as it liked, one day the black would win. The odds were against her. But there were no odds; the die was cast. The solace of independent thought, that stuffs out with its bright colours whatever crevices of the mind the tide of misery has forgotten to fill, was taken from her. A wall of darkness, thought-proof and rigid like a fire-curtain, rattled down upon her consciousness. She was cut off from herself; a kind of fizzing, a ghastly mental effervescence, started in her head.

It suddenly seemed to Lavinia that she was going down a tunnel that grew smaller and smaller; something was after her. She ran, she crawled; she flung herself on her face, she wriggled. . . . .

‘Gondoliere!’ she cried, ‘Torniamo al hotel.’

‘Subito Signorina?’

‘Subito, subito.’

The next morning Lavinia was sitting by her mother’s side in the Orient express. They had been travelling some hours. The train pulled up at a station.

‘Brescia?’ she thought. ‘Why do I remember Brescia? But Elizabeth was wrong. I shall never forget him.’

THE TRAVELLING GRAVE

A VISITOR FROM DOWN UNDER

After a promising start, the March day had ended in a wet evening. It was hard to tell whether rain or fog predominated. The loquacious bus conductor said, ‘A foggy evening,’ to those who rode inside, and ‘A wet evening,’ to such as were obliged to ride outside. But in or on the buses, cheerfulness held the field, for their patrons, inured to discomfort, made light of climatic inclemency. All the same, the weather was worth remarking on: the most scrupulous conversationalist could refer to it without feeling self convicted of banality. How much more the conductor who, in common with most of his kind, had a considerable conversational gift.

The bus was making its last journey through the heart of London before turning in for the night. Inside it was only half full. Outside, as the conductor was aware by virtue of his sixth sense, there still remained a passenger too hardy or too lazy to seek shelter. And now, as the bus rattled rapidly down the Strand, the footsteps of this person could be heard shuffling and creaking upon the metal-shod steps.

‘Anyone on top?’ asked the conductor, addressing an errant umbrella-point and the hem of a mackintosh.

‘I didn’t notice anyone,’ the man replied.

‘It’s not that I don’t trust you,’ remarked the conductor pleasantly, giving a hand to his alighting fare, ‘but I think I’ll go up and make sure.’

Moments like these, moments of mistrust in the infallibility of his observation, occasionally visited the conductor. They came at the end of a tiring day, and if he could he withstood them. They were signs of weakness, he thought; and to give way to them matter for self-reproach. ‘Going barmy, that’s what you are,’ he told himself, and he casually took a fare inside to prevent his mind dwelling on the unvisited outside. But his unreasoning disquietude survived this distraction, and murmuring against himself he started to climb the steps.

To his surprise, almost stupefaction, he found that his misgivings were justified. Breasting the ascent, he saw a passenger sitting on the right-hand front seat; and the passenger, in spite of his hat turned down, his collar turned up, and the creased white muffler that showed between the two, must have heard him coming; for though the man was looking straight ahead, in his outstretched left hand, wedged between the first and second fingers, he held a coin.

‘Jolly evening, don’t you think?’ asked the conductor, who wanted to say something. The passenger made no reply, but the penny, for such it was, slipped the fraction of an inch lower in the groove between the pale freckled fingers.

‘I said it was a damn wet night,’ the conductor persisted irritably, annoyed by the man’s reserve.

Still no reply.

‘Where you for?’ asked the conductor, in a tone suggesting that wherever it was, it must be a discreditable destination.

‘Carrick Street.’

‘Where?’ the conductor demanded. He had heard all right, but a slight peculiarity in the passenger’s pronunciation made it appear reasonable to him, and possibly humiliating to the passenger, that he should not have heard.

‘Carrick Street.’

‘Then why don’t you say Carrick Street?’ the conductor grumbled as he punched the ticket.

There was a moment’s pause, then:

‘Carrick Street,’ the passenger repeated.

‘Yes, I know, I know, you needn’t go on telling me,’ fumed the conductor, fumbling with the passenger’s penny. He couldn’t get hold of it from above; it had slipped too far, so he passed his hand underneath the other’s and drew the coin from between his fingers.