PODOLO

The evening before we made the expedition to Podolo we talked it over, and I agreed there was nothing against it really.

‘But why did you say you’d feel safer if Walter was going too?’ Angela asked me. And Walter said, ‘What good should I be? I can’t help to row the gondola, you know.’

Then I felt rather silly, for everything I had said about Podolo was merely conversational exaggeration, meant to whet their curiosity, like a newspaper headline: and I knew that when Angela actually saw the dull little island, its stony and inhospitable shore littered with broken bottles and empty tins, she would think what a fool I was, with my romancing. So I took back everything I said, called my own bluff, as it were, and explained that I avoided Podolo only because of its exposed position: it was four miles from Venice, and if a boisterous bora got up (as it sometimes did, without warning) we should find getting back hard work, and might be late home. ‘And what will Walter say,’ I wound up, ‘if he comes back from Trieste’ (he was going there for the day on business) ‘and finds no wife to welcome him?’ Walter said, on the contrary, he had often wished such a thing might happen. And so, after some playful recriminations between this lately married, charming, devoted couple we agreed that Podolo should be the goal for tomorrow’s picnic. ‘You must curb my wife’s generous impulses,’ Walter warned me; ‘she always wants to do something for somebody. It’s an expensive habit.’ I assured him that at Podolo she would find no calls on her heart or her purse. Except perhaps for a rat or two it was quite uninhabited. Next morning in brilliant sunshine Walter gulped down his breakfast and started for the station. It seemed hard that he should have to spend six hours of this divine day in a stuffy train. I stood on the balcony watching his departure.

The sunlight sparkled on the water; the gondola, in its best array, glowed and glittered. ‘Say good-bye to Angela for me,’ cried Walter as the gondolier braced himself for the first stroke. ‘And what is your postal address at Podolo?’ ‘Full fathom five,’ I called out, but I don’t think my reply reached him.

Until you get right up to Podolo you can form no estimate of its size. There is nothing near by to compare it with. On the horizon it looks like a foot-rule. Even now, though I have been there many times, I cannot say whether it is a hundred yards long or two hundred. But I have no wish to go back and make certain.

We cast anchor a few feet from the stony shore. Podolo, I must say, was looking its best, green, flowery, almost welcoming. One side is rounded to form the shallow arc of a circle: the other is straight. Seen from above, it must look like the moon in its first quarter. Seen as we saw it from the water-line with the grassy rampart behind, it forms a kind of natural amphitheatre. The slim withy-like acacia trees give a certain charm to the foreground, and to the background where they grow in clumps, and cast darker shadows, an air of mystery. As we sat in the gondola we were like theatre-goers in the stalls, staring at an empty stage.

It was nearly two o’clock when we began lunch. I was very hungry, and, charmed by my companion and occupied by my food, I did not let my eyes stray out of the boat. To Angela belonged the honour of discovering the first denizen of Podolo.

‘Why,’ she exclaimed, ‘there’s a cat.’ Sure enough there was: a little cat, hardly more than a kitten, very thin and scraggy, and mewing with automatic regularity every two or three seconds. Standing on the weedy stones at the water’s edge it was a pitiful sight. ‘It’s smelt the food,’ said Angela. ‘It’s hungry. Probably it’s starving.’

Mario, the gondolier, had also made the discovery, but he received it in a different spirit. ‘Povera bestia,’ he cried in sympathetic accents, but his eyes brightened. ‘Its owners did not want it. It has been put here on purpose, one sees.’ The idea that the cat had been left to starve caused him no great concern, but it shocked Angela profoundly.

‘How abominable!’ she exclaimed. ‘We must take it something to eat at once.’

The suggestion did not recommend itself to Mario, who had to haul up the anchor and see the prospect of his own lunch growing more remote: I too thought we might wait till the meal was over. The cat would not die before our eyes. But Angela could brook no delay. So to the accompaniment of a good deal of stamping and heavy breathing the prow of the gondola was turned to land.

Meanwhile the cat continued to miaow, though it had retreated a little and was almost invisible, a thin wisp of tabby fur, against the parched stems of the outermost grasses.

Angela filled her hand with chicken bones.

‘I shall try to win its confidence with these,’ she said, ‘and then if I can I shall catch it and put it in the boat and we’ll take it to Venice. If it’s left here it’ll certainly starve.’

She climbed along the knife-like gunwale of the gondola and stepped delicately on to the slippery boulders.

Continuing to eat my chicken in comfort, I watched her approach the cat. It ran away, but only a few yards: its hunger was obviously keeping its fear at bay. She threw a bit of food and it came nearer: another, and it came nearer still. Its demeanour grew less suspicious; its tail rose into the air; it came right up to Angela’s feet. She pounced. But the cat was too quick for her; it slipped through her hands like water. Again hunger overpowered mistrust. Back it came. Once more Angela made a grab at it; once more it eluded her. But the third time she was successful. She got hold of its leg.

I shall never forget seeing it dangle from Angela’s (fortunately) gloved hand. It wriggled and squirmed and fought, and in spite of its tiny size the violence of its struggles made Angela quiver like a twig in a gale. And all the while it made the most extraordinary noise, the angriest, wickedest sound I ever heard. Instead of growing louder as its fury mounted, the sound actually decreased in volume, as though the creature was being choked by its own rage. The spitting died away into the thin ghost of a snarl, infinitely malevolent, but hardly more audible from where I was than the hiss of air from a punctured tyre.

Mario was distressed by what he felt to be Angela’s brutality. ‘Poor beast!’ he exclaimed with pitying looks. ‘She ought not to treat it like that.’ And his face gleamed with satisfaction when, intimidated by the whirling claws, she let the cat drop. It streaked away into the grass, its belly to the ground.

Angela climbed back into the boat. ‘I nearly had it,’ she said, her voice still unsteady from the encounter. ‘I think I shall get it next time. I shall throw a coat over it.’ She ate her asparagus in silence, throwing the stalks over the side. I saw that she was preoccupied and couldn’t get the cat out of her mind. Any form of suffering in others affected her almost like an illness. I began to wish we hadn’t come to Podolo; it was not the first time a picnic there had gone badly.

‘I tell you what,’ Angela said suddenly, ‘if I can’t catch it I’ll kill it. It’s only a question of dropping one of these boulders on it. I could do it quite easily.’ She disclosed her plan to Mario, who was horror-struck. His code was different from hers. He did not mind the animal dying of slow starvation; that was in the course of nature. But deliberately to kill it! ‘Poveretto! It has done no one any harm,’ he exclaimed with indignation. But there was another reason, I suspected, for his attitude. Venice is overrun with cats, chiefly because it is considered unlucky to kill them. If they fall into the water and are drowned, so much the better, but woe betide whoever pushes them in.

I expounded the gondolier’s point of view to Angela, but she was not impressed. ‘Of course I don’t expect him to do it,’ she said, ‘nor you either, if you’d rather not. It may be a messy business but it will soon be over. Poor little brute, it’s in a horrible state. Its life can’t be any pleasure to it.’