‘Below the two windows of my sitting-room was a canal with a pavement—a fondamenta—bordering it. You could only see the pavement by leaning out of the window, it was so far below; but what a rewarding sight it was! Together the canal and the fondamenta made a stage on which the scenery didn’t vary much but the action was always changing. Though nothing sensational ever happened, something was always going to happen; and that something was heralded by shouts of warning or encouragement, advice or reproof: nothing that took place, or looked like taking place, escaped somebody’s comment.

‘It was a way of living by proxy, and it exactly suited me, in my limp convalescent state, to be a spectator of the spectators. I didn’t try to write, I just sat looking. Very often I didn’t even take the trouble to go to the windows: I could see from my chair a great deal—the houses opposite, the big acacia with its tufted top, sensitive to every air that blew, the terrace beside it, sometimes the scene of impassioned carpet-beating, sometimes of alfresco parties, the petunias in boxes along its balustrade, the luxuriant bignonia that dripped from it, and the scarcely less luxuriant wistaria that climbed in and out of the bignonia. It was mid-June; the bignonia was beginning to put out its scarlet tongues—an insult which I took in good part; the wistaria was blooming for the second time; their blossoms did not accord, yet there was something touching about their friendship: it was so intimate yet on so grand a scale.

‘Next came the great palazzo to which the terrace was a foot-stool—the Palazzo Trevisan. It differed in plan from most Venetian palaces in having two wings with a courtyard in between. The courtyard was also a garden in the Italian sense—that is to say it possessed trees, shrubs, creepers and a fountain; but no flowers to speak of. It looked dreary in the rain but on bright days when the sunshine lay heavy on the housetops it made a great patch of shade for which the eye was thankful; and I could imagine how cool it was beneath the trees. The garden had a water-gate let into the wall and a flight of stone steps, stained and seaweedy, that were submerged at high tide. But I never saw it opened. No gondola ever drew up at the steps; the gondolier’s anxious cry, warning his fare against the slippery surface—“Piano—si scivola!”—was never heard. Not that the steps were unused. Barche and sandole—nondescript boats of all work—were moored to them, and moored, too, to the tall blue posts with their gilded and coroneted summits that stood, slanting this way and that, like a forest in the water.

‘No one said them nay, no one told them to tie up elsewhere, for the noble family who owned the palace, and from whom it took its name, had long since left and now it was inhabited, so Giuseppina told me, by many families, some of whom were well to do, while some occupied tenements of no more than two rooms each. The palace had come down in the world. It was encased in pale grey stucco, and had the tall, round-headed windows of the late sixteenth century, each bordered by a thin band of Istrian stone; the balconies, the dripstones, the sham machicolations which held up the roof, were of the same material. The shutters were painted brown outside, but inside they were grey, a darker grey than the stucco, so that when they were open the palace was a symphony of shades from white to dark grey, and might, if it had looked smarter, have been compared to a fashionable elderly lady dressed for a garden-party; but it didn’t look smart—no building in Venice does.

‘Some of the occupants of the palace opened their shutters in the daytime, some left them ajar, some kept them closed; few kept them completely closed, for the front that faced me was the north front, and the sun only reached it in the evening. Venetians—perhaps all Italians—are very shutter-conscious. Facing south, my sitting-room got the full force of the sunshine, if there was any; whether there was or not, Giuseppina would come about midday and try to close my shutters, leaving me in darkness; otherwise, she said, the sun would fade the covers—she was very jealous of her mistress’s possessions. But I insisted on having them left a little open, for me to see out by; when this had been done, my flat and the palace opposite were like two people looking at each other through half-closed eyes.

‘When the sun had gone round I threw the shutters back and resumed my watch at the window. I must have sat for many hours of every day in this way, like a passenger in a railway train, not taking in any special feature of what I saw but passively enjoying the sense of sight.

‘Several days passed and then, one morning, Giuseppina brought me a letter.

‘I thought at once that it was a letter from Antonio, for there was no stamp on it, it had come by hand. But the handwriting told me it was not.

‘Giuseppina watched me open it. It was written in Italian in a very sloping hand, with spidery letters not easy to read. I have it here,’ my friend went on, and pulled out his pocket-book; but like a speaker who does not have to rely on his notes he read, or rather translated, without consulting it:

‘ “Egregio signore,—It is many days now that I have seen you looking from your window and it seems to me that always your eyes have been fixed on me.” ’

My friend looked up, and almost as though he were illustrating the letter, he raised his eyes to mine. Then he dropped them and went on:

‘ “Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think you do not look at me without interest. It would not be possible to gaze so long at one object unless the object had aroused one’s interest. And I, signore, am also interested in you. I know your face—ah, very well. I know—do not ask me how—that you are a foreigner. Ah! You would be surprised if you knew how much I know about you. Do not think it is because I am inquisitive. I cannot help knowing about you, any more than I can help knowing whether we have the sun or not. I ask only one thing, signore, do not leave Venice, do not leave me, without making a sign.” ’

My friend’s voice grew a little unsteady at this point, and he broke off.

‘How did she finish it?’ I asked. ‘Foreigners have such odd ways of ending letters.’

‘She didn’t finish it,’ he answered.

‘She didn’t even give her name?’

He shook his head.

‘But how could she expect you to make a sign when you didn’t know her name or her address?’

He suddenly became too agitated to answer.

‘But you know her name now?’ I persisted.

‘Yes, I know it now.’

After a moment or two my friend took up his tale.

‘I was furious at the letter and my first reflection was: Now I shall never be able to sit at the window again. You don’t know how essential it is for a writer, at least it is for me, to be able to be absolutely passive, well, not quite passive, but as unconscious of absorbing as the body when it breathes. You can’t do that with someone watching you, watching you in a particular way, I mean; speculating about you, wondering what you’re up to, trying to make contact through their eyes. I had enough of that from Giuseppina. She was always peeping at me. I would look up to see the door ajar, and half a face showing—to be followed at once by the entrance of its owner, looking disarmingly frank and innocent. It was bad enough to have this espionage indoors, but to have it from outside as well, a cross-fire, was really too much. I was seriously put out. You know how it is when one is nervous; the full force of one’s irritation concentrates on a single grievance. Then I realized that by shifting my chair to the other window I could still command a view—the view of the creeper-hung terrace—and be out of sight of the harpy in the palace.

‘She had asked me for a sign—well, now she had it.

‘I meant to tear the letter up, but, as you see, I didn’t. I kept it as one does sometimes keep things, to sharpen the edge of my annoyance. One’s nature demands a sensitive place—a soft spot, a sore spot—that will yield a thrill or a pang: at least mine does. As I had no soft spot at the moment, the sore spot did just as well. It reminded me of all the idle, inquisitive women who had from time to time plagued me unmercifully about my work, wasting my time as freely as if it was their own; and whenever I sat down at my new gazebo I felt I was giving them all a retrospective snub.