‘Sometimes the portinaia—the door-keeper—from her eyrie on the left, or her husband, or one of her children, would challenge the entrant, who would then answer something I could not catch: these, I supposed, were strangers to her. Those who went in without having their business asked were the habitués, the tenants, and these I gradually got to know.

‘And also I got to know that none of them was she; for her I should have recognized instantly, I had as little doubt of that as I had that she would recognize me. And when she recognizes me she will not be able to help betraying it, I thought.

‘Hope was so buoyant in me that for several days my failure to find the object of my search only made me more hopeful; I felt, illogically, that the odds against me were being exhausted, and it was a mathematical certainty that I should be successful. Only patience was needed, and I was unconscious of the need, for hope has no need of patience. But gradually it was borne in on me that the sands were running out, my days in Venice were numbered, and I might have to leave without accomplishing what I had come to think of as the aim and object not only of my visit but of my life.

‘I tried to consider my predicament impartially, and relate it to the canons and requirements of ordinary, rational living; and then I began to suffer in earnest, for fantasy in the grip of facts is like a fly caught in the toils of a spider. I could not bring myself to go back on the promise I had made myself; it seemed like blasphemy against myself, as if I was requiring myself to deny my own existence. In vain, as a discipline, I tried to concentrate on what I was doing at the moment, to do things deliberately, and at set times, to make a ceremony of lighting a cigarette, to be critically conscious of the taste of food and wine, to remind myself, when walking, that I was putting one foot in front of another. Many such exercises in realism I went through, yet they had no reality for me—my only reality was in some room in the Palazzo Trevisan which I had begun to think I should never see.

‘You know the Zattere and how it faces the long crescent of the Giudecca, with the canal in between as wide as the Thames at London Bridge and much deeper—but I told you all that. I’m getting old, I repeat myself—no, you needn’t deny it, Arthur, it’s the truth and I hope I’m not too old to recognize the truth. It’s a wonderful view but I always turned my back on it, the palace interested me so much more.

‘Well, one evening when I had gone out to keep my vigil, about six o’clock I think it was (I usually spent the two hours to dinner-time thus occupied) I was sitting on my stone seat staring at the palace when Antonio came by. My eyes recognized him but for a moment my mind didn’t—he had become an absolute stranger to my thoughts. Then, my whole being welcomed him, I scarcely remembered what had come between us, and for a moment, so potent was his presence in bringing back the past, I could hardly associate myself with the ghost I had turned into—it seemed a dream.

‘He was striding along between the brightly-coloured nurse-maids and their charges, and I jumped up with hand outstretched, meaning to cross his path. But he looked right through me, and if I hadn’t swerved I believe he would have walked right through me, as if I had been indeed a ghost.

‘Shaken, I sat down again, and for several moments I couldn’t even think, I could only feel contrary tides of emotion sweeping over me. Then I saw that I was facing outwards, looking at the Giudecca, not at the palace, and I knew that whatever my mind might tell me, something more instinctive than my mind had given up hope.

‘It was a heavy day threatening thunder, like so many June days in Venice; and in the thick, white sirocco sunlight the colours of the houses on the Giudecca—grey, yellow, terracotta, pink—seemed to merge and lose their proper qualities in a uniform lack of tone; and what stood out was the fenestration, the whitish oblongs and truncated ovals of the windows, monotonously repeated. Except for a dreadful travesty of Gothic, three enormous eyelets beyond the Redentore, scarcely a single pointed arch could I see.

‘I suddenly felt a respect for the five factory chimneys, and I looked with indulgence, almost with affection, on the great bulk of Stucky’s flour mill, battlemented, pinnacled, turreted, machicolated, a monument to the taste of 1870, that might have been built out of a child’s box of bricks. A romantic intention had reared it, and left behind something that was solid and substantial and a benefit to mankind.

‘I am short-sighted, and as my eye travelled backward from the mill, I saw something which I had taken to be a line of fishing boats moored in front of the houses opposite. But now I saw that it was not masts, and spars and rigging that was veiling the houses from me, it was scaffolding; I couldn’t see the houses, but behind the scaffolding they were there all right, waiting to be repaired, to be cured of whatever sickness they were suffering from; it was just a cloud of invisibility, a temporary eclipse, and it would pass. Only let the workmen get on with their job—don’t take them off for one of your European wars, Arthur—and the houses would be as good as ever. I don’t know why, but this discovery put fresh heart in me; and the uprush of confidence brought an idea with it, as it so often does.

‘I jumped off the seat and crossed over to the palace with as much determination as if it had been a fortress I was going to take by storm, and rang the bell as if I had every right to ring it. With the angry buzz of a trapped hornet the door opened, and I was inside. A sigh of fulfilment escaped me, as if something I had long been waiting for at last had come to pass. But where now? Which way? Which of the four staircases should I take? While I was debating a voice slanted down at me, like a shaft of sunlight piercing the shadow in a picture: “Chi xè?” it rasped. Who was I, what did I want? I could not answer either of those questions, I could not even consider them as questions, only as obstacles to my progress. I waved and shouted something, but it did not satisfy the caretaker: she came waddling down her private staircase, almost touching each side, so fat was she. She advanced across the damp flagstones of the entrata and barred my way. “Chi xè?” she asked again and this time I found a kind of answer.

‘ “Cerco una signorina!” I exclaimed. “I am looking for a young lady!”

‘It wasn’t really an answer, and it wouldn’t have gone down in England: but in Italy it did.

‘ “Va bene!” she said, and my mind rather than my eye took note of her disappearance, as if she hadn’t been a woman but a difficulty to be disposed of. Something seemed to guide my footsteps as I dashed up the main staircase: the steps were dirty under the grey and white stucco of the rounded ceiling, and sweating, as I was, from the sirocco. Almost before I was aware of it I had cannoned out into the great sala: I pulled up short on the slippery terrazzo like a schoolboy breaking off a slide. After the gloom of the entrata, the tall windows at either end made the gallery unexpectedly light. A row of doors faced me: I chose the middle one and rang the bell. A man appeared in his shirt sleeves, flanked by two small children who stared up at me with their fingers in their mouths.

‘ “What do you want?” he asked.

‘ “Cerco una signorina,” I replied.

‘He smiled, not altogether pleasantly. “But there are so many young ladies,” he said. “What is her name?”

‘ “I don’t know,” I confessed. “She knows me, but I don’t know her.”

‘ “What does she look like?” he asked. “Is she dark or fair?”

‘Again I had to say I didn’t know, and a sense of the hopelessness of my quest began to steal over me: I felt how silly, and, above all, how unromantic I must look, at my age, looking for a young lady whom I didn’t know.