A silence followed.
"Let us sit down," said my hostess. "Let us make our visitor welcome."
The six of them gently creaked and subsided into their former places. Emerald and my hostess remained standing.
"Sit down, Emerald. Our visitor shall have my chair as it is the best." I realised that inevitably there was no extra seat.
"Of course not," I said. "I can only stay for a minute. I am waiting for the rain to stop," I explained feebly to the rest of them.
"I insist," said my hostess.
I looked at the chair to which she was pointing. The padding was burst and rotten, the woodwork bleached and crumbling to collapse. All of them were watching me with round, vague eyes in their flat faces.
"Really," I said, "no, thank you, It"s kind of you, but I must go." All the same, the surrounding wood and the dark marsh beyond it loomed scarcely less appalling than the house itself and its inmates.
"We should have more to offer, more and better in every way, were it not for our landlord." She spoke with bitterness, and it seemed to me that on all the faces the expression changed. Emerald came towards me out of her corner, and again began to finger my clothes. But this time her sister did not correct her, and when I stepped away, she stepped after me and went on as before.
"She has failed in the barest duty of sustentation."
I could not prevent myself starting at the p.r.o.noun. At once, Emerald caught hold of my dress, and held it tightly.
"But there is one place she cannot spoil for us. One place where we can entertain in our own way."
"Please," I cried. "Nothing more. I am going now."
Emerald"s pygmy grip tautened.
"It is the room where we eat."
All the watching eyes lighted up, and became something they had not been before.
"I may almost say where we feast."
The six of them began again to rise from their spidery bowers.
"Because she cannot go there."
The sisters clapped their hands, like a rustle of leaves.
"There we can be what we really are."
The eight of them were now grouped round me. I noticed that the one pointed out as the youngest was pa.s.sing her dry, pointed tongue over her lower lip.
"Nothing unladylike, of course."
"Of course not," I agreed.
"But firm," broke in Emerald, dragging at my dress as she spoke. "Father said that must always come first."
"Our father was a man of measureless wrath against a slight," said my hostess. "It is his continuing presence about the house which largely upholds us."
"Shall I show her?" asked Emerald.
"Since you wish to," said her sister disdainfully.
From somewhere in her musty garments Emerald produced a sc.r.a.p of card, which she held out to me.
"Take it in your hand. I"ll allow you to hold it."
It was a photograph, obscurely damaged.
"Hold up the lamp," squealed Emerald. With an aloof gesture her sister raised it.
It was a photograph of myself when a child, bobbed and waistless. And through my heart was a tiny brown needle.
"We"ve all got things like it," said Emerald jubilantly. "Wouldn"t you think her heart would have rusted away by now?"
"She never had a heart," said the elder sister scornfully, putting down the light.
"She might not have been able to help what she did," I cried.
I could hear the sisters catch their fragile breath.
"It"s what you do that counts," said my hostess, regarding the discoloured floor, "not what you feel about it afterwards. Our father always insisted on that. It"s obvious."
"Give it back to me," said Emerald, staring into my eyes. For a moment I hesitated.
"Give it back to her," said my hostess in her contemptuous way. "It makes no difference now. Everyone but Emerald can see that the work is done."
I returned the card, and Emerald let go of me as she stuffed it away.
"And now will you join us?" asked my hostess. "In the inner room?" As far as was possible, her manner was almost casual.
"I am sure the rain has stopped," I replied. "I must be on my way."
"Our father would never have let you go so easily, but I think we have done what we can with you."
I inclined my head.
"Do not trouble with adieux," she said. "My sisters no longer expect them." She picked up the lamp. "Follow me. And take care. The floor has weak places."
"Goodbye," squealed Emerald.
"Take no notice, unless you wish," said my hostess.
I followed her through the mouldering rooms and across the rotten floors in silence. She opened both the outer doors and stood waiting for me to pa.s.s through. Beyond, the moon was shining, and she stood dark and shapeless in the silver flood.
On the threshold, or somewhere on the far side of it, I spoke.
"I did nothing," I said. "Nothing."
So far from replying, she dissolved into the darkness and silently shut the door.
I took up my painful, lost, and forgotten way through the wood, across the dreary marsh, and back to the little yellow road.
Never Visit Venice (1968).
Travel is a good thing; it stimulates the imagination. Everything else is a snare and a delusion. Our own journey is entirely imaginative. Therein lies its strength. LOUIS-FERDINAND CeLINE Henry Fern was neither successful in the world"s eyes nor unsuccessful; partly because he lived in a world society in which to be either requires considerable craft. Fern was not good at material scheming. His job stood far below his theoretical capacities, but he had a very clear idea of his own defects, and was inclined inwardly to believe that but for one or two strokes of sheer good fortune, he would have been a mere social derelict. He did not sufficiently understand that it has been made almost impossible to be a social derelict.
Not that Fern was adapted to that status any better than to the status of tyc.o.o.n. Like most introverts, he was very dependent upon small, minute-to-minute comforts, no matter whence they came. Fern"s gaze upon life was very decisively inwards. He read much. He reflected much. One of his purest pleasures was an entire day in bed; all by himself, in excellent health. He lived in a quite pleasant surburban flat, with a view over a park. Unfortunately, the park, for the most part, was more beautiful when Fern was not there; because when he was there, it tended to fill with raucous loiterers and tiny piercing radios.
Fern was an only child. His parents were far off and in poorer circ.u.mstances than when he had been a boy. He had much difficulty, not perhaps in making friends, but in keeping up an interest in them. There seemed to be something in him which made him different from most of the people he encountered in the office or in the train or in the park or at the houses of others. He could not succeed in defining what this difference was, and he simultaneously congratulated and despised himself for having it. He would sincerely have liked to be rid of it, but at the same time was pretty sure it was the best thing about him. If only others were interested in the best!
One thing it plainly did was hold Fern back in what people called his career. Here it did damage in several different ways. That it disconnected him from the network of favour and promotion was only the most obvious. Much worse was that it made favour and promotion seem to Fern doubtfully worth while. Worse still was that it made him see through the work he had to do: see that, like so much that is called work, it was little more than protective colouration; but see also that the blank disclosure of this fact would destroy not merely the work itself and his own income, but the hopes of the many who were committed to at least a half-belief in its importance, even when they chafed against it. Worst of all probably was the simple fact that this pa.s.sionate division inside him ate up his energy and sent it to waste. Fern would have liked to be an artist, but seemed to himself to have little creative talent. He soon realised that it has become a difficult world for those who possibly are artists only in living. There is so little scope for practice and rehearsal.
Nor could Fern find a woman who seemed to feel in the least as he did. Having heard and read often that it is useless to seek for one"s ideal woman, that the very fancy of an ideal woman is an absurdity, he at first made up his mind to concentrate upon the good qualities that were actually to be found, which were undoubtedly many, at least by accepted standards. He even became engaged to be married on two occasions; but the more he saw of each fiancee, despite her beauty and charm of character, the more he felt himself an alien and an imposter. Unable to dissemble any more, he had himself broken off the engagement. He had felt much anguish, but it was not, he felt, anguish of the right kind. Even in that he seemed isolated. The women must have realised something of the truth, because though both, when he spoke, expressed aggressive dismay, since marriage is so much sought after for itself, they soon went quietly, and were heard of by Fern no more. Now he was nearing forty: not, he thought, unhappy, when all was considered; but he could not do so much considering every day, and often he felt puzzled and sadly lonely. Things could be so very much worse, and that very easily, as none knew better than Fern; but this reflection, well justified though it was, did not prevent Fern from thinking, not infrequently, of suicide, or from letting the back of his mind dwell pleasurably and recurrently upon the thought of Death"s warm, white, and loving arms.
One thing about which Fern felt true anguish was the problem of travel, or, as others put it, his "holidays".
Here the shortage of money really mattered. "Why do I not go out for more?" he asked himself.
He had no difficulty in answering himself. Apart from the obvious doubt as to whether it was a good bargain to sell himself further into slavery in order to receive in return perhaps seven more days each year for travel and enough extra money to travel a little (a very little) more comfortably, he saw well that even these rewards might be vitiated by the extra care that would probably travel with the recipient of them. He realised early that, except for a few natural bohemians, travel can be of value only when based upon private resources: hence the almost universal adulteration of travel into organised tourism, an art into a science, so that the shrinking surface of the earth, in its physical aspect as in its way of life, becomes a single place, not worth leaving home to see. Fern saw this very clearly, but it was considerably too wide and theoretical a consideration to deter one so truly a traveller but who had yet travelled so little as Fern. What really held Fern back from travel, as from much else, was the lack of a fellow-traveller, remembering always that this fellow-traveller had to comply pretty nearly with an ideal which Fern could by no means define, but could only sense and serve, present or (as almost always) absent beyond reasonable hope.
He had shared a holiday with both his fiancees one holiday in each case. Much the same things had happened each time; doubtless because men notoriously involve themselves (even when they do it half-heartedly) with the same woman in different shapes, or, perhaps, as Lord Chesterfield says, because women are so much more alike than are men. On each occasion, it had been two or three weeks of differing objectives, conscious and unconscious, at all levels, and, especially, of utterly different responses to everything encountered; but a matter also of determined and scrupulous effort on both sides not only to understand but to act upon and make allowances for the other"s point of view. All these things had made of the holiday a reproduction of extension of common life, which was not at all what Fern had in mind. Both parties had, in the American formula, "worked at" the relationship, worked as hard as slaves under an overseer; but the produce was unmarketable. "You"re too soulful about everything," complained one of the girls. She spoke quite affectionately, and truly for his own good, as the world goes, and as Fern perceived. None the less, he came to surmise that for him travel might be a mystical undertaking. He had some time read of Renan"s concept that for each man there is an individual "means to salvation": for some the ascent to Monsalvat, for some alcohol or laudanum, for some wenching and whoring, for some even the common business of day-to-day life. For Fern salvation might lie in travel; but surely not in solitary travel. And how much more difficult than ever this new consideration would make finding a companion! Almost, how impossible! Fern felt his soul (as the girl had called it) shrink when he first clearly sensed the hopeless conflict between deepest need and inevitable absence of response; the conflict which makes even men and women who are capable of better things live as they do. He and the girl were on a public seat in Bruges at the time; among the trees along the Dyver, looking at the swans on the ca.n.a.l.
At least politeness had been maintained on these trips; from first to last. It was something by no means to be despised. Moreover, when Fern had travelled with others, with a man friend, or with a party, he had fared considerably worse. Then there had been little in the way of manners and no obligation even to essay mutuality. In the longer run, therefore, Fern had travelled little and enjoyed less. This in no way modified his unwordly att.i.tude to travel. He knew that few people do enjoy it, despite the ever-increasing number who set forth; and resented the fact that actual experience of travel had seemed, for practical purposes, to put him among the majority of them, but not with them, as usual. Nor could he see even the possibility of a solution. Not enough money. Not enough time. And no intimates, let alone initiates. It had been quite bad enough even when he had only been twenty-five.
Fern began to have a dream. Foreshadowings or intimations came to him first; thereafter, at irregular intervals, the whole experience (in so far as it could be described as a whole), or bits or sc.r.a.ps of it, portions or distortions. There seemed to be no system in its total or partial recurrence. As far as Fern was concerned, it merely did not come often enough. He felt that it would be unlucky (by which he meant destructive) to note too precisely the dates of the dream"s reappearances. But Fern was soon musing about the content of the dream during waking hours; sometimes even by policy and on purpose. To the infrequent dream of the night, he added an increasing habit of deliberate daydreaming; a pastime so disapproved of by the experts.
Fern"s dream, though glowing, was simple.
He dreamed that he was in Venice, where he had never been. He was drifting in a gondola across an expanse of water he had read about, called the Lagoon. Lying in his embrace at the bottom of the boat was a woman in evening dress or party dress or gay dress of some kind. He did not know how he had met her: whether in Venice or in London. Conceivably, even, he knew her already, outside the dream; had long known her, or at least set eyes on her. When he awoke, he could never remember her face with sufficient clarity; or perhaps could remember only for a moment or two after waking, in the manner of dreams. It was a serious frustration, because the woman was very desirable, and because between Fern and her, and between them only as far as Fern was concerned, was understanding and affinity. Such understanding could not last, Fern realised even in the dream: it might not last beyond that one night; or it might last as long as six or seven days. Fern could always remember the woman"s dress: but it was not always the same dress; it was sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes crimson, sometimes mottled like a fish. Above the boat, were always stars, and always the sky was a peculiarly deep lilac, which lingered with Fern and which he had never seen in the world exterior to the dream. There was never a moon, but behind the gondola, along some kind of waterfront, sparkled the raffish, immemorial, and evocative lights of Fern"s hypothetical Venice. Ahead, in contrast, lay a long, dark reef, with occasional and solitary lights only. There were tiny waves lapping round the gondola, and Fern was in some way aware of bigger waves beating slowly on the far side of the reef. He never knew where the two of them were going, but they were going somewhere, because journeys without destination are as work without product: the product may disappoint, but is indispensible and has to be borne. Fern wished that he could enter the dream at an earlier point, so that he might have some idea of how he had met the woman, but always when awareness began, the pair of them were a long way out across the water with the string of gaudy lights far behind. For some reason, Fern had an idea that he had met the woman by eager but slightly furtive arrangement, outside an enormous hotel, very fashionable and luxurious. The gondolier was always vague: Fern had read and been told that, since the advent of powered craft, gondoliers were costly and difficult. (None the less, this one seemed, whatever the explanation, to be devoted and amenable.) The beginning and the end of the dream were lost in the lilac night. The beginning, Fern thought, the beginning of the whole, wonderful experience might have been only a few hours earlier. The end he hesitated to speculate about. Nor could he even, upon waking, remember anything that he and the woman had said to one another. A curious, disembodied feeling came back with him, however, and remained with him until the demands of the day ahead dragged him within minutes into full consciousness. He felt that his personal ident.i.ty had been in partial dissolution, and that in some measure he had been also the night, the gondola, and even the woman with him. This sense of disembodiment he could even sometimes recapture in his daydreams, when circ.u.mstances permitted sufficient concentration. Above all, the dream, possibly more tender than pa.s.sionate, brought a boundless feeling of plain and simple relief. Fern could not conceive of the world"s cares ever diminishing to permit so intense a relief in waking life.
By day, more and more often, Fern saw himself in Venice. By night on those nights he was in Venice.
It had begun happening years ago, and he had still never been to Venice. The impact of Fern"s dream upon waking existence seemed confined to the fact that when men and women spoke of their goals in life, as men and women occasionally do, referring to a sales managership or a partnership or a nice little cottage in the country or a family of four boys and four girls, Fern at once saw that lilac sky, heard the lapping of those tiny waves, felt a deep, obscure pain, and sensed an even greater isolation than usual.
He supposed that the dream was fragile. If thought about too practically, if a.n.a.lysed too closely, it might well cease to recur. The dream was probably best left in the back of the mind, at the edges of the mind; within that mental area which comes into its own between waking and sleeping and, less happily, between sleeping and waking.
Possibly, therefore, the dream had the effect of actually deterring Fern from looking out much more practical knowledge about Venice. All he knew about the place was sc.r.a.ppy, uncoordinated stuff ingathered from before the time when the dream had first visited him: for example, he had read a steam-rollered abridgement of Arthur Machen"s Casanova translation, and, long before that, a costumed legend of Venice in the Renaissance by Rafael Sabatini, which belonged to his mother. Fern fully realised that, even geographically, the real Venice could hardly be much like his dream. And it scarcely needs adding that the woman in the dream seemed outside the bounds of possibility, let alone the money to pay for her and the gondola. Just as the real Venice could not resemble the dream Venice, so real life could not resemble life in the dream.
For years, then, Fern teetered along the tightrope between content and discontent; between mild self-congratulation and black frustration; between the gritty disillusionments of human intimacy and travel (for Fern the two became more and more inseparable), and the truth and power of his dream. It might be a twilight tightrope, but twilight was not an hour which Fern despised.
So when trouble was added unto Fern in the end, he failed for a long time to be aware of it. Then one spring day, and what was more, in the office, he suddenly realised that his dream had not returned for a long time. He thought that it must have been months since it had last visited him; perhaps more than a year. And, in consequence, he perceived that the dream of the day, always so much paler, of course, but normally, and given even reasonably right circ.u.mstances, almost summonable at will, had become totally bloodless and faintly hysterical. Instead of advancing to meet him half-way when he felt the need of it, it was more and more requiring to be conjured, even compelled. It had become much like an aspirin: an anodyne strictly exterior, and so a deceiver. Fern soon came to see that for months he had been standing naked against life"s stones and spears without knowing it.
Even though it was the spring, always the most difficult season of the year, he looked himself over, confirmed that he was surviving, and seemed to inaugurate an inner change. This was perhaps the moment, which comes to so many, when Fern simultaneously matured and withered. He became more practical, as people call it; less demanding of life.
He was sincerely astonished when during that same summer he was given significant promotion in his work. In due course, he was equally surprised to find that the additional responsibilities of his new position by no means outweighed the advantage of the greater pay, as he had always supposed they would; the truth being that the tendency is for all to carry the same responsibility, so that soon all will receive the same reward, if reward will any longer be the word. People felt vaguely but approvingly that Fern had taken more of a grip on himself. Fern, cheated of his dream, sometimes even felt something of the kind himself. Two or three years pa.s.sed, while the land steadily receded beneath Fern"s tightrope.
When the dream snapped off (as seemed to Fern to have happened, so abrupt had been discovery), its place was taken in the back and the edges of Fern"s mind by the sentiment of death. "G.o.d!" he had thought earlier, feeling pierced by a sword through the stomach, as, at that moment, we all do; "G.o.d! I am going to have to die." But in those days, with the rest of us, he had thought of it only occasionally. Now the thought was no longer an infrequent, stabbing shock. It was a soft-footed, never-absent familiar; neither quite an enemy to him nor quite a friend. The thought was steadily making Fern dusty, mangy, less visible; all in the midst of his perceptibly greater successfulness.
And it was almost as it it were these two things in conjunction, the new practicality and the faint, ever-spinning sentiment of death, that brought about Fern"s ultimate decision actually to see Venice; as if he had abruptly said out loud, "After all, a man should visit Venice before he dies." With departure in sight, and upon the advice of an older man, he read the Prince of Lampedusa"s Gattopardo in an English paperback. "It happens to be about Sicily," observed Fern"s friend, "but it applies to the whole of Italy, and it"s concerned with the only thing that matters there, unless you"re an actual archaeologist." Fern gathered that the only thing which mattered was that Italy had undergone a great change.
II.
Despite his ruminations and his hopes, Fern had never before travelled beyond France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia, to all of which regions he considered himself comparitively acclimatised and much attached. By the time he found himself, as will shortly be seen, thinking once more about his dream, he had been in and around Venice for seventeen days, and they had been days of surprise, horror, fantasy, and conflict.
He could find kinship with no one. There was something terrifyingly insane about the total breakdown of the place: the utter discrepancy between the majesty and mystery of the monuments and the tininess of all who dwelt around them or came supposedly to gaze upon them. Fern looked upon these mighty works and despaired. Now he sat on an eighteenth-century stone bollard at the tip of the Punta di Salute, and summed it all up.
Many times Fern had read or been told that the great trouble with Venice was the swarm of visitors. You could hardly see the real people, he had always been informed. Indeed, the real people were often said to be dying out.
But by now it was the visitors who seemed to him a mere mist: a flutter of small, anxious sparrows, endlessly twittering, whether rich or poor, about "currency" (Fern could fully understand only those who twittered in English); endlessly pecked and gashed by the local hawks; endlessly keeping up with neighbours at home, who were as unqualified to visit Venice as themselves. All visitors had at once too little time and too much. As he wandered down a calle or through a palazzo, he perceived that very few indeed of the visitors visited anything beyond the cathedral and seat of the former rulers; or saw much even of these, if only because of the crowd inside and the shouting of the guides, as mechanical and stereotyped as the swift mutterings of the priests.
The visitors sat about the Piazzo San Marco, proclaimed by so many wise voices as the world"s most beautiful work of men (though infested with pigeons, shot or mutilated elsewhere in Italy), in a constant stew, rich or poor, about the prices: a preoccupation which was thoroughly justified. The women took off their shoes because they had walked a few hundred yards. They stuck out their poor legs, and, to do them justice, endeavoured intermittently but with pathetic unproficiency, to catch a life as it pa.s.sed, to utter the right cries. If life, their faces enquired, could not be caught in Venice, where could it be caught? For a few, right back at home, Fern felt; for the majority, no longer anywhere. Of the men, most were past even making the attempt. They sat looking foolish, fretful, bored, insufficiently occupied, and, above all, out of place. Nor could Fern but agree it was hard that one could not buy an aniseed or a cup of coffee in a place so beautiful without the beauty being tarnished by the price a price probably unavoidable from the caterer"s point of view, because of forces as uncontrollable by him as by Fern... And, of course, there were other visitors, mainly English, who despised the great and ancient monuments, structures on so different a scale from themselves, and spent their time poking their noses into what they conceived to be the "real living and working conditions" of the Venetians.
It was not so much the visitors, with their fleeting pa.s.sage, their phantom foreign money, that startled Fern, but these same Venetians. So far from the place being half empty, as he had been led to expect, it was swarming from edge to edge; and it swarmed with sentimental, self-satisfied philistines, more identical and ma.s.s-produced than he would have thought possible, inescapable except inside the faded, ill-kept palazzi where one had to pay to enter. Those among the Venetians who were not leeching on the visitors seemed to be industrial workers from the vast plants lined up across the water at Mestre; labour force to the war machines of a new invader holding the city under siege of modernity and required merely to await the inevitable self-induced collapse, much as the Turks waited for Byzantium to destroy itself.
The human din in Venice cancelled the quiet which might have been expected from the absence of Motor Moloch. It continued throughout the twenty-four hours, merely becoming after midnight more sinister, shrill, and unpredictable. Every night, gangs of youths screamed their way through the alleys. Folding iron shutters crashed like cannon through the early watches. Altercations, s.e.xual or political, continued fortissimi in male voices for fifty minutes at a time. Fern, in his pension attic, would look at his watch and see it was two o"clock, three o"clock, four o"clock. The noise would diminish, he would fall asleep, and then there would be more screaming boys, more clanging shutters. It was a highly traditional uproar perhaps, but Venice seemed to have an unhappy apt.i.tude for combining only the worst of past society with the society of today. What might once have been falcons, had become hawks, and were now carrion crows.
Fern went to hear Rigoletto at the Fenice and to hear a concert with a famous conductor and a famous soloist: Both occasions were more than half empty, and such people as were there were either elderly Americans doing their duty by a dead ideal (often at the behest of their hotel porters) and intermittently slumbering, or dubious Italian youths, palpably with free seats and very concerned to make clear that fact to the fools who had paid. The performances in themselves seemed to Fern good, but that only made it worse. They seemed to be provided for a bygone generation, a bygone species of man, a world that had been laughed out of life and replaced by nothing.
Fern wandered through the shouting, pushing crowds, more and more sick at heart. As, at the concert, the beauty of the performance only made more poignant the entire absence of an audience, so, in the city at large, the incomparable magnificence and grace of the structures only made more dispiriting the entire absence of these qualities in the beholders. The stripped palaces, indifferently maintained even when a few rooms were "open to the public", failed even to evoke their past. They would appeal only to those ultimate playboys who positively prefer their roses or their ca.n.a.ls to be dead.
Fern found only one place that satisfied when regarded even as a ghost, and as thus offering life of a kind and in a degree. This was a suite of comparatively small bedrooms and dressing rooms and powder rooms high up in one of the remoter palaces, all fragile woodwork in faded green, red, and gold, with elaborate Murano looking-gla.s.ses; tender, canopied beds; and flowery dressing tables. These small, fastidious, flirtatious rooms, alone in all Venice, vouchsafed that frisson which is history. Obviously, few came near them, other than an occasional perfunctory cleaner, from year"s end to year"s end. This might spare the delightful rooms for their proper wraiths, but it also pointed to an insoluble dilemma.
In most of the palazzi, Fern could spend a morning or afternoon and see only a handful of his kind in the whole building, and all of them rushing through in twenty minutes. Nor could this be sensibly objected to: with the destruction of their owners the palazzi had been destroyed also. It was offensive to pretend that these corpses still lived; odious to seek profit from their corruption.
Between the beauty of Venice and the people there was no link: not even of ignorant awe; perhaps that least of all. Much as the folk had pillaged the Roman villas, so Venice was being pillaged now; and Fern sensed that the very fact of the pillage being often called preservation implied that total dissolution was in sight. Venice was rotted with the world"s new littleness. To many her beauty was actually antagonistic, as imposing upon them a demand to which they were unable to rise. Soon the Lagoon would be "reclaimed" and the Venetian dream submitted to a new law of values; a puritan law ant.i.thetical to the law of pleasure that had prevailed there for so long; the terrain applied to the uses of the post-Garibaldian ma.s.s, existing only in its own expansion. Mestre and multiplication would compel unconditional surrender. The state of affairs that Fern now looked upon was more of a pretence, more of a masquerade than anything even in Venice"s past. It was perhaps proper that Venice should end with a divertiss.e.m.e.nt, but Fern felt that the fires of dawn were visible through the holes in the scenery; the decapitation overdue.
The Venetian dream?
Perched on his bollard, Fern realised with a start that he had been in Venice seventeen days, and not given a thought to his own dream.
During those seventeen days, he had not spoken to a single person except in the ways of triviality and cross-purposes. He never struck up acquaintance easily, but the conflictual impact of Venice, at once so lovely and so appalling, had transfixed him into even more of a trance than usual. He had wandered with a set stare; lost in a dream of another kind, a seemingly impersonal dream in which the dreamer had been the shadow. Big ships were pa.s.sing quite frequently along the Ca.n.a.le della Giudecca to his left, into and out from the docks renewed by Mussolini. Unlike so much else, the ships were beautiful and alive at the same time. The scale of things contracted to the problems of one dreamer. Fern felt very lonely.
A manifest Englishman landed with an Italian youth from the traghetto at Fern"s rear. He was bald and barrel-shaped. His large moustache and fringe of hair were ginger. He wore a brown tweed jacket b.u.t.toned across the stomach, dingy grey trousers, and an untidy shirt with a club tie. One might see him presiding knowledgeably over a weekend rally of motor cars in Surrey or Hampshire.
He walked out at the end of the stone promontory, dragging the Italian boy (in open white shirt and tight, bright trousers) by the hand. The Italian boy was making a girlish show of reluctance. The Englishman, a few feet away from Fern"s bollard, pointed with his free hand to some object in the distance; something about which it was inconceivable to him that no one else should care, let alone a person for whom he himself cared so much. All the same, the boy did not care at all. He was no longer going through the motions of petulance, but stood quite still, looking blank, bored, resistant of new knowledge, and professionally handsome.
"d.a.m.n it!" said the Englishman, "You might show some interest."
The boy said nothing. An expression of dreadful disappointment and wild rage transfigured the Englishman"s unremarkable face. He said something in Italian which Fern took to be at once bitter and obscene. At the same time, he threw away the boy"s hand as if it had turned glutinous in his grasp. He then strutted off by himself towards the Zattere.