Henry James: Complete Stories 1864-1874 (41 page)

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Page 237
to be bad, in battered frames, were suspended. With the exception of several straw-bottomed chairs with their backs to the wall, the grand obscure vista contained nothing else to minister to effect. It was evidently never used save as a passage, and little even as that. I may add that by the time the door opened again through which the maid-servant had escaped, my eyes had grown used to the want of light.
I had not meant by my private ejaculation that I must myself cultivate the soil of the tangled enclosure which lay beneath the windows, but the lady who came toward me from the distance over the hard, shining floor might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I went rapidly to meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian: The garden, the gardendo me the pleasure to tell me if it's yours!
She stopped short, looking at me with wonder; and then, Nothing here is mine, she answered in English, coldly and sadly.
Oh, you are English; how delightful! I remarked, ingenuously. But surely the garden belongs to the house?
Yes, but the house doesn't belong to me. She was a long, lean, pale person, habited apparently in a dull-coloured dressing-gown, and she spoke with a kind of mild literalness. She did not ask me to sit down, any more than years before (if she were the niece) she had asked Mrs. Prest, and we stood face to face in the empty pompous hall.
Well then, would you kindly tell me to whom I must address myself? I'm afraid you'll think me odiously intrusive, but you know I
must
have a gardenupon my honour I must!
Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not dressed, and long fine hands which werepossiblynot clean. She clasped these members almost convulsively as, with a confused, alarmed look, she broke out, Oh, don't take it away from us; we like it ourselves!
You have the use of it then?
Oh yes. If it wasn't for that! And she gave a shy, melancholy smile.
Isn't it a luxury, precisely? That's why, intending to be in Venice some weeks, possibly all summer, and having some
 
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literary work, some reading and writing to do, so that I must be quiet, and yet if possible a great deal in the open airthat's why I have felt that a garden is really indispensable. I appeal to your own experience, I went on, smiling. Now can't I look at yours?
I don't know, I don't understand, the poor woman murmured, planted there and letting her embarrassed eyes wander all over my strangeness.
I mean only from one of those windowssuch grand ones as you have hereif you will let me open the shutters. And I walked toward the back of the house. When I had advanced half-way I stopped and waited, as if I took it for granted she would accompany me. I had been of necessity very abrupt, but I strove at the same time to give her the impression of extreme courtesy. I have been looking at furnished rooms all over the place, and it seems impossible to find any with a garden attached. Naturally in a place like Venice gardens are rare. It's absurd if you like, for a man, but I can't live without flowers.
There are none to speak of down there. She came nearer to me, as if, though she mistrusted me, I had drawn her by an invisible thread. I went on again, and she continued as she followed me: We have a few, but they are very common. It costs too much to cultivate them; one has to have a man.
Why shouldn't I be the man? I asked. I'll work without wages; or rather I'll put in a gardener. You shall have the sweetest flowers in Venice.
She protested at this, with a queer little sigh which might also have been a gush of rapture at the picture I presented. Then she observed, We don't know youwe don't know you.
You know me as much as I know you; that is much more, because you know my name. And if you are English I am almost a countryman.
We are not English, said my companion, watching me helplessly while I threw open the shutters of one of the divisions of the wide high window.
You speak the language so beautifully: might I ask what you are? Seen from above the garden was certainly shabby; but I perceived at a glance that it had great capabilities. She
 
Page 239
made no rejoinder, she was so lost in staring at me, and I exclaimed, You don't mean to say you are also by chance American?
I don't know; we used to be.
Used to be? Surely you haven't changed?
It's so many years agowe are nothing.
So many years that you have been living here? Well, I don't wonder at that; it's a grand old house. I suppose you all use the garden, I went on, but I assure you I shouldn't be in your way. I would be very quiet and stay in one corner.
We all use it? she repeated after me, vaguely, not coming close to the window but looking at my shoes. She appeared to think me capable of throwing her out.
I mean all your family, as many as you are.
There is only one other; she is very oldshe never goes down.
Only one other, in all this great house! I feigned to be not only amazed but almost scandalised. Dear lady, you must have space then to spare!
To spare? she repeated, in the same dazed way.
Why, you surely don't live (two quiet womenI see
you
are quiet, at any rate) in fifty rooms! Then with a burst of hope and cheer I demanded: Couldn't you let me two or three? That would set me up!
I had now struck the note that translated my purpose and I need not reproduce the whole of the tune I played. I ended by making my interlocutress believe that I was an honourable person, though of course I did not even attempt to persuade her that I was not an eccentric one. I repeated that I had studies to pursue; that I wanted quiet; that I delighted in a garden and had vainly sought one up and down the city; that I would undertake that before another month was over the dear old house should be smothered in flowers. I think it was the flowers that won my suit, for I afterwards found that Miss Tita (for such the name of this high tremulous spinster proved somewhat incongruously to be) had an insatiable appetite for them. When I speak of my suit as won I mean that before I left her she had promised that she would refer the question to her aunt. I inquired who her aunt might be and she answered, Why, Miss Bordereau! with an air of surprise, as if I
 
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might have been expected to know. There were contradictions like this in Tita Bordereau which, as I observed later, contributed to make her an odd and affecting person. It was the study of the two ladies to live so that the world should not touch them, and yet they had never altogether accepted the idea that it never heard of them. In Tita at any rate a grateful susceptibility to human contact had not died out, and contact of a limited order there would be if I should come to live in the house.
We have never done anything of the sort; we have never had a lodger or any kind of inmate. So much as this she made a point of saying to me. We are very poor, we live very badly. The rooms are very barethat you might take; they have nothing in them. I don't know how you would sleep, how you would eat.
With your permission, I could easily put in a bed and a few tables and chairs.
C'est la moindre des choses
and the affair of an hour or two. I know a little man from whom I can hire what I should want for a few months, for a trifle, and my gondolier can bring the things round in his boat. Of course in this great house you must have a second kitchen, and my servant, who is a wonderfully handly fellow (this personage was an evocation of the moment), can easily cook me a chop there. My tastes and habits are of the simplest; I live on flowers! And then I ventured to add that if they were very poor it was all the more reason they should let their rooms. They were bad economistsI had never heard of such a waste of material.
I saw in a moment that the good lady had never before been spoken to in that way, with a kind of humorous firmness which did not exclude sympathy but was on the contrary founded on it. She might easily have told me that my sympathy was impertinent, but this by good fortune did not occur to her. I left her with the understanding that she would consider the matter with her aunt and that I might come back the next day for their decision.
The aunt will refuse; she will think the whole proceeding very
louche!
Mrs. Prest declared shortly after this, when I had resumed my place in her gondola. She had put the idea into my head and now (so little are women to be counted on) she
 
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appeared to take a despondent view of it. Her pessimism provoked me and I pretended to have the best hopes; I went so far as to say that I had a distinct presentiment that I should succeed. Upon this Mrs. Prest broke out, Oh, I see what's in your head! You fancy you have made such an impression in a quarter of an hour that she is dying for you to come and can be depended upon to bring the old one round. If you do get in you'll count it as a triumph.
I did count it as a triumph, but only for the editor (in the last analysis), not for the man, who had not the tradition of personal conquest. When I went back on the morrow the little maid-servant conducted me straight through the long sala (it opened there as before in perfect perspective and was lighter now, which I thought a good omen) into the apartment from which the recipient of my former visit had emerged on that occasion. It was a large shabby parlour, with a fine old painted ceiling and a strange figure sitting alone at one of the windows. They come back to me now almost with the palpitation they caused, the successive feelings that accompanied my consciousness that as the door of the room closed behind me I was really face to face with the Juliana of some of Aspern's most exquisite and most renowned lyrics. I grew used to her afterwards, though never completely; but as she sat there before me my heart beat as fast as if the miracle of resurrection had taken place for my benefit. Her presence seemed somehow to contain his, and I felt nearer to him at that first moment of seeing her than I ever had been before or ever have been since. Yes, I remember my emotions in their order, even including a curious little tremor that took me when I saw that the niece was not there. With her, the day before, I had become sufficiently familiar, but it almost exceeded my courage (much as I had longed for the event) to be left alone with such a terrible relic as the aunt. She was too strange, too literally resurgent. Then came a check, with the perception that we were not really face to face, inasmuch as she had over her eyes a horrible green shade which, for her, served almost as a mask. I believed for the instant that she had put it on expressly, so that from underneath it she might scrutinise me without being scrutinised herself. At the same time it increased the presumption that there was a ghastly death's-head
 
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lurking behind it. The divine Juliana as a grinning skullthe vision hung there until it passed. Then it came to me that she
was
tremendously oldso old that death might take her at any moment, before I had time to get what I wanted from her. The next thought was a correction to that; it lighted up the situation. She would die next week, she would die tomorrowthen I could seize her papers. Meanwhile she sat there neither moving nor speaking. She was very small and shrunken, bent forward, with her hands in her lap. She was dressed in black and her head was wrapped in a piece of old black lace which showed no hair.
My emotion keeping me silent she spoke first, and the remark she made was exactly the most unexpected.
III
Our house is very far from the centre, but the little canal is very
comme il faut.
It's the sweetest corner of Venice and I can imagine nothing more charming, I hastened to reply. The old lady's voice was very thin and weak, but it had an agreeable, cultivated murmur and there was wonder in the thought that that individual note had been in Jeffrey Aspern's ear.
Please to sit down there. I hear very well, she said quietly, as if perhaps I had been shouting at her; and the chair she pointed to was at a certain distance. I took possession of it, telling her that I was perfectly aware that I had not been properly introduced and could only throw myself upon her indulgence. Perhaps the other lady, the one I had had the honour of seeing the day before, would have explained to her about the garden. That was literally what had given me courage to take a step so unconventional. I had fallen in love at sight with the whole place (she herself probably was so used to it that she did not know the impression it was capable of making on a stranger), and I had felt it was really a case to risk something. Was her own kindness in receiving me a sign that I was not wholly out in my calculation? It would render me extremely happy to think so. I could give her my word of honour that I was a most respectable, inoffensive person and that as an inmate they would be barely

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