The Italian still stood looking fixedly at the paving stones. Then he thrust one hand into the back pocket of his trousers and produced a neat pocketbook: possibly a gift from the Englishman. After examining the contents with almost comic care, he returned the pocketbook to its place and strolled off. In pursuit, Fern imagined; thought he did not turn round to see. Judging from many experiences since his arrival, he thought that were he to do so, the next approach might be to him. He had found it a situation that put him at a loss in all its aspects. He simply could not live up to what was expected of a lone Englishman in Italy.

By now he felt so alone that he almost wished that he could. Hitherto in Venice he had been neither happy nor unhappy but simply amazed; on occasion aghast. Now the recollection of his dream had coincided with the rapid dissolution of the perambulating philosopher in him. Acclimatisation to Venice had set in with a rush. The September breeze blew gently up the Ca.n.a.le di San Marco in Fern's face; sweet and cool, as it sighed for the slow sickness of Venice's stifling summer. The flashy motor-boats cackled and yelped around him, driving the gondolas to their death. Fern, thrust back upon his own life, pa.s.sed his hand over his legs, his arms, his shoulders. He felt a pain he had almost forgotten during the years he had walked his tightrope.

What could Venice do for him but sadden him further? Fern decided to go home the next day; if the owner of the pension would permit him to depart ahead of his time. He rose, extended and contracted his legs, stumped up and down a bit, gazed for the last time upon one particularly incomparable Venetian prospect, and felt quite equal to weeping, had it not been for the self-consciousness of solitude in a foreign land.

He walked away.

III.

That evening, Fern pushed his way along the Molo. He wanted no more unsettled business in his heart.

The owner of the pension had indicated that for a room in modern Venice, as for so much else, there is always a queue. He tried to charge Fern up to the end of the week, but did not try to keep him. Fern had already suspected that in the campaign between the visitors and the Venetians there are few clear-cut victories on either side.

Fern had even an excuse for his promenade. It was to be his last night in Venice, and, as he might have put it in his manly and practical aspect, 'You can't leave Venice without ever having been in a gondola.' Gondolas may not last much longer, nor may people. But gondolas, being no longer very functional, are not much good without someone to love on the journey.

On the Molo, Americans stood about, j.a.ping one another uneasily or over-confidently; wondering how to fill in before flying on to Athens or back to Paris the next morning; questing for highb.a.l.l.s or local vintages on the rocks. Uncontrolled Italian children and their plump, doting parents effortlessly dominated the prospect. Away to the south, over towards Chioggia, single lights gleamed romantically. The sky was turning to deep lilac and filling with festive, silvery stars.

Fern turned leftwards up an alley, where it was quieter, then wound about through dark courts and pa.s.sages, like a beetle through a tome. Immediately he was alone, or almost so, among the great dark buildings, his mind returned to those small, elegant bedrooms and boudoirs at the top of the palazzo he had visited. The recollection of them made him shiver with the pathos of something so hopelessly irrecoverable that was still so hopelessly necessary. Thinking about them, feeling still the intensity of their atmosphere, he could smell the perfume of the Venetian decadence; that long century when the lion drowsed, awaiting Napoleon, the city fell irrevocably to pieces, and all the fashionable wore curious, enveloping masks, so that they looked partly like strange animals, partly like comedians, and partly like ravishers and ravished.

There was such a figure standing before him; dark and motionless against the rail along the side of a ca.n.a.l, which edged the small piazzetta Fern entered; neither quite in the light from the one lamp in the piazzetta, nor quite out of it. Fern slipped into a shadowy doorway and stared, silent and listening to his heartbeat.

On the other side of the ca.n.a.l loomed a formless stone structure, from all the windows of which seemed to shine an even, pale light, something between pink and blue; and Fern, whose hearing was at all times excessively acute, thought he could detect the faint echo of music and revelry seeping through the thick walls and closed cas.e.m.e.nts. Then he realised that the pale light was the reflection of the late evening sky on the gla.s.s, and that the sound was no more than the general cry of Venice. He drew himself together.

Almost in silence down the ca.n.a.l came a gondola. Fern, however sharp his ears, could hear only the softest plash, plash, plash. Then the ferro came into view, and the gondola stopped by the figure against the railing. The gondolier seemed to be dressed in black. But Fern's attention was concentrated upon the equally dark pa.s.senger; the person for whom the gondola had come.

At first, and in the most curious way, nothing more seemed to happen. The gondola just lay there in the faintly coloured dusk; with the gondolier almost invisible, and the presumed pa.s.senger still apparently waiting for someone or something, certainly making no motion to step aboard, indeed making no motion of any kind. Two middle-aged men, both dressed in light colours, crossed the piazzetta from the opposite corner, and proceeded in the direction from which Fern had come. They were talking loudly and simultaneously, in the usual way, and gave no sign of noticing the gondola and the figure by the railing. Of course, there was no reason why they should notice them. All the same, Fern felt that two or three minutes must have pa.s.sed while the group remained motionless in dim outline against the vast stone building on the other side of the ca.n.a.l.

At least that length of time pa.s.sed before it occurred to Fern that it might be for him they waited. He had set forth to destroy his dream (even though he had not expressed it quite like that) and thereby, as so often, might have wound up the mechanism for making it come true; because life goes ever crabwise, as the great Venetian, Baron Corvo, constantly proclaimed. Fern shrank back into his dark doorway. He feared lest the whiteness of his face give him away.

The strange set piece lingered for a few more moments. Then Fern realised that the figure which had been standing by the railings was now somehow in the gondola, and that the gondola was once more coming towards him. It glided down the side of the piazzetta, making only the ghost of a sound; the plash, plash, plash of the paddle might have been the wings of a night bird, or the trembling of Fern's own heart muscles. Five or six gay little children ran across the piazzetta in the line of the two men in grey. They were heavily preoccupied with abusing and hitting one another.

Peeping out, Fern saw that the pa.s.senger was still standing in the gondola, somewhat towards the bow. The whole course of events was too fanciful, so that Fern's only resolution was to withdraw. He was waiting until the disappearance of the gondola should make this possible. The gondola could hardly have taken more than a minute to pa.s.s, but before it had departed from Fern's view, as he hid in his doorway, the standing pa.s.senger made a slight movement; from within the dark hooded cloak a woman looked straight into Fern's pale face, and seemed to smile in welcome. In an instant, the gondola was gone.

A narrow fondamenta continued alongside the ca.n.a.l from out of the piazzetta. Fern ran to the corner and hastened after the vanishing boat, which seemed now to be travelling very much faster. As he sped on, his shoes clattering on the stones, he wondered if insidious Venice had promoted an insanity in him, a mad confusion between dream and dread. He was pretty sure that, if he should run at all, he should by rights run in the opposite direction. But having started to run, having begun such a disturbance of the night, he had to run on. He nearly managed to overtake the boat just as it was pa.s.sing under the next bridge. One would have been convinced that the gondolier at least must have heard him and seen him, but the gondola slid on undeflected. Fern realised that beyond the bridge the fondamenta did not continue. He stood on the crest of the arch and watched. He did not care, had no t.i.tle, to call after. The stones of Venice closed softly over the departing shadow.

And then, only twenty or thirty minutes later, something happened which explained these small but singular events.

Deep in thought, and troubled in soul, Fern strolled back to the wide promenade which faces the Ca.n.a.le di San Marco and is the princ.i.p.al waterfront of the city. The distance from the piazzetta of the odd events was not great, but in Venice, for better or for worse, one can seldom walk straight ahead and un.o.bstructed for more than a few paces, and Fern, his mind in any case on other things, lost himself in a small way at least twice. In the end, he emerged on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Everything was brightly illuminated, the sky was perfect, and Fern reflected that, after all, Venice did look rather festive, even a trifle exalted, as she should do. But his mind was on his own loneliness, and on his dream: if, at this late hour, he had, after all, made a tiny concession to Venice, he wanted someone with whom to join hands on it, wanted that person badly. Even so, he stood still, uncertain whether to turn leftwards where it would be quieter, or rightwards where adventure was more likely. Now that the chance had gone, he very positively wished that he had spoken to the woman in the piazzetta. It could hardly have been a matter of life or death. Fern trembled slightly. He was indeed an irresolute creature. By now, reason told him, it could hardly matter less which way he turned.

He simply lacked the heart, the energy, the curiosity to wander off towards the darker area to the left; to take a brisk solitary const.i.tutional along the front, safe except perhaps from cutpurses, as his father would certainly do, and think nothing of it, indeed be all the better for it. Fern turned towards Danieli's (a line of American women leaned like beautiful wasting candles over the rail of the roof-garden, high above); towards the Piazza; towards life, in the commercial or Thomas Cook connotation of the word.

Within a minute or two, he thought he saw again the woman whose face he had seen so momentarily in the gondola.

She was standing by herself in much the same way at the edge of the ca.n.a.l, though this time it was the Ca.n.a.le di San Marco, almost the sea. She was still wearing the hooded black cloak, as in a picture by one of the Longhis, but was no longer so m.u.f.fled in it. It looked to Fern that beneath it she was wearing a spreading, period dress. Despite the crowd, which had by no means ceased to push and bawl in his ears, he was really frightened. He did not put the thought into words within his head, but his thought was that this was an apparition, and that he was having a breakdown. The figure stood there so motionless, so detached from all those vulgar people, so spectrally apparelled; and, of course, so recurrent. As in the piazzetta, he stood and stared; not unlike a ghost himself. Everything faded but that single figure.

Then she walked steadily towards him, twenty or thirty-five yards, and spoke.

'English?'

She really was dressed in an eighteenth-century style, and beneath her hood Fern could see piled-up hair.

'Yes,' said Fern. 'English.'

'The city of Venice would like to invite you for a gondola trip.'

Here indeed was an explanation: at least within limits. She was connected with 'publicity' and was merely dressing the part. It was an explanation all too consistent with what Fern had seen of the place. He laughed a little too brashly, a little too brusquely.

But no doubt she was accustomed professionally to all gradations of oafishness.

'Complimentary, of course,' she said.

That, thought Fern, was like the Venice he had so far seen.

The woman was an Italian and did not speak words such as complimentary with ease.

'Are you alone?' asked the woman.

'Yes,' said Fern. 'Quite alone. You must invite someone else. I don't qualify.'

'But you do qualify,' said the woman. 'The city of Venice wants to help lonely visitors.'

It sounded ghastly, but the woman spoke with an aspect of sincerity that at least made it possible to reply with reasonable self-respect.

'Tell me more,' said Fern.

'We go in a gondola,' explained the woman, speaking carefully, in the way of professional guides, as if to a backward child, 'along the Grand Ca.n.a.l and across the Lagoon.'

It was not the manner in which Fern had visualised the realisation of his dream, but no doubt it was the dream which controlled the situation, and not he. Just then he could hardly be expected to think it all out.

'We?' enquired Fern. 'How many will there be?'

'Just you and I.' She said it with the dignity that certain Italian women can bring to statements that many other women can utter only with a blush and giggle or excessive explanation.

'And, of course, the gondolier,' she added with a beautiful smile.

'I shall be very pleased,' said Fern. 'Thank you.' He managed to accept with some degree of the same simplicity.

'There you are,' she said, using perhaps not quite the right idiom, and pointing to a gondola. Fern, even though apprehensive of capsizing the unknown craft, managed to hand her in as if to the manner born. They settled side by side on the cushions. Her cloak and wide skirt beneath spread themselves over his legs. She had neither spoken to the gondolier nor, as far as Fern had noticed, even looked at him. He cast off in silence, and they were out on the ca.n.a.l, with the other side, the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore looking disproportionately nearer almost of the instant. Fern tried to squint backwards in order to examine the gondolier, but it was difficult to see more than his shoes.

Fern squinted backwards a second time. They were not shoes. They were black feet.

But now there was nothing to worry about: indeed, when things were rightly conceived, there never had been anything to worry about. 'I think I saw you earlier this evening,' said Fern conversationally. 'On one of the narrower ca.n.a.ls.'

'People often see me, but it is only a few that I can call,' she replied in her not quite perfect idiom.

She began to describe the sights they were pa.s.sing. Fern knew most of them already, and more about them than the basic information deemed appropriate for Anglo-Saxon visitors. All the same, he liked listening to her deep voice and was often charmed by the way she put things. The effect of her simple tale was quite different when one was alone with her, he felt, than it would have been if she had been speaking to a crowd of tourists. They entered the Grand Ca.n.a.l. Just visible across the water to the left was the bollard on which that same afternoon Fern had summed up his conflictual condemnation; had sentenced Venice to depart from his life the next morning.

Fern continued listening respectfully, but by now he could feel the warmth of her body, and the spreading of her stiff skirt over his legs was delightful. It was difficult to listen indefinitely to such topographical plat.i.tudes when there was so much else that might be said, and doubtless a limit on the time.

He must have conveyed something of discontent to her because it seemed to him that her flow of facts (not all of them facts, either, he rather thought) began to falter. As they were traversing the few seconds of darkness under the Ponte dell'Accademia, she said, 'Perhaps you know Venice as well as I do?' Her tone was not peevish but friendly and solicitous, and Fern decided at once that it was a most unusual thing for a professional guide, always fearful of losing all justification for existence if any real knowledge on the part of the visitor is admitted. Fern's heart warmed to her further.

'I'm sure not,' he said. 'I've been here just over two weeks. Just long enough to know that two months are needed or perhaps two years.'

'If I go beyond the obvious things, I get into what you call deep waters.'

'I can well imagine,' replied Fern, not necessarily imagining very clearly. 'Let's stick to the obvious things.'

Fern, when he thought about it, could see and hear that the Ca.n.a.l Grande, most beautiful thoroughfare in the world (as so many have said), was its usual horrible self, loaded with roaring power-craft, congested with idiot tourists, lined with darkened palaces that should have been alive with lights; but he found that for once he was hardly thinking about it at all. He even reflected that he was glad the power-craft made his own progress slower; though it was, as ever in modern Venice, hard on the black gondolier.

'It was all so beautiful once.'

Fern could hardly believe his ears. He had so far found it a point of honour among Venetians not to admit that things had ever been better than they were now. He believed, indeed, that most of them were quite sincerely unaware of the fact.

Fern took his companion's hand. It seemed a very soft and unprofessional hand, and she let it lie in his undisturbed.

She spoke again. 'There is a rich American woman further back who has collected all the ugliest things in the world. You could never believe how ugly and how many. She keeps them in a half-built palazzo, which she never finishes. I could not bring myself to spoil so nice an evening by pointing it out.'

'I know about her,' smiled Fern. 'I've been there.'

'Can such a woman be capable of love?'

They were slowly pa.s.sing the Palazzo Rezzonico.

'Never the time and the place and the one capable of love, said the English poet.' Fern was rather surprised by himself.

A speed-boat full of white-shirted youths whizzed across their bows, almost capsizing them.

'It will be better out on the Lagoon,' said Fern's companion, drawing up her feet. 'Less interference and more real danger.'

Fern could not be sure what exactly she meant, but she seemed to find the prospect pleasurable, because her eyes gleamed for a second inside her hood as she spoke.

'Why danger?'

'At night there is always some danger out on the Lagoon.' She said it placidly, perhaps with a faint potentiality of contempt. Fern did not risk making the potential actual.

However curious Fern was about her, he asked no personal questions. He probably felt that they could elicit only inappropriate answers, but more important was the fact that he found the relationship easy and delightful, just as it was. Particularly unwise would have been any reference to the many others with whom she must have made this excursion, 'lonely people': Fern knew it was an odious cliche. It had never before occurred to Fern as possible that what was, after all, companionship on a business basis could so touch his real feelings. Least of all was it the way in which he had dreamed it.

But now she seemed to have shrunk away into the blackness. Fern still held her hand, but he felt that the racket around them, the emptiness of the palaces, spread a paralysing infection of disillusionment. He too began to long for the Lagoon.

He decided that sincerity was best.

'I really didn't mean to stop you talking. I was enjoying it.'

'I have nothing to tell which you do not know already.' Her voice was m.u.f.fled by the black garment into which she had withdrawn.

'I used to have a dream,' said Fern in something of a rush. 'For years I dreamt that I was doing exactly what I am doing now.'

'Venice is everyone's dream,' she replied. 'Venice is a dream.'

'With no reality?'

'The reality is what you call a nightmare.'

They were within two or three hundred yards of the Rialto bridge, high and wide with the marble bowers of ancient jewellers and poison-sellers. Here the scene on both sides of the ca.n.a.l was more animated; people sat at waterside cafe tables; a barge ploughed up and down bearing ma.s.sed singers of 'O Sole Mio' and 'Torna a Surriento.' Many people were at least attempting to enjoy themselves.

'The city fathers would hardly approve of your calling Venice a nightmare,' said Fern, pressing her hand.

'The city fathers, as you call them, are all dead. Everyone in Venice is dead. It is a dead city. Do you need to be told?'

Then Fern got it out; put it into words. 'I need you to love me.'

Amid the glare of the cafe lights, and the booming of the drum, he lifted himself on to his elbow and looked down at her elusive face, cased in its dark hood.

She said nothing.

'Make my dream come true. Love me.'

She still did not speak. Now they were actually abreast of the man with the vast drum. He shouted something light-hearted and scatological as the gondola toiled past the broken water. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

'Make my life worth while. Redeem me.'

From the depths of her black cloak she looked into his eyes.

'You said you dreamed no longer. Do you know why?'

'I think I began to despair of the dream coming true.'

The dream stopped when you decided to visit Venice. Never visit Venice.'

She stirred, withdrew her hand, and kissed him softly with cool lips.

'Set me free,' said Fern. 'Give me peace.'

In the long darkness beneath the Ponte di Rialto, he put his hand on the tight bodice over her breast. When they emerged, his arms were so fast around her that nothing could ever part them. The sorters in the Post Office on the Fondamenta dei Tedeschi perceived this and called shrilly. It was rare to see anyone in a gondola except the elderly and exhausted, with death making a busy third at the paddle.

There was no more for Fern to say except endearments. On and up past the dark palaces went the gondola, ploughing and labouring, tilting and rocking, as powered craft, large and small, shot past like squibs and rockets. The very extremity and eccentricity of the consequent, artificial motion added to the isolation as Fern made love on the deep, velvety cushions. Their black gondolier must have had the tirelessness of a demiurge, so regular and relentless was their advance.

'You are the moon and the stars,' said Fern. 'You are the apples on the tree, the gold of the morning, the desire of the evening. You are good, you are lovely, you are life. You are my heart's delight.'

The Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi came into sight.

'Isolde!' said Fern tenderly.

He had found a travelling companion.

'Tristan!' she replied, entering into the spirit of it.

'Perhaps that was when Venice died?' suggested Fern. 'When Tristan and Isolde was composed here.'