Collected Stories by Henry James

  The gondola stopped, the old palace was there; it was a house of the class which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified name. ‘How charming! It’s grey and pink!’ my companion exclaimed; and that is the most comprehensive description of it. It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career. But its wide front, with a stone balcony from end to end of the piano nobile or most important floor, was architectural enough, with the aid of various pilasters and arches; and the stucco with which in the intervals it had long ago been endued was rosy in the April afternoon. It overlooked a clean, melancholy, unfrequented canal, which had a narrow riva or convenient footway on either side. ‘I don’t know why – there are no brick gables,’ said Mrs Prest, ‘but this corner has seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than like Venice. It’s perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though you can pass on foot scarcely any one ever thinks of doing so. It has the air of a Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches.’

  I forget what answer I made to this – I was given up to two other reflections. The first of these was that if the old lady lived in such a big, imposing house she could not be in any sort of misery and therefore would not be tempted by a chance to let a couple of rooms. I expressed this idea to Mrs Prest, who gave me a very logical reply. ‘If she didn’t live in a big house how could it be a question of her having rooms to spare? If she were not amply lodged herself you would lack ground to approach her. Besides, a big house here, and especially in this quartier perdu, proves nothing at all: it is perfectly compatible with a state of penury. Dilapidated old palazzi, if you will go out of the way for them, are to be had for five shillings a year. And as for the people who live in them – no, until you have explored Venice socially as much as I have you can form no idea of their domestic desolation. They live on nothing, for they have nothing to live on.’ The other idea that had come into my head was connected with a high blank wall which appeared to confine an expanse of ground on one side of the house. Blank I call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick that had turned pink with time; and a few thin trees, with the poles of certain rickety trellises, were visible over the top. The place was a garden and apparently it belonged to the house. It suddenly occurred to me that if it did belong to the house I had my pretext.

  I sat looking out on all this with Mrs Prest (it was covered with the golden glow of Venice) from the shade of our felze, and she asked me if I would go in then, while she waited for me, or come back another time. At first I could not decide – it was doubtless very weak of me. I wanted still to think I might get a footing, and I was afraid to meet failure, for it would leave me, as I remarked to my companion, without another arrow for my bow. ‘Why not another?’ she inquired, as I sat there hesitating and thinking it over; and she wished to know why even now and before taking the trouble of becoming an inmate (which might be wretchedly uncomfortable after all, even if it succeeded), I had not the resource of simply offering them a sum of money down. In that way I might obtain the documents without bad nights.

  ‘Dearest lady,’ I exclaimed, ‘excuse the impatience of my tone when I suggest that you must have forgotten the very fact (surely I communicated it to you) which pushed me to throw myself upon your ingenuity. The old woman won’t have the documents spoken of; they are personal, delicate, intimate, and she hasn’t modern notions, God bless her! If I should sound that note first I should certainly spoil the game. I can arrive at the papers only by putting her off her guard, and I can put her off her guard only by ingratiating diplomatic practices. Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance. I am sorry for it, but for Jeffrey Aspern’s sake I would do worse still. First I must take tea with her; then tackle the main job.’ And I told over what had happened to John Cumnor when he wrote to her. No notice whatever had been taken of his first letter, and the second had been answered very sharply, in six lines, by the niece. ‘Miss Bordereau requested her to say that she could not imagine what he meant by troubling them. They had none of Mr Aspern’s papers, and if they had should never think of showing them to any one on any account whatever. She didn’t know what he was talking about and begged he would let her alone.’ I certainly did not want to be met that way.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Prest, after a moment, provokingly, ‘perhaps after all they haven’t any of his things. If they deny it flat how are you sure?’

  ‘John Cumnor is sure, and it would take me long to tell you how his conviction, or his very strong presumption – strong enough to stand against the old lady’s not unnatural fib – has built itself up. Besides, he makes much of the internal evidence of the niece’s letter.’

  ‘The internal evidence?’

  ‘Her calling him “Mr Aspern”. ’

  ‘I don’t see what that proves.’

  ‘It proves familiarity, and familiarity implies the possession of mementos, of relics. I can’t tell you how that “Mr” touches me – how it bridges over the gulf of time and brings our hero near to me – nor what an edge it gives to my desire to see Juliana. You don’t say “Mr” Shakespeare.’

  ‘Would I, any more, if I had a box full of his letters?’

  ‘Yes, if he had been your lover and some one wanted them!’ And I added that John Cumnor was so convinced, and so all the more convinced by Miss Bordereau’s tone, that he would have come himself to Venice on the business were it not that for him there was the obstacle that it would be difficult to disprove his identity with the person who had written to them, which the old ladies would be sure to suspect in spite of dissimulation and a change of name. If they were to ask him point-blank if he were not their correspondent it would be too awkward for him to lie; whereas I was fortunately not tied in that way. I was a fresh hand and could say no without lying.

  ‘But you will have to change your name,’ said Mrs Prest. ‘Juliana lives out of the world as much as it is possible to live, but none the less she has probably heard of Mr Aspern’s editors; she perhaps possesses what you have published.’

  ‘I have thought of that,’ I returned; and I drew out of my pocket-book a visiting-card, neatly engraved with a name that was not my own.

  ‘You are very extravagant; you might have written it,’ said my companion.

  ‘This looks more genuine.’

  ‘Certainly, you are prepared to go far! But it will be awkward about your letters; they won’t come to you in that mask.’

  ‘My banker will take them in and I will go every day to fetch them. It will give me a little walk.’

  ‘Shall you only depend upon that?’ asked Mrs Prest. ‘Aren’t you coming to see me?’

  ‘Oh, you will have left Venice, for the hot months, long before there are any results. I am prepared to roast all summer – as well as hereafter, perhaps you’ll say! Meanwhile, John Cumnor will bombard me with letters addressed, in my feigned name, to the care of the padrona.’

  ‘She will recognise his hand,’ my companion suggested.

  ‘On the envelope he can disguise it.’

  ‘Well, you’re a precious pair! Doesn’t it occur to you that even if you are able to say you are not Mr Cumnor in person they may still suspect you of being his emissary?’

  ‘Certainly, and I see only one way to parry that.’

  ‘And what may that be?’

  I hesitated a moment. ‘To make love to the niece.’

  ‘Ah,’ cried Mrs Prest, ‘wait till you see her!’

  II

  ‘I MUST work the garden – I must work the garden,’ I said to myself, five minutes later, as I waited, upstairs, in the long, dusky sala, where the bare scagliola floor gleamed vaguely in a chink of the closed shutters. The place was impressive but it looked cold and cautious. Mrs Prest had floated away, giving me a rendezvous at the end of hal
f an hour by some neighbouring watersteps; and I had been let into the house, after pulling the rusty bell-wire, by a little red-headed, white-faced maid-servant, who was very young and not ugly and wore clicking pattens and a shawl in the fashion of a hood. She had not contented herself with opening the door from above by the usual arrangement of a creaking pulley, though she had looked down at me first from an upper window, dropping the inevitable challenge which in Italy precedes the hospitable act. As a general thing I was irritated by this survival of mediaeval manners, though as I liked the old I suppose I ought to have liked it; but I was so determined to be genial that I took my false card out of my pocket and held it up to her, smiling as if it were a magic token. It had the effect of one indeed, for it brought her, as I say, all the way down. I begged her to hand it to her mistress, having first written on it in Italian the words, ‘Could you very kindly see a gentleman, an American, for a moment?’ The little maid was not hostile, and I reflected that even that was perhaps something gained. She coloured, she smiled and looked both frightened and pleased. I could see that my arrival was a great affair, that visits were rare in that house, and that she was a person who would have liked a sociable place. When she pushed forward the heavy door behind me I felt that I had a foot in the citadel. She pattered across the damp, stony lower hall and I followed her up the high staircase – stonier still, as it seemed – without an invitation. I think she had meant I should wait for her below, but such was not my idea, and I took up my station in the sala. She flitted, at the far end of it, into impenetrable regions, and I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist’s parlour. It was gloomy and stately, but it owed its character almost entirely to its noble shape and to the fine architectural doors – as high as the doors of houses – which, leading into the various rooms, repeated themselves on either side at intervals. They were surmounted with old faded painted escutcheons, and here and there, in the spaces between them, brown pictures, which I perceived 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 garden – do 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 garden – upon 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 were – possibly – not 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 literary work, some reading and writing to do, so that I must be quiet, and yet if possible a great deal in the open air – that’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 windows – such grand ones as you have here – if 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 you – we 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 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 ago – we 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 old – she 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 women – I 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 aft
erwards 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 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 bare – that 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 handy 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 economists – I 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.