Perhaps it did, but all the same, six weeks later, toward the
middle of June, the moment when Mrs. Prest undertook her annual
migration, I had made no measurable advance. I was obliged to
confess to her that I had no results to speak of. My first step
had been unexpectedly rapid, but there was no appearance that it
would be followed by a second. I was a thousand miles from taking
tea with my hostesses — that privilege of which, as I reminded Mrs.
Prest, we both had had a vision. She reproached me with wanting
boldness, and I answered that even to be bold you must have an
opportunity: you may push on through a breach but you can't batter
down a dead wall. She answered that the breach I had already made
was big enough to admit an army and accused me of wasting precious
hours in whimpering in her salon when I ought to have been carrying
on the struggle in the field. It is true that I went to see her
very often, on the theory that it would console me (I freely
expressed my discouragement) for my want of success on my own
premises. But I began to perceive that it did not console me to be
perpetually chaffed for my scruples, especially when I was really
so vigilant; and I was rather glad when
my derisive friend closed
her house for the summer. She had expected to gather amusement
from the drama of my intercourse with the Misses Bordereau, and she
was disappointed that the intercourse, and consequently the drama,
had not come off. "They'll lead you on to your ruin," she said
before she left Venice. "They'll get all your money without
showing you a scrap." I think I settled down to my business with
more concentration after she had gone away.
It was a fact that up to that time I had not, save on a single
brief occasion, had even a moment's contact with my queer
hostesses. The exception had occurred when I carried them
according to my promise the terrible three thousand francs. Then
I found Miss Tita waiting for me in the hall, and she took the
money from my hand so that I did not see her aunt. The old lady
had promised to receive me, but she apparently thought nothing of
breaking that vow. The money was contained in a bag of chamois
leather, of respectable dimensions, which my banker had given me,
and Miss Tita had to make a big fist to receive it. This she did
with extreme solemnity, though I tried to treat the affair a little
as a joke. It was in no jocular strain, yet it was with
simplicity, that she inquired, weighing the money in her two palms:
"Don't you think it's too much?" To which I replied that that
would depend upon the amount of pleasure I should get for it.
Hereupon she turned away from me quickly, as she had done the day
before, murmuring in a tone different from any she had used
hitherto: "Oh, pleasure, pleasure — there's no pleasure in this
house!"
After this, for a long time, I never saw her, and
I wondered
that the common chances of the day should not have helped us to
meet. It could only be evident that she was immensely on her guard
against them; and in addition to this the house was so big that for
each other we were lost in it. I used to look out for her
hopefully as I crossed the
sala in my comings and goings, but
I was not rewarded with a glimpse of the tail of her dress. It was
as if she never peeped out of her aunt's apartment. I used to
wonder what she did there week after week and year after year. I
had never encountered such a violent
parti pris of seclusion;
it was more than keeping quiet — it was like hunted creatures
feigning death. The two ladies appeared to have no visitors
whatever and no sort of contact with the world. I judged at least
that people could not have come to the house and that Miss Tita
could not have gone out without my having some observation of it.
I did what I disliked myself for doing (reflecting that it was only
once in a way): I questioned my servant about their habits and let
him divine that I should be interested in any information he could
pick up. But he picked up amazingly little for a knowing Venetian:
it must be added that where there is a perpetual fast there are
very few crumbs on the floor. His cleverness in other ways was
sufficient, if it was not quite all that I had attributed to him on
the occasion of my first interview with Miss Tita. He had helped
my gondolier to bring me round a boatload of furniture; and when
these articles had been carried to the top of the palace and
distributed according to our associated wisdom he organized my
household with such promptitude as was consistent with the fact
that it was composed exclusively of
himself. He made me in short
as comfortable as I could be with my indifferent prospects. I
should have been glad if he had fallen in love with Miss
Bordereau's maid or, failing this, had taken her in aversion;
either event might have brought about some kind of catastrophe, and
a catastrophe might have led to some parley. It was my idea that
she would have been sociable, and I myself on various occasions saw
her flit to and fro on domestic errands, so that I was sure she was
accessible. But I tasted of no gossip from that fountain, and I
afterward learned that Pasquale's affections were fixed upon an
object that made him heedless of other women. This was a young
lady with a powdered face, a yellow cotton gown, and much leisure,
who used often to come to see him. She practiced, at her
convenience, the art of a stringer of beads (these ornaments are
made in Venice, in profusion; she had her pocket full of them, and
I used to find them on the floor of my apartment), and kept an eye
on the maiden in the house. It was not for me of course to make
the domestics tattle, and I never said a word to Miss Bordereau's
cook.
It seemed to me a proof of the old lady's determination to
have nothing to do with me that she should never have sent me a
receipt for my three months' rent. For some days I looked out for
it and then, when I had given it up, I wasted a good deal of time
in wondering what her reason had been for neglecting so
indispensable and familiar a form. At first I was tempted to send
her a reminder, after which I relinquished the idea (against my
judgment as to what was right in the particular case), on the
general ground of wishing to keep quiet. If Miss Bordereau
suspected me of ulterior aims she would suspect me less if I should
be businesslike, and yet I consented not to be so. It was possible
she intended her omission as an impertinence, a visible irony, to
show how she could overreach people who attempted to overreach her.
On that hypothesis it was well to let her see that one did not
notice her little tricks. The real reading of the matter, I
afterward perceived, was simply the poor old woman's desire to
emphasize the fact that I was in the enjoyment of a favor as
rigidly limited as it had been liberally bestowed. She had given
me part of her house, and now she would not give me even a morsel
of paper with her name on it. Let me say that even at first this
did not make me too miserable, for the whole episode was
essentially delightful to me. I foresaw that I should have a
summer after my own literary heart, and the sense of holding my
opportunity was much greater than the sense of losing it. There
could be no Venetian business without patience, and since I adored
the place I was much more in the spirit of it for having laid in a
large provision. That spirit kept me perpetual company and seemed
to look out at me from the revived immortal face — in which all his
genius shone — of the great poet who was my prompter. I had invoked
him and he had come; he hovered before me half the time; it was as
if his bright ghost had returned to earth to tell me that he
regarded the affair as his own no less than mine and that we should
see it fraternally, cheerfully to a conclusion. It was as if he
had said, "Poor dear, be easy with her; she has some natural
prejudices; only give her time.
Strange as it may appear to you
she was very attractive in 1820. Meanwhile are we not in Venice
together, and what better place is there for the meeting of dear
friends? See how it glows with the advancing summer; how the sky
and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all
shimmer and melt together." My eccentric private errand became a
part of the general romance and the general glory — I felt even a
mystic companionship, a moral fraternity with all those who in the
past had been in the service of art. They had worked for beauty,
for a devotion; and what else was I doing? That element was in
everything that Jeffrey Aspern had written, and I was only bringing
it to the light.
I lingered in the sala when I went to and fro; I used to
watch — as long as I thought decent — the door that led to Miss
Bordereau's part of the house. A person observing me might have
supposed I was trying to cast a spell upon it or attempting some
odd experiment in hypnotism. But I was only praying it would open
or thinking what treasure probably lurked behind it. I hold it
singular, as I look back, that I should never have doubted for a
moment that the sacred relics were there; never have failed to feel
a certain joy at being under the same roof with them. After all
they were under my hand — they had not escaped me yet; and they made
my life continuous, in a fashion, with the illustrious life they
had touched at the other end. I lost myself in this satisfaction
to the point of assuming — in my quiet extravagance — that poor Miss
Tita also went back, went back, as I used to phrase it. She did
indeed, the gentle spinster, but not quite so
far as Jeffrey
Aspern, who was simply hearsay to her, quite as he was to me. Only
she had lived for years with Juliana, she had seen and handled the
papers and (even though she was stupid) some esoteric knowledge had
rubbed off on her. That was what the old woman represented —
esoteric knowledge; and this was the idea with which my editorial
heart used to thrill. It literally beat faster often, of an
evening, when I had been out, as I stopped with my candle in the
re-echoing hall on my way up to bed. It was as if at such a moment
as that, in the stillness, after the long contradiction of the day,
Miss Bordereau's secrets were in the air, the wonder of her
survival more palpable. These were the acute impressions. I had
them in another form, with more of a certain sort of reciprocity,
during the hours that I sat in the garden looking up over the top
of my book at the closed windows of my hostess. In these windows
no sign of life ever appeared; it was as if, for fear of my
catching a glimpse of them, the two ladies passed their days in the
dark. But this only proved to me that they had something to
conceal; which was what I had wished to demonstrate. Their
motionless shutters became as expressive as eyes consciously
closed, and I took comfort in thinking that at all events through
invisible themselves they saw me between the lashes.
I made a point of spending as much time as possible in the
garden, to justify the picture I had originally given of my
horticultural passion. And I not only spent time, but (hang it! as
I said) I spent money. As soon as I had got my rooms arranged and
could give the proper thought to the matter I
surveyed the place
with a clever expert and made terms for having it put in order. I
was sorry to do this, for personally I liked it better as it was,
with its weeds and its wild, rough tangle, its sweet,
characteristic Venetian shabbiness. I had to be consistent, to
keep my promise that I would smother the house in flowers.
Moreover I formed this graceful project that by flowers I would
make my way — I would succeed by big nosegays. I would batter the
old women with lilies — I would bombard their citadel with roses.
Their door would have to yield to the pressure when a mountain of
carnations should be piled up against it. The place in truth had
been brutally neglected. The Venetian capacity for dawdling is of
the largest, and for a good many days unlimited litter was all my
gardener had to show for his ministrations. There was a great
digging of holes and carting about of earth, and after a while I
grew so impatient that I had thoughts of sending for my bouquets to
the nearest stand. But I reflected that the ladies would see
through the chinks of their shutters that they must have been
bought and might make up their minds from this that I was a humbug.
So I composed myself and finally, though the delay was long,
perceived some appearances of bloom. This encouraged me, and I
waited serenely enough till they multiplied. Meanwhile the real
summer days arrived and began to pass, and as I look back upon them
they seem to me almost the happiest of my life. I took more and
more care to be in the garden whenever it was not too hot. I had
an arbor arranged and a low table and an armchair put into it; and
I carried out books and portfolios (I had always some business of
writing in hand), and worked and waited
and mused and hoped, while
the golden hours elapsed and the plants drank in the light and the
inscrutable old palace turned pale and then, as the day waned,
began to flush in it and my papers rustled in the wandering breeze
of the Adriatic.
Considering how little satisfaction I got from it at first it
is remarkable that I should not have grown more tired of wondering
what mystic rites of ennui the Misses Bordereau celebrated in their
darkened rooms; whether this had always been the tenor of their
life and how in previous years they had escaped elbowing their
neighbors. It was clear that they must have had other habits and
other circumstances; that they must once have been young or at
least middle-aged. There was no end to the questions it was
possible to ask about them and no end to the answers it was not
possible to frame. I had known many of my country-people in Europe
and was familiar with the strange ways they were liable to take up
there; but the Misses Bordereau formed altogether a new type of the
American absentee. Indeed it was plain that the American name had
ceased to have any application to them — I had seen this in the ten
minutes I spent in the old woman's room. You could never have said
whence they came, from the appearance of either of them; wherever
it was they had long ago dropped the local accent and fashion.
There was nothing in them that one recognized, and putting the
question of speech aside they might have been Norwegians or
Spaniards. Miss Bordereau, after all, had been in Europe nearly
three-quarters of a century; it appeared by some verses addressed
to her by Aspern on the occasion of his own second absence from
America — verses of which Cumnor and I had after
infinite conjecture
established solidly enough the date — that she was even then, as a
girl of twenty, on the foreign side of the sea. There was an
implication in the poem (I hope not just for the phrase) that he
had come back for her sake. We had no real light upon her
circumstances at that moment, any more than we had upon her origin,
which we believed to be of the sort usually spoken of as modest.
Cumnor had a theory that she had been a governess in some family in
which the poet visited and that, in consequence of her position,
there was from the first something unavowed, or rather something
positively clandestine, in their relations. I on the other hand
had hatched a little romance according to which she was the
daughter of an artist, a painter or a sculptor, who had left the
western world when the century was fresh, to study in the ancient
schools. It was essential to my hypothesis that this amiable man
should have lost his wife, should have been poor and unsuccessful
and should have had a second daughter, of a disposition quite
different from Juliana's. It was also indispensable that he should
have been accompanied to Europe by these young ladies and should
have established himself there for the remainder of a struggling,
saddened life. There was a further implication that Miss Bordereau
had had in her youth a perverse and adventurous, albeit a generous
and fascinating character, and that she had passed through some
singular vicissitudes. By what passions had she been ravaged, by
what sufferings had she been blanched, what store of memories had
she laid away for the monotonous future?
I asked myself these things as I sat spinning theories about
her in my arbor and the bees droned
in the flowers. It was
incontestable that, whether for right or for wrong, most readers of
certain of Aspern's poems (poems not as ambiguous as the sonnets —
scarcely more divine, I think — of Shakespeare) had taken for
granted that Juliana had not always adhered to the steep footway of
renunciation. There hovered about her name a perfume of reckless
passion, an intimation that she had not been exactly as the
respectable young person in general. Was this a sign that her
singer had betrayed her, had given her away, as we say nowadays, to
posterity? Certain it is that it would have been difficult to put
one's finger on the passage in which her fair fame suffered an
imputation. Moreover was not any fame fair enough that was so sure
of duration and was associated with works immortal through their
beauty? It was a part of my idea that the young lady had had a
foreign lover (and an unedifying tragical rupture) before her
meeting with Jeffrey Aspern. She had lived with her father and
sister in a queer old-fashioned, expatriated, artistic Bohemia, in
the days when the aesthetic was only the academic and the painters
who knew the best models for a
contadina and
pifferaro wore
peaked hats and long hair. It was a society less furnished than
the coteries of today (in its ignorance of the wonderful chances,
the opportunities of the early bird, with which its path was
strewn), with tatters of old stuff and fragments of old crockery;
so that Miss Bordereau appeared not to have picked up or have
inherited many objects of importance. There was no enviable
bric-a-brac, with its provoking legend of cheapness, in the room in
which I had seen her. Such a fact as that suggested bareness, but
nonetheless it worked happily into the
sentimental interest I had
always taken in the early movements of my countrymen as visitors to
Europe. When Americans went abroad in 1820 there was something
romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with the perpetual
ferryings of the present hour, when photography and other
conveniences have annihilated surprise. Miss Bordereau sailed with
her family on a tossing brig, in the days of long voyages and sharp
differences; she had her emotions on the top of yellow diligences,
passed the night at inns where she dreamed of travelers' tales, and
was struck, on reaching the Eternal City, with the elegance of
Roman pearls and scarfs. There was something touching to me in all
that, and my imagination frequently went back to the period. If
Miss Bordereau carried it there of course Jeffrey Aspern at other
times had done so a great deal more. It was a much more important
fact, if one were looking at his genius critically, that he had
lived in the days before the general transfusion. It had happened
to me to regret that he had known Europe at all; I should have
liked to see what he would have written without that experience, by
which he had incontestably been enriched. But as his fate had
ordered otherwise I went with him — I tried to judge how the Old
World would have struck him. It was not only there, however, that
I watched him; the relations he had entertained with the new had
even a livelier interest. His own country after all had had most
of his life, and his muse, as they said at that time, was
essentially American. That was originally what I had loved him
for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and
provincial, when the famous "atmosphere" it is supposed to lack was
not even
missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form
almost impossible, he had found means to live and write like one of
the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel,
understand, and express everything.