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CHAPTER IV
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.
Content of CHAPTER IV [Henry James' novel: The Aspern Papers]
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