A stone floor the dining-room had, and walls of hard plaster, with strips of Syrian embroidery. About the walls were chairs, stately, uncomfortable, inhuman. The windows, giving on the Grand Canal, were immensely tall. It was an apartment for giants to live in. Sam felt that into this room had strode men in armor who with gigantic obscene laughter had discussed the torture of pale protestants against the Doge, and that they, not so unlike Edith Cortright for all her gentleness, had guffawed here with servants purple-uniformed, slatternly, and truculent.
The English couple crept away early. After their flutter of goodbyes, Sam lumbered to his feet and sighed, “I guess I’d—”
“No. Stay half an hour.”
“If you’d really—And how I have come to hate hotels!”
“You really liked having a home.”
“I certainly did!”
“Why do you stay away from it? Isn’t it—”
Then she laughed, lighted a cigarette, held it with arching fingers. “I suppose it’s rather ludicrous, my trying to give advice—and my own life such a mess that I endure it only by getting rid of all ambition, all purpose, and just floating, trying to get along with as little complication as possible.”
They talked slowly, and mostly they talked in silence. It was tranquil in that vast cool room above the Grand Canal. Out on the harbor, bands of singers in gondolas chanted old Italian ballads. They were, actually, rather commercialized, these singers; not for romance and the love of moonlight were they warbling, and between bursts of ecstasy they passed the hat from listening gondola to gondola, and were much rewarded by sentimentalists from Essen, Pittsburgh, and Manchester. The songs were conscientiously banal—“Donna è Mobile” and “Santa Lucia” for choice. Yet the whole theatric setting and the music across the water lured Sam into a still excitement.
“I can’t imagine you in any complications,” he wondered.
“I shouldn’t use that word, perhaps. All the complications are inside myself. It’s just that certain conditions of life have rather taken my confidence in myself away from me, and I’m so afraid of doing the wrong thing that it’s easier to do nothing.”
“That’s how I feel myself! Though with you, I can’t imagine it—you’re sure of yourself.”
“Not really. I’m like a man learning a new language—he can do it beautifully as long as he can introduce the subjects of conversation and use the words he knows—he can talk splendidly about Waiter, bring two more coffees, or What is the next train for Turin, but he’s lost if somebody else asks the questions and insists on talking about anything beyond page sixty in the Hugo Method! Here, in my own flat, with my own people, I’m safely on this side of Page Sixty, but I’d be horribly fluttered if I stepped out on Page Sixty-one! … By the way, I shall be very happy if you’re bored by your hotel here and care to come in for tea now and then.”
“Awfully good of—”
Without much consciousness of rising, he had strolled to the open window. “I do appreciate it. … Feel rather at loose ends.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it? If you care to. I’m a good confidante!”
“Well—”
He flung out with a suicidal defiance.
“I don’t like to whine—I don’t think I do, much—and I don’t like admitting I’m licked. But I am. And I’m getting a little sick of not being able to sleep nights, brooding about it. Too damn much brooding probably!” He tramped out to the narrow balcony, above the canal and the sound of splashing water. On this balcony once (though Sam did not know it) Lord Byron had stood, snarling to a jet-bright lady a more pitiful and angry tale.
Edith Cortright was beside him, murmuring—oh, her words were a commonplace “Would you like to tell me about it?” but her voice was kind, and curiously honest, curiously free of the barriers between a strange man and a strange woman. And with her Venice murmured, and the songs of love.
“Oh, I suppose it’s a very ordinary story. My wife is younger than I am, and livelier, and she’s found a man in Berlin, and I guess I’ve lost her. For keeps. … Oh, I know I oughtn’t to undress in public like this. But I swear I haven’t before! Am I rotten to—”
She said quickly, “Don’t! Of course you’re not. I’d be glad if I could tell my own story.”
“Please!”
“And I haven’t told people, either, not even my friends, though I suppose they guess—Perhaps you and I can be franker with each other because we are strangers. I do understand how you feel, Mr. Dodsworth. I suppose the people I know here and in England and at home believe that I lead such a nun-like existence because I had an idolatrous worship of the late Honorable Cecil R. A. Cortright. Such a charming man! Perfect manners, and too perfect a game of bridge! Wonderful war record—M.C., D.S.O. Actually my husband was—He was a dreadful liar; one of these hand-kissing, smiling, convincing liars. He was a secret drunkard. He humiliated me constantly as a backwoods American; used to apologize to people, oh, so prettily, when I said ‘I guess’ instead of the equally silly ‘I fancy.’ And his dear mother used to congratulate me on my luck in having won her darling. Oh, I’m sorry! Beastly of me! Fatal Venetian night!”
Her quick breath was not a sob but a sound of anger. Her hand gripped the thin fluted railing of the balcony. He patted it shyly and said, as he would to his daughter Emily, “Maybe it’s good for both of us to tell our troubles a little. But—I wish I could hate my girl. I can’t. And I imagine you can’t hate Cortright. Might be good for us!”
“Yes,” dryly. “It would. But I’m beautifully beginning to be able to. I—Have you ever seen Malapert’s etchings? Let me show you a book of them I received today.”
He dutifully looked at etchings for fifteen minutes, and said
