Night Journey Read Online Free Page A

overlooking the Lagoon and unpacked my few things. Nothing now till nightfall.
    Strange to be in this loveliest of all cities again after five years, especially so after the dangerous and depressing journey, first across wide and devious stretches of sea in a state of unsleeping armed alert, then across country still showing the blight of civil war—that civil war which had been a symptom of the ailment of which all Europe was now sick. The last time I was in Venice the Spanish sore hadn’t even begun to fester; and Schuschnigg at least was still alive and a free Austrian cabinet still met—whether it was to consider the Fatherland Front or the future of comic opera; and the shadow of a bloodstained neurotic despot had fallen across my beloved Vienna, but only the shadow. That Europe in which I had grown up had never been a real place. In it men had worked and played and tended their own affairs, not quite conscious, but never entirely unconscious, of the insecure, fluid, temporary nature of it all. Like ants building in ground soon to be re-turned.
    The differences which war had brought to this city of pleasure seemed at first quite few. Many of the gondola men still plied, but the water buses were happily fewer; the enchanted St. Mark’s Square was scarcely less crowded for the time of year, the pigeons as numerous and as well fed. Shops were still stacked with beautiful silks, tooled leathers, costume jewellery, Murano glass, shirts, embroidered blouses, rich materials, haute couture fashions. The grocery shops and fish shops were full, fruit shops were overflowing. I had forgotten that I had now been moved to the winning side.
    Perhapsthe greatest difference was in the languages. I heard no English, no French, only once American, twice Spanish. Being a polyglot, I am sensitive to the dialects of others; and I could pick out Bavarian from Prussian, Saxon from Westphalian, northern Italian from Roman; twice with something of a thrill I heard pure Viennese.
    Only when dusk fell did more changes show. The brilliance of the cafés and the lights round the Piazza San Marco had gone, as had all the lights except navigation lights on the lagoon. Even the lanterns in the gondolas had been dimmed; they moved through the narrow canals like glow-worms, and the gondoliers called their peculiar cry more often at corners so that they should not bump into their fellows. The great clock of the Campanile was not lit. The Lido was invisible. The cathedral and churches were not flood-lit. All this seemed to me a great improvement.
    The day had been bright and clear, but towards evening a watery mist crept over the sun, and now in the dusk a feeling of damp crept over the city. Depressed, I went back to the hotel.
    The depression was perhaps more one of instinct and fore-boding, because so far everything had gone without a hitch. The first big test had come on landing from the ship and passing the port authorities, but the questions asked had been well within the scope of a man who knew Edmondo Catania as well as I did. Of course the secret police had been hanging about, and one of them had listened to my answers, but I had been used to them in Italy for a long time, and they seemed no different from before the war. Mussolini’s Mafia, my father had called them, because the Duce had truncated and rendered innocuous that earliest of racketeering organisations by the expedient of incorporating its leading members in his secret police.
    So I had signed at the hotel and filled up the various forms with a first creeping sense of confidence. One hears frequently of the liar who tells his story so often that he begins to believe it himself.
    After dinner out again. In the semi-darkness of St. Mark’s Square the murmur of voices was like the movement of the sea. As I walked across it one of the café orchestras began to play “ Sibella”. Venice, like a popular woman surrouded by her suitors, was anxious that