The Aspern Papers | Page 9

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 scandalized. "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 not 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 honorable 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 afterward 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.
"The aunt will refuse; she will think the whole proceeding very
louche!" Mrs. Prest declared shortly after this, when I had resumed my
place in her gondola. She had put the idea into my head and now (so
little are women to be counted on) she appeared to take a despondent
view of it. Her pessimism