I went out in the gondola yesterday on the lagoon on the other side of the island. It was an afternoon of faint, exquisite sunshine, and the water lay like a mirror, bright and motionless, reflecting nothing but a small stake, or the hull, hoisted nets, and stooping back of a fisher and his boat. I looked along the level, polished surface to where sails rose up against the sky, between the black, compact bulk of the forts. The water lapped around the oar as it dipped and lifted, and trickled with a purring sound from the prow. I lay and felt perfectly happy, not thinking of anything, hardly conscious of myself. I had closed my eyes, and when I opened them again we were drifting close to a small island, on which there was a many-windowed building, most of the windows grated over, and a church with closed doors; the building almost filled the island; it had a walled garden with trees. A kind of moaning sound came from inside the walls, rising and falling, confused and broken. 'It is San Clemente,' said the gondolier over my shoulder; 'they keep mad people there, mad women.'
November 1.—She writes affectionate letters to me, without a respite; she will not let me alone to get well. For I am sure I could get well here if I were quite left to myself. And now even Venice is turning evil. Is it in the place, in myself, is it my disease returning to take hold of me? Is it the power of the woman coming back across land and water to take hold of me? I am getting afraid to go about this strange house at night; the wind comes in from the sea, and tears at the old walls and the roof; I scarcely know if it is the wind I hear when I wake up in the night.
November 3.—There is something unnatural in standing between water and water and hearing the shriek of a steam-engine. I am hardly too far, I suppose, from the railway-station, to have actually heard it. But the idea seems a foolish joke, unworthy of the place.
November 6.—Every day I find myself growing more uneasy. If I look out of the windows at dawn, when land and water seem to awaken like a flower, some poison comes to me out of this perhaps too perfect beauty. I dread the day, which seems to follow me and drag me back, after I have escaped another night; I never felt anything like this insidious coiling of water about one.
I came to Venice for peace, and I find a subtle terror growing up out of its waters, with a more ghostly insistence than anything solid on the earth has ever given me. Daylight seems to mask some gulf, which, with the early dark and the first lamps, begins to grow visible. As I look across at Venice from this island, I see darkness, and lights growing like trees and flowers out of the creeping water, and, white and immense, with its black windows and one lighted lamp, the Doges' Palace. Nothing else is real, and the beauty of this one white thing, the one thing whose form the eye can fasten upon, is the beauty of witchcraft. I expect to see it gone in the morning.
And the noises here are mysterious. I hear a creak outside my window, and it comes nearer, and a great orange sail passes across the window like a curtain drawn over it. Bells break out, and ring wildly, as if out of the water. Steamers hoot, with that unearthly sound to which one can never get accustomed. The barking of a dog comes from somewhere across the water, a voice cries out suddenly, and then the shriek of steam from a vessel, and again, from some new quarter, a volley of bells.