The Man in the Picture Read Free Page A

suffered nightmares if I was ill and had a fever. Because I had such trouble finding the right place for it, in the end I left the painting propped up there, against the bookcase. And I could not stop looking at it. Every time I came back into these rooms, it drew me. I spent more time looking at it – no, into it – than I did with pictures of far greater beauty and merit. I seemed to need it, to spend far too much time looking into every corner, every single face.
    I did not hear any more from the tiresome pest in the auction rooms, and I soon forgot about him entirely.

    Just one curious thing happened around that time. It was in the autumn of the same year, the first week of Michaelmas term and a night when the first chills of autumn had me ring for a fire. It was blazing up well, and I was working at my desk, in the circle of lamplight, when I happened to glance up for a second. The Venetian painting was directly in my sight and something about it made me look more closely. Cleaning had revealed fresh depths to the picture, and much more detail was now clear. I could see far more people who were crowded on the path beside the water, several rows deep in places, and gondolas and other craft laden with revellers, some masked, others not, on the canal. I had studied the faces over and over again, and each time I found more. People hung out of windows and over balconies, more were in the dim recesses of rooms in the palazzi. But now, it was only one person, one figure, which caught my eye and stood out from all the rest, and although he was near the front of the picture, I did not think I had noticed the man before. He was not looking at the lagoon or the boats, but rather away from them and out of the scene – he seemed, in fact, to be looking at me, and into this room. He wore clothes of the day but plain ones, not the elaborate fancy dress of many of the carnival-goers, and he was not masked. But two of the revellers close to him wore masks and both appeared to have their hands upon him, one on his shoulder, the other round his left wrist, almost as if they were trying to keep a hold of him or even pull him back. His face had a strange expression, as if he were at once astonished and afraid. He was looking away from the scene because he did not want to be part of it and into my room, at me – at anyone in front of the picture – with what I can only describe as pleading. But for what? What was he asking? The shock was seeing a man’s figure there at all when I had previously not noticed it. I supposed that the lamplight, cast on the painting at a particular angle, had revealed the figure clearly for the first time. Whatever the reason, his expression distressed me and I could not work with my former deep concentration. In the night, I woke several times, and, once, out of a strange dream in which the man in the picture was drowning in the canal and stretching out his arms for me to save him, and so vivid was the dream that I got out of bed and came in here, switched on the lamp and looked at the picture. Of course nothing had changed. The man was not drowning though he still looked at me, still pleaded, and I felt that he had been depicted trying to get away from the two men who had their hands on him.
    I went back to bed.
    And that, for a very long time, was that. Nothing more happened. The picture stayed propped up on the bookcase for months until eventually I found a space for it there, where you see it now.
    I did not dream about it again. But it never lessened its hold on me, its presence was never anything but powerful, as if the ghosts of all those people in that weirdly lit, artificial scene were present with me, forever in the room.

    Some years passed. The painting did not lose any of its strange force but of course everyday life goes on and I became used to it. I often spent time looking at it though, staring at the faces, the shadows, the buildings, the dark rippling waters of the Grand Canal, and I also