“Always so obliging, that Mr Rudyard …”
“What can he be?” thought Cornélie. “French, German, English, American?”
II
AFTER LUNCH she had hired an open carriage and taken a drive through Rome, a first taste of the city she had so yearned for. That first impression had been a great disappointment. Her lively imagination, her reading, even the photographs she had bought in Florence and pored over with the devotion of a novice sightseer, had given her a vision of a city from an ideal antiquity, an ideal Renaissance, and she had forgotten that, especially in Rome, life has moved on inexorably and that the ages do not appear in buildings and ruins as separate periods but every period is linked to the next by a tight-knit succession of days and years.
So she had found the dome of Saint Peter’s small, the Corso narrow, Trajan’s Column a column like any other; she had not seen the Forum as she drove past and on the Palatine she had not been able to call a single emperor to mind.
Now she was back home and tired, resting and thinking, melancholy yet savouring her vague thoughts, the silence around her and the big boarding-house, to which most guests had not yet returned. She thought of The Hague, of her large family, father, mother, brothers and sisters, to whom she had said farewell for a considerable time in order to travel. Her father, a retired colonel of hussars, not being a man of means, had not been able to help satisfy her whim, as he put it, and she would not have been able to indulge that whim, of starting a new life, without a small legacy left her years ago by a godmother. She was glad to have a degree of independence, although she felt the selfishness of that independence …
But what good would she have been to her circle, after the commotion surrounding her divorce? She was weak — selfish — and she knew it; but she had suffered a blow to which she had at first thought she would succumb. And when she survived after all, she had gathered together her remaining energy and told herself that she could not go on living in the same tight circle of sisters and friends, and she had forced her life to take a different direction. She had always had a flair for turning an old dress into an apparently new outfit, of transforming last year’s hat into a new creation, and she had done the same with her diffuse and miserable life, storm-tossed and broken as it was: she had scraped together, frugally as it were, what remained and was still serviceable, and from those remnants she had made herself a new life. Yet in the old atmosphere this new life had no room to breathe: it was aimless and alien there, and she had managed to force it into a new path, despite the resistance of family and friends. Perhaps she would not have been quite so resolute in this if her life had not felt quite so fractured. Perhaps she would not have been quite so aware of her energy if she had suffered only a little. She had her strength and she had her weakness; there was a great wholeness in her, but great diversity too, and perhaps that complexity had been the salvation of her youth.
Besides, she was very young, twenty-three, and at that age there is an unconscious resilience, for all the apparent weakness. And her contradictions constituted her equilibrium, so that she did not gravitate towards the abyss … All of that passed through her, vague and cloud-like, not with the concision of words, but with the mistiness of weary dreams. Lying there she did not look as if she had ever exerted the power of giving her life a new direction. A pale, delicate woman, slim and with disjointed movements, lying on a chaise-longue in a no longer pristine dressing gown with its faded pink and crumpled lace. Yet she was surrounded by the poetry of herself, despite those tired eyes, the limp lines of her garment, despite the rented room, with the hastily improvised air of comfort, which owed more to flair than to reality and could be fitted into any suitcase. With her fragile figure, her pale features, more refined than beautiful, she was surrounded by a halo of individuality, an atmosphere that she emanated unconsciously, that travelled from her eyes to the things she gazed at, from her fingers to the things she stroked. For those unsympathetic to her that atmosphere was odd, eccentric, unbefitting for a young lady from The Hague, and was censured. For those who were sympathetic it had an element of talent, soul, something special that almost resembled genius, though in an enervated form, and was enchanting and thought-provoking and promised much: perhaps too much to contain. This woman was a child of her time but particularly of her environment, which was why she was so immature: conflict against conflict, a balance of contradiction, which might be either her downfall or her salvation, but was certainly her fate.
She felt lonely in Italy. She had lived for weeks in Florence, and had tried to construct a life rich in art and history. Though she forgot much about herself, she still felt lonely. She had spent two weeks in Siena, but had found it oppressive with its gloomy streets and funereal palaces, and had longed for Rome. But that afternoon she had not yet found Rome. And though she felt tired, most of all she felt lonely, totally alone and futile in the great wide world, in a great city, a city where one perhaps feels greatness and futility more intensely than anywhere else. She felt like a tiny atom of suffering, like an ant, an insect, battered and half-crushed among the vast cupolas of Rome that she sensed were outside.
Her hand wandered idly over her reading-matter, which in her conscientious way she had piled up on a side table near her, a few translated classics: Ovid, Tacitus, then Dante, Petrarch and Tasso. Dusk was falling in her room, not a light to read by, and she was too unsure of herself to ring for a lamp; a chill drifted through her room, now that the sun had completely set, and she had forgotten to have them light a stove that first day. Wide acres of loneliness surrounded her, her suffering pained her, her soul longed for another soul, her lips for a kiss, her arms for the man who had once been her husband, and as she tossed about on her cushions, wringing her hands, indecision rose from deep within her:
“Oh God, tell me what I’m to do!”
III
THERE WAS A BUZZ of voices at dinner; the three or four long tables were full; the marchesa sat at the head of the centre table. Now and then she beckoned impatiently to Giuseppe, the old head waiter, who had dropped a spoon at an archducal court, and youthful waiters trotted about breathlessly. Sitting opposite her Cornélie found the benevolent fat gentleman whom the German ladies had called Mr Rudyard, and by her place setting her flask of Genzano. She thanked him with a smile, and talked to Mr Rudyard — the usual chit-chat: how she had been for a tour that afternoon, her first taste of Rome, the Forum, the Pincio. She talked to the German ladies and with the Englishwoman, who was always so tired from ‘sightseeing’, and the German ladies, an old baroness and her daughter, a young baroness, laughed with her at the two aesthetes whom Cornélie had encountered in the drawing-room that first morning. They were sitting some distance away; tall and angular, with unwashed hair, in strangely cut evening dresses that revealed bosoms and arms, comfortably covered by grey woollen vests, over which they had calmly draped strings of large blue beads. Both of them surveyed the long table, as if pitying anyone who had travelled to Rome to become acquainted with art, since they alone knew what art in Rome was. While eating, which they did unappetisingly, almost with their fingers, they read aesthetic works, frowning and occasionally looking up crossly because people were talking at table. With their pedantry, their impossible manners, their appalling taste in clothes, together with their great pretentiousness, they were typical English ladies on their travels, of the kind one finds nowhere but in Italy. The criticism of them at table was unanimous. They came to Pensione Belloni every winter, and painted watercolours in the Forum or on the Via Appia. And they were so extraordinary in their unprecedented originality, in their angular scruffiness, with their evening dresses, the woollens, the blue necklaces, the aesthetic books and their fingers busily picking meat apart, that all eyes were drawn to them by a Medusa-like attraction. The young baroness, a type from a fashionable magazine, incisive, quick-witted, with her round little German face and high sharply drawn eyebrows, laughed with Cornélie, and was showing her a sketchbook containing a drawing she had dashed off of the two aesthetic ladies, when Giuseppe led a young lady to the end of the table where Cornélie and Rudyard were sitting opposite each other. She had obviously just arrived, wished the assembled gathering a good evening, and sat down with a great rustle of material. All eyes turned from the aesthetic ladies towards this newcomer. It was immediately obvious that she was American, almost too beautiful, too young to be travelling alone, with a smiling self-assurance, as if she were at home, very white, with very lovely dark eyes, teeth like a dentist’s advertisement, her full bust sheathed in mauve linen with silver trimmings full of arabesques, on her heavily permed hair a large mauve hat with a cascade of black ostrich feathers, attached by an over-large paste clasp. Her silk underskirts rustled at every movement, the plumes waved, the paste glittered. And despite this showy appearance she was like a child, no more than twenty, with a naive look: she immediately addressed Cornélie and Rudyard; said she was tired, had come from Naples, had danced at Prince Cibo’s the night before, that her name was Miss Urania Hope, that her father lived in Chicago. That she had two brothers who, despite papa’s fortune, worked on a ranch way out West, but that she had been brought up like a spoilt child by her father, who nevertheless wanted her to stand on her own feet and so let her travel alone, and wanted to arrange joint outings in the Old World, in “dear old Italy”. She was overjoyed to hear that Cornélie was also travelling alone, and Rudyard teased the ladies about their newfangled notions, and the two baronesses applauded them. Miss Hope took an immediate liking to her Dutch fellow-traveller, but Cornélie, hesitant, gently declined, saying that she was busy and wanted to study in the museums. “My, my, so serious?” inquired Miss Hope respectfully, and the underskirts rustled, the plumes waved and the paste sparkled. She struck Cornélie as a multicoloured butterfly, nimble and unthinking, that was in danger of crashing into the conservatory glass of a confined existence. Though she felt no attraction to the strange creature that looked at the same time like a coquette and a child, she did feel pity, why she did not know. After supper Rudyard suggested a short walk to the two German ladies. The young baroness came over to Cornélie and asked her to join them, to see Rome by moonlight, nearby, around the Villa Medici. She was grateful for the kind words, and was going to put on a hat when Miss Hope ran after her.