All this passed vaguely through her mind as clouds pass before the eyes, not with the conciseness of words but with the misty indefiniteness of a dreamy fatigue. As she lay there, she did not look as if she had ever exerted the strength to give a new path to her life: a pale, delicate woman, slender, with drooping movements, lying on a sofa in her not very fresh dressing-gown, with its faded pink and its rumpled lace. And yet there was a certain poetical fragrance about her personality, despite her weary eyes and the limp outlines of her attire, despite the boarding-house room, with its air of quickly improvised comfort, a comfort which was a matter of tact rather than reality and could be packed away in a single trunk. Her frail figure, her pale and delicate rather than beautiful features were surrounded, as by an aura, by that atmosphere of personal poetry which she unconsciously radiated, which she shed from her eyes upon the things which she beheld, from her fingers upon the things which she touched. To those who did not like her, this peculiar atmosphere, this unusualness, this eccentricity, this unlikeness to the typical young woman of the Hague, was the very thing with which they reproached her. To those who liked her, it was partly talent, partly soul; something peculiar to her which seemed almost genius; yet it was perturbing. It invested her with a great charm; it gave pause for thought and it promised much: more, perhaps, than could be realized. And this woman was the child of her time but especially of her environment and therefore so unfinished, revealing disparity against disparity, in an equilibrium of opposing forces, which might be her undoing or her salvation, but were in either case her fate.
She felt lonely in Italy. She had stayed for weeks at Florence, where she tried to lead a full life, enriched by art and history. There, it was true, she forgot herself to a great extent, but she still felt lonely. She had spent a fortnight at Siena, but Siena had depressed her, with its sombre streets, its dead palaces; and she had yearned for Rome. But she had not found Rome yet that afternoon. And, though she felt tired, she felt above all things lonely, terribly lonely and useless in a great world, in a great town, a town in which one feels the greatness, uselessness and vast antiquity of things more perhaps than anywhere else. She felt like a little atom of suffering, like an insect, an ant, half-trodden, half-crushed, among the immense domes of Rome, of whose presence out of doors she was subtly conscious.
And her hand wandered vacantly over her books, which she had stacked punctiliously and conscientiously on a little table: some translations of the classics, Ovid, Tacitus, together with Dante, Petrach, Tasso. It was growing dusk in her room, there was no light to read by, she was too much enervated to ring for a lamp; a chilliness hovered in her little room, now that the sun had quite gone down, and she had forgotten to ask for a fire on that first day. Loneliness was all about her, her suffering pained her; her soul craved for a fellow-soul, but her mouth craved for a kiss, her arms for him, once her husband; and, turning on her cushions and wringing her hands, she prayed deep down in herself:
CHAPTER III
At dinner there was a buzz of voices; the three or four long tables were all full; the marchesa sat at the head of the centre table. Now and then she beckoned impatiently to Giuseppe, the old major-domo, who had dropped a spoon at an archducal court; and the unfledged little waiters rushed about breathlessly. Cornélie found the obliging stout gentleman, whom the German ladies called Mr. Rudyard, sitting opposite her and her fiasco of Genzano beside her plate. She thanked Mr. Rudyard with a smile and made the usual remarks: how she had been for a drive that afternoon and had made her first acquaintance with Rome, the Forum, the Pincio. She talked to the German ladies and to the English one, who was always so tired with her sight-seeing; and the Germans, a Baronin and the Baronesse her daughter, laughed with her at the two æsthetes whom Cornélie had come upon that morning in the drawing-room. The two were sitting some distance away, lank and angular, grimy-haired, in curiously cut evening-dress, which showed the breast and arms warmly covered with a Jaeger undervest, on which, in their turn, lay strings of large blue beads. Their eyes browsed over the long table, as though they were pitying everybody who had come to Rome to learn about art, because they two alone knew what art was. While eating, which they did unpleasantly, almost with their fingers, they read æsthetic books, wrinkling their brows and now and then looking up angrily, because the people about them were talking. With their self-conceit, their impossible manners, their worse than tasteless dress and their great air of superiority, they represented types of travelling Englishwomen that are never met except in Italy. They were unanimously criticized at the table. They came to the Pension Belloni every winter and made drawings in water-colours in the Forum or the Via Appia. And they were so remarkable in their unprecedented originality, in their grimy angularity, with their evening-dresses, their Jaegers, their strings of blue beads, their æsthetic books and their meat-picking fingers, that all eyes were constantly wandering in their direction, as though under the influence of a Medusa spell.
The young baroness, a type out of the Fliegende Blätter, witty and quick, with her little round, German face and arched, pencilled eyebrows, was laughing with Cornélie and showing her a thumb-nail caricature which she had made of the two æsthetic ladies in her sketch-book, when Giuseppe conducted a young lady to the end of the table where Cornélie and Rudyard sat opposite each other. She had evidently just arrived, said “Evening” to everybody near her and sat down with a great rustling. It was at once apparent that she was an American, almost too good-looking, too young, to be travelling alone like that, with a smiling self-possession, as if she were at home: a very white complexion, very fine dark eyes, teeth like a dentist’s advertisement, her full breast moulded in mauve cloth plentifully decorated with silver braid, on her heavily-waved hair a large mauve hat with a cascade of black ostrich-feathers, fastened by an over-large paste buckle. At every movement the silk of her petticoat rustled, the feathers nodded, the paste buckle gleamed. And, notwithstanding all this showiness, she was child-like: she was perhaps just twenty, with an ingenuous expression in her eyes. She at once spoke to Cornélie, to Rudyard; said that she was tired, that she had come from Naples, that she had been dancing last night at Prince Cibo’s, that her name was Miss Urania Hope, that her father lived in Chicago, that she had two brothers who, in spite of her father’s money, were working on a farm in the Far West, but that she had been brought up as a spoilt child by her father, who, however, wanted her to be able to stand on her own feet and was therefore making her travel by herself in the Old World, in dear old Italy. She was delighted to hear that Cornélie was also travelling alone; and Rudyard chaffed the ladies about their modern views, but the Baronin and the Baronesse applauded them. Miss Hope at once took a liking to her Dutch fellow-traveller and wanted to arrange joint excursions; but Cornélie, withdrawing into herself, made a tactful excuse, said that her time was fully engaged, that she wanted to study in the museums.
“So serious?” asked Miss Hope, respectfully.
And the petticoat rustled, the plumes nodded, the paste buckle gleamed.
She made on Cornélie the impression of a gaudy butterfly, which, sportive and unthinking, might easily one day dash itself to pieces against the hot-house windows of our cabined existence. She felt no attraction towards this strange, pretty little creature, who looked like a child and a cocotte in one; but she felt sorry for her, she did not know why.