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.
“Stay with me in the drawing-room …”
“I’m going for a walk with the baroness,” replied Cornélie.
“That German lady?”
“Yes.”
“Does she belong to the nobility?”
“I fancy she does.”
“Are there many people from the nobility in this pensione?” asked Miss Hope eagerly.
Cornélie laughed.
“I don’t know. I only arrived here this morning.”
“I think there are. I’ve heard that there are lots of members of the nobility here. Are you a member of the nobility?”
“I was!” laughed Cornélie. “But I had to relinquish my title.”
“What a shame!” cried Miss Hope. “The nobility is so sweet. Do you know what I have? An album of coats-of-arms, of all sorts of families, and another album of samples—silk and brocade of every ball gown of the queen of Italy … Would you like to see it?”
“I’d love to,” laughed Cornélie. “But now I must put my hat on.”
She went off and returned in her hat and cape: the German ladies and Rudyard were already waiting in the vestibule and asked why she was laughing. She told them about the album of samples of the queen’s evening gowns, which caused great merriment.
“Who is he?” she asked the baroness, as they walked on ahead down the Via Sistina; the young baroness followed with Rudyard.
She found the baroness charming, but was struck, in this German woman from an aristocratic military background, by a cold, cynical view of life not exactly typical of her Berlin environment.
“I don’t know,” replied the baroness with some indifference. “We travel a lot. At the moment we have no house in Berlin. We want to enjoy our trip. Mr Rudyard is very nice. He helps us with all kinds of things: tickets for a papal mass, introductions here, invitations there. He appears to have considerable influence. What do I care who or what he is? Else feels the same. I take what he has to offer here and apart from that I don’t delve too deeply into him …”
They walked on.
The baroness took Cornélie’s arm.
“My dear child, don’t think us too cynical. I scarcely know you, but I like you. Odd, isn’t it, on our travels, suddenly to be sitting down to a pensione set menu with scrawny chicken. Don’t think us bad, or cynical. Oh, perhaps we are. Our cosmopolitan, dissolute life free of duty makes one like that: ignoble, cynical and selfish. Very selfish. Rudyard does us many favours. Why shouldn’t I accept them? I couldn’t care less who or what he is. I’m not putting myself under an obligation to him.”
Cornélie looked round involuntarily. In the street, almost completely dark, she saw Rudyard and the young baroness, almost whispering and acting mysteriously.
“And does your daughter feel the same?”
“Oh yes. We’re not under any obligation to him. We don’t even care greatly for him, with his pock-marked face and black nails. We simply accept his introductions. Do likewise. Or … don’t. Perhaps it would be nobler of you not to. I, I’ve become very selfish, through our travelling. What difference does it make to me …”
The dark street seemed to invite confidences, and Cornélie understood a little of that cynical indifference, unusual in a woman brought up amid narrow concepts of duty and morality. It was not noble; but was it not weariness at life’s tribulations? Whatever the case, she had a vague understanding of that indifferent tone, that nonchalant shrug of the shoulders …
And they turned past Hôtel Hassler and approached the Villa Medici. The full moon poured out its flood of white light, and Rome was bathed in the blue-white nocturnal glow. From the full basin of the fountain, beneath the black holm oaks, whose foliage provided an ebony frame for the painting of Rome, the abundant water splashed noisily down …
“Rome must be beautiful,” said Cornélie softly.
Rudyard and the young baroness had caught up, and heard Cornélie’s words.
“Rome is beautiful,” he said earnestly. “And Rome is more. Rome is a great consolation to many people.”
In the bluish moonlit night his words struck her. The city seemed to be undulating mystically at her feet. She looked at him: he stood before her, with his black coat, without much linen on show: always a fat, polite gentleman. His voice was very piercing, with a rich tone of conviction. She looked at him for a long time, unsure of herself and vaguely sensing an approaching suggestion, but mutely hostile.
Then he added, as if not wanting her to dwell too long on what he had said:
“A great consolation, for many people … since beauty consoles …”
And she found his last remark an aesthetic truism, but he had meant her to find it so.
IV
CORNÉLIE FOUND THE FIRST DAYS in Rome extremely exhausting. She did too much, as everyone does who has just arrived; she wanted to embrace the whole city at once, and the distances, though covered in a carriage, wore her out. In addition she was constantly disappointed, in paintings, in statues, in buildings. At first she did not dare admit those disappointments to herself, but one afternoon, dog-tired, after a painful disappointment in the Sistine Chapel, she admitted it. Everything she saw and already knew from her studies was a disappointment. She decided not to see anything else for the time being. And after her gruelling days of going out in the morning, out in the afternoon, it was a luxury to abandon herself to the subconscious stream of days. She stayed home in the mornings in a peignoir, in her cosy, lofty birdcage of a sitting-room, wrote letters, dreamed a little, her arms folded round her head, read Ovid, Petrarch, listened to some street musicians, who with trembling tenor voices, to the plaintive twang of their guitars filled the quiet street with the sobbing passion of music. At lunch she felt she had been fortunate in her choice of pensione: in her corner at table she found the Baroness Von Rothkirch with her nonchalant condescension towards Rudyard interesting, as she saw how travel can uproot someone from their narrow circle. The young baroness, who did not worry at all about life and just painted and sketched, interested her when she whispered to Rudyard, so that Cornélie did not understand. Miss Hope was so naive, so childishly scatterbrained, that Cornélie could not see how Hope Senior, the rich stocking-manufacturer over there in Chicago, simply let this girl travel alone with her excessive monthly allowance and total lack of worldliness and understanding of people; and Rudyard himself, although she was sometimes repelled by him, fascinated her despite that repulsion. So although she had not struck up a deeper friendship with any of these table companions, there were people around her to whom she could talk, and the table conversation was a diversion from the whole day’s loneliness.
For in these days of weariness and disappointment she took only a short afternoon walk down the Corso or the Pincio, then returned home, made tea for herself in her silver teapot, and daydreamed in front of the wood fire till it was time to dress for dinner.
And the well-lit dining-room with the Guercino ceiling was cheerful. The pensione was full: the marchesa was sleeping in the bathroom, having given up her own room. There was a constant buzz of voices at table, the waiters trotted about and spoons and forks clattered. The melancholy mood of so many restaurants with set menus was absent here. People knew each other and the bustle of Roman life, the oxygen of Roman air, seemed to have injected vitality into their gestures and conversations. Amid
that vitality the two scruffy aesthetic ladies stood out with their unchanging attitude: always in evening dress, the woollens, the beads, the reading of the thick tome; the angry looks because people were talking.
And after dinner people sat in the drawing-room, in the hall, getting to know this person and that, and talking of Rome, Rome, Rome … There was always great excitement about the music in the various churches: people consulted the Herald, asked Rudyard, who knew everything, and surrounded him, while he smiled, fat and polite, and distributed tickets, telling them the days and times when there was an important service in such and such church. Now and then, in passing, he gave English ladies who were not au fait, information about the complex formalities and hierarchies of Catholic worship: he told them the nationalities indicated by the various colours of the seminarists whom one met in hordes on the Pincio in the afternoon, staring at St Peter’s, in ecstasy at the mighty symbol of their mighty religion; he told them the difference between a church and a basilica; he told intimate stories about the life of Leo XIII. He talked about all this in a fascinating, insinuating tone: the English ladies, eager for information, hung on his every word, found him most charming, asked him for a thousand details.
These days, then, were a time of recuperation for Cornélie. She recovered from her exhaustion, and became indifferent to Rome. But she had no thought of leaving early. Whether she was here or somewhere else, it was the same: she had to be somewhere. Apart from that the pensione was good, and her table companions were excellent company. She no longer read Hare’s Walks through Rome or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but reread Ouida’s Ariadne. She did not like the book as much as when she had found it in The Hague three years before, and read nothing else. But she enjoyed herself for a whole evening with the Von Rothkirch ladies looking at Miss Hope’s collection of seals and sample album. How keen those Americans were on nobility and royalty. The baroness magnanimously stamped her coat-of-arms in the album. The samples were much admired, gold brocade, silk as heavy as silver, foliage-patterned tulle. Miss Hope told them how she had acquired them: she knew one of the queen’s lady’s maids through her having previously served an American lady and for a high price that maid was able to provide her with the samples: a precious scrap, picked up while the queen was having a fitting, sometimes even cut from a wide seam. The child was prouder of her collection of samples than an Italian prince of his paintings, said Baroness Von Rothkirch. But despite that ridiculousness, that vanity, the beautiful American girl appealed to Cornélie because of the spontaneity and honesty of her nature. In the evenings she looked utterly charming, in a black low-cut dress or a red chiffon blouse. For that matter, it was different every evening. It was a kaleidoscope of outfits, blouses, jewels. She wandered through the ruins of the Forum in a tailored off-white linen suit, lined in orange silk, and her white lace petticoat tripped airily over the foundations of the Basilica Julia or the temple of Vesta. Her busily designed hats provided a dash of the colours of the Avenue de l’Opéra or Regent’s Street amid the tragic earnestness of the Colosseum or in the palace ruins of the Palatine. The young baroness teased her about her orange silk lining, so in keeping with the Forum; about her hats, so in keeping with the seriousness of a site of Christian martyrdom, but she never became angry. “But it’s a lovely hat!” she would reply in her Yankee accent, giving a splendid view of her fine teeth, but opening her mouth wide, as if she were cracking hazelnuts. And the child was delighted, delighted with the “old baroness” and the “young baroness”, delighted at being in a pensione run by a down-at-heel Italian marchesa. And the moment she caught sight of the grey lion’s mane of the Marchesa Belloni, she would leave the others, rush up to her—according to Mrs Von Rothkirch, because a marchioness is above a baroness—pull ‘la Belloni’ into a corner and monopolise her, if possible for the whole evening. Rudyard joined the two of them, the marchioness and Miss Hope, and seeing this Cornélie again wondered what Rudyard was, who he was, and what he was after. But it did not interest the baroness, who had just obtained a ticket to mass in the Papal chapel, and the young baroness said only that he was a good raconteur of saints’ legends, which helped explain some paintings in Doria and Corsini.
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