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The Inevitable

by Louis Couperus · English · Gutenberg #43005 · 497,896 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Inevitable

Author: Louis Couperus

Translator: Alexander Teixeira de Mattos


        
Release date: June 21, 2013 [eBook #43005]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INEVITABLE ***

                             THE INEVITABLE

                                   BY
                             LOUIS COUPERUS



                             Translated by

                      ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS



                                New York
                         Dodd, Mead and Company
                                  1920







THE INEVITABLE


CHAPTER I


The Marchesa Belloni's boarding-house was situated in one of the
healthiest, if not one of the most romantic quarters of Rome. One
half of the house had formed part of a villino of the old Ludovisi
Gardens, those beautiful old gardens regretted by everybody who knew
them before the new barrack-quarters were built on the site of the old
Roman park, with its border of villas. The entrance to the pension
was in the Via Lombardia. The older or villino portion of the house
retained a certain antique charm for the marchesa's boarders, while
the new premises built on to it offered the advantages of spacious
rooms, modern sanitation and electric light. The pension boasted a
certain reputation for comfort, cheapness and a pleasant situation:
it stood at a few minutes' walk from the Pincio, on high ground, and
there was no need to fear malaria; and the price charged for a long
stay, amounting to hardly more than eight lire, was exceptionally
low for Rome, which was known to be more expensive than any other
town in Italy. The boarding-house therefore was generally full. The
visitors began to arrive as soon as October: those who came earliest
in the season paid least; and, with the exception of a few hurrying
tourists, they nearly all remained until Easter, going southward to
Naples after the great church festivals.

Some English travelling-acquaintances had strongly recommended the
pension to Cornélie de Retz van Loo, who was travelling in Italy by
herself; and she had written to the Marchesa Belloni from Florence. It
was her first visit to Italy; it was the first time that she had
alighted at the great cavernous station near the Baths of Diocletian;
and, standing in the square, in the golden Roman sunlight, while
the great fountain of the Acqua Marcia gushed and rippled and the
cab-drivers clicked with their whips and their tongues to attract
her attention, she was conscious of her "nice Italian sensation,"
as she called it, and felt glad to be in Rome.

She saw a little old man limping towards her with the instinct of
a veteran porter who recognizes his travellers at once; and she read
"Hotel Belloni" on his cap and beckoned to him with a smile. He saluted
her with respectful familiarity, as though she were an old acquaintance
and he glad to see her; asked if she had had a pleasant journey,
if she was not over-tired; led her to the victoria; put in her rug
and her hand-bag; asked for the tickets of her trunks; and said that
she had better go on ahead: he would follow in ten minutes with the
luggage. She received an impression of cosiness, of being well cared
for by the little old lame man; and she gave him a friendly nod as
the coachman drove away. She felt happy and careless, though she had
just the faintest foreboding of something unhappy and unknown that
was going to happen to her; and she looked to right and left to take
in the streets of Rome. But she saw only houses upon houses, like so
many barracks; then a great white palace, the new Palazzo Piombino,
which she knew to contain the Juno Ludovisi; and then the vettura
stopped and a boy in buttons came out to meet her. He showed her into
the drawing-room, a gloomy apartment, in the middle of which was a
table covered with periodicals, arranged in a regular and unbroken
circle. Two ladies, obviously English and of the æsthetic type, with
loose-fitting blouses and grimy hair, sat in a corner studying their
Baedekers before going out. Cornélie bowed slightly, but received
no bow in return; she did not take offence, being familiar with the
manners of the travelling Briton. She sat down at the table and took
up the Roman Herald, the paper which appears once a fortnight and
tells you what there is to do in Rome during the next two weeks.

Thereupon one of the ladies asked her, from the corner, in an
aggressive tone:

"I beg your pardon, but would you please not take the Herald to
your room?"

Cornélie raised her head very haughtily and languidly in the direction
where the ladies were sitting, looked vaguely above their grimy heads,
said nothing and glanced down at the Herald again; and she thought
herself a very experienced traveller and smiled inwardly because she
knew how to deal with that type of Englishwoman.

The marchesa entered and welcomed Cornélie in Italian and in
French. She was a large, fat matron, vulgarly fat; her ample bosom
was contained in a silk cuirass or spencer, shiny at the seams
and bursting under the arms; her grey frizzled hair gave her a
somewhat leonine appearance; her great yellow and blue eyes, with
bistre shadows beneath them, wore a strained expression, the pupils
unnaturally dilated by belladonna; a pair of immense crystals sparkled
in her ears; and her fat, greasy fingers were covered with nameless
jewels. She talked very fast; and Cornélie thought her sentences as
pleasant and homely as the welcome of the lame porter in the square
outside the station. The marchesa led her to the lift and stepped in
with her; the hydraulic lift, a railed-in cage, running up the well
of the staircase, rose solemnly and suddenly stopped, motionless,
between the second and the third floor.

"Third floor!" cried the marchesa to some one below.

"Non c'e acqua!" the boy in buttons calmly called back, meaning thereby
to convey that--as seemed natural--there was not enough water to move
the lift.

The marchesa screamed out some orders in a shrill voice; two facchini
came running up and hung on to the cable of the lift, together with the
ostensibly zealous boy in buttons; and by fits and starts the cage rose
higher and higher, until at last it almost reached the third storey.

"A little higher!" ordered the marchesa.

But the facchini strained their muscles in vain: the lift refused
to stir.

"We can manage!" said the marchesa. "Wait a bit."

Taking a great stride, which revealed the enormous white-stockinged
calf of her leg, she stepped on to the floor, smiled and gave her
hand to Cornélie, who imitated her gymnastics.

"Here we are!" sighed the marchesa, with a smile of satisfaction. "This
is your room."

She opened a door and showed Cornélie a room. Though the sun was
shining brightly out of doors, the room was as damp and chilly as
a cellar.

"Marchesa," Cornélie said, without hesitation, "I wrote to you for
two rooms facing south."

"Did you?" asked the marchesa, plausibly and ingenuously. "I really
didn't remember. Yes, that is one of those foreigners' ideas: rooms
facing south.... This is really a beautiful room."

"I'm sorry, but I can't accept this room, marchesa."

La Belloni grumbled a bit, went down the corridor and opened the door
of another room:

"And this one, signora?... How do you like this?"

"Is it south?"

"Almost"

"I want it full south."

"This looks west: you see the most splendid sunsets from your window."

"I absolutely must have a south room, marchesa."

"I also have the most charming little apartments looking east: you
get the most picturesque sunrises there."

"No, marchesa."

"Don't you appreciate the beauties of nature?"

"Just a little, but I put my health first."

"I sleep in a north room myself."

"You are an Italian, marchesa, and you're used to it."

"I'm very sorry, but I have no rooms facing south."

"Then I'm sorry too, marchesa, but I must look out somewhere else."

Cornélie turned as though to go away. The choice of a room sometimes
means the choice of a life.

The marchesa caught hold of her hand and smiled. She had abandoned
her cool tone and her voice was all honey:

"Davvero, that's one of those foreigners' ideas: rooms facing
south! But I have two little kennels left. Here...."

And she quickly opened two doors, two snug little cupboards of rooms,
which showed through the open windows a lofty and spacious view of
the sky, outspread above the streets and roofs below, with the blue
dome of St. Peter's in the distance.

"These are the only rooms I have left facing south," said the marchesa,
plaintively.

"I shall be glad to have these, marchesa."

"Sixteen lire," smiled la Belloni.

"Ten, as you wrote."

"I could put two persons in here."

"I shall stay all the winter, if I am satisfied."

"You must have your way!" the marchesa exclaimed, suddenly, in her
sweetest voice, a voice of graceful surrender. "You shall have the
rooms for twelve lire. Don't let us discuss it any more. The rooms
are yours. You are Dutch, are you not? We have a Dutch family staying
here: a mother with two daughters and a son. Would you like to sit
next to them at table?"

"No, I'd rather you put me somewhere else; I don't care for my
fellow-countrymen when travelling."

The marchesa left Cornélie to herself. She looked out of the window,
absent-mindedly, glad to be in Rome, yet faintly conscious of the
something unhappy and unknown that was going to happen. There was a tap
at her door; the men carried in her luggage. She saw that it was eleven
o'clock and began to unpack. One of her rooms was a small sitting-room,
like a bird-cage in the air, looking out over Rome. She altered the
position of the furniture, draped the faded sofa with a shawl from the
Abruzzi and fixed a few portraits and photographs with drawing-pins to
the wall, whose white-washed surface was broken up by rudely-painted
arabesques. And she smiled at the border of purple hearts transfixed
by arrows, which surrounded the decorated panels of the wall.

After an hour's work her sitting-room was settled: she had a home
of her own, with a few of her own shawls and rugs, a screen here,
a little table there, cushions on the sofa, books within easy
reach. When she had finished and had sat down and looked around her,
she suddenly felt very lonely. She began to think of the Hague and
of what she had left behind her. But she did not want to think and
picked up her Baedeker and read about the Vatican. She was unable to
concentrate her thoughts and turned to Hare's Walks in Rome. A bell
sounded. She was tired and her nerves were on edge. She looked in the
glass, saw that her hair was out of curl, her blouse soiled with coal
and dust, unlocked a second trunk and changed her things. She cried
and sobbed while she was curling her hair. The second bell rang; and,
after powdering her face, she went downstairs.

She expected to be late, but there was no one in the dining-room and
she had to wait before she was served. She resolved not to come down
so very punctually in future. A few boarders looked in through the
open door, saw that there was no one sitting at table yet, except a
new lady, and disappeared again.

Cornélie looked around her and waited.

The dining-room was the original dining-room of the old villa, with a
ceiling by Guercina. The waiters loitered about. An old grey major-domo
cast a distant glance over the table, to see if everything was in
order. He grew impatient when nobody came and told them to serve the
macaroni to Cornélie. It struck Cornélie that he too limped with one
leg, like the porter. But the waiters were very young, hardly more than
sixteen to eighteen, and lacked the waiter's usual self-possession.

A stout gentleman, vivacious, consequential, pock-marked, ill-shaven,
in a shabby black coat which showed but little linen, entered,
rubbing his hands, and took his seat, opposite Cornélie.

He bowed politely and began to eat his macaroni.

And this seemed to be the signal for the others to begin eating,
for a number of boarders, mostly ladies, now came in, sat down
and helped themselves to the macaroni, which was handed round
by the youthful waiters under the watchful eye of the grey-haired
major-domo. Cornélie smiled at the oddity of these travelling types;
and, when she involuntarily glanced at the pock-marked gentleman
opposite, she saw that he too was smiling.

He hurriedly mopped up his tomato-sauce with his bread, bent a little
way across the table and almost whispered, in French:

"It's amusing, isn't it?"

Cornélie raised her eyebrows:

"What do you mean?"

"A cosmopolitan company like this."

"Oh, yes!"

"You are Dutch?"

"How do you know?"

"I saw your name in the visitors' book, with 'la Haye' after it."

"I am Dutch, yes."

"There are some more Dutch ladies here, sitting over there: they
are charming."

Cornélie asked the major-domo for some vin ordinaire.

"That wine is no good," said the stout gentleman, vivaciously. "This
is Genzano," pointing to his fiasco. "I pay a small corkage and drink
my own wine."

The major-domo put a pint bottle in front of Cornélie: it was included
in her pension without extra charge.

"If you like, I will give you the address where I get my wine. Via
della Croce, 61."

Cornélie thanked him. The pock-marked gentleman's uncommon ease and
vivacity diverted her.

"You're looking at the major-domo?" he asked.

"You are a keen observer," she smiled in reply.

"He's a type, our major-domo, Giuseppe. He used to be major-domo in
the palace of an Austrian archduke. He did I don't know what. Stole
something, perhaps. Or was impertinent. Or dropped a spoon on the
floor. He has come down in the world. Now you behold him in the
Pension Belloni. But the dignity of the man!"

He leant forward:

"The marchesa is economical. All the servants here are either old or
very young. It's cheaper."

He bowed to two German ladies, a mother and daughter, who had come
in and sat down beside him:

"I have the permit which I promised you, to see the Palazzo Rospigliosi
and Guido Reni's Aurora" he said, speaking in German.

"Is the prince back then?"

"No, the prince is in Paris. The palace is not open to visitors,
except yourselves."

This was said with a gallant bow.

The German ladies exclaimed how kind he was, how he was able to do
anything, to find a way out of every difficulty. They had taken endless
trouble to bribe the Rospigliosi porter and they had not succeeded.

A little thin Englishwoman had taken her seat beside Cornélie.

"And for you, Miss Taylor, I have a card for a low mass in His
Holiness' private chapel."

Miss Taylor was radiant with delight.

"Have you been sight-seeing again?" the pock-marked gentleman
continued.

"Yes, Museo Kircheriano," said Miss Taylor. "But I am tired out. It
was most exquisite."

"My prescription, Miss Taylor, is that you stay at home this afternoon
and rest."

"I have an engagement to go to the Aventino...."

"You mustn't. You're tired. You look worse every day and you're losing
flesh. You must rest, or you sha'n't have the card for the low mass."

The German ladies laughed. Miss Taylor, flattered, in an ecstasy of
delight, gave her promise. She looked at the pock-marked gentleman
as though she expected to hear the judgement of Solomon fall from
his lips.

Lunch was over: the rump-steak, the pudding, the dried figs. Cornélie
rose:

"May I give you a glass out of my bottle?" asked the stout
gentleman. "Do taste my wine and tell me if you like it. If so,
I'll order a fiasco for you in the Via della Croce."

Cornélie did not like to refuse. She sipped the wine. It was
deliciously pure. She thought that it would be a good thing to drink
a pure wine in Rome; and, as she reflected, the stout gentleman seemed
to read her quick thought:

"It is a good thing," he said, "to drink a strengthening wine while
you are in Rome, where life is so tiring."

Cornélie agreed.

"This is Genzano, at two lire seventy-five the fiasco. It will last
you a long time: the wine keeps. So I'll order you a fiasco."

He bowed to the ladies around and left the room.

The German ladies bowed to Cornélie.

"Such an amiable man, that Mr. Rudyard."

"What can he be?" Cornélie wondered. "French, German, English,
American?"







CHAPTER II


She had hired a victoria after lunch and had driven through Rome, to
make her first acquaintance with the city for which she had longed
so eagerly. This first impression was a great disappointment. Her
unspoiled imagination, her reading, even the photographs which she had
bought in Florence and studied with the affection of an inexperienced
tourist had given her the illusion of a city of an ideal antiquity,
an ideal Renascence; and she had forgotten that, especially in Rome,
life has progressed pitilessly and that the ages are not visible,
in buildings and ruins, as distinct periods, but that each period is
closely connected with the next by the passing days and years.

Thus she had thought the dome of St. Peter's small, the Corso narrow
and Trajan's Column a column like any other; she had not noticed the
Forum as she drove past it; and she had been unable to think of a
single emperor when she was at the Palatine.

Now she was home again, tired, and was resting a little and meditating;
she felt depressed, yet she enjoyed her vague reflections and the
silence about her in the big house, to which most of the boarders had
not yet returned. She thought of the Hague, of her big family, her
father, mother, brothers and sisters, to whom she had said good-bye
for a long time to go abroad. Her father, a retired colonel of hussars
living on his pension, with no great private means, had been unable to
contribute anything to the fulfilment of her caprice, as he called it;
and she would not have been able to satisfy that caprice, of beginning
a new life, but for a small legacy which she had inherited some years
ago from a godmother. She was glad to be more or less independent,
though she felt the selfishness of her independence.

But what could she have done for her family-circle, after the scandal
of her divorce? She was weak and selfish, she knew it; but she had
received a blow under which she had at first expected to succumb. And,
when she found herself surviving it, she had mustered such energy as
she possessed and said to herself that she could not go on existing in
that same narrow circle of her sisters and her girl friends; and she
had forced her life into a different path. She had always had the knack
of creating an apparently new frock out of an old dress, transforming
a last year's hat into one of the latest fashion. Even so she had
now done with her distraught and wretched life, all battered and
broken as it was: she had gathered together, as in a fit of economy,
all that was left, all that was still serviceable; and out of those
remnants she had made herself a new existence. But this new life was
unable to breathe in the old atmosphere: it felt aimless in it and
estranged; and she had managed to force it into a different path,
in spite of all the opposition of her family and friends. Perhaps she
would not have succeeded so readily if she had not been so completely
shattered. Perhaps she would not have felt this energy if she had
suffered only a little. She had her strength and she had her weakness;
she was very simple and yet she was very various; and it was perhaps
just this complexity that had been the saving of her youth.

Besides, she was actually very young, only twenty-three; and in youth
one possesses an unconscious vitality, notwithstanding any apparent
weakness. And her contradictory qualities gave her equilibrium and
saved her from falling over into the abyss....

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:

"O God, tell me what to do!"







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.

After dinner, Rudyard proposed to take the two German ladies for
a little walk. The younger baroness came to Cornélie and asked if
she would come too, to see Rome by moonlight, quite close, from the
Villa Medici. She felt grateful for the kindly suggestion and was
just going to put on her hat, when Miss Hope ran after her:

"Stay and sit with me in the drawing-room."

"I am going for a walk with the Baronin," Cornélie replied.

"That German lady?"

"Yes."

"Is she a noblewoman?"

"I presume so."

"Are there many titled people in the house?" asked Miss Hope, eagerly.

Cornélie laughed:

"I don't know. I only arrived this morning."

"I believe there are. I heard that there were many titled people
here. Are you one?"

"I was!" Cornélie laughed. "But I had to give up my title."

"What a shame!" Miss Hope exclaimed. "I love titles. Do you know what
I've got? An album with the coats of arms of all sorts of families
and another album with patterns of silk and brocade from each of the
Queen of Italy's ball-dresses. Would you care to see it?"

"Very much indeed!" Cornélie laughed. "But I must put on my hat now."

She went and returned in a hat and cloak; the German ladies and
Rudyard were waiting in the hall and asked what she was laughing
at. She caused great merriment by telling them about the album with
the patterns of the queen's ball-dresses.

"Who is he?" she asked the Baronin, as she walked in front with her,
along the Via Sistina, while the Baronesse and Rudyard followed.

She thought the Baronin a charming person, but she was surprised to
find, in this German woman, who belonged to the titled military-class,
a coldly cynical view of life which was not exactly that of her
Berlin environment.

"I don't know," the Baronin answered, with an air of indifference. "We
travel a great deal. We have no house in Berlin at present. We want
to make the most of our stay abroad. Mr. Rudyard is very pleasant. He
helps us in all sorts of ways: tickets for a papal mass, introductions
here, invitations there. He seems to have plenty of influence. What
do I care who or what he is! Else agrees with me. I accept what he
gives us and for the rest I don't try to fathom him."

They walked on. The Baronin took Cornélie's arm:

"My dear child, don't think us more cynical than we are. I hardly know
you, but I've felt somehow drawn towards you. Strange, isn't it, when
one's abroad like this and has one's first talk at a table-d'hôte,
over a skinny chicken? Don't think us shabby or cynical. Oh, dear,
perhaps we are! Our cosmopolitan, irresponsible, unsettled life makes
us ungenerous, cynical and selfish. Very selfish. Rudyard shows us
many kindnesses. Why should I not accept them? I don't care who or
what he is. I am not committing myself in any way."

Cornélie looked round involuntarily. In the nearly dark street she saw
Rudyard and the young Baronesse, almost whispering and mysteriously
intimate.

"And does your daughter think so too?"

"Oh, yes! We are not committing ourselves in any way. We do not
even particularly like him, with his pock-marked face and his dirty
finger-nails. We merely accept his introductions. Do as we do. Or
... don't. Perhaps it will be better form if you don't. I ... I have
become a great egoist, through travelling. What do I care?..."

The dark street seemed to invite confidences; and Cornélie to some
extent understood this cynical indifference, particularly in a woman
reared in narrow principles of duty and morality. It was certainly
not good form; but was it not weariness brought about by the wear
and tear of life? In any case she vaguely understood it: that tone
of indifference, that careless shrugging of the shoulders....

They turned the corner of the Hotel Massier and approached the Villa
Medici. The full moon was pouring down its flood of white radiance
and Rome lay in the flawless blue glamour of the night. Overflowing
the brimming basin of the fountain, beneath the black ilexes, whose
leafage held the picture of Rome in an ebony frame, the waste water
splashed and clattered.

"Rome must be very beautiful," said Cornélie, softly.

Rudyard and the Baronesse had come nearer and heard what she said:

"Rome is beautiful," he said, earnestly. "And Rome is more. Rome is
a great consolation to many people."

His words, spoken in the blue moonlit night, impressed her. The city
seemed to lie in mystical billows at her feet. She looked at him,
as he stood before her in his black coat, showing but little linen,
the same stout, civil gentleman. His voice was very penetrating, with
a rich note of conviction in it. She looked at him long, uncertain
of herself and vaguely conscious of an approaching intimation, but
still antipathetic.

Then he added, as though he did not wish her to meditate too deeply
the words which he had uttered:

"A great consolation to many ... because beauty consoles."

And she thought his last words an æsthetic commonplace; but he had
meant her to think so.







CHAPTER IV


Those first days in Rome tired Cornélie greatly. She did too much, as
every one does who has just arrived in Rome; she wanted to take in the
whole city at once; and the distances, although covered in a carriage,
and the endless galleries in the museums resulted in producing physical
exhaustion. Moreover she was constantly experiencing disappointments,
in respect of pictures, statues or buildings. At first she dared not
own to these disappointments; but one afternoon, feeling dead-tired,
after she had been painfully disappointed in the Sistine Chapel, she
owned up to herself. Everything that she saw that was already known
to her from her previous studies disappointed her. Then she resolved
to give sight-seeing a rest. And, after those fatiguing days, when
every morning and every afternoon was spent out of doors, it was
a luxury to surrender herself to the unconscious current of daily
life. She remained at home in the mornings, wrapped in a tea-gown,
in her cosy little bird-cage of a sitting-room, writing letters,
dreaming a little, with her arms folded behind her head; she read
Ovid and Petrarch, or listened to a couple of street-musicians, who,
with their quavering tenors, to the shrill whining of their guitars,
filled the silent street with a sobbing passion of music. At lunch
she considered that she had been lucky in her pension, in her little
corner at the table. She was interested in Baronin von Rothkirch, with
her indifferent, aristocratic condescension towards Rudyard, because
she saw how residence abroad can draw a person out of the narrow ring
of caste principles. The young Baronesse, who cared nothing about
life and merely sketched and painted, interested her because of her
whispering intimacy with Rudyard, which she failed to understand. Miss
Hope was so ingenious, so childishly irrational, that Cornélie could
not imagine how old Hope, the rich stockinet-manufacturer over in
Chicago, allowed this child to travel about alone, with her far too
generous monthly allowance and her total ignorance of the world and
people; and Rudyard himself, though she sometimes felt an aversion
for him, attracted her in spite of that aversion. Although she had
so far formed no deeper friendship with any of her fellow-boarders,
at any rate they were people to whom she was able to talk; and the
conversation at table was a diversion amid the solitude of the rest
of the day.

For in the afternoons, during this period of fatigue and
disappointment, she would merely go for a short walk by herself down
the Corso or on the Pincio and then return home, make her own tea in
her little silver tea-pot and sit dreaming by the log fire, in the
dusk, until it was time to dress for dinner.

And the brightly-lit dining-room with the Guercino ceiling was gay
and cheerful. The pension was crammed: the marchesa had given up
her own room and was sleeping in the bath-room. A hum of voices
buzzed around the tables; the waiters rushed to and fro; spoons
and forks clattered. There was none of the melancholy spirit of so
many tables-d'hôte. The people knew one another; and the excitement
of Roman life, the oxygen in the Roman air seemed to lend an added
vivacity to the gestures and conversation. Amidst this vivacity the
two grimy æsthetic ladies attracted attention by their unvarying pose,
with their eternal evening-dress, their Jaegers, their beads, the fat
books which they read, their angry looks because people were talking.

After dinner they sat in the drawing-room or in the hall, made
friends here and there and talked about Rome, Rome, Rome. There
was always a great fuss about the music in the different churches:
they consulted the Herald; they asked Rudyard, who knew everything,
and gathered round him; and he, fat and polite as ever, smiled and
distributed tickets and named the day and hour at which an important
service would be held in this church or in that. To English ladies,
who were not fully informed, he would now and then, as it were
casually, impart details about the complexities of Catholic ritual
and the Catholic hierarchy; he explained the nationalities denoted
by the various colours of the seminarists whom you met in shoals of
an afternoon on the Pincio, staring at St. Peter's, in ecstasy over
St. Peter's, the mighty symbol of their mighty religion; he set forth
the distinction between a church and a basilica; he related anecdotes
of the private life of Leo XIII. His manner of speaking of all these
things possessed an insinuating charm: the English ladies, greedy
for information, hung on his lips, thought him too awfully nice,
asked him for a thousand particulars.

These days were a great rest for Cornélie. She recovered from her
fatigue and felt indifferent towards Rome. But she did not think of
leaving any the sooner. Whether she was here or elsewhere was all
the same to her: she had to be somewhere. Besides, the pension was
good, her fellow-boarders pleasant and cheerful. She no longer read
Hare's Walks in Rome or Ovid's Metamorphoses, but she read Ouida's
Ariadne over again. She did not care for the book as much as she
had done three years before, at the Hague; and after that she read
nothing. But she amused herself with the von Rothkirch ladies for a
whole evening, looking over Miss Hope's album of seals and collection
of patterns. How mad those Americans were on titles and royalties! The
Baronin good-naturedly contributed an impression of her own arms to
the album. And the patterns were greatly admired: gold brocades; silks
heavily interwoven with silver; spangled tulles. Miss Hope related how
she had come by them: she knew one of the queen's waiting-women, who
had formerly been in service with an American; and this waiting-woman
was now able to procure the patterns for her at a high price: a
precious bit of material picked up while the queen was trying on,
or sometimes even cut out of a broad seam. The child was prouder of
her collection of patterns than an Italian prince of his paintings,
said Baronin von Rothkirch. But, notwithstanding this absurdity, this
vanity, Cornélie came to like the pretty American girl because of her
candid and unsophisticated nature. She looked most attractive in the
evening, in a black low-cut dress, or in a rose chiffon blouse. For
that matter, it was a different frock every night. She possessed a
kaleidoscopic collection of dresses, blouses and jewels. She would walk
through the ruins of the Forum in a tailor-made suit of cream cloth,
lined with orange silk; and her white lace petticoat flitted airily
over the foundations of the Basilica Julia or the Temple of Vesta. Her
gaily-trimmed hats introduced patches of colour from Regent Street or
the Avenue de l'Opéra into the tragic seriousness of the Colosseum or
the ruined palace of the Palatine. The young Baronesse teased her about
her orange silk lining, so in harmony with the Forum, about her hats,
so in keeping with the seriousness of a place of Christian martyrdom,
but she was never angry:

"It's a nice hat anyway!" she would say, in her Yankee drawl, which
always afforded a good view of her pretty teeth but made her strain
her mouth as though she were cracking filberts.

And the child enjoyed everything, enjoyed the Baronin and the
Baronesse, enjoyed being at a pension kept by a decayed Italian
marchioness. And, as soon as she caught sight of the Marchesa
Belloni's grey, leonine head, she would make a rush for her--because a
marchioness is higher than a baroness, said Madame von Rothkirch--drag
her into a corner and if possible monopolize her throughout the
evening. Rudyard would then join them; and Cornélie, seeing this,
wondered what Rudyard was, who he was and what he was about. But this
did not interest the Baronin, who had just received a card for a mass
in the papal chapel; and the young Baronesse merely said that he told
legends of the saints so nicely, when explaining the pictures to her
in the Doria and the Corsini.







CHAPTER V


One evening Cornélie made the acquaintance of the Dutch family beside
whom the Marchesa had first wished to place her at table: Mrs. van der
Staal and her two daughters. They too were spending the whole winter in
Rome: they had friends there and went out visiting. The conversation
flowed smoothly; and mevrouw invited Cornélie to come and have a chat
in her sitting-room. Next day she accompanied her new acquaintances
to the Vatican and heard that mevrouw was expecting her son, who was
coming to Rome from Florence to continue his archæological studies.

Cornélie was glad to meet at the hotel a Dutch element that was
not antipathetic. She thought it pleasant to talk Dutch again and
she confessed as much. In a day or two she had become intimate with
Mrs. van der Staal and the two girls; and on the evening when young
Van der Staal arrived she opened her heart more than she had ever
thought that she could do to strangers whom she had known for barely
a few days.

They were sitting in the Van der Staal's sitting-room, Cornélie in a
low chair by the blazing log-fire, for the evening was chilly. They
had been talking about the Hague, about her divorce; and she was now
speaking of Italy, of herself:

"I no longer see anything," she confessed. "Rome has quite bewildered
me. I can't distinguish a colour, an outline. I don't recognize
people. They all seem to whirl round me. Sometimes I feel a need to sit
alone for hours in my bird-cage upstairs, to recollect myself. This
morning, in the Vatican, I don't know: I remember nothing. It is all
grey and fuzzy around me. Then the people in the boarding-house:
the same faces every day. I see them and yet I don't see them. I
see ... I see Madame von Rothkirch and her daughter, I see the fair
Urania ... and Rudyard ... and the little Englishwoman, Miss Taylor,
who is always so tired with sight-seeing and who thinks everything
most exquisite. But my memory is so bad that, when I am alone, I have
to think to myself: Madame von Rothkirch is tall and stately, with
the smile of the German Empress--she is rather like her--talking fast
and yet with indifference, as though the words just fell indifferently
from her lips...."

"You're a good observer," said Van der Staal.

"Oh, don't say that!" said Cornélie, almost vexed. "I see nothing and
I can't remember. I receive no impressions. Everything around me is
colourless. I really don't know why I have come abroad.... When I am
alone, I think of the people whom I meet. I know Madame von Rothkirch
now and I know Else. Such a round, merry face, with arched eyebrows,
and always a joke or a witticism: I find it tiring sometimes, she makes
me laugh so. Still they are very nice. And the fair Urania. She tells
me everything. She is as communicative ... as I am at this moment. And
Rudyard: I see him before me too."

"Rudyard!" smiled mevrouw and the girls.

"What is he?" Cornélie asked, inquisitively. "He is so civil, he
ordered my wine for me, he can always get one all sorts of cards."

"Don't you know what Rudyard is?" asked Mrs. van der Staal.

"No; and Mrs. von Rothkirch doesn't know either."

"Then you had better be careful," laughed the girls.

"Are you a Catholic?" asked mevrouw.

"No."

"Nor the fair Urania either? Nor Mrs. von Rothkirch?"

"No."

"Well, that is why la Belloni put Rudyard at your table. Rudyard is
a Jesuit. Every pension in Rome has a Jesuit who lives there free
of charge, if the proprietor is a good friend of the Church, and who
tries to win souls by making himself especially agreeable."

Cornélie refused to believe it.

"You can take my word for it," mevrouw continued, "that in a pension
like this, a first-class pension, a pension with a reputation,
a great deal of intrigue goes on."

"La Belloni?" Cornélie enquired.

"Our marchesa is a thorough-paced intrigante. Last winter, three
English sisters were converted here."

"By Rudyard?"

"No, by another priest. Rudyard is here for the first time this
winter."

"Rudyard walked quite a long way with me in the street this morning,"
said young Van der Staal. "I let him talk, I heard all he had to say."

Cornélie fell back in her chair:

"I am tired of people," she said, with the strange sincerity which
was hers. "I should like to sleep for a month, without seeing anybody."

And, after a short pause, she got up, said goodnight and went to bed,
while everything swam before her eyes.







CHAPTER VI


She remained indoors for a day or two and had her meals served in her
room. One morning, however, she was going for a stroll in the Villa
Borghese, when she met young Van der Staal, on his bicycle.

"Don't you ride?" he asked, jumping off.

"No."

"Why not?"

"It is an exercise which doesn't suit my style," Cornélie replied,
vexed at meeting any one who disturbed the solitude of her stroll.

"May I walk with you?"

"Certainly."

He gave his machine into the charge of the porter at the gate and
walked on with her, quite naturally, without saying very much:

"It's beautiful here," he remarked.

His words seemed to convey a simple meaning. She looked at him,
for the first time, attentively.

"You're an archæologist?" she asked.

"No," he said, deprecatingly.

"What are you, then?"

"Nothing. Mamma says that, just to excuse me. I am nothing and a very
useless member of society at that. And I am not even well off."

"But you are studying, aren't you?"

"No. I do a little casual reading. My sisters call it studying."

"Do you like going about, as your sisters do?"

"No, I hate it. I never go with them."

"Don't you like meeting and studying people?"

"No. I like pictures, statues and trees."

"A poet?"

"No. Nothing. I am nothing, really."

She looked at him, with increased attention. He was walking very simply
by her side, a tall, thin fellow of perhaps twenty-six, more of a boy
than a man in face and figure, but endowed with a certain assurance
and restfulness that made him seem older than his years. He was pale;
he had dark, cool, almost reproachful eyes; and his long, lean figure,
in his badly-kept cycling-suit, betrayed a slight indifference,
as though he did not care what his arms and legs looked like.

He said nothing but walked on pleasantly, unembarrassed, without
finding it necessary to talk. Cornélie, however, grew fidgety and
sought for words:

"It is beautiful here," she stammered.

"Oh, it's very beautiful!" he replied, calmly, without seeing that
she was constrained. "So green, so spacious, so peaceful: those
long avenues, those vistas of avenues, like an antique arch, over
yonder; and, far away in the distance, look, St. Peter's, always
St. Peter's. It's a pity about those queer things lower down: that
restaurant, that milk-tent. People spoil everything nowadays.... Let
us sit down here: it is so lovely here."

They sat down on a bench.

"It is such a joy when a thing is beautiful," he continued. "People
are never beautiful. Things are beautiful: statues and paintings. And
then trees and clouds!"

"Do you paint?"

"Sometimes," he confessed, grudgingly. "A little. But really everything
has been painted already; and I can't really say that I paint."

"Perhaps you write too?"

"There has been even more written than painted, much more. Perhaps
everything has not yet been painted, but everything has certainly been
written. Every new book that is not of absolute scientific importance
is superfluous. All the poetry has been written and every novel too."

"Do you read much?"

"Hardly at all. I sometimes dip into an old author."

"But what do you do then?" she asked, suddenly, querulously.

"Nothing," he answered, calmly, with a glance of humility. "I do
nothing, I exist."

"Do you think that a good mode of existence?"

"No."

"Then why don't you adopt another?"

"As I might buy a new coat or a new bicycle?"

"You're not speaking seriously," she said, crossly.

"Why are you so vexed with me?"

"Because you annoy me," she said, irritably.

He rose, bowed civilly and said:

"Then I had better go for a turn on my bicycle."

And he walked slowly away.

"What a stupid fellow!" she thought, peevishly.

But she thought it tiresome that she had wrangled with him, because
of his mother and his sisters.







CHAPTER VII


At the hotel, however, he spoke to Cornélie politely, as though
there had been no embarrassment, no wrangling interchange of words
between them, and he even asked her quite simply--because his mother
and sisters had some calls to pay that afternoon--whether they should
go to the Palatine together.

"I passed it the other day," she said, indifferently.

"And don't you intend to see the ruins?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"They don't interest me. I can't see the past in them. I merely
see ruins."

"But then why did you come to Rome?" he asked, irritably.

She looked at him and could have burst into sobs:

"I don't know," she said, meekly. "I could just as well have gone
somewhere else. But I had formed a great idea of Rome; and Rome
disappoints me."

"How so?"

"I find it hard and inexorable and devoid of feeling. I don't know
why, but that's the impression it makes upon me. And I am in a mood
at present which somehow makes me want something less insensible
and imperturbable."

He smiled:

"Come along," he said. "Come with me to the Palatine. I must show
you Rome. It is so beautiful."

She felt too much depressed to remain alone; and so she put on
her things and left the hotel with him. The cabmen outside cracked
their whips:

"Vole? Vole?" they shouted.

He picked out one:

"This is Gaetano," he said. "I always take him. He knows me, don't
you, Gaetano?"

"Si, signorino. Cavallo di sangue, signorina!" said Gaetano, pointing
to his horse.

They drove away.

"I am always frightened of these cabmen," said Cornélie.

"You don't know them," he answered, smiling. "I like them. I like
the people. They're nice people."

"You approve of everything in Rome."

"And you submit without reserve to a mistaken impression."

"Why mistaken?"

"Because that first impression of Rome, as hard and unfeeling, is
always the same and always mistaken."

"Yes, it's that. Look, we are driving by the Forum. Whenever I see
the Forum, I think of Miss Hope and her orange lining."

He felt annoyed and did not answer.

"This is the Palatine."

They alighted and passed through the entrance.

"This wooden staircase takes us to the Palace of Tiberius. Above the
palace, on the top of the arches, is a garden from which we look down
on the Forum."

"Tell me about Tiberius. I know that there were good and bad
emperors. We were taught that at school. Tiberius was a bad emperor,
wasn't he?"

"He was a dismal brute. But why do you want me to tell you about him?"

"Because otherwise I can take no interest in those arches and
chambers."

"Then let us go up to the top and sit in the garden."

They did so.

"Don't you feel Rome here?" he asked.

"I feel the same everywhere," she replied.

But he seemed not to hear her:

"It's the atmosphere around you," he continued. "You should try to
forget our hotel, to forget Belloni and all our fellow-visitors and
yourself. When anybody first arrives here, he has all the usual trouble
about the hotel, his rooms, the table-d'hôte, the vaguely likable or
dislikable people. You've got over that now. Clear your mind of it. And
try to feel only the atmosphere of Rome. It's as if the atmosphere had
remained the same, notwithstanding that the centuries lie piled up
one above the other. First the middle ages covered the antiquity of
the Forum and now it is hidden everywhere by our nineteenth-century
craze for travel. There you have Miss Hope's orange lining. But the
atmosphere has always remained the same. Unless I imagine it...."

She was silent.

"Perhaps I do," he continued. "But what does that matter to me? Our
whole life is imagination; and imagination is a beautiful thing. The
beauty of our imagination is the consolation of our lives, to those of
us who are not men of action. The past is beauty. The present is not,
does not exist. And the future does not interest me."

"Do you never think about modern problems?" she asked.

"The woman question? Socialism? Peace?"

"Well, yes, for instance."

"No," he smiled. "I think of them sometimes, but not about them."

"How do you mean?"

"I get no further. That is my nature. I am a dreamer by nature;
and my dream is the past."

"Don't you dream of yourself?"

"No. Of my soul, my inner self? No. It interests me very little."

"Have you ever suffered?"

"Suffered? Yes, no. I don't know. I feel sorry for my utter uselessness
as a human being, as a son, as a man; but, when I dream, I am happy."

"How do you come to speak to me so openly?"

He looked at her in surprise:

"Why should I be reticent about myself?" he asked. "I either don't
talk or I talk as I am doing now. Perhaps it is a little odd."

"Do you talk to every one so intimately?"

"No, hardly to anybody. I once had a friend ... but he's dead. Tell
me, I suppose you consider me morbid?"

"No, I don't think so."

"I shouldn't mind if you did. Oh, how beautiful it is here! Are you
drinking Rome in with your very breath?"

"Which Rome?"

"The Rome of antiquity. Under where we are sitting is the Palace of
Tiberius. I see him walking about there, with his tall, strong figure,
with his large, searching eyes: he was very strong, he was very dismal
and he was a brute. He had no ideals. Farther down, over there, is the
Palace of Caligula, a madman of genius. He built a bridge across the
Forum to speak to Jupiter in the Capitol. That's a thing one couldn't
do nowadays. He was a genius and a madman. When a man's like that,
there's a good deal about him to admire."

"How can you admire an age of emperors who were brutes and mad?"

"Because I see their age before my eyes, in the past, like a dream."

"How is it possible that you don't see the present before you, with the
problems of our own time, especially the eternal problem of poverty?"

He looked at her:

"Yes," he said, "I know. That is my sin, my wickedness. The eternal
problem of poverty doesn't affect me."

She looked at him contemptuously:

"You don't belong to your period," she said, coldly.

"No."

"Have you ever felt hungry?"

He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

"Have you ever pictured yourself leading the life of a labourer, of
a factory-girl who works until she's worn out and old and half-dead
for a bare crust of bread?"

"Oh, those things are so horrible and so ugly: don't talk about
them!" he entreated.

The expression of her eyes was cold; the corners of her lips were
depressed as though by a feeling of distaste; and she rose from
her seat.

"Are you angry?" he asked, humbly.

"No," she said, gently, "I am not angry."

"But you despise me, because you consider me a useless creature,
an æsthete and a dreamer?"

"No. What am I myself, that I should reproach you with your
uselessness?"

"Oh, if we could only find something!" he exclaimed, almost in ecstasy.

"What?"

"An aim. But mine would always remain beauty. And the past."

"And, if I had the strength of mind to devote myself to an aim,
it would above all be this: bread for the future."

"How abominable that sounds!" he said, rudely but sincerely. "Why
didn't you go to London, or Manchester, or one of those black
manufacturing towns?"

"Because I hadn't the strength of mind and because I think too much
of myself and of a sorrow that I have had lately. And I expected to
find distraction in Italy."

"And that is where your disappointment lies. But perhaps you will
gradually acquire greater strength and then devote yourself to your
aim: bread for the future. I sha'n't envy you, however: bread for
the Future!..."

She was silent.

Then she said, coldly:

"It is getting late. Let us go home...."







CHAPTER VIII


Duco van der Staal had taken a large, vault-like studio, with a chilly
north light, up three flights of stairs in the Via del Babuino. Here he
painted, modelled and studied and here he dragged all the beautiful and
antique objects that he succeeded in picking up in the little shops
along the Tiber or in the Mercato dei Fiori. That was his passion:
to hunt through Rome for a panel of an old triptych or a fragment of
ancient sculpture. In this way his studio had not remained the large,
chilly, vault-like workroom bearing witness to zealous and serious
study, but had become a refuge for dim-coloured remnants of antiquity
and ancient art, a museum for his dreaming spirit. Already as a child,
as a boy, he had felt that passion for antiquity developing; he learnt
how to rummage through the stocks of old Jewish dealers; he taught
himself to haggle when his purse was not full; and he collected
first rubbish and afterwards, gradually, objects of artistic and
financial value. And it was his great hobby, his one vice: he spent
all his pocket-money on it and, later, without reserve, the little
that he was able to earn. For sometimes, very seldom, he would finish
something and sell it. But generally he was too ill-satisfied with
himself to finish anything; and his modest notion was that everything
had already been created and that his art was useless.

This idea sometimes paralysed him for months together, without making
him unhappy. When he had the money to keep himself going--and his
personal needs were very small--he felt rich and was content in his
studio or would wander, perfectly content, through the streets of
Rome. His long, careless, lean, slender body was at such times clad
in his oldest suit, which afforded an unostentatious glimpse of an
untidy shirt with a soft collar and a bit of string instead of a tie;
and his favourite headgear was a faded hat, battered out of shape by
the rain. His mother and sisters as a rule found him unpresentable,
but had given up trying to transform him into the well-groomed son
and brother whom they would have liked to take to the drawing-rooms
of their Roman friends. Happy to breathe the atmosphere of Rome, he
would wander for hours through the ruins and see, in a dazzling vision
of phantom columns, ethereal temples and translucent marble palaces
looming up in a shimmering sunlit twilight; and the tourists going
by with their Baedekers, who passed this long lean young man seated
carelessly on the foundations of the Temple of Saturn, would never
have believed in his architectural illusions of harmonious ascending
lines, crowned by an array of statues in noble and god-like attitudes,
high in the blue sky.

But he saw them before him. He raised the shafts of the pillars,
he fluted the severe Doric columns, he bent and curved the cushioned
Ionic capitals and unfurled the leaves of the Corinthian acanthuses;
the temples rose in the twinkling of an eye, the basilicas shot up as
by magic, the graven images stood white against the elusive depths
of the sky and the Via Sacra became alive. He, in his admiration,
lived his dream, his past. It was as though he had known preexistence
in ancient Rome; and the modern houses, the modern Capitol and all
that stood around the tomb of his Forum were invisible to his eyes.

He would sit like this for hours, or wander about and sit down again
and be happy. In the intensity of his imagination, he conjured
up history from the clouds of the past, first of all as a mist,
a miraculous haze, whence the figures stepped out against the
marble background of ancient Rome. The gigantic dramas were enacted
before his dreaming eyes as on an ideal stage which stretched from
the Forum to the hazy, sun-shot azure of the Campagna, with slips
that lost themselves in the depths of the sky. Roman life came into
being, with a toga'd gesture, a line of Horace, a sudden vision of
an emperor's murder or a contest of gladiators in the arena. And
suddenly also the vision paled and he saw the ruins, the ruins only,
as the tangible shadow of his unreal illusion: he saw the ruins as
they were, brown and grey, eaten up with age, crumbled, martyred,
mutilated with hammers, till only a few occasional pillars lifted
and bore a trembling architrave, that threatened to come crashing to
the ground. And the browns and greys were so richly and nobly gilded
by splashes of sunlight, the ruins were so exquisitely beautiful in
decay, so melancholy in their unwitting fortuitousness of broken lines,
of shattered arches and mutilated sculpture, that it was as though
he himself, after his airy vision of radiant dream-architecture, had
tortured and mutilated them with an artist's hand and caused them to
burst asunder and shake and tremble, for the sake of their wistful
aftermath of beauty. Then his eyes grew moist, his heart became more
full than he could bear and he went away, through the Arch of Titus
by the Colosseum, through the Arch of Constantine, on and on, and
hurried past the Lateran to the Via Appia and the Campagna, where
his smarting eyes drank in the blue of the distant Alban Hills, as
though that would cure them of their excessive gazing and dreaming....

Neither in his mother nor in his sisters did he find a strain that
sympathized with his eccentric tendencies; and, since that one friend
who died, he had never found another and had always been lonely within
and without, as though the victim of a predestination which would not
allow him to meet with sympathy. But he had peopled his loneliness so
densely with his dreams that he had never felt unhappy because of it;
and, even as he loved roaming alone among the ruins and along the
country-roads, so he cherished the privacy of his lonely studio,
with the many silent figures on an old panel of some triptych, on
a tapestry, or on the many closely hung sketches, all around him,
all with the charm of their lines and colours, all with the silent
gesture of their movement and emotion and all blending together
in twilit corners or a shadowy antique cabinet. And in between all
this lived his china and bronze and old silver, while the faded gold
embroidery of an ecclesiastical vestment gleamed faintly and the
old leather bindings of his books stood in comfortable brown rows,
ready to give forth, when his hands opened them, images which mistily
drifted upwards, living their loves and their sorrows in the tempered
browns and reds and golds of the soundless atmosphere of the studio.

Such was his simple life, without much inward doubting, because he
made no great demands upon himself, and without the modern artist's
melancholy, because he was happy in his dreams. He had never, despite
his hotel life with his mother and sisters--he slept and took his meals
at Belloni's--met many people or concerned himself with strangers,
being by nature a little shy of Baedekered tourists, of short-skirted
English ladies, with their persistent little exclamations of uniform
admiration, and feeling entirely impossible in the half-Italian,
half-cosmopolitan set of his rather worldly mother and smart little
sisters, who spent their time dancing and cycling with young Italian
princes and dukes.

And, now that he had met Cornélie de Retz, he had to confess to himself
that he possessed but little knowledge of human nature and that he
had never learnt to believe in the reality of such a woman, who might
have existed in books, but not in actual life. Her very appearance--her
pallor, her drooping charm, her weariness--had astonished him; and her
conversation astonished him even more: her positiveness mingled with
hesitation; her artistic feeling modified by the endeavour to take part
in her period, a period which he failed to appreciate as artistic,
enamoured as he was of Rome and of the past. And her conversation
astonished him, attractive though the sound of it was and offended
as he often was by a recurrent bitterness and irony, followed again
by depression and discouragement, until he thought it over again and
again, until in his musing he seemed to hear it once more on her own
lips, until she joined the busts and torsos in his studio and appeared
before him in the lily-like frailness of her visible actuality,
against the preraphaelite stiffness of line and the Byzantine gold
and colour of the angels and madonnas on canvas and tapestry.

His soul had never known love; and he had always looked on love as
imagination and poetry. His life had never known more than the natural
virile impulse and the ordinary little love-affair with a model. And
his ideas on love swayed in a too wide and unreal balance between
a woman who showed herself in the nude for a few lire and Petrarch's
Laura; between the desire roused by a beautiful body and the exaltation
inspired by Dante's Beatrice; between the flesh and the dream. He had
never contemplated an encounter of kindred souls, never longed for
sympathy, for love in the full and pregnant sense of the word. And,
when he began to think and to think long and often of Cornélie de Retz,
he could not understand it. He had pondered and dreamed for days,
for a week about a woman in a poem; on a woman in real life never.

And that he, irritated by some of her sayings, had nevertheless seen
her stand with her lily-like outline against his Byzantine triptych,
like a wraith in his lonely dreams, almost frightened him, because
it had made him lose his peace of mind.







CHAPTER IX


It was Christmas Day, on which occasion the Marchesa Belloni
entertained her boarders with a Christmas-tree in the drawing-room,
followed by a dance in the old Guercino dining-room. To give a ball and
a Christmas-tree was a custom with many hotel-keepers; and the pensions
that gave no dance or Christmas-tree were known and numbered and were
greatly blamed by the foreigners for this breach of tradition. There
were instances of very excellent pensions to which many travellers,
especially ladies, never went, because there was neither a dance nor
a Christmas-tree at Christmas.

The marchesa realized that her tree was expensive and that her
dance cost money too and she would gladly have found an excuse for
avoiding both, but she dared not: the reputation of her pension,
as it happened, depended on its worldliness and smartness, on the
table-d'hôte in the handsome dining-room, where people dressed for
dinner, and also on the brilliant party given at Christmas. And it
was amusing to see how keen all the ladies were to receive gratis in
their bill for a whole winter's stay a trashy Christmas present and the
opportunity of dancing without having to pay for a glass of orgeade
and a bit of pastry, a sandwich and a cup of soup. Giuseppe, the old
nodding major-domo, looked down contemptuously on this festivity:
he remembered the gala pomp of his archducal evenings and considered
the dance inferior and the tree paltry. Antonio, the limping porter,
accustomed to his comparatively quiet life--fetching a visitor or
taking him to the station; sorting the post twice a day at his ease;
and for the rest pottering around his lodge and the lift--hated the
dance, because of all the guests of the boarders, each of whom was
entitled to invite two or three friends, and because of all that tiring
fuss about carriages, when a good many of the visitors skipped into
their vettura without tipping him. Round about Christmas, therefore,
relations between the marchesa and her two principal dignitaries
became far from harmonious; and a hail of orders and abuse would
patter down on the backs of the old cameriere, crawling wearily up
and downstairs with their hot-water-cans in their trembling hands,
and of the young greenhorns of waiters, colliding with one another
in their undisciplined zeal and smashing the plates. And it was only
now, when the whole staff was put to work that people saw how old the
cameriere were and how young the waiters and qualified as disgraceful
and shocking the thrifty method of the marchesa in employing none but
wrecks and infants in her service. The one muscular facchino, who was
essential for hauling the luggage, cut an unexpected figure of virile
maturity and robustness. But above everything the visitors detested the
marchesa because of the great number of her servants, reflecting that
now, at Christmas-time, they would have to tip every one of them. No,
they never imagined that the staff was so large! Quite unnecessarily
large too! Why couldn't the marchesa engage a couple of strong young
maids and waiters instead of all those old women and little boys? And
there was much hushed plotting and confabulating in the corners of the
passages and at meals, to decide on the tips to be given: they didn't
want to spoil the servants, but still they were staying all the winter;
and therefore one lira was hardly enough and they hesitated between
one lira twenty-five and one lira fifty. But, when they counted on
their fingers that there were fully five-and-twenty servants and
that therefore they were close on forty lire out of pocket, they
thought it an awful lot and they got up subscription-lists. Two
lists went round, one of one lira and one of twelve lire a visitor,
the latter subscription covering the whole staff. On this second list
some, who had arrived a month before and who had arranged to leave,
entered their names for ten lire and some for six lire. Five lire
was by general consent considered too little; and, when it became
known that the grimy æsthetic ladies intended to give five lire,
they were regarded with the greatest contempt.

It all meant a lot of trouble and excitement. As Christmas drew nearer,
people streamed to the presepii set up by painters in the Palazzo
Borghese: a panorama of Jerusalem and the shepherds, the angels,
the Magi and Mary and the Child in the manger with the ox and the
ass. They listened in the Ara Coeli to the preaching of little boys
and girls, who by turns climbed the platform and told the story of the
Nativity, some shyly reciting a little poem, prompted by an anxious
mother; others, girls especially, declaiming and rolling their eyes
with the dramatic fervour of little Italian actresses and ending up
with a religious moral. The people and countless tourists stood and
listened to the preaching; a pleasant spirit prevailed in the church,
where the shrill young children's voices were lifted up in oratory;
there was laughter at a gesture or a point driven home; and the
priests strolling round the church wore an unctuous smile because it
was all so pretty and so satisfactory. And in the chapel of the Santo
Bambino the miraculous wooden doll was bright with gold and jewels;
and the close-packed multitude thronged to gaze at it.

All the visitors at Belloni's bought bunches of holly in the Piazza
di Spagna to adorn their rooms with; and some, such as the Baronin
van Rothkirch, set up a private Christmas-tree in their own rooms. On
the evening before the great party one and all went to admire these
private trees, going in and out of one another's rooms; and all the
boarders wore a kind, festive smile and welcomed everybody, however
much at other times they might quarrel and intrigue against one
another. It was universally agreed that the Baronin had taken great
pains and that her tree was magnificent. Her bedroom had been cleverly
metamorphosed into a boudoir, the beds draped to look like divans,
the wash-hand-stands concealed; and the tree was radiant with candles
and tinsel. And the Baronin, a little sentimentally inclined, for the
season reminded her of Berlin and her lost domesticity, opened her
doors wide to everybody and was even offering the two æsthetic ladies
sweets, when the marchesa, also smiling, appeared at the door, with
her bosom moulded in sky-blue satin and with even larger crystals than
usual in her ears. The room was full: there were the Van der Staals,
Cornélie, Rudyard, Urania Hope and other guests going in and out,
so that it became impossible to move and they stood packed together
or sat on the draped beds of the mother and daughter. The marchesa
led in beside her an unknown young man, short, slender, with a pale
olive complexion and with dark, bright, witty, lively eyes. He wore
dress-clothes and displayed the vague good manners of a beloved and
careless viveur, distinguished and yet conceited. And she proudly
went up to the Baronin, who kept prettily wiping her moist eyes,
and with a certain arrogance presented:

"My nephew, Duca di San Stefano, Principe di Forte-Braccio...."

The well-known Italian name sounded from her lips in the small,
crowded room with deliberate distinctness; and all eyes went to the
young man, who bowed low before the Baronin and then looked round
the room with a vague, ironical glance. The marchesa's nephew had not
yet been seen at the hotel that winter, but everybody knew that the
young Duke of San Stefano, Prince of Forte-Braccio, was a nephew of
the marchesa's and one of the advertisements for her pension. And,
while the prince talked to the Baronin and her daughter, Urania Hope
stared at him as a miraculous being from another world. She clung
tight to Cornélie's arm, as though she were in danger of fainting at
the sight of so much Italian nobility and greatness. She thought him
very good-looking, very imposing, short and slender and pale, with
his carbuncle eyes and his weary distinction and the white orchid
in his button-hole. She would have loved to ask the marchioness to
introduce her to her chic nephew, but she dared not, for she thought
of her father's stockinet-factory at Chicago.

The Christmas-tree party and the dance took place the following
night. It became known that the marchesa's nephew was coming that
evening too; and a great excitement reigned throughout the day. The
prince arrived after the presents had been taken down from the tree
and distributed and made a sort of state entry by the side of his
aunt, the marchesa, into the drawing-room, where the dancing had not
yet begun, though the guests were sitting about the room, all fixing
their eyes on the ducal and princely apparition.

Cornélie was strolling with Duco van der Staal, who to his mother's
and sisters' great surprise had fished out his dress-clothes and
appeared in the big hall; and they both observed the triumphant entry
of la Belloni and her nephew and laughed at the fanatically upturned
eyes of the English and American ladies. They, Cornélie and Duco,
sat down in the hall on two chairs, in front of a clump of palms,
which concealed one of the doors of the drawing-room, while the dance
began inside. They were talking about the statues in the Vatican,
which they had been to see two days before, when they heard, as though
close to their ears, a voice which they recognized as the marchesa's
commanding organ, vainly striving to sink into a whisper. They looked
round in surprise and perceived the hidden door, which was partly open,
and through the open space they faintly distinguished the slim hand and
black sleeve of the prince and a piece of the blue bosom of la Belloni,
both seated on a sofa in the drawing-room. They were therefore back to
back, separated by the half-open door. They listened for fun to the
marchesa's Italian; the prince's answers were lisped so softly that
they could scarcely catch them. And of what the marchesa said they
heard only a few words and scraps of sentences. They were listening
quite involuntarily, when they heard Rudyard's name clearly pronounced
by the marchesa.

"And who besides?" asked the prince, softly.

"An English miss," said the marchesa. "Miss Taylor: she's sitting
over there, by herself in the corner. A simple little soul.... The
Baronin and her daughter.... The Dutchwoman: a divorcée.... And the
pretty American."

"And those two very attractive Dutch girls?" asked the prince.

The music boom-boomed louder; and Cornélie and Duco did not catch
the reply.

"And the divorced Dutchwoman?" the prince asked next.

"No money," the marchesa answered, curtly.

"And the young baroness?"

"No money," la Belloni repeated.

"So there's no one except the stocking-merchant?" asked the prince,
wearily.

La Belloni became cross, but Cornélie and Duco could not understand the
sentences which she rattled out through the boom-booming music. Then,
during a lull, they heard the marchesa say:

"She is very pretty. She has tons and tons of money. She could have
gone to a first-class hotel but preferred to come here because, as a
young girl travelling by herself, she was recommended to me and finds
it pleasanter here. She has the big sitting-room to herself and pays
fifty lire a day for her two rooms. She does not care about money. She
pays three times as much as the others for her wood; and I also charge
her for the wine."

"She sells stockings," muttered the prince, obstinately.

"Nonsense!" said the marchesa. "Remember that there's nobody at
the moment. Last winter we had rich English titled people, with a
daughter, but you thought her too tall. You're always discovering
some objection. You mustn't be so difficult."

"I think those two little Dutch dolls attractive."

"They have no money. You're always thinking what you have no business
to think."

"How much did Papa promise you if you...."

The music boomed louder.

" ... makes no difference.... If Rudyard talks to her.... Miss Taylor
is easy.... Miss Hope...."

"I don't want so many stockings as all that."

" ... very witty, I dare say.... If you don't care to...."

"No."

" ... then I retire.... I'll tell Rudyard so.... How much?"

"Sixty or seventy thousand: I don't know exactly."

"Are they urgent?"

"Debts are never urgent!"

"Do you agree?"

"Very well. But mind, I won't sell myself for less than ten
millions.... And then you get...."

They both laughed; and again the names of Rudyard and Urania were
pronounced.

"Urania?" he asked.

"Yes, Urania," replied la Belloni. "Those little Americans are
very tactful. Look at the Comtesse de Castellane and the Duchess of
Marlborough: how well they bear their husbands' honours! They cut
an excellent figure. They are mentioned in every society column and
always with respect."

" ... All right then. I am tired of these wasted winters. But not
less than ten millions."

"Five."

"No, ten."

The prince and the marchesa had stood up to go. Cornélie looked at
Duco. He laughed:

"I don't quite understand them," he said. "It's a joke, of course."

Cornélie was startled:

"A joke, you think, Mr. van der Staal?"

"Yes, they're humbugging."

"I don't believe it."

"I do."

"Have you any knowledge of human nature?"

"Oh, no, none at all!"

"I'm getting it, gradually. I believe that Rome can be dangerous and
that an hotel-keeping marchesa, a prince and a Jesuit...."

"What about them?"

"Can be dangerous, if not to your sisters, because they have no money,
but at any rate to Urania Hope."

"I don't believe it for a moment. It was all chaff. And it doesn't
interest me. What do you think of Praxiteles' Eros? I think it the most
divine statue that I ever saw. Oh, the Eros, the Eros! That is love,
the real love, the predestined, fatal love, begging forgiveness for
the suffering which it causes."

"Have you ever been in love?"

"No. I have no knowledge of human nature and I have never been in
love. You are always so definite. Dreams are beautiful, statues
are delightful and poetry is everything. The Eros expresses love
completely. The love of the Eros is so beautiful! I could never love
so beautifully as that.... No, it does not interest me to understand
human nature; and a dream of Praxiteles, lingering in a mutilated
marble torso, is nobler than anything that the world calls love."

She knitted her brows; her eyes were sombre.

"Let us go to the dancers," she said. "We are so out of it all here."







CHAPTER X


The day after the dance, at table, Cornélie received a strange
impression: suddenly, as she sipped her delicious Genzano, ordered
for her by Rudyard, she became aware that it was not by accident that
she was sitting with the Baronin and her daughter, with Urania and
Miss Taylor; she saw that the marchesa had an intention behind this
arrangement. Rudyard, always civil, polite, thoughtful, always full
of attentions, his pockets always filled with cards of introduction
very difficult to obtain--or so at least he contended--talked
without ceasing, lately more particularly to Miss Taylor, who went
faithfully to hear all the best church music and always returned
home in ecstasy. The pale, simple, thin little Englishwoman, who at
first used to go into raptures over museums, ruins and the sunsets
on the Aventine or the Monte Mario and who was always tired by her
rambles through Rome, now devoted herself exclusively to the hundreds
of churches, visited and studied them all and above all faithfully
attended the musical services and spoke ecstatically of the choir in
the Sistine Chapel and the quavering Glorias of the male soprani.

Cornélie spoke to Mrs. van der Staal and the Baronin von Rothkirch
of the conversation between the marchesa and her nephew which
she had heard through the half-open door; but neither of them,
though interested and curious, took the marchesa's words seriously,
regarding them only as so much thoughtless talk between a foolish,
match-making aunt and an unwilling nephew. Cornélie was struck by
seeing how unable people are to take things seriously; but the Baronin
was quite indifferent, saying that Rudyard could do her no harm and
was still supplying her with tickets; and Mrs. van der Staal, who had
been in Rome a long time and was accustomed to little boarding-house
conspiracies, considered that Cornélie was making herself too uneasy
about the fair Urania's fate.

Suddenly, however, Miss Taylor disappeared from the table. They thought
that she was ill, until it came to light that she had left the Pension
Belloni. Rudyard said nothing; but, a few days later, the whole pension
knew that Miss Taylor had been converted to the Catholic faith and
had moved to a pension recommended by Rudyard, a pension frequented
by monsignori and noted for its religious tone. Her disappearance
produced a certain constraint in the conversation between Rudyard,
the German ladies and Cornélie; and the latter, in the course of a
week which the Baronin was spending at Naples, changed her seat and
joined her fellow-countrywomen the Van der Staals. The Von Rothkirches
also changed, because of the draught, said the Baronin; their seats
were taken by new arrivals; and Urania was left alone with Rudyard
at lunch and dinner, amid those foreign elements.

Cornélie reproached herself and one day spoke seriously to the American
girl and warned her. But she dared not repeat what she had overheard
at the dance; and her warning made no impression on Urania. And,
when Rudyard had obtained for Miss Hope the privilege of a private
audience of the Pope, Urania would not hear a word against Rudyard
and considered him the kindest man whom she had ever met, Jesuit or
no Jesuit.

But Rudyard continued to appear through a haze of mystery; and people
were not agreed as to whether he was a priest or a layman.







CHAPTER XI


"What do those strangers matter to you?" asked Duco.

They were sitting in his studio: Mrs. van der Staal, Cornélie and the
girls, Annie and Emilie. Annie was pouring out the tea; and they were
discussing Miss Taylor and Urania.

"I am a stranger to you too!" said Cornélie.

"You are not a stranger to me, to us. But Miss Taylor and Urania don't
matter. Hundreds of shadows pass through our lives: I don't see them
and don't feel for them."

"And am I not a shadow?"

"I have talked to you too much in the Borghese and on the Palatine
to look upon you as a shadow."

"Rudyard is a dangerous shadow," said Annie.

"He has no hold over us," Duco replied.

Mrs. van der Staal looked at Cornélie. She understood the enquiring
glance and said, laughing:

"No, he has no hold over me either. Still, if I felt the need of
a religion, I mean an ecclesiastical religion, I would rather be a
Roman Catholic than a Protestant. But, as things are ..."

She did not complete her sentence. She felt safe in this studio,
in this soft, many-coloured profusion of beautiful things, in the
affection of her friends; she felt in harmony with them all: with the
worldly charm of that somewhat superficial mother and her two pretty
girls, a little doll-like and vaguely cosmopolitan and a trifle vain
of the little marquises with whom they danced and bicycled; and with
that son, that brother so very different from the three of them and
yet obviously related to them, as a movement, a gesture, a single
word would show. It also struck Cornélie that they accepted each
other affectionately as they were: Duco, his mother and sisters,
with their stories about the Princesses Colonna and Odescalchi;
mevrouw and the girls and him, with his worn jacket and his unkempt
hair. And, when he began to speak, especially about Rome, when he
put his dream into words, in almost bookish sentences, which however
flowed easily and naturally from his lips, Cornélie felt in harmony
with her surroundings, secure and interested and to some extent
lost that longing to contradict him which his artistic indolence
sometimes aroused in her. And, besides, his indolence suddenly seemed
to her merely apparent and perhaps an affection, for he showed her
sketches and water-colour drawings, not one of them finished, but
every water-colour alive with light before all things, alive with
all that light of Italy: the pearl sunsets over the molten emerald of
Venice; the campanili of Florence drawn vaguely and dreamily against
tender tea-rose skies; Siena fortress-like, blue-black in the bluish
moonlight; the blazing sunshine behind St. Peter's; and, above all,
the ruins, in every kind of light: the Forum in the bright sunlight,
the Palatine by twilight, the Colosseum mysterious in the night;
and then the Campagna: all the dream-like skies and luminous haze of
the glad and sad Campagna, with pale-pink mauves, dewy blues, dusky
violets or the swaggering ochres of pyrotechnical sunsets and clouds
flaring like the crimson pinions of the phoenix. And, when Cornélie
asked him why nothing was finished off, he answered that nothing was
right. He saw the skies as dreams, visions and apotheoses; and on
his paper they became water and paint; and paint was not a thing to
be finished off. Besides, he lacked the self-confidence. And then he
laid his skies aside, he said, and sat down to copy Byzantine madonnas.

When he saw that his water-colours interested her nevertheless, he
went on talking about himself: how he had at first raved over the
noble and ingenuous Primitives, Giotto and especially Lippo Memmi;
how, after that, spending a year in Paris, he had found nothing that
excelled Forain: cold, dry satire in two or three lines; how, next,
in the Louvre, Rubens had become revealed to him, Rubens whose own
talent and whose own brush he used to trace amid all the prentice-work
and imitations of his pupils, until he was able to tell which cherub
was by Rubens himself in a sky full of cherubs painted by four or
five disciples.

And then, he said, he would pass weeks without giving a thought to
painting or taking up a brush and would go daily to the Vatican,
lost in contemplation of the magnificent marbles.

Once he had sat dreaming a whole morning in front of the Eros; once
he had dreamt a poem there, to a very gentle, melodious, monotonous
accompaniment, like an inward incantation. On coming home he had
tried to put both poem and music on paper, but he had failed. Now he
could no longer look at Forain, thought Rubens coarse and disgusting,
but remained faithful to the Primitives:

"And suppose for a moment that I painted a lot and sent a lot of
pictures to exhibitions? Should I be any the happier? Should I feel
satisfied in having done something? I doubt it. Sometimes I do finish
a water-colour and sell it; and then I can go on living for a month
without troubling Mamma. Money I don't care about. Ambition is quite
foreign to my nature.... But don't let us talk about myself. Do you
still think of the future and ... bread?"

"Perhaps," she said, with a melancholy laugh, while the studio around
her grew dusk and dim and the figures of his mother and sisters,
sitting silent, languid and uninterested in their easy-chairs,
gradually faded away and every colour slowly paled. "But I am so
weak-minded. You say that you are not an artist; and I ... I am not
an apostle."

"To give one's life a course: that is the difficulty. Every life
has a line, an appointed course, a road, a path: life has to flow
along that line to death and what comes after death; and that line
is difficult to find. I shall never find my line."

"I don't see my line before me either."

"Do you know, a restlessness has come over me. Mamma, listen, a
restlessness has come over me. I used to dream in the Forum, I was
happy and didn't think about my line, my appointed course. Mamma,
do you think about your line? Do you, girls?"

His sisters giggled in the dark, sunk in their low chairs, like two
pussy-cats. Mamma got up:

"Duco dear, you know I can't follow you. I admire Cornélie for liking
your water-colours and understanding what you mean by that line. My
line is to go home at once, for it's very late."

"That's the line of the next two seconds. But there is a restlessness
about my line that affects it for days and weeks to come. I am not
leading the right life. The past is very beautiful and so peaceful,
because it has been. But I have lost that peace. The present is very
small. But the future! ... Oh, if we could only find an aim ... for
the future!"

They no longer listened; they went down the dark stairs, groping
their way.

"Bread?" he asked himself, wonderingly.







CHAPTER XII


One morning when Cornélie stayed indoors she went through the books
that lay scattered about her room. And she found that it was useless
for her to read Ovid, in order to study something of Roman manners,
some of which had alarmed and shocked her; she found that Dante and
Petrarch were too difficult to learn Italian from, whereas she had
only to pick up a word or two in order to make herself understood in a
shop or by the servants; she found Hare's Walks a too wearisome guide,
because every cobble-stone in Rome did not inspire her with the same
interest that Hare evidently derived from it. Then she confessed to
herself that she could never see Italy and Rome as Duco van der Staal
did. She never saw the light of the skies or the drifting of the clouds
as he had seen them in his unfinished water-colour sketches. She had
never seen the ruins transfigured in glory as he did in his hours of
dreaming on the Palatine or in the Forum. She saw a picture merely
with a layman's eye; a Byzantine madonna made no appeal to her. She
was very fond of statues; but to fall head over ears in love with
a mutilated marble torso, in the spirit in which he loved the Eros,
seemed to her sickly ... and yet it seemed to be the right spirit in
which to see the Eros. Well, not sickly, she admitted ... but morbid:
the word, though she herself smiled at it expressed her opinion better;
not sickly, but morbid. And she looked upon an olive as a tree rather
like a willow, whereas Duco had told her that an olive was the most
beautiful tree in the world.

She did not agree with him, either about the olive or about the
Eros; and yet she felt that he was right from a certain mysterious
standpoint on which there was no room for her, because it was like
a mystic eminence amid impassable sensitive spheres which were not
hers, even as the eminence was to her an unknown vantage-point of
sensitiveness and vision. She did not agree with him and yet she
was convinced of his greater rightness, his truer view, his nobler
insight, his deeper feeling; and she was certain that her way of
seeing Italy, in the disappointment of her disillusion, in the
grey light of a growing indifference, was neither noble nor good;
and she knew that the beauty of Italy escaped her, whereas to him
it was like a tangible and comprehensible vision. And she cleared
away Ovid and Petrarch and Hare's guidebook and locked them up in
her trunk and took out the novels and pamphlets which had appeared
that year about the woman movement in Holland. She took an interest
in the problem and thought that it made her more modern than Duco,
who suddenly seemed to her to belong to a bygone age, not modern,
not modern. She repeated the words with enjoyment and suddenly felt
herself stronger. To be modern: that should be her strength. One
phrase of Duco's had struck her immensely, that exclamation:

"Oh, if we could only find an aim! Our life has a line, a path,
which it must follow...."

To be modern: was that not a line? To find the solution of a modern
problem: was that not an aim in life? He was quite right, from his
point of view, from which he saw Italy; but was not the whole of
Italy a past, a dream, at least that Italy which Duco saw, a dreamy
paradise of nothing but art? It could not be right to stand like
that, see like that a dream like that. The present was here: on
the grey horizon muttered an approaching storm; and the latter-day
problems flashed like lightning. Was that not what she had to live
for? She felt for the woman, she felt for the girl: she herself
had been the girl, brought up only as a social ornament, to shine,
to be pretty and attractive and then of course to get married; she
had shone and she had married; and now she was three-and-twenty,
divorced from the husband who at one time had been her only aim and,
for her sake, the aim of her parents; now she was alone, astray,
desperate and utterly disconsolate: she had nothing to cling to and
she suffered. She still loved him, cad and scoundrel though he was;
and she had thought that she was doing something very clever, when she
went abroad, to Italy, to study art. But she did not understand art,
she did not feel Italy. Oh, how clearly she saw it, after those talks
with Duco, that she would never understand art, even though she used
to sketch a bit, even though she used to have a biscuit-group after
Canova in her boudoir, Cupid and Psyche: so nice for a young girl! And
with what certainty she now knew that she would never grasp Italy,
because she did not think an olive-tree so very beautiful and had
never seen the sky of the Campagna as a fluttering phoenix-wing! No,
Italy would never be the consolation of her life....

But what then? She had been through much, but she was alive and very
young. And once again, at the sight of those pamphlets, at the sight
of that novel, the desire arose in her soul: to be modern, to be
modern! And to take part in the problem of to-day! To live for the
future! To live for her fellow-women, married or unmarried!...

She dared not look deep down into herself, lest she should waver. To
live for the future!... It separated her a little more from Duco,
that new ideal. Did she mind? Was she in love with him? No, she
thought not. She had been in love with her husband and did not want
to fall in love at once with the first agreeable young man whom she
chanced to meet in Rome....

And she read the pamphlets, about the feminine problem and love. Then
she thought of her husband, then of Duco. And wearily she dropped the
pamphlets and reflected how sad it all was: people, women, girls. She,
a woman, a young woman, an aimless woman: how sad her life was! And
Duco: he was happy. And yet he was seeking the line of his life,
yet he was looking out for his aim. A new restlessness had entered
into him. And she wept a little and anxiously twisted herself on her
cushions and clasped her hands and prayed, unconsciously, without
knowing to whom she was praying:

"O God, tell me what to do!"







CHAPTER XIII


It was then, after a few days, that Cornélie conceived the idea
of leaving the boarding-house and going to live in rooms. The
hotel-life disturbed her budding thoughts, like a wind of vanity
that was constantly blighting very vague and fragile blossoms;
and, despite a torrent of abuse from the marchesa, who reproached
her with having engaged to stay the whole winter, she moved into
the rooms which she had found with Duco van der Staal, after much
hunting and stair-climbing. They were in the Via dei Serpenti, up any
number of stairs: a set of two roomy, but almost entirely unfurnished
apartments, containing only the absolute essentials; and, though the
view extended far and wide above the house-tops of Rome to the circular
ruin of the Colosseum, the rooms were rough and uncomfortable, bare
and uninviting. Duco had not approved of them and said that they made
him shiver, although they faced the sun; but there was something about
the ruggedness of the place that harmonized with Cornélie's new mood.

When they parted that day, he thought how inartistic she was and
she how unmodern he was. They did not meet again for several days;
and Cornélie was very lonely, but did not feel her loneliness,
because she was writing a pamphlet on the social position of divorced
women. The idea was suggested to her by a few sentences in a tract
on the feminist problem; and at once, without wasting much time in
thought, she flung off her sentences in a succession of impulses and
intuitions, rough-hewn, cold and clear; she wrote in an epistolary
style, without literary art, as though to warn girls against cherishing
too many illusions about marriage.

She had not made her rooms comfortable; she sat there, high up over
Rome, with her view across the house-tops to the Colosseum, writing,
writing and writing, absorbed in her sorrow, uttering herself in
her stubborn sentences, feeling intensely bitter, but pouring the
wormwood of her soul into her pamphlet. Mrs. van der Staal and the
girls, who came to see her, were surprised by her untidy appearance,
her rough-looking rooms, with a dying fire in the little grate and
with no flowers, no books, no tea and no cushions; and, when they went
away after fifteen minutes, pleading urgent errands, they looked at
each other, tripping down the endless stairs, with eyes of amazement,
utterly at a loss to understand this transformation of an interesting,
elegant little woman, surrounded by an aura of poetry and a tragic
past, into an "independent woman," working furiously at a pamphlet full
of bitter invective against society. And, when Duco looked her up again
in a week's time and came to sit with her a little, he remained silent,
stiff and upright in his chair, without speaking, while Cornélie read
the beginning of her pamphlet to him. He was touched by the glimpses
which it revealed to him of personal suffering and experience, but he
was irritated by a certain discord between that slender, lily-like
woman, with her drooping movements, and the surroundings in which
she now felt at her ease, entirely absorbed in her hatred for the
society--Hague society--which had become hostile to her because she
refused to go on living with a cad who ill-treated her. And while
she was reading, Duco thought:

"She would not write like that if she were not writing it all down from
her own suffering. Why doesn't she make a novel of it? Why generalize
from one's personal sorrows and why that admonishing voice?..."

He did not like it. He thought the sound of that voice was hard,
those truths so personal, that bitterness unattractive and that
hatred of convention so small. And, when she put a question to him,
he did not say much, nodded his head in vague approval and remained
sitting in his stiff, uncomfortable attitude. He did not know what to
answer, he was unable to admire, he thought her inartistic. And yet a
great compassion welled up within him when he saw, in spite of it all,
how charming she would be and what charm and womanly dignity would be
hers could she find the line of her life and moved harmoniously along
that line with the music of her own movement. He now saw her taking a
wrong road, a path pointed out to her by the fingers of others and not
entered upon from the impulse of her own soul. And he felt the deepest
pity for her. He, an artist, but above all a dreamer, sometimes saw
vividly, despite his dreaming, despite his sometimes all-embracing
love of line and colour and atmosphere; he, the artist and dreamer,
sometimes very clearly saw the emotion looming through the outward
actions of his fellow-creatures, saw it like light shining through
alabaster; and he suddenly saw her lost, seeking, straying: seeking
she herself knew not what, straying she herself knew not through what
labyrinth, far from her line, the line of her life and the course of
her soul's journey, which she had never yet found.

She sat before him excitedly. She had read her last pages with a
flushed face, in a resonant voice, her whole being in a fever. She
looked as if she would have liked to fling those bitter pages
at the feet of her Dutch sisters, at the feet of all women. He,
absorbed in his speculations, melancholy in his pity for her,
had scarcely listened, nodding his head in vague approval. And
suddenly she began to speak of herself, revealed herself wholly,
told him her life: her existence as a young girl at the Hague, her
education with a view to shining a little and being attractive and
pretty, with not one serious glance at her future, only waiting for
a good match, with a flirtation here and a little love-affair there,
until she was married: a good match, in her own circle; her husband
a first lieutenant of hussars, a fine, handsome fellow, of a good,
distinguished family, with a little money. She had fallen in love with
him for his handsome face and his fine figure, which his uniform showed
to advantage, and he with her as he might have done with any other
girl who had a pretty face. Then came the revelation of those very
early days: the discord between their characters manifesting itself
luridly at once. She, spoilt at home, dainty, delicate, fastidious,
but selfishly fastidious and flying out against any offence to her
own spoilt little ego; he no longer the lover but immediately and
brutally the man with rights to this and rights to that, with an oath
here and a roar there; she with neither the tact nor the patience
to make of their foundering lives what could still be made of them,
nervous, quick-tempered, quick to resent coarseness, which made his
savagery flare up so violently that he ill-treated her, swore at her,
struck her, shook her and banged her against the wall.

The divorce followed. He had not consented at first, content, in
spite of all, to have a house and in that house a wife, female to
him, the male, and declining to return to the discomfort of life in
chambers, until she simply ran away, first to her parents, then to
friends in the country, protesting loudly against the law, which was
so unjust to women. He had yielded at last and allowed himself to
be accused of infidelity, which was not beside the truth. She was
now free, but stood as it were alone, looked at askance by all her
acquaintances, refusing to yield to their conventional demand for that
sort of half-mourning which, according to their conventional ideas,
should surround a divorced woman and at once returning to her former
life, the gay life of an unmarried girl. But she had felt that this
could not go on, both because of her acquaintances and because of
herself: her acquaintances looking at her askance and she loathing
her acquaintances, loathing their parties and dinners, until she felt
profoundly unhappy, lonely and forlorn, without anything or anybody
to cling to, and had felt all the depression that weighs down on the
divorced woman. Sometimes, in her heart of hearts, she reflected that
by dint of great patience and great tact she might have managed that
man, that he was not wicked, only coarse, that she was still fond of
him, or at least of his handsome face and his sturdy figure. Love, no,
it was not love; but had she ever thought of love as she now sometimes
pictured it? And did not nearly everybody live more or less so-so,
with a good deal of give and take?

But this regret she hardly confessed to herself, did not now confess
to Duco; and what she did confess was her bitterness, her hatred of
her husband, of marriage, of convention, of people, of the world,
of all the great generalities, generalizing her own feelings into
one great curse against life. He listened to her, with pity. He
felt that there was something noble in her, which, however, had been
stifled from the beginning. He forgave her for not being artistic,
but he was sorry that she had never found herself, that she did
not know what she was, who she was, what her life should be, or
where the line of her life wound, the only path which she ought to
tread, as every life follows one path. Oh, how often, if a person
would but let herself go, like a flower, like a bird, like a cloud,
like a star which so obediently ran its course, she would find her
happiness and her life, even as the flower or the bird finds them,
even as the cloud drifts before the sun, even as the star follows its
course through the heavens. But he told her nothing of his thoughts,
knowing that, especially in her present mood of bitterness, she would
not understand them and could derive no comfort from them, because they
would be too vague for her and too far removed from her own manner of
thinking. She thought of herself, but imagined that she was thinking
of women and girls and their movement towards the future. The lines
of the women ... but had not every woman a line of her own? Only,
how few of them knew it: their direction, their path, their line of
life, their wavering course in the twilight of the future. And perhaps,
because they did not know it for themselves, they were now all seeking
together a broad path, a main road, along which they would march in
troops, in a threatening multitude of women, in regiments of women,
with banners and mottoes and war-cries, a broad path, parallel with
the movement of the men, until the two paths would melt into one,
until the troops of women would mingle with the troops of men, with
equal rights and equal fullness of life....

He said nothing to her. She noticed his silence and did not see how
much was going on within him, how earnestly he was thinking of her,
how profoundly he pitied her. She thought that she had bored him. And
suddenly, around her, she saw the dim, barren room, saw that the fire
was out; and her zeal subsided, her fever cooled and she thought her
pamphlet bad, lacking strength and conviction. What would she not
have given for a word from him! But he sat silent, seemed to take no
interest, probably did not admire her style of writing. And she felt
sad, deserted, lonely, estranged from him and bitter because of the
estrangement; she felt ready to weep, to sob; and, strange to say, in
her bitterness she thought of him, of her husband, with his handsome
face. She could not restrain herself, she wept. Duco came up to her,
put his hand on her shoulder. Then she felt something of what was
going on within him and that his silence was not due to coldness. She
told him that she could not remain alone that evening: she was too
wretched, too wretched. He comforted her, said that there was much
that was good, much that was true in her pamphlet; that he was not
a good judge of these modern questions; that he was never clever
except when he talked about Italy; that he felt so little for people
and so much for statues, so little for what was newly building for
a coming century and so much for what lay in ruins and remained over
from earlier centuries. He said it as though apologizing. She smiled
through her tears but repeated that she could not stay alone that
evening and that she was coming with him to Belloni's, to his mother
and sisters. And they went together, they walked round together; and,
to divert her mind, he spoke to her of his own thoughts, told her
anecdotes of the Renascence masters. She did not hear what he said,
but his voice was sweet to her ears. There was something so gentle
about his indifference to the modern things that interested her, he had
so much calmness, healing as balsam, in the restfulness of his soul,
which allowed itself to move along the golden thread of his dreams,
as though that thread was the line of his life, so much calmness and
gentleness that she too grew calmer and gentler and looked up to him
with a smile.

And, however far removed they might be from each other--he going along
a dreamy path, she lost in an obscure maze--they nevertheless felt each
other approaching, felt their souls drawing nearer to each other, while
their bodies moved beside each other in the actual street, through
Rome, in the evening. He put his arm through hers to guide her steps.

And, when they came in sight of Belloni's, she thanked him, she did
not know exactly for what: for the look in his eyes, for his voice, for
the walk, for the consolation which she felt inexplicably yet clearly
radiating from him; and she was glad to have come with him this evening
and to feel the distraction of the Belloni table-d'hôte around her.

But at night, alone, alone in her bare rooms, she was overcome by
her wretchedness as by a sea of blackness; and, looking out at the
Colosseum, which showed faintly as a black arc in the black night,
she sobbed until she felt herself sinking to the point of death,
derelict, lonely and forlorn, high up above Rome, above the roofs,
above the pale lights of Rome by night, under the clouds of the
black night, sinking and derelict, as though she were drifting,
a shipwrecked waif on an ocean which drowned the world and roared
its plaints to the inexorable heavens.







CHAPTER XIV


Nevertheless Cornélie recovered her calmness when her pamphlet
was finished. She unpacked her trunks, arranged her rooms a little
more snugly and, now more at her ease, rewrote the pamphlet and,
in the revision, improved her style and even her ideas. When she had
done working in the morning, she usually lunched at a small osteria,
where she nearly always met Duco van der Staal and had her meal with
him at a little table. As a rule she dined at Belloni's, beside the
Van der Staals, in order to obtain a little diversion. The marchesa
had not bowed to her at first, though she suffered her to attend her
table-d'hôte, at three lire an evening; but after a time she bowed to
Cornélie again, with a bitter-sweet little smile, for she had relet
her two rooms at a higher price. And Cornélie, in her calmer mood,
found it pleasant to change in the evening, to see Mrs. van der Staal
and the girls, to listen to their little stories about the Roman
salons and to cast a glance over the long tables. And they saw that
the guests were ever again different, as in a kaleidoscope of fleeting
personalities. Rudyard had disappeared, owing money to the marchesa,
no one knew whither; the Von Rothkirches had gone to Greece; but Urania
Hope was still there and sat next to the Marchesa Belloni. On her other
side was the nephew, the Prince of Forte-Braccio, Duke of San Stefano,
who dined at Belloni's every night. And Cornélie saw that a sort of
conspiracy was in progress, the marchesa and the prince laying siege
to the vain little American from either side. And next day she saw two
monsignori seated in eager conversation with Urania at the marchesa's
table, while the marchesa and the prince nodded their heads. All the
visitors commented on it, every eye was turned in that direction,
everybody watched the manoeuvres and delighted in the romance.

Cornélie was the only one who was not amused. She would have liked to
warn Urania against the marchesa, the prince and the monsignori who had
taken Rudyard's place, but especially against marriage, even marriage
with a prince and duke. And, growing excited, she spoke to Mrs. van
der Staal and the girls, repeated phrases out of her pamphlet, glowing
with her red young hatred against society and people and the world.

Dinner was over; and, still eagerly talking, she went with the Van
der Staals--mevrouw and the girls and Duco--to the drawing-room,
sat down in a corner, resumed her conversation, flew out at mevrouw,
who had contradicted her, and then suddenly saw a fat lady--the girls
had already nick-named her the Satin Frigate--come towards her with
a smile and say, while still at some distance:

"I beg your pardon, but there's something I want to say. Look here, I
have been to Belloni's regularly every winter for the last ten years,
from November to Easter; and every evening after dinner--but only
after dinner--I sit in this corner, at this table, on this sofa. I
hope you won't mind, but I should be glad to have my own seat now."

And the Satin Frigate smiled amiably; but, when the Van der Staals and
Cornélie rose in mute amazement, she dumped herself down with a rustle
on the sofa, bobbed up and down for a moment on the springs, laid her
crochet-work on the table with a gesture as though she were planting
the Union Jack in a new colony and said, with her most amiable smile:

"Very much obliged. So many thanks."

Duco roared, the girls giggled, but the Satin Frigate merely nodded to
them good-humouredly. And, not even yet realizing what had happened,
astounded but gay, they sat down in another corner, the girls still
seized with an irrepressible giggle. The two æsthetic ladies, with
the evening-dress and the Jaegers, who sat reading at the table in
the middle of the room, closed their two books with one slam, rose
and indignantly went away, because people were laughing and talking
in the drawing-room:

"It's a shame!" they said, aloud.

And, angular, arrogant and grimy, they stalked out through the door.

"What strange people!" thought Duco, smiling. "Shadows of
people!... Their lines curl like arabesque through ours. Why do they
cross our lines with their petty movements and why are ours never
crossed by those which perhaps would be dearest to our souls?..."

He always took Cornélie back to the Via dei Serpenti. They walked
slowly through the silent, deserted streets. Sometimes it was late in
the evening, but sometimes it was immediately after dinner and then
they would go through the Corso and he would generally ask her to
come and sit at Aragno's for a little. She agreed and they drank their
coffee amid the gaiety of the brightly-lit café, watching the bustle
on the pavement outside. They exchanged few words, distracted by the
passers-by and the visitors to the café; but they both enjoyed this
moment and felt at one with each other. Duco evidently did not give
a thought to the unconventionality of their behaviour; but Cornélie
thought of Mrs. van der Staal and that she would not approve of it or
consent to it in one of her daughters, to sit alone with a gentleman
in a café in the evening. And Cornélie also remembered the Hague and
smiled at the thought of her Hague friends. And she looked at Duco,
who sat quietly, pleased to be sitting with her, and drank his coffee
and spoke a word now and again or pointed to a queer type or a pretty
woman passing....

One evening, after dinner, he suggested that they should all go to
the ruins. It was full moon, a wonderful sight. But mevrouw was
afraid of malaria, the girls of foot-pads; and Duco and Cornélie
went by themselves. The streets were quite empty, the Colosseum rose
menacingly like a fortress in the night; but they went in and the
moonlight blue of the night shone through the open arches: the round
pit of the arena was black on one side with shadow, while the stream
of moonlight poured in on the other side, like a white flood, like
a cascade; and it was as though the night were haunted, as though
the Colosseum were haunted by all the dead past of Rome, emperors,
gladiators and martyrs; shadows prowled like lurking wild animals,
a patch of light suggested a naked woman and the galleries seemed to
rustle with the sound of the multitude. And yet there was nothing and
Duco and Cornélie were alone, in the depths of the huge, colossal ruin,
half in shadow and half in light; and, though she was not afraid, she
was obsessed by that awful haunting of the past and pushed closer to
him and clutched his arm and felt very, very small. He just pressed
her hand, with his simple ease of manner, to reassure her. And the
night oppressed her, the ghostliness of it all suffocated her, the
moon seemed to whirl giddily in the sky and to expand to a gigantic
size and spin round like a silver wheel. He said nothing, he was in
one of his dreams, seeing the past before him. And silently they went
away and he led her through the Arch of Titus into the Forum. On
the left rose the ruins of the imperial palaces; and all around
them stood the black fragments, with a few pillars soaring on high
and the white moonlight pouring down like a ghostly sea out of the
night. They met no one, but she was frightened and clung tighter to his
arm. When they sat down for a moment on a fragment of the foundation
of some ancient building, she shivered with cold. He started up,
said that she must be careful not to catch a chill; and they walked
on and left the Forum. He took her home and she went upstairs alone,
striking a match to see her way up the dark staircase. Once in her
room, she perceived that it was dangerous to wander about the ruins
at night. She reflected how little Duco had spoken, not thinking
of danger, lost in his nocturnal dream, peering into the awful
ghostliness. Why ... why had he not gone alone? Why had he asked her
to go with him? She fell asleep after a chaos of whirling thoughts:
the prince and Urania, the fat satin lady, the Colosseum and the
martyrs and Duco and Mrs. van der Staal. His mother was so ordinary,
his sisters charming but commonplace and he ... so strange! So simple,
so unaffected, so unreserved; and for that very reason so strange. He
would be impossible at the Hague, among her friends. And she smiled
as she thought of what he had said and how he had said it and how he
could sit quietly silent, for minutes on end, with a smile about his
lips, as though thinking of something beautiful....

But she must warn Urania....

And she wearily fell asleep.







CHAPTER XV


Cornélie's premonition regarding Mrs. van der Staal's opinion of her
intercourse with Duco was confirmed: mevrouw spoke to her seriously,
saying that she would compromise herself if she went on like that and
adding that she had spoken to Duco in the same sense. But Cornélie
answered rather haughtily and nonchalantly, declared that, after
always minding the conventions and becoming very unhappy in spite of
it, she had resolved to mind them no longer, that she valued Duco's
conversation and that she was not going to be deprived of it because
of what people thought or said. And then, she asked Mrs. van der Staal,
who were "people?" Their three or four acquaintances at Belloni's? Who
knew her besides? Where else did she go? Why should she care about
the Hague? And she gave a scornful laugh, loftily parrying Mrs. van
der Staal's arguments.

The conversation caused a coolness between them. Wounded in her
touchy over-sensitiveness, she did not come to dinner at Belloni's
that evening. Next day, meeting Duco at their little table in the
osteria, she asked him what he thought of his mother's rebuke. He
smiled vaguely, raising his eyebrows, obviously not realizing the
commonplace truth of his mother's words, saying that those were just
Mamma's ideas, which of course were all very well and current in
the set in which Mamma and his sisters lived, but which he didn't
enter into or bother about, unless Cornélie thought that Mamma was
right. And Cornélie blazed out contemptuously, shrugged her shoulders,
asked who or what there was for whose sake she should allow herself
to break off their friendly intercourse. They ordered a mezzo-fiasco
between them and had a long, chatty lunch like two comrades, like
two students. He said that he had been thinking over her pamphlet;
he talked, to please her, about the modern woman, modern marriage,
the modern girl. She condemned the way in which Mrs. van der Staal
was bringing up her daughters, that light, frivolous education and
that endless going about, on the look for a husband. She said that
she spoke from experience.

They walked along the Via Appia that afternoon and went to the
Catacombs, where a Trappist showed them round. When Cornélie returned
home she felt pleasantly light and cheerful. She did not go out again;
she piled up the logs on her fire against the evening, which was
turning chilly, and supped off a little bread and jelly, so as not
to go out for her dinner. Sitting in her tea-gown, with her hands
folded over her head, she stared into the briskly burning logs and
let the evening speed past her. She was satisfied with her life,
so free, independent of everything and everybody. She had a little
money, she could go on living like this. She had no great needs. Her
life in rooms, in little restaurants was not expensive. She wanted
no clothes. She felt satisfied. Duco was an agreeable friend: how
lonely she would be without him! Only her life must acquire some
aim. What aim? The feminist movement? But how, abroad? It was such
a different movement to work at.... She would send her pamphlet now
to a newly founded women's paper. But then? She wasn't in Holland
and she didn't want to go to Holland; and yet there would certainly
be more scope there for her activity, for exchanging views with
others. Whereas here, in Rome.... An indolence overcame her, in
the drowsiness of her cosy room. For Duco had helped her to arrange
her sitting-room. He certainly was a cultivated fellow, even though
he was not modern. What a lot he knew about history, about Italy;
and how cleverly he told it all! The way he explained Italy to her,
she was interested in the country after all.

Only, he wasn't modern. He had no insight into Italian politics,
into the struggle between the Quirinal and the Vatican, into
anarchism, which was showing its head at Milan, into the riots in
Sicily.... An aim in life: what a difficult thing it was! And, in
her evening drowsiness after a pleasant day, she did not feel the
absence of an aim and enjoyed the soft luxury of letting her thoughts
glide on in unison with the drowsy evening hours, in a voluptuous
self-indulgence. She looked at the sheets of her pamphlet, scattered
over her big writing-table, a real table to work at: they lay yellow
under the light of her reading-lamp; they had not all been recopied,
but she was not in the mood now; she threw a log into the little grate
and the fire smoked and blazed. So pleasant, that foreign habit of
burning wood instead of coal....

And she thought of her husband. She missed him sometimes. Could she
not have managed him, with a little tact and patience? After all,
he was very nice during the period of their engagement. He was rough,
but not bad. He might have sworn at her sometimes, but perhaps he did
not mean any great harm. He waltzed divinely, he swung you round so
firmly.... He was good-looking and, she had to confess, she was in love
with him, if only for his handsome face, his handsome figure. There
was something about his eyes and mouth that she was never able to
resist. When he spoke, she had to look at his mouth. However, that
was all over and done with....

After all, perhaps the life at the Hague was too monotonous for her
temperament. She liked travelling, seeing new people, developing
new ideas; and she had never been able to settle down in her little
set. And now she was free, independent of all ties, of all people. If
Mrs. van der Staal was angry, she didn't care.... And, all the same,
Duco was rather modern, in his indifference to convention. Or was
it merely the artistic side in him? Or was he, as a man who was not
modern, indifferent to it even as she, a modern woman, was? A man
could allow himself more. A man was not so easily compromised.... A
modern woman. She repeated the words proudly. Her drowsiness acquired
a certain arrogance. She drew herself up, stretching out her arms,
looked at herself in the glass: her slender figure, her delicate
little face, a trifle pale, with the eyes big and grey and bright
under their remarkably long lashes, her light-brown hair in a loose,
tangled coil, the lines of her figure, like those of a drooping lily,
very winsome in the creased folds of her old tea-gown, pale-pink and
faded.... What was her path in life? She felt herself to be something
more than a worker and fighter, to be very complex, felt that she was
a woman too, felt a great womanliness inside her, like a weakness
which would hamper her energy. And she wandered through the room,
unable to decide to go to bed, and, staring into the gloomy ashes
of the expiring fire, she thought of her future, of what she would
become and how, of how she would go and whither, along which curve
of life, wandering through what forests, winding through what alleys,
crossing which other curves of which other, seeking souls....







CHAPTER XVI


The idea had long fixed itself in Cornélie's mind that she must speak
to Urania Hope; and one morning she sent her a note asking for an
appointment that afternoon. Miss Hope wrote back assenting; and at
five o'clock Cornélie found her at home in her handsome and expensive
sitting-room at Belloni's: many lights, many flowers; Urania hammering
on the piano in an indoor gown of Venetian lace; the table decked with
a rich tea, with cut bread-and-butter, cakes and sweets. Cornélie had
said that she wanted to see Miss Hope alone, on a matter of importance,
and at once asked if she would be alone, feeling a doubt of it, now
that Urania was receiving her so formally. But Urania reassured her:
she had said that she was at home to no one but Mrs. de Retz and was
very curious to know what Cornélie had come to talk about. Cornélie
reminded Urania of her former warning and, when Urania laughed, she
took her hand and looked at her with such serious eyes that she made an
impression of the American girl's frivolous nature and Urania became
puzzled. Urania now suddenly thought it very momentous--a secret,
an intrigue, a danger, in Rome!--and they whispered together. And
Cornélie, no longer feeling anxious amid this increasing intimacy,
confessed to Urania what she had heard through the half-open door: the
marchesa's machinations with her nephew, whom she was absolutely bent
on marrying to a rich heiress at the behest of the prince's father, who
seemed to have promised her so much for putting the match through. Then
she spoke of Miss Taylor's conversion, effected by Rudyard: Rudyard,
who did not seem able to achieve his purpose with Urania, failing to
obtain a hold on her confiding, but frivolous, butterfly nature, and
who, as Cornélie suspected, had for that reason incurred the disfavour
of his ecclesiastical superiors and vanished without settling his
debt to the marchesa. His place appeared to have been taken by the two
monsignori, who looked more dignified and worldly and displayed great
unctuousness, were more lavish in smiles. And Urania, staring at this
danger, at these pit-falls under her feet which Cornélie had suddenly
revealed to her, now became really frightened, turned pale and promised
to be on her guard. Really she would have liked to tell her maid to
pack up at once, so that they might leave Rome as soon as possible,
for another town, another pension, one with lots of titled people: she
adored titles! And Cornélie, seeing that she had made an impression,
continued, spoke of herself, spoke of marriage in general, said that
she had written a pamphlet against marriage and on The Social Position
of Divorced Women. And she spoke of the suffering which she had been
through and of the feminist movement in Holland. And, once in the vein,
she abandoned all restraint and talked more and more emphatically,
until Urania thought her exceedingly clever, a very clever girl,
to be able to argue and write like that on a ques-tion brû-lante,
laying a fine stress on the first syllables of the French words. She
admitted that she would like to have the vote and, as she said this,
spread out the long train of her lace tea-gown. Cornélie spoke of the
injustice of the law which leaves the wife nothing, takes everything
from her and forces her entirely into the husband's power; and Urania
agreed with her and passed the little dish of chocolate-creams. And
to the accompaniment of a second cup of tea they talked excitedly,
both speaking at once, neither listening to what the other was saying;
and Urania said that it was a shame. From the general discussion they
relapsed to the consideration of their particular interests: Cornélie
depicted the character of her husband, unable, in the coarseness of
his nature, to understand a woman or to consent that a woman should
stand beside him and not beneath him. And she once more returned to
the Jesuits, to the danger of Rome for rich girls travelling alone,
to that virago of a marchesa and to the prince, that titled bait
which the Jesuits flung to win a soul and to improve the finances
of an impoverished Italian house which had remained faithful to the
Pope and refused to serve the king. And both of them were so vehement
and excited that they did not hear the knock and looked up only when
the door slowly opened. They started, glanced round and both turned
pale when they saw the Prince of Forte-Braccio enter the room. He
apologized with a smile, said that he had seen a light in Miss
Urania's sitting-room, that the porter had told him she was engaged,
but that he had ventured to disobey her orders. And he sat down;
and, in spite of all that they had been saying, Urania thought it
delightful to have the prince sitting there and accepting a cup of
tea at her hands and graciously consenting to eat a piece of cake.

And Urania showed her album of coats of arms--the prince had already
contributed an impression of his--and next the album with patterns
of the queen's ball-dresses. Then the prince laughed and felt in his
pocket for an envelope; he opened it and carefully produced a cutting
of blue brocade embroidered with silver and seed-pearls.

"What is it?" asked Urania, in ecstasy.

And he said that he had brought her a pattern of her majesty's last
dress; his cousin--not a Black, like himself, but a White, belonging
not to the papal but to the court party and a lady-in-waiting to the
queen--had procured this cutting for him for Urania's album. Urania
would see it herself: the queen would wear the dress at next week's
court ball. He was not going, he did not even go to his cousin's
officially, not to her parties; but he saw her sometimes, because
of the family relationship, out of friendship. And he begged Urania
not to give him away: it might injure him in his career--"What
career?" Cornélie wondered to herself--if people knew that he saw
much of his cousin; but he had called on her pretty often lately,
for Urania's sake, to get her that pattern.

And Urania was so grateful that she forgot all about the social
position of girls and women, married or unmarried, and would gladly
have sacrificed her right to the franchise for such a charming Italian
prince. Cornélie became vexed, rose, bowed coldly to the prince and
drew Urania with her to the door:

"Don't forget what we have been saying," she warned her. "Be on
your guard."

And she saw the prince look at her sarcastically, as they whispered
together, suspecting that she was talking about him, but proud of
the power of his personality and his title and his attentions over
the daughter of an American stockinet-manufacturer.







CHAPTER XVII


A coolness had arisen between Mrs. van der Staal and Cornélie; and
Cornélie no longer went to dine at Belloni's. She did not see mevrouw
and the girls again for weeks; but she saw Duco daily. Notwithstanding
the essential differences in their characters, they had grown so
accustomed to being together that they missed each other if a day
passed without their meeting; and so they had gradually come to
lunch and dine together every day, almost as a matter of course:
in the morning at the osteria and in the evening at some small
restaurant or other, usually very simply. To avoid dividing the bill,
Duco would pay one time and Cornélie the next. Generally they had
much to talk about: he taught her Rome, took her after lunch to all
manner of churches and museums; and under his guidance she began
to understand, appreciate and admire. By unconscious suggestion he
inspired her with some of his ideas. She found painting very difficult,
but understood sculpture much more readily. And she began to look upon
him as not merely morbid; she looked up to him, he spoke quite simply
to her, as from his exalted standpoint of feeling and knowledge and
understanding, of very exalted matters which she, as a girl and later
as a young married woman, had never seen in the glorious apotheosis
which he caused to rise before her like the first gleam of a dawn,
of a new day in which she beheld new types of life, created of all
that was noblest in the artist's soul. He regretted that he could not
show her Giotto in the Santa Croce at Florence and the Primitives in
the Uffizi and that he had to teach her Rome straight away; but he
introduced her to all the exuberant art-life of the Papal Renascence,
until, under the influence of his speech, she shared that life for a
single intense second and until Michael Angelo and Raphael stood out
before her, also living. After a day like that, he would think that
after all she was not so hopelessly inartistic; and she thought of
him with respect, even after the suggestion was interrupted and when
she reflected on what she had seen and heard and really, deep down in
herself, no longer understood things so well as she had that morning,
because she was lacking in love for them. But so much glamour of colour
and the past remained whirling before her eyes in the evening that
it made her pamphlet seem drab and dull; and the feminist movement
ceased to interest her and she did not care about Urania Hope.

He admitted to himself that he had quite lost his peace of mind,
that Cornélie stood before him in his thoughts, between him and his
old triptychs, that his lonely, friendless, ingenuous, simple life,
content with wandering through and outside Rome, with reading,
dreaming and now and then painting a little, had changed entirely
in habit and in line, now that the line of his life had crossed that
of hers and they both seemed to be going one way, he did not really
know why. Love was not exactly the word for the feeling that drew
him towards her. And just very vaguely, inwardly and unconsciously
he suspected, though he never actually said or even thought as much,
that it was the line of her figure, which was marked by something
almost Byzantine, the slenderness of the frame, the long arms, the
drooping lily-line of the woman who suffered, with the melancholy in
her grey eyes, overshadowed by their almost too-long lashes; that it
was the noble shape of her hand, small and pretty for a tall woman;
that it was a movement of her neck, as of a swaying stalk, or a tired
swan trying to glance backwards. He had never met many women and those
whom he had met had always seemed very ordinary; but she was unreal
to him, in the contradictions of her character, in its vagueness
and intangibility, in all the half-tints which escaped his eye,
accustomed to half-tints though it was.... What was she like? What he
had always seen in her character was a woman in a novel, a heroine in
a poem. What was she as a living woman of flesh and blood? She was
not artistic and she was not inartistic; she had no energy and yet
she did not lack energy; she was not precisely cultivated; and yet,
obeying her impulse and her intuition, she wrote a pamphlet on one of
the most modern questions and worked at it and revised and copied it,
till it became a piece of writing no worse than another. She had a
spacious way of thinking, loathing all the pettiness of the cliques,
no longer feeling at home, after her suffering, in her little Hague
set; and here, in Rome, at a dance she listened behind a door to
a nonsensical conspiracy, hardly worthy of the name, he thought,
and had gone to Urania Hope to mingle with the confused curves of
smaller lives, curves without importance, of people whom he despised
for their lack of line, of colour, of vision, of haze, of everything
that was dear as life to him and made up life for him.... What was
she like? He did not understand her. But her curve was of importance
to him. She was not without a line: a line of art and line of life;
she moved in the dream of her own indefiniteness before his gazing
eyes; and she loomed up out of the haze, as out of the twilight of
his studio atmosphere, and stood before him like a phantom. He would
not call that love; but she was dear to him like a revelation that
constantly veiled itself in secrecy. And his life as a lonely wanderer
was, it was true, changed; but she had introduced no inharmonious
habit into his life: he enjoyed taking his meals in a little café or
osteria; and she took them with him easily and simply, not squalidly
but pleasantly and harmoniously, with an adaptability and with just
as much natural grace as when she used to dine of an evening at the
table-d'hôte at Belloni's. All this--that contradictory admixture of
unreality, of inconsistency; that living vision of indefiniteness;
that intangibility of her individual essence; that self-concealment of
the soul; that blending of her essential characteristics--had become
a charm to him: a restlessness, a need, a nervous want in his life,
otherwise so restful, so easily contented and calm, but above all a
charm, an indispensable every-day charm.

And, without troubling about what people might think, about what
Mrs. van der Staal thought, they would one day go to Tivoli together,
or another day walk from Castel Gandolfo to Albano and drive to the
Lago di Nemi and picnic at the Villa Sforza-Cesarini, with the broken
capital of a classic pillar for a table. They rested side by side in
the shadow of the trees, admired the camellias, silently contemplated
the glassy clearness of the lake, Diana's looking-glass, and drove
back over Frascati. They were silent in the carriage; and he smiled
as he reflected how they had been taken everywhere that day for man
and wife. She also thought of their increasing intimacy and at the
same time thought that she would never marry again. And she thought
of her husband and compared him with Duco, so young in the face but
with eyes full of depth and soul, a voice so calm and even, with
everything that he said much to the point, so accurately informed;
and then his calmness, his simplicity, his lack of passion, as though
his nerves had schooled themselves only to feel the calmness of art
in the dreamy mist of his life. And she confessed to herself, there,
in the carriage beside him, amid the softly shelving hills, purpling
away in the evening, while before her faded the rose-mallow of a pale
gold sunset, that he was dear to her because of that cleverness, that
absence of passion, that simplicity and that accuracy of information--a
clear voice sounding up out of the dreamy twilight--and that she was
happy to be sitting beside him, to hear that voice and by chance
to feel his hand, happy in that her line of life had crossed his,
in that their two lines seemed to form a path towards the increasing
brightness, the gradual daily elucidation of their immediate future....







CHAPTER XVIII


Cornélie now saw no one except Duco. Mrs. van der Staal had broken
with her and would not allow her daughters to have any further
intercourse with her. A coolness had arisen even between the mother
and the son. Cornélie saw no one now except Duco and, at times,
Urania Hope. The American girl came to her pretty often and told
her about Belloni's, where the people talked about Cornélie and Duco
and commented on their relations. Urania was glad to think herself
above that hotel gossip, but still she wanted to warn Cornélie. Her
words displayed a simple spontaneity of friendship that appealed to
Cornélie. When Cornélie, however, asked after the prince, she became
silent and confused and evidently did not wish to say much. Then,
after the court ball, at which the queen had really worn the dress
embroidered with seed-pearls, Urania came and looked Cornélie up again
and admitted, over a cup of tea, that she had that morning promised to
go and see the prince at his own place. She said this quite simply,
as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Cornélie was
horrified and asked her how she could have promised such a thing.

"Why not?" Urania replied. "What is there in it? I receive his
visits. If he asks me to come and see his rooms--he lives in the
Palazzo Ruspoli and wants to show me his pictures and miniatures and
old lace--why should I refuse to go? Why should I make a fuss about
it? I am above any such narrow-mindedness. We American girls go about
freely with our men friends. And what about yourself? You go for walks
with Mr. van der Staal, you lunch with him, you go for trips with him,
you go to his studio...."

"I have been married," said Cornélie. "I am responsible to no one. You
have your parents. What you are thinking of doing is imprudent and
high-handed. Tell me, does the prince think of ... marrying you?"

"If I become a Catholic."

"And ...?"

"I think ... I shall. I have written to Chicago," she said,
hesitatingly.

She closed her beautiful eyes for a second and went pale, because
the title of princess and duchess flashed before her sight.

"Only ..." she began.

"Only what?"

"I sha'n't have a cheerful life. The prince belongs to the Blacks. They
are always in mourning because of the Pope. They have hardly anything
in their set: no dances, no parties. If we got married, I should like
him to come to America with me. Their home in the Abruzzi is a lonely,
tumbledown castle. His father is a very proud, stand-offish, silent
person. I have been told so by ever so many people. What am I to do,
Cornélie? I'm very fond of Gilio: his name is Virgilio. And then, you
know, the title is an old Italian title: Principe di Forte-Braccio,
Duca di San Stefano.... But then, you see, that's all there is
to it. San Stefano is a hole. That's where his papa lives. They
sell wine and live on that. And olive-oil; but they don't make any
money. My father manufactures stockinet; but he has grown rich on
it. They haven't many family-jewels. I have made enquiries.... His
cousin, the Contessa di Rosavilla, the lady in waiting to the queen,
is nice ... but we shouldn't see her officially. I shouldn't be able
to go anywhere. It does strike me as rather boring."

Cornélie spoke vehemently, blazed out and repeated her phrases: against
marriage in general and now against this marriage in particular, merely
for the sake of a title. Urania assented: it was merely for the title;
but then there was Gilio too, of course: he was so nice and she was
fond of him. But Cornélie didn't believe a word of it and told her
so straight out. Urania began to cry: she did not know what to do.

"And when were you to go to the prince?"

"This evening."

"Don't go."

"No, no, you're right, I sha'n't go."

"Do you promise me?"

"Yes, yes."

"Don't go, Urania."

"No, I sha'n't go. You're a dear girl. You're quite right: I won't
go. I swear to you I won't."







CHAPTER XIX


The undertaking which Urania had given was so vague, however,
that Cornélie felt uneasy and spoke of it to Duco that evening,
when she met him at the restaurant. But he was not interested
in Urania, in what she did or didn't do; and he shrugged his
shoulders indifferently. Cornélie, on the other hand, was silent
and absent-minded and did not listen to what he was talking about:
a side-panel of a triptych, undoubtedly by Lippo Memmi, which
he had discovered in a little shop by the Tiber; the angel of the
Annunciation, almost as beautiful as the one in the Uffizi, kneeling
with the stir of his last flight yet about him, with the lily-stem
in his hands. But the dealer asked two hundred lire for it and he
did not want to give more than fifty. And yet the dealer had not
mentioned Memmi's name, did not suspect that the angel was by Memmi.

Cornélie was not listening; and suddenly she said:

"I am going to the Palazzo Ruspoli."

He looked up in surprise:

"What for?"

"To ask for Miss Hope."

He was dumb with amazement and continued to look at her open-mouthed.

"If she's not there," Cornélie went on, "it's all right. If she is, if
she has gone after all, I'll ask to speak to her on urgent business."

He did not know what to say, thinking her sudden idea so strange,
so eccentric, thinking it so unnecessary that her curve should cross
the curves of insignificant, indifferent people, that he did not know
how to choose his words. Cornélie glanced at her watch:

"It's past half-past nine. If she does go, she will go about this
time."

She called the waiter and paid the bill. And she buttoned her coat
and stood up. He followed after her:

"Cornélie," he began, "isn't what you are doing rather strange? It'll
mean all sorts of worries for you."

"If one always objected to being worried, one would never do a good
action."

They walked on in silence, he moving irritably by her side. They did
not speak: he thought her intention simply crazy; she thought him
wanting in chivalry, not to wish to protect Urania. She was thinking
of her pamphlet, of her fellow-women; and she wanted to protect Urania
from marriage, from that prince. And they walked through the Corso
to the Palazzo Ruspoli. He became nervous, made another attempt to
restrain her; but she had already asked the porter:

"Is il signore principe at home?"

The man looked at her suspiciously:

"No," he said, curtly.

"I believe he is. If so, ask if Miss Hope is with his excellency. Miss
Hope was not at home; I believe that she was coming to see the prince
this evening; and I want to speak to her urgently ... on a matter
which will not brook delay. Here: la Signora de Retz...."

She handed him her card. She spoke with the greatest self-possession
and referred to Urania's visit calmly and simply, as though it were
an every-day occurrence for American girls to call on Italian princes
in the evening and as though she were persuaded that the porter knew
of this custom. The man was disconcerted by her attitude, bowed,
took the card and went away. Cornélie and Duco waited in the portico.

He admired her calmness. He considered her behaviour eccentric; but
she carried out her eccentricity with a self-assurance which once
more showed her in a new light. Would he never understand her, would
he never grasp anything or know anything for certain of that changeful
and intangible vagueness of hers? He could never have spoken those few
words to that porter in just that tone! Where had she got that tact
from, that dignified, serious attitude towards that imposing janitor,
with his long cane and his cocked hat? She did it all as easily as
she ordered their simple dinner, with a pleasant familiarity, of the
waiter at their little restaurant.

The porter returned:

"Miss Hope and his excellency beg that you will come upstairs."

She looked at Duco with a triumphant smile, amused at his confusion:

"Will you come too?"

"Why, no," he stammered. "I can wait for you here."

She followed the footman up the stairs. The wide corridor was hung
with family-portraits. The drawing-room door was open and the prince
came out to meet her.

"Please forgive me, prince," she said, calmly, putting out her hand.

His eyes were small and pinched and gleamed like carbuncles; he was
white with rage; but he controlled himself and pressed his lips to
the hand which she gave him.

"Forgive me," she went on. "I want to speak to Miss Hope on an
urgent matter."

She entered the drawing-room; Urania was there, blushing and
embarrassed.

"You understand," Cornélie said, with a smile, "that I would not have
disturbed you if it had not been important. A question between women
... and still important!" she continued, jestingly; and the prince
made an insipid, gallant reply. "May I speak to Miss Hope alone for
a moment?"

The prince looked at her. He suspected unfriendliness in her and more,
hostility. But he bowed, with his insipid smile, and said that he
would leave the ladies to themselves. He went to another room.

"What is it, Cornélie?" asked Urania, in agitation.

She took Cornélie's two hands and looked at her anxiously.

"Nothing," said Cornélie, severely. "I have nothing to say to you. Only
I had my suspicions and felt sure that you would not keep your
promise. I wanted to make certain if you were here. Why did you come?"

Urania began to weep.

"Don't cry!" whispered Cornélie, mercilessly. "For God's sake don't
start crying. You've done the most thoughtless thing imaginable...."

"I know I have!" Urania confessed, nervously, drying her tears.

"Then why did you do it?"

"I couldn't help it."

"Alone, with him, in the evening! A man well-known to be a bad lot."

"I know."

"What do you see in him?"

"I'm fond of him."

"You only want to marry him for his title. For the sake of his title
you're compromising yourself. What if he doesn't respect you this
evening as his future wife? What if he compels you to be his mistress?"

"Cornélie! Don't!"

"You're a child, a thoughtless child. And your father lets you travel
by yourself ... to see 'dear old Italy!' You're an American and
broad-minded: that's all right; to travel through the world pluckily
on your own is all right; but you're not a woman, you're a baby!"

"Cornélie...."

"Come away with me; say that you're going with me ... for an urgent
reason. Or no ... better say nothing. Stay. But I'll stay too."

"Yes, you stay too."

"We'll send for him now."

"Yes."

Cornélie rang the bell. A footman appeared.

"Tell his excellency that we are ready."

The man went away. In a little while the prince entered. He had never
been treated like that in his own house. He was seething with rage,
but he remained very polite and outwardly calm:

"Is the important matter settled?" he asked, with his small eyes and
his hypocritical smile.

"Yes; thank you very much for your discretion in leaving us to
ourselves," said Cornélie. "Now that I have spoken to Miss Hope,
I am greatly relieved by what she has told me. Aha, you would like
to know what we were talking about!"

The prince raised his eyebrows. Cornélie had spoken archly, holding
up her finger as though in threat, smiling; and the prince looked at
her and saw that she was handsome. Not with the striking beauty and
freshness of Urania Hope, but with a more complex attractiveness, that
of a married woman, divorced, but very young; that of a fin-de-siècle
woman, with a faintly perverse expression in her deep grey eyes,
moving under very long lashes; that of a woman of peculiar grace
in the drooping lines of her tired, lax, morbid charm: a woman who
knew life; a woman who saw through him: he was certain of it; a woman
who, though disliking him, nevertheless spoke to him coquettishly in
order to attract him, to win him, unconsciously, from sheer womanly
perversity. And he saw her, in her perverse beauty, and admired her,
sensitive as he was to various types of women. He suddenly thought her
handsomer and less commonplace than Urania and much more distinguished
and not so ingenuously susceptible to his title, a thing which he
thought so silly in Urania. He was suddenly at his ease with her,
his anger subsided: he thought it fun to have two good-looking women
with him instead of one; and he jested in return, saying that he was
consumed with curiosity, that he had been listening at the door but
had been unable to catch a word, alas!

Cornélie laughed with coquettish gaiety and looked at her watch. She
said something about going, but sat down at the same time, unbuttoned
her coat and said to the prince:

"I have heard so much about your miniatures. Now that I have the
chance, may I see them?"

The prince was willing, charmed by the look in her eyes, by her voice;
he was all fire and flame in a second.

"But," said Cornélie, "my escort is waiting outside in the portico. He
would not come up: he doesn't know you. It is Mr. van der Staal."

The prince laughed as he glanced at her. He knew of the gossip at
Belloni's. He did not for a moment doubt the existence of a liaison
between Van der Staal and Signora de Retz. He knew that they did not
care for the proprieties. And he began to like Cornélie very much.

"But I will send to Mr. van der Staal at once to ask him to come up."

"He is waiting in the portico," said Cornélie. "He won't like to...."

"I'll go myself," said the prince, with obliging vivacity.

He left the room. The ladies stayed behind. Cornélie took off her
coat, but kept on her hat, because her hair was sure to be untidy. She
looked into the glass:

"Have you your powder on you?" she asked Urania.

Urania took her little ivory powder-box from her bag and handed it
to Cornélie. And, while Cornélie powdered her face, Urania looked at
her friend and did not understand. She remembered the impression of
seriousness which Cornélie had made on her at their first meeting:
studying Rome; afterwards, writing a pamphlet on the woman question
and the position of divorced women. Then her warnings against marriage
and the prince. And now she suddenly saw her as a most attractive,
frivolous woman, irresistibly charming, even more bewitching than
actually beautiful, full of coquetry in the depths of her grey eyes,
which glanced up and down under the curling lashes, simply dressed in
a dark-silk blouse and a cloth skirt, but with so much distinction
and so much coquetry, with so much dignity and yet with a touch of
yielding winsomeness, that she hardly knew her.

But the prince had returned, bringing Duco with him. Duco was nervously
reluctant, not knowing what had happened, not grasping how Cornélie had
acted. He saw her sitting quietly, smiling; and she at once explained
that the prince was going to show her his miniatures.

Duco declared flatly that he did not care for miniatures. The prince
suspected from his irritable tone that he was jealous. And this
suspicion incited the prince to pay attentions to Cornélie. And
he behaved as though he were showing his miniatures only to her,
as though he were showing her his old lace. She admired the lace
in particular and rolled it between her delicate fingers. She asked
him to tell her about his grandmothers, who used to wear the lace:
had they had any adventures? He told her one, which made her laugh
very much; then he told an anecdote or two, vivaciously, flaming
up under her glance, and she laughed. Amid the atmosphere of that
big drawing-room, his study--it contained his writing-table--with
the candles lighted and flowers everywhere for Urania, a certain
perverse gaiety began to reign, an airy joie de vivre. But only
between Cornélie and the prince. Urania had fallen silent; and Duco
did not speak a word. Cornélie was a revelation to him also. He had
never seen her like that: not at the dance on Christmas Day, nor at
the table-d'hôte, nor in his studio, nor on their excursions, nor in
their restaurant. Was she a woman, or was she ten women?

And he confessed to himself that he loved her, that he loved her
more at each revelation, more with each woman that he saw in her,
like a new facet which she made to gleam and glitter. But he could
not speak, could not join in their pleasantry, feeling strange in
that atmosphere, strange in that atmosphere of buoyant animal spirits,
caused by nothing but aimless words, as though the French and Italian
which they mixed up together were dropping so many pearls, as though
their jests shone like so much tinsel, as though their equivocal
playing upon words had the iridescence of a rainbow....

The prince regretted that his tea was no longer fit to drink, but
he rang for some champagne. He thought that his plans had partly
failed that evening, for, fearing to lose Urania, he had intended
to compel her; seeing her hesitation, he had resolved to force the
irreparable. But his nature was so devoid of seriousness--he was
marrying to please his father and the Marchesa Belloni rather than
himself; he enjoyed his life quite as well with a load of debts and no
wife as he could hope to do with a wife and millions of money--that
he began to consider the failure of his plans highly amusing and had
to laugh within himself when he thought of his father, of his aunt,
the marchesa, and of their machinations, which had no effect on Urania,
because a pretty, flirtatious woman had objected.

"Why did she object?" he wondered, as he poured out the foaming
Monopole, spilling it over the glasses. "Why does she put herself
between me and the American stocking-seller? Is she herself in Italy
hunting for a title?"

But he did not care: he thought the intruder charming, pretty, very
pretty, coquettish, seductive, bewitching. He fussed around her,
neglecting Urania, almost forgetting to fill her glass. And, when
it grew late and Cornélie at last rose to go and drew Urania's arm
through hers and looked at the prince with a glance of triumph which
they mutually understood, he whispered in her ear:

"I am ever so grateful to you for visiting me in my humble abode. You
have defeated me: I acknowledge myself defeated."

The words appeared to be merely an allusion to their jesting discussion
about nothing; but, uttered between him and her, between the prince
and Cornélie, they sounded full of meaning; and he saw the smile of
victory in her eyes....

He remained behind in his room and poured himself out what remained of
the champagne. And, as he raised the glass to his lips, he said, aloud:

"O, che occhi! Che belli occhi!... Che belli occhi!..."







CHAPTER XX


Next day, when Duco met Cornélie at the osteria, she was very cheerful
and excited. She told him that she had already received a reply from
the woman's paper to which she had sent her pamphlet the week before
and that her work was not only accepted but would be paid for. She
was so proud at earning money for the first time that she was as
merry as a little child. She did not speak of the previous evening,
seemed to have forgotten Urania, but felt an exuberant need to talk.

She formed all sorts of great plans: to travel about as a journalist,
to fling herself into the movement of the great cities, to pursue every
reality, to have herself sent by some paper as a delegate to congresses
and festivals. The few guilders which she was earning already made
her intoxicated with zeal; and she would like to make a lot of money
and do a great deal and consider no fatigue. He thought her simply
adorable: in the half light of the osteria, as she sat at the little
table eating her gnocchi, with in front of her the mezzofiasco of
pale-yellow wine of the country, her usual languor acquired a new
vivacity which astonished him; her outline, half-dark on the left,
lighted on the right by the sunshine in the street, acquired a modern
grace of drawing which reminded him of the French draughtsmen: the
rather pale face with the delicate features, lit up by her smile,
faintly indicated under the sailor hat, which slanted over her eyes;
the hair, touched with gold, or a dark light-brown; the white veil
raised into a rumpled mist above; her figure, slender and gracious
in the simple, unbuttoned coat, with a bunch of violets in her blouse.

The manner in which she helped herself to wine, in which she addressed
the cameriere--the only one, who knew them well, from seeing them
daily--with a pleasant familiarity; the vivacity replacing her languor;
her great plans, her gay phrases: all this seemed to shine upon him,
unconstrained and yet distinguished, free and yet womanly and, above
all, easy, as she was at her ease everywhere, with an assimilative
tact which for him constituted a peculiar harmony. He thought of
the evening before, but she did not speak of it. He thought of that
revelation of her coquetry, but she was not thinking of coquetry. She
was never coquettish with him. She looked up to him, regarded him as
clever and exceptional, though not belonging to his time; she respected
him for the things which he said and thought; and she was as matter of
fact towards him as one chum towards another, who happened to be older
and cleverer. She felt for him a sincere friendship, an indescribable
something that implied the need of being together, of living together,
as though the lines of their two lives should form one line. It was
not a sisterly feeling and it was not passion and to her mind it
was not love; but it was a great sense of respectful tenderness, of
longing admiration and of affectionate delight at having met him. If
she never saw him again, she would miss him as she would never miss
any one in her life. And that he took no interest in modern questions
did not lower him in the eyes of this young modern Amazon, who was
about to wave her first banner. It might vex her for an instant,
but it did not carry weight in her estimation of him. And he saw
that, with him, she was simply affectionate, without coquetry. Yet
he would never forget what she had been like yesterday, with the
prince. He had felt jealousy and noticed it in Urania also. But she
herself had acted so spontaneously in harmony with her nature that
she no longer thought of that evening, of the prince, of Urania,
of her own coquettishness or of any possible jealousy on their side.

He paid the bill--it was his turn--and she gaily took his arm and
said that she had a surprise in store for him, with which he would
be very pleased. She wanted to give him something, a handsome, a very
handsome keepsake. She wanted to spend on it the money she was going
to receive for her article. But she hadn't got it yet ... as though
that mattered! It would come in due time. And she wanted to give him
his present now.

He laughed and asked what it could be. She hailed a carriage and
whispered an address to the driver. Duco did not hear. What could it
be? But she refused to tell him yet.

The vetturino drove them through the Borgo to the Tiber and stopped
outside a dark little old-curiosity-shop, where the wares lay heaped
up right out into the street.

"Cornélie!" Duco exclaimed, guessing.

"Your Lippo Memmi angel. I'm getting it for you. Not a word!"

The tears came to his eyes. They entered the shop.

"Ask him how much he wants for it."

He was too much moved to speak; and Cornélie had to ask the price
and bargain. She did not bargain long: she bought the panel for a
hundred and twenty lire. She herself carried it to the victoria.

And they drove back to his studio. They carried the angel up the
stairs together, as though they were bearing an unsullied happiness
into his home. In the studio they placed the angel on a chair. Of a
noble aspect, of a somewhat Mongolian type, with long, almond-shaped
eyes, the angel had just knelt down in the last stir of his flight;
and the gold scarf of his gold-and-purple cloak fluttered in the
air while his long wings quivered straight above him. Duco stared at
his Memmi, filled with a two-fold emotion, because of the angel and
because of her.

And with a natural gesture he spread out his arms:

"May I thank you, Cornélie?"

And he embraced her; and she returned his kiss.







CHAPTER XXI


When she came home she found the prince's card. It was an ordinary
civility after yesterday evening, her unexpected visit to the
Palazzo Ruspoli, and she did not give it a second thought. She was
in a pleasant frame of mind, pleased with herself, glad that her work
would appear first as an article in Het Recht der Vrouw [1]--she would
publish it as a pamphlet afterwards--and glad that she had made Duco
happy with the Memmi. She changed into her tea-gown and sat down by the
fire in her musing attitude and thought of how she could carry out her
great plans. To whom ought she to apply? There was an International
Women's Congress sitting in London; and Het Recht der Vrouw had sent
her a prospectus. She turned over the pages. Different feminist leaders
were to speak; there would be numbers of social questions discussed:
the psychology of the child; the responsibility of the parents; the
influence on domestic life of women's admission to all the professions;
women in art, women in medicine; the fashionable woman; the woman at
home, on the stage; marriage- and divorce-laws.

In addition the prospectus gave concise biographies of the speakers,
with their portraits. There were American, Russian, English, Swedish,
Danish women; nearly every nationality was represented. There were
old women and young women; some pretty, some ugly; some masculine,
some womanly; some hard and energetic, with sexless boys' faces; one
or two only were elegant, with low-cut dresses and waved hair. It was
not easy to divide them into groups. What impulse in their lives had
prompted them to join in the struggle for women's rights? In some,
no doubt, inclination, nature; in an occasional case, vocation;
in another, the desire to be in the fashion. And, in her own case,
what was the impulse?... She dropped the prospectus in her lap and
stared into the fire and reflected. Her drawing-room education passed
before her once more, followed by her marriage, by her divorce....

What was the impulse? What was the inducement?... She had come to it
gradually, to go abroad, to extend her sphere of vision, to reflect,
to learn about art, about the modern life of women. She had glided
gradually along the line of her life, with no great effort of will
or striving, without even thinking much or feeling much.... She
glanced into herself, as though she were reading a modern novel,
the psychology of a woman. Sometimes she seemed to will things, to
wish to strive, as just now, to pursue her great plans. Sometimes
she would sit thinking, as she often did in these days, beside her
cosy fire. Sometimes she felt, as she now did, for Duco. But mostly
her life had been a gradual gliding along the line which she had to
follow, urged by the gentle pressure of the finger of fate.... For
a moment she saw it clearly. There was a great sincerity in her: she
never posed either to herself or to others. There were contradictions
in her, but she recognized them all, in so far as she could see
herself. But the open landscape of her soul became clear to her at
that moment. She saw the complexity of her being gleam with its many
facets.... She had taken to writing, out of impulse and intuition;
but was her writing any good? A doubt rose in her mind. A copy of
the code lay on her table, a survival of the days of her divorce; but
had she understood the law correctly? Her article was accepted; but
was the judgement of the editress to be trusted? As her eyes wandered
once again over those women's portraits and biographies, she became
afraid that her work would not be good, would be too superficial,
and that her ideas were not directed by study and knowledge. But she
could also imagine her own photograph appearing in that prospectus,
with her name under it and a brief comment: writer of The Social
Position of Divorced Women, with the name of the paper, the date and
so on. And she smiled: how highly convincing it sounded!

But how difficult it was to study, to work and understand and act and
move in the modern movement of life! She was now in Rome: she would
have liked to be in London. But it did not suit her at the moment
to make the journey. She had felt rich when she bought Duco's Memmi,
thinking of the payment for her article; and now she felt poor. She
would much have liked to go to London. But then she would have missed
Duco. And the congress lasted only a week. She was pretty well at home
here now, was beginning to love Rome, her rooms, the Colosseum lying
yonder like a dark oval, like a sombre wing at the end of the city,
with the hazy-blue mountains behind it.

Then the prince came into her mind and for the first time she thought
of yesterday, saw that evening again, an evening of jesting and
champagne: Duco silent and sulky, Urania depressed and the prince
small, lively, slender, roused from his slackness as an aristocratic
man-about-town and with his narrow carbuncle eyes. She thought him
really pleasant; once in a way she liked that atmosphere of coquetry
and flirtation; and the prince had understood her. She had saved
Urania, she was sure of that; and she felt the content of her good
action....

She was too lazy to dress and go to the restaurant. She was not very
hungry and would stay at home and sup on what was in her cupboard:
a couple of eggs, bread, some fruit. But she remembered Duco and that
he would certainly be waiting for her at their little table and she
wrote him a note and sent it by the hall-porter's boy....

Duco was just coming down, on his way out to the restaurant, when
he met the little fellow on the stairs. He read the note and felt
as if he was suffering a grievous disappointment. He felt small and
unhappy, like a child. And he went back to his studio, lit a single
lamp, threw himself on a broad couch and lay staring in the dusk at
Memmi's angel, who, still standing on the chair, glimmered vaguely
gold in the middle of the room, sweet as comfort, with his gesture
of annunciation, as though he sought to announce all the mystery that
was about to be fulfilled....







CHAPTER XXII


A few days later, Cornélie was expecting a visit from the prince, who
had asked her for an appointment. She was sitting at her writing-table,
correcting proofs of her article. A lamp on the writing-table cast
a soft glow over her through a yellow silk shade; and she wore
her tea-gown of white crêpe de Chine, with a bunch of violets at
her breast. Another lamp, on a pedestal, cast a second gleam from a
corner; and the room flickered in cosy intimacy with the third light
from the log-fire, falling over water-colours by Duco, sketches and
photographs, white anenomes in vases, violets everywhere and one tall
palm. The writing-table was littered with books and printed sheets,
bearing witness to her work.

There was a knock at the door; and, at her "Come in," the prince
entered. She remained seated for a moment, laid down her pen and
rose. She went up to him with a smile and held out her hand. He
kissed it. He was very smartly dressed in a frock-coat, with a silk
hat and pale-grey gloves; he wore a pearl pin in his tie. They sat
down by the fire and he paid her compliments in quick succession, on
her sitting-room, her dress and her eyes. She made a jesting reply;
and he asked if he was disturbing her:

"Perhaps you were writing an interesting letter to some one near
your heart?"

"No, I was revising some proofs."

"Proofs?"

"Yes."

"Do you write?"

"I have just begun to."

"A story?"

"No, an article."

"An article? What about?"

She gave him the long title. He looked at her open-mouthed. She
laughed gaily:

"You would never have believed it, would you?"

"Santa Maria!" he murmured in surprise, unaccustomed in his own world
to "modern" women, taking part in a feminist movement. "Dutch?"

"Yes, Dutch."

"Write in French next time: then I can read it."

She laughed and gave her promise, poured him out a cup of tea, handed
the chocolates. He nibbled at them:

"Are you so serious? Have you always been? You were not serious the
other day."

"Sometimes I am very serious."

"So am I."

"I gathered that. If I had not come that time, you might have become
very serious."

He gave a fatuous laugh and looked at her knowingly:

"You are a wonderful woman!" he said. "Very interesting and very
clever. What you want to happen happens."

"Sometimes."

"Sometimes what I want also. Sometimes I also am very clever. When
I want a thing. But generally I don't want it."

"You did the other day."

He laughed:

"Yes! You were cleverer than I then. To-morrow perhaps I shall be
cleverer than you."

"Who knows!"

They both laughed. He nibbled the chocolates in the dish, one after
the other, and asked if he might have a glass of port instead of
tea. She poured him out a glass.

"May I give you something?"

"What?"

"A souvenir of our first acquaintance."

"It is very charming of you. What is it to be?"

He took something wrapped in tissue-paper from his pocket and handed
it to her. She opened the little parcel and saw a strip of old Venetian
lace, worked in the shape of a flounce, for a low bodice.

"Do accept it," he besought her. "It is a lovely piece. It is such
a pleasure to me to give it to you."

She looked at him with all her coquetry in her eyes, as though she
were trying to see through him.

"You must wear it like this."

He stood up, took the lace and draped it over her white tea-gown from
shoulder to shoulder. His fingers fumbled with the folds, his lips
just touched her hair.

She thanked him for his gift. He sat down again:

"I am glad that you will accept it."

"Have you given Miss Hope something too?"

He laughed, with his little laugh of conquest:

"Patterns are all she wants, patterns of the queen's ball-dresses. I
wouldn't dare to give you patterns. To you I give old lace."

"But you nearly ruined your career for the sake of that pattern?"

"Oh, well!" he laughed.

"Which career?"

"Oh, don't!" he said, evasively. "Tell me, what do you advise me
to do?"

"What do you mean?"

"Shall I marry her?"

"I am against all marriage, between cultivated people."

She wanted to repeat some of her phrases, but thought to herself,
why? He would not understand them. He looked at her profoundly,
with his carbuncle eyes:

"So you are in favour of free love?"

"Sometimes. Not always. Between cultivated people."

He was certain now, had any doubt still lingered in his mind, that
a liaison existed between her and Van der Staal.

"And do you think me ... cultivated?"

She laughed provocatively, with a touch of scorn in her voice:

"Listen. Shall I speak to you seriously?"

"I wish you would."

"I consider neither you nor Miss Hope suited for free love."

"So I am not cultivated?"

"I don't mean it in the sense of being civilized. I mean modern
culture."

"So I am not modern."

"No," she said, slightly irritated.

"Teach me to be modern."

She gave a nervous laugh:

"Oh, don't let us talk like this! You want to know my advice. I advise
you not to marry Urania."

"Why not?"

"Because you would both of you have a wretched life. She is a dear
little American parvenue...."

"I am offering her what I possess; she is offering me what she
possesses...."

He nibbled at the chocolates. She shrugged her shoulders:

"Then marry her," she said, with indifference.

"Tell me that you don't want me to and I won't."

"And your father? And the marchesa?"

"What do you know about them?"

"Oh ... everything and nothing!"

"You are a demon!" he exclaimed. "An angel and a demon! Tell me,
what do you know about my father and the marchesa?"

"For how much are you selling yourself to Urania? For not less than
ten millions?"

He looked at her in bewilderment.

"But the marchesa thinks five enough. And a very handsome sum it is:
five millions. Which is it, dollars or lire?"

He clapped his hands together:

"You are a devil!" he cried. "You are an angel and a devil! How do
you know? How do you know? Do you know everything?"

She flung herself back in her chair and laughed:

"Everything."

"But how?"

She looked at him and shook her head tantalizingly.

"Tell me."

"No. It's my secret."

"And you think that I ought not to sell myself?"

"I dare not advise you as regards your own interest."

"And as regards Urania?"

"I advise her not to do it."

"Have you done so already?"

"Once in a way."

"So you are my enemy?" he exclaimed, angrily.

"No," she said, gently, wishing to conciliate him. "I am a friend."

"A friend? To what length?"

"To the length to which I wish to go."

"Not the length to which I wish?"

"Oh, no, never!"

"But perhaps we both wish to go to the same length?"

He had stood up, with his blood on fire. She remained seated calmly,
almost languidly, with her head thrown back. She did not reply. He
fell on his knees, seized her hand and was kissing it before she
could prevent him:

"Oh, angel, angel. Oh, demon!" he muttered, between his kisses.

She now withdrew her hand, pushed him away from her gently and said:

"How quick an Italian is with his kisses!"

She laughed at him. He rose from his knees:

"Teach me what Dutchwomen are like, though they are slower than we."

She pointed to his chair, with an imperious gesture:

"Sit down," she said. "I am not a typical Dutchwoman. If I
were, I should not have come to Rome. I pride myself on being a
cosmopolitan. But we were not discussing that, we were speaking of
Urania. Are you thinking seriously of marrying her?"

"What can I do, if you thwart me? Why not be on my side, like a
dear friend?"

She hesitated. Neither of these two, Urania or he, was ripe for
her ideas. She despised them both. Very well, let them get married:
he in order to be rich; she to become a princess and duchess.

"Listen to me," she said, bending towards him. "You want to marry her
for the sake of her millions. But your marriage will be unhappy from
the beginning. She is a frivolous little thing; she will want to cut
a dash ... and you belong to the Blacks."

"We can live at Nice: then she can do as she pleases. We will come
to Rome now and again, go to San Stefano now and again. And, as for
unhappiness," he continued, pulling a tragic face, "what do I care? I
am not happy as it is. I shall try to make Urania happy. But my heart
... will be elsewhere."

"Where?"

"With the feminist movement."

She laughed:

"Well, shall I be nice to you?"

"Yes."

"And promise to help you?"

What did she care, when all was said?

"Oh, angel, demon!" he cried. He nibbled at a chocolate. "And what
does Mr. van der Staal think of it?" he asked, mischievously.

She raised her eyebrows:

"He doesn't think about it. He thinks only of his art."

"And of you."

She looked at him and bowed her head in queenly assent:

"And of me."

"You often dine with him."

"Yes."

"Come and dine with me one day."

"I shall be delighted."

"To-morrow evening? And where?"

"Wherever you like."

"In the Grand-Hôtel?"

"Ask Urania to come too."

"Why not you and I alone?"

"I think it better that you should invite your future wife. I will
chaperon her."

"You are right. You are quite right. And will you ask Mr. van der
Staal also to give me the pleasure of his company?"

"I will."

"Until to-morrow then, at half-past eight?"

"Until half-past eight to-morrow."

He rose to take his leave:

"Propriety demands that I should go," he said. "Really I should prefer
to stay."

"Well, then stay ... or stay another time, if you have to go now."

"You are so cold."

"And you don't think enough of Urania."

"I think of the feminist movement."

He sat down.

"I'm afraid you must go," she said, laughing with her eyes. "I have
to dress ... to go and dine with Mr. van der Staal."

He kissed her hand:

"You are an angel and a demon. You know everything. You can do
anything. You are the most interesting woman I ever met."

"Because I correct proofs."

"Because you are what you are."

And, very seriously, still holding her hand he said, almost
threateningly:

"I shall never be able to forget you."

And he went away. As soon as she was alone, she opened all her
windows. She realized, it was true, that she was something of a
coquette, but that lay in her nature: she was like that of herself, to
some men. Certainly not to all. Never to Duco. Never to men whom she
respected. Whereas she despised that little prince, with his blazing
eyes and his habit of kissing people.... But he served to amuse her....

And she dressed and went out and reached the restaurant long after
the appointed hour, found Duco waiting for her at their little table,
with his head in his hands, and at once told him that the prince had
detained her.







CHAPTER XXIII


Duco had at first wished to decline the invitation, but Cornélie
said that she would think it pleasanter if he came. And it was an
exquisite dinner in the restaurant of the Grand-Hôtel and Cornélie
had enjoyed herself exceedingly and looked most charming in an old
yellow ball-dress, dating back to the first days of her marriage,
which she had altered quickly here and there and draped with the
prince's old lace. Urania had looked very handsome, with her clear,
fresh complexion, her shining eyes and gleaming teeth, clad in a
close-fitting frock in the latest fashion, blue-black spangles on
black tulle, as though she were moulded in a cuirass: the prince said,
a siren with a mermaid's tail. And the people at the other tables had
stared across at theirs, for everybody knew Virgilio di Forte-Braccio;
everybody knew that he was going to marry a rich American heiress;
and everybody had noticed that he was paying great attention to the
slender, fair-haired woman whom nobody knew. She had been married,
they thought; she was chaperoning the future princess; and she was
very intimate with that young man, a Dutch painter, who was studying
art in Italy. They had soon found out all that there was to know.

Cornélie had thought it pleasant that they all looked at her; and
she had flirted so obviously with the prince that Urania had become
angry. And early next morning, while Cornélie was still in bed, no
longer thinking of last night but pondering over a sentence in her
pamphlet, the maid knocked, brought in her breakfast and letters and
said that Miss Hope was asking to speak to her. Cornélie had Urania
shown in, while she remained in bed and drank her chocolate. And
she looked up in surprise when Urania at once overwhelmed her with
reproaches, burst into sobs, scolded and raved, made a violent scene,
said that she now saw through her and admitted that the marchesa had
urged her to be careful of Cornélie, whom she described as a dangerous
woman. Cornélie waited until she had had her say and replied coolly
that she had nothing on her conscience, that on the contrary she had
saved Urania and been of service to her as a chaperon, though she did
not tell her that the prince had wanted her, Cornélie, to dine with
him alone. But Urania refused to listen and went on ranting. Cornélie
looked at her and thought her vulgar in that rage of hers, talking
her American English, as though she were chewing filberts; and at
last she answered, calmly:

"My dear girl, you're upsetting yourself about nothing. But, if
you like, I will write to the prince that he must pay me no more
attentions."

"No, no, don't do that: it'll make Gilio think I'm jealous!"

"And aren't you?"

"Why do you monopolize Gilio? Why do you flirt with him? Why do
you make yourself conspicuous with him, as you did yesterday, in a
restaurant full of people?"

"Well, if you dislike it, I won't flirt with Gilio again or make myself
conspicuous with him again. I don't care twopence about your prince."

"That's an extra reason."

"Very well, dear, that's settled."

Her coolness calmed Urania, who asked:

"And do we remain good friends?"

"Why, of course, my dear girl. Is there any occasion for us to
quarrel? I don't see it."

Both of them, the prince and Urania, were quite indifferent to
her. True, she had preached to Urania in the beginning, but about a
general idea: when afterwards she perceived Urania's insignificance,
she withdrew the interest which she took in her. And, if the girl
was offended by a little gaiety and innocent flirtation, very well,
there should be no more of it. Her thoughts were more with the proofs
which the post had brought her.

She got out of bed and stretched herself:

"Go into the sitting-room, Urania dear, and just let me have my bath."

Presently, all fresh and smiling, she joined Urania in the
sitting-room. Urania was crying.

"My dear child, why are you upsetting yourself like this? You've
achieved your ideal. Your marriage is as good as certain. You're
waiting for an answer from Chicago? You're impatient? Then cable
out. I should have cabled at once in your place. You don't imagine,
do you, that your father has any objection to your becoming Duchess
di San Stefano?"

"I don't know yet what I myself want," said Urania, weeping. "I don't
know, I don't know."

Cornélie shrugged her shoulders:

"You're more sensible than I thought," she said.

"Are you really my friend? Can I trust you? Can I trust your advice?"

"I won't advise you again. I have advised you. You must know your
own mind."

Urania took her hand:

"Which would you prefer, that I accepted Gilio ... or not?"

Cornélie looked her straight in the eyes:

"You're making yourself unhappy about nothing. You think--and
the marchesa probably thinks with you--that I want to take Gilio
from you? No, darling, I wouldn't marry Gilio if he were king and
emperor. I have a bit of the socialist in me: I don't marry for the
sake of a title."

"No more would I."

"Of course, darling, no more would you. I never dreamt of suggesting
that you would. But you ask me which I should prefer. Well, I tell
you in all sincerity: I don't prefer either. The whole business leaves
me cold."

"And you call yourself my friend!"

"So I am, dear, and I will remain your friend. Only don't come
overwhelming me with reproaches on an empty stomach!"

"You're a flirt."

"Sometimes. It comes natural to me. But, honestly, I won't be so
again with Gilio."

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes, of course. What do I care? He amuses me; but, if it offends you,
I'll gladly sacrifice my amusement for your sake. I don't value it
so much."

"Are you fond of Mr. van der Staal?"

"Very."

"Are you going to marry him, Cornélie?"

"No, dear. I sha'n't marry again. I know what marriage means. Are
you coming for a little walk with me? It's a fine day; and you have
upset me so with your little troubles that I can't do any work this
morning. It's lovely weather: come along and buy some flowers in the
Piazza di Spagna."

They went and bought the flowers. Cornélie took Urania back to
Belloni's. As she walked away, on the road to the osteria for lunch,
she heard somebody following her. It was the prince.

"I caught sight of you from the corner of the Via Aurora," he
said. "Urania was just going home."

"Prince," she said at once, "there must be no more of it."

"Of what?"

"No more visits, no more joking, no more presents, no more dinners
at the Grand-Hôtel, no more champagne."

"Why not?"

"The future princess won't have it."

"Is she jealous?"

Cornélie described the scene to him:

"And you mayn't even walk with me."

"Yes, I may."

"No, no."

"I shall, for all that."

"By the right of the man, of the strongest?"

"Exactly."

"My vocation is to fight against it. But to-day I am untrue to my
vocation."

"You are charming ... as always."

"You mustn't say that any more."

"Urania's a bore.... Tell me, what do you advise me to do? Shall I
marry her?"

Cornélie gave a peal of laughter:

"You both of you keep asking my advice!"

"Yes, yes, what do you think?"

"Marry her by all means!"

He did not observe her contempt.

"Exchange your escutcheon for her purse," she continued and laughed
and laughed.

He now perceived it:

"You despise me, perhaps both of us."

"Oh, no!"

"Tell me that you don't despise me."

"You ask me my opinion. Urania is a very sweet, dear child, but she
ought not to travel by herself. And you ..."

"And I?"

"You are a delightful boy. Buy me those violets, will you?"

"Subito, subito!"

He bought her the bunch of violets:

"You're crazy over violets, aren't you?"

"Yes. This must be your second ... and your last present. And here
we say good-bye."

"No, I shall take you home."

"I'm not going home."

"Where are you going?"

"To the osteria. Mr. van der Staal is waiting for me."

"He's a lucky man!"

"Why?"

"He needs must be!"

"I don't see why. Good-bye, prince."

"Ask me to come too," he entreated. "Let me lunch with you."

"No," she said, seriously. "Really not. It's better not. I believe...."

"What?"

"That Duco is just like Urania."

"Jealous?... When shall I see you again?"

"Really, believe me, it's better not.... Good-bye, prince. And thank
you ... for the violets."

He bent over her hand. She went into the osteria and saw that Duco
had witnessed their leave-taking through the window.







CHAPTER XXIV


Duco was silent and nervous at table. He played with his bread;
and his fingers trembled. She felt that he had something on his mind:

"What is it?" she asked, kindly.

"Cornélie," he said, excitedly, "I want to speak to you."

"What about?"

"You're not behaving properly."

"In what respect?"

"With the prince. You've seen through him and yet ... yet you go on
putting up with him, yet you're always meeting him. Let me finish,"
he said, looking around him: there was no one in the restaurant save
two Italians, sitting at the far table, and they could speak without
being overheard. "Let me finish," he repeated, when she tried to
interrupt him. "Let me say what I have to say. You of course are
free to act as you please. But I am your friend and I want to advise
you. What you are doing is not right. The prince is a cad, a low,
common cad. How can you accept presents from him and invitations? Why
did you compel me to come yesterday? The dinner was one long torture
to me. You know how fond I am of you: why shouldn't I confess it? You
know how high I hold you. I can't bear to see you lowering yourself
with him. Let me speak. Lowering, I say. He is not worthy to tie your
shoe-strings. And you play with him, you jest with him, you flirt--let
me speak--you flirt with him. What can he be to you, a coxcomb like
that? What part can he play in your life? Let him marry Miss Hope:
what do you care about either of them? What do inferior people matter
to you, Cornélie? I despise them and so do you. I know you do. Then
why do you cross their lives? Let them live in the vanity of their
titles and money: what is it all to you? I don't understand you. Oh,
I know, you're not to be understood, all the woman part of you! And I
love everything that I see of you: I love you in everything. It doesn't
matter whether I understand you. But I do feel that this isn't right. I
ask you not to see the prince any more. Have nothing more to do with
him. Cut him.... That dinner, last night, was a torture to me...."

"My poor boy," she said, gently, filling his glass from their fiasco,
"but why?"

"Why? Why? Because you're lowering yourself."

"I do not stand so high. No, let me speak now. I do not stand
high. Because I have a few modern ideas and a few others which are
broader-minded than those of most women? Apart from that I am an
ordinary woman. When a man is cheerful and witty, it amuses me. No,
Duco, I'm speaking now. I don't consider the prince a cad. I may think
him a coxcomb, but I think him cheerful and witty. You know that I
too am very fond of you, but you are neither cheerful nor witty. Now
don't get angry. You are much more than that. I'm not even comparing
il nostro Gilio with you. I won't say anything more about you, or
you will become conceited, but cheerful and witty you are not. And
my poor nature sometimes feels a need for these qualities. What have
I in my life? Nothing but you, you alone. I am very glad to possess
your friendship, very happy in having met you. But why may I not
sometimes be cheerful? Really, there is a little light-heartedness
in me, a little frivolity even. Am I bound to fight against it? Duco,
am I wicked?"

He smiled sadly; there was a moist light in his eyes; and he did
not answer.

"I can fight, if necessary," she resumed. "But is this a thing to fight
against? It is a passing bubble, nothing more. I forget it the next
minute. I forget the prince the next minute. And you I do not forget."

He was looking at her radiantly.

"Do you understand that? Do you understand that I don't flirt and
fence with you? Shake hands and stop being angry."

She gave him her hand across the table and he pressed her fingers:

"Cornélie," he said, softly. "Yes, I feel that you are loyal. Cornélie,
will you be my wife?"

She looked straight in front of her and drooped her head a little
and stared before her earnestly. They were no longer eating. The two
Italians stood up, bowed and went away. They were alone. The waiter
set some fruit before them and withdrew.

They both sat silent for a moment. Then she spoke in a gentle voice;
and her whole being displayed so tender a melancholy that he could
have burst into sobs and worshipped her where she sat.

"I knew of course that you would ask me that some day. It was in the
nature of things. A great friendship like ours was bound to lead to
that question. But it can't be, dearest Duco. It can't be, my dear,
dear boy. I have my own ideas ... but it's not that. I am against
marriage ... but it's not that. In some cases a woman is unfaithful
to all her ideas in a single second.... Then what is it?..."

She stared wide-eyed and passed her hand over her forehead, as though
she did not see clearly. Then she continued:

"It is this, that I am afraid of marriage. I have been through it,
I know what it means.... I see my husband before me now. I see
that habit, that groove before me, in which the subtler individual
characteristics are effaced. That is what marriage is: a habit,
a groove. And I tell you candidly: I think marriage loathsome. I
think passion beautiful, but marriage is not passion. Passion can
be noble and superhuman, but marriage is a human institution based
upon our petty human morality and calculation. And I have become
frightened of those prudent moral ties. I promised myself--and I
believe that I shall keep my promise--never to marry again. My whole
nature has become unfitted for it. I am no longer the Hague girl
going to parties and dinners and looking out for a husband, together
with her parents.... My love for him was passion. And in my marriage
he wanted to restrict that passion to a groove and a custom. Then I
rebelled.... I'd rather not talk about it. Passion lasts too short a
time to fill a married life.... Mutual esteem to follow, etcetera? One
needn't marry for that. I can feel esteem just as well without being
married. Of course there is the question of the children, there are
many difficulties. I can't think it all out now. I merely feel now,
very seriously and calmly, that I am not fit to marry and that I
never will marry again. I should not make you happy.... Don't be sad,
Duco. I am fond of you, I love you. And perhaps ... had I met you
at the right moment. Had I met you before, in my Hague life ... you
would certainly have stood too high for me. I could not have grown
fond of you. Now I can understand you, respect you and look up to
you. I tell you this quite simply, that I love you and look up to you,
look up to you, in spite of all your gentleness, as I never looked up
to my husband, however much he made his manly privilege prevail. And
you are to believe that, very firmly and with great certainty, and
you must believe that I am true. I am coquettish ... only with Gilio."

He looked at her through his silent tears. He stood up, called the
waiter, paid the bill absent-mindedly, while everything swam and
flashed before his eyes. They went out of the door and she hailed a
carriage and told the man to drive to the Villa Doria-Pamphili. She
remembered that the gardens were open. They drove there in silence,
steeped in their thoughts of the future that was opening tremulously
before them. Sometimes he heaved a deep breath and quivered all over
his body. Once she fervently squeezed his hand. At the gate of the
villa they alighted and walked up the majestic avenues. Rome lay in
the depths below; and they suddenly saw St. Peter's. But they did
not speak; and she suddenly sat down on an ancient bench and began
to weep softly and feebly. He put his arm round her and comforted
her. She dried her tears, smiled and embraced him and returned his
kiss.... Twilight fell; and they went back. He gave the address of
his studio. She accompanied him. And she gave herself to him, in all
her truthful sincerity and with a love so violent and so great that
she thought she would swoon in his arms.







CHAPTER XXV


They did not alter their mode of life. Duco, however, after a
scene with his mother, no longer slept at Belloni's but in a
little room adjoining his studio and at first filled with trunks
and lumber. Cornélie was sorry about the scene: she had always had
a liking for Mrs. van der Staal and the girls. But a certain pride
arose in her; and Cornélie despised Mrs. van der Staal because she
was unable to understand either her or Duco. Still, she would have
been pleased to prevent this coolness. At her advice Duco went to see
his mother again, but she remained cool and sent him away. Thereupon
Cornélie and Duco went to Naples. They did not do this by way of
an elopement, they did it quite simply: Cornélie told Urania and
the prince that she was going to Naples for a little while and that
Van der Staal would probably follow her. She did not know Naples and
would appreciate it greatly if Van der Staal showed her over the town
and the surrounding country. Cornélie kept on her rooms in Rome. And
they spent a fortnight of sheer, careless and immense happiness. Their
love grew spacious and blossoming in the golden sunlight of Naples,
on the blue gulfs of Amalfi, Sorrento, Capri and Castellamare, simply,
irresistibly and restfully. They glided gradually along the purple
thread of their lives, they walked hand in hand down their lines now
fused into one path, heedless of the laws and ideas of men; and their
attitude was so lofty, their action so serene and so certain of their
happiness, that their relations did not degenerate into insolence,
although within themselves they despised the world. But this happiness
softened all that pride in their soaring souls, as if their happiness
were strewing blossoms all around it. They lived in a dream, first
among the marbles in the museum, then on the flower-strewn cliffs
of Amalfi, on the beach of Capri or on the terrace of the hotel at
Sorrento, with the sea roaring at their feet and, in a pearly haze,
yonder, vaguely white, as though drawn in white chalk, Castellamare
and Naples and the ghost of Vesuvius, with its hazy plume of smoke.

They held aloof from everybody, from all the people and excursionists;
they had their meals at a small table; and it was generally

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