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'm nothing and a very
useless member of society at that. And I'm 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 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 life?"
"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
sisters.