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!"