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.