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 Cœli 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