Inevitable Read Free

was back home and tired, resting and thinking, melancholy yet savouring her vague thoughts, the silence around her and the big boarding-house, to which most guests had not yet returned. She thought of The Hague, of her large family, father, mother, brothers and sisters, to whom she had said farewell for a considerable time in order to travel. Her father, a retired colonel of hussars, not being a man of means, had not been able to help satisfy her whim, as he put it, and she would not havebeen able to indulge that whim, of starting a new life, without a small legacy left her years ago by a godmother. She was glad to have a degree of independence, although she felt the selfishness of that independence …
    But what good would she have been to her circle, after the commotion surrounding her divorce? She was weak—selfish—and she knew it; but she had suffered a blow to which she had at first thought she would succumb. And when she survived after all, she had gathered together her remaining energy and told herself that she could not go on living in the same tight circle of sisters and friends, and she had forced her life to take a different direction. She had always had a flair for turning an old dress into an apparently new outfit, of transforming last year’s hat into a new creation, and she had done the same with her diffuse and miserable life, storm-tossed and broken as it was: she had scraped together, frugally as it were, what remained and was still serviceable, and from those remnants she had made herself a new life. Yet in the old atmosphere this new life had no room to breathe: it was aimless and alien there, and she had managed to force it into a new path, despite the resistance of family and friends. Perhaps she would not have been quite so resolute in this if her life had not felt quite so fractured. Perhaps she would not have been quite so aware of her energy if she had suffered only a little. She had her strength and she had her weakness; there was a great wholeness in her, but great diversity too, and perhaps that complexity had been the salvation of her youth.
    Besides, she
was
very young, twenty-three, and at that age there is an unconscious resilience, for all theapparent weakness. And her contradictions constituted her equilibrium, so that she did not gravitate towards the abyss … All of that passed through her, vague and cloud-like, not with the concision of words, but with the mistiness of weary dreams. Lying there she did not look as if she had ever exerted the power of giving her life a new direction. A pale, delicate woman, slim and with disjointed movements, lying on a chaise-longue in a no longer pristine dressing gown with its faded pink and crumpled lace. Yet she was surrounded by the poetry of herself, despite those tired eyes, the limp lines of her garment, despite the rented room, with the hastily improvised air of comfort, which owed more to flair than to reality and could be fitted into any suitcase. With her fragile figure, her pale features, more refined than beautiful, she was surrounded by a halo of individuality, an atmosphere that she emanated unconsciously, that travelled from her eyes to the things she gazed at, from her fingers to the things she stroked. For those unsympathetic to her that atmosphere was odd, eccentric, unbefitting for a young lady from The Hague, and was censured. For those who were sympathetic it had an element of talent, soul, something special that almost resembled genius, though in an enervated form, and was enchanting and thought-provoking and promised much: perhaps too much to contain. This woman was a child of her time but particularly of her environment, which was why she was so immature: conflict against conflict, a balance of contradiction, which might be either her downfall or her salvation, but was certainly her fate.
    She felt lonely in Italy. She had lived for weeks in Florence, and had tried to construct a life rich in art and history. Though she