Chapter 16

Her friends were surprised that she "took it as well as she did." Considering her emotional legacy, they had expected a collapse. On the contrary she remained, as it seemed, almost passionless. She did not show even that desire for sympathy which is characteristic of hysterical natures.

Fanny Brassfield noticed presently, however, that Lilla could no longer look at negroes without turning pale, that her antipathy to certain colors, sounds, and perfumes had increased, and that sometimes she appeared to be listening to a voice inaudible to others.

It was the voice of her thoughts, which she heard, now and then, just as if some one were whispering in her ear.

She became subject to reveries in which there were frequent lapses from all mental function. Then, of a sudden, she was filled with a longing for movement.

She went abroad alone, and settled herself in a villa on the French Riviera.

Every morning there appeared on the terrace of a neighboring villa a young Frenchwoman in a white straw hat and a white dress, carrying an ebony cane, and followed by a brown spaniel. In the evening the stranger might be seen pacing behind the marble urns in a gown of gold and silver lace, or perhaps in a black dress spotted with large medallions of pearl and turquoise. A tall man walked by her side; and when their silhouettes stood out against the luminous sea there came to Lilla, with the interminable odor of roses, a soft laugh of happiness.

The sound floated across a gulf as wide as that which separates one world from another.

As for Lilla, her world lay in the past; and all this semitropical luxuriance of nature, enriched and complicated by an insatiable mankind, was lost in such mistiness as had risen round her in childhood--when her world had seemed to lie in the future. Sometimes those past events, from her continual rehearsal of them, attained recreation; the precious scenes surrounded her visibly and almost tangibly; and the dark garden of the villa became the other garden, the threshold of love. Then she realized that this was one more delusion due to her abnormal state of mind. In her terror she reached out through the shadows to grasp at something that might help her to regain contact with reality. She clutched a rose, and as she crushed its sweetness to her face its thorn pierced her lip. She burst into a fit of crying and laughing at this reassurance--this proof that there existed, after all, a material world, of beauty inextricably mingled with despair.

But loneliness remained.

She expected no abatement of this loneliness; for he was gone after showing her that it was he, of a worldful of men, for whom she had been waiting. And now, more and more, her objective mind was filled with hitherto unsuspected memories of him, a thousand fragmentary recollections that she fitted together into an image more vivid than the man himself had been. This image, gilded by layer after layer of pathetic thoughts, enlarged by the continuous enhancement of his value, gradually assumed an heroic magnitude, and became more splendid than a statue in a temple. So now it was no longer a man that she contemplated in her reveries, but a sort of god whose stubbornness had destroyed her.

In those nightmares of hers, however, he was still a man, subject to mortal tragedy. Waking with a cry, she discerned, in the act of fading away against the curtains, the dead-white, wedge-shaped face of Anna Zanidov.

One day she closed the villa and went swiftly to Lausanne.

She entered a bright consulting room where there rose to meet her, from behind a desk, a calm-looking man with a bushy red and white beard. His gaze took in, in a flash, her widow's weeds, her tall, slim person, her delicate, pale brown face, her features composed and yet a trifle wild, her whole effect of elegance and singularity.

"I feel as if I am going mad," she blurted out, by way of greeting.

The famous physician smoothed his beard reflectively.

"There is a story, perhaps?"

And when she had told him everything, he remarked, "I will make out for you a series of appointments."

"The cause will remain," she returned.

"But I shall change your thoughts about the cause," he said paternally.

"No!" she exclaimed, in a voice vibrant with apprehension. For she would have gone on risking this madness that she feared, rather than let him efface from her conscious thoughts, or even dim, one recollection of Lawrence.

He understood. Casting down his eyes, he reflected:

"Apparently this charming person has never been told how extreme an example she is of our poor civilisées. For the sake of a dead man she is willing, after all, to commit slow suicide. If she continues to nurse this grief which is indissoluble from her love, with her predispositions she will go the usual way, probably ending in a psychic collapse. Ah, yes, if she had not come to me she would just have drifted on and on into the devil knows what. As it is, I don't fancy that I could make her quite unemotional; but that grief--there's no reason why she should go through life under that additional burden! She is exquisite, young, sure of many happy years with some one else, if she is cured of this preoccupation with that fellow who is gone. Shall I ask permission to try to do her that favor?"

The celebrated specialist, raising his eyes, said benevolently to Lilla:

"At least, madam, you have no objection to my stopping those nightmares of yours?"

Every day, for three weeks, she returned to the consultation room, sat down in a deep leather chair, fixed her eyes on a bright metal ball, and fell asleep. The famous physician found her, as he had expected, extremely impressionable. On waking, she had no objective recollection of what had been said to her.

But the dreams ceased to torment her.

With a strange, almost unprecedented feeling of peace she traveled down to Lake Como. Here she dwelt in a house smothered in flowers, on a promontory that was almost an island.

In the morning she walked in the garden, drenched in sunshine, enveloped in the silence of the lake, beyond which she saw, far away, other villas nestling at the bases of the mountains. A sensation of humility came to her. Amid that great panorama of blue and gold she seemed to perceive subtle traces of a beneficent divinity. The sunshine veiled the hawks that were soaring through the sky in quest of weaker birds; the waters of the lake concealed the fishes that were devouring one another; and when, with a timid and pleading naïveté, she paused before a rosebush, she did not see, behind those petals, the spiders spinning their traps.

As she returned toward the house, there stole over her a pleasant weakness, a childlike and tremulous trust; and she felt the soft air more keenly, smelled more delicate fragrances, heard a multitude of infinitesimal sounds that had not reached her ears a moment ago.

She sat in a high-ceiled, white-walled room with French windows opening on a terrace where _olea fragans_ blossoms expanded round the base of a statue by Canova. At last a feeling of incompleteness penetrated her languor. She rose to pace the mosaic floor on which appeared a design of mermaids and tritons.

"What shall I do now? I must fill my life with something. I must find some way to occupy my mind."

She thought of mastering another language; for like many persons of similar temperament she found the learning of foreign tongues a simple matter. But what language? Already she knew French, Italian, and German. Russian, then?

She recoiled from that thought, associated as it was with Anna Zanidov.

Sitting down at the piano, she played Chopin.

Her interpretation of the piece was good, but not eloquent. The spirit that she had heard certain musicians put into it was lacking. She remembered how differently even old Brantome, the expatriated French critic, had expressed these phrases. She wondered why, with her immense passion for music, she had never been able to translate its profoundest spirit.

And she recalled an old longing of hers to compose some musical masterpiece. For that purpose she had faithfully studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and musical form, had steeped herself in the works of the masters from Palestrina to Stravinsky. Yet her own creative efforts had ended in platitudes. Was it true that women, supposed to be more emotional than men, were incapable of employing successfully the most intense medium for the revealment of emotion?

"What am I good for? Ah, what shall I do with my life?"

Late in the afternoon a boatman rowed her out on the lake. At twilight the mauve shadows on the cliffs combined with the pallor of the Alps to form round her a setting full of poetry and pathos. She thought how perfectly these things might once have enclosed her in the scenery of love--yet now, for some reason, they were incapable of composing with a proper vividness the scenery of grief.

She returned to the villa to find visitors, women whom she had known in girlhood, who had married members of the Italian nobility, and now were sojourning in the neighborhood. They brought men with them, and sometimes stayed to dinner.

One night, as she leaned against the balustrade of the terrace, watching the strings of lights across the lake, a young Roman, tall, dark and aquiline, handsome and strong, laid his hand upon hers.

"It is a world made for happiness," he breathed.

The others, in the white-walled room now mellow from lamplight, were clustered round the piano, and one of them was singing a song by Tosti. Without drawing away her hand, Lilla returned:

"Happiness. Yes, tell me what it consists in."

"In the glory of life and love. In the splendors of this world and our acceptance of them--we who are this world's strange, sensitive culmination. Not to question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours that a thousand generations have made so fine, so complex. To be natural in the heart of nature."

She smiled mournfully:

"You realists! And are these things that you celebrate reality? They fade and die----"

"But while they live they live," he cried low, with an accent of austere passion, and seized her in his arms.

For a moment she did not move. She let herself feel that contact, that strength and fervor, with a nearly analytical attentiveness, with, a melancholy curiosity. But of a sudden she pushed him from her with a surprising strength, her heart beating wildly. She stared at him in amazement, then entered the house.

A fortnight later she returned to New York.

Winter was imminent; but few of her friends had yet appeared in town. One day on Fifth Avenue, however, she met old Brantome, the critic, who invited her to an afternoon of music at his apartment.