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Corinna
by
“But why are we stopping?” retorted the other, irritably. “Drive on!”
“Don’t you think it beautiful?” asked the elder lady.
The coachman’s smile was lost in his great beard, as he urged the horses on.
“You are such a prude, my dear Milly,” said the first voice. “To me this kind of thing is like a thunderstorm, or a heavy sea….”
Helena could hear no more. She felt crushed with vexation, shame and horror.
A farm labourer came shuffling along the highroad. Helena ran to meet him, so as to prevent him from witnessing the scene, and at the same time ask his help. But he was already too near.
“I believe it’s the miller’s black stallion,” he said gravely. “In that case it will be better to wait until it’s all over, for he won’t brook interference. If the lady will leave it to me, I will bring her mare home later on.”
Glad to have done with the matter, Helena hurried away.
When she arrived home, she was ill.
She refused to ride her mare again, for in her eyes the beast had become unclean.
This pretty adventure had a greater influence on Helena’s psychic development than might have been expected. The brutal outbreak of a natural instinct, the undisguised exhibition of which in the community of men is punished with a term of imprisonment, haunted her as if she had been present at an execution. It distressed her during the day and disturbed her dreams at night. It increased her fear of nature and made her give up her former amazon’s life. She remained at home and gave herself up to study.
The house boasted a library. But as misfortune would have it, no additions had been made since her grandfather’s death. All books were therefore a generation too old, and Helena found antiquated ideals. The first book which fell into her hands was Madame de Stael’s Corinna The way in which the volume lay on the shelf indicated that it had served a special purpose. Bound in green and gold, a little shabby at the edges, full of marginal notes and underlined passages, the work of her late mother, it became a bridge, as it were, between mother and daughter, which enabled the now grown-up daughter to make the acquaintance of the dead mother. These pencil notes were the story of a soul. Displeasure with the prose of life and the brutality of nature, had inflamed the writer’s imagination and inspired it to construct a dreamworld in which the souls dwelled, disincarnate. It was essentially an aristocratic world, this dreamworld, for it required financial independence from its denizens, so that the soul might be fed with thoughts. This brain-fever, called romance, was therefore the gospel of the wealthy, and became absurd and pitiful as soon as it penetrated to the lower classes.
Corinna became Helena’s ideal: the divinely inspired poetess who like the nun of the middle-ages, had vowed a vow of chastity, so that she might lead a life of purity, who was, of course, admired by a brilliant throng, rose to immeasurable heights above the heads of the petty every-day mortals. It was the old ideal all over again, transposed: salutes, standing at attention, rolling of drums, the first place everywhere. Helena was quite ignorant of the fact that Madame de Stael outlived the Corinna ideal, and did not become a real influence until she came out of her dreamworld into the world of facts.
She ceased to take an interest in everyday affairs, she communed with herself and brooded over her ego. The inheritance which her mother had left her in posthumous notes began to germinate. She identified herself with both Corinna and her mother, and spent much time in meditating on her mission in life. That nature had intended her to become a mother and do her share in the propagation of the human race, she refused to admit her mission was to explain to humanity what Madame de Stael’s Corinna had thought fifty years ago; but she imagined the thoughts were her own, striving to find expression.