“And so am I,” I protested. “Particularly delighted to see you so well.”
“Yes, I’m wonderfully well now,” he said, blowing out his chest.
“And young,” I went on. “Younger than I am! How have you done it?”
“Aha!” The old Count cocked his head on one side mysteriously.
More in joke than in earnest, “I believe you’ve been seeing Steinach in Vienna,” I said. “Having a rejuvenating operation.”
For all reply, the old Count raised the forefinger of his right hand, laying it first to his lips, then along the side of his nose, and as he did so he winked. Then clenching his fist, and with his thumb sticking rigidly up, he made a complicated gesture which would, I am sure, for an Italian, have been full of a profound and vital significance. To me, however, unfamiliar with the language of signs, the exact meaning was not entirely clear. But the Count offered no verbal explanation. Still without uttering a word, he raised his hat; then laying his finger once more to his lips, he turned and ran with an astonishing agility down the steep path towards the little carriage of the funicular, in which the Colombella had already taken her seat.
For Hubert Lapell this first love-affair was extremely important. “Important” was the word he had used himself when he was writing about it in his diary. It was an event in his life, a real event for a change. It marked, he felt, a genuine turning-point in his spiritual development.
“Voltaire,” he wrote in his diary--and he wrote it a second time in one of his letters to Minnie--“Voltaire said that one died twice: once with the death of the whole body and once before, with the death of one’s capacity to love. And in the same way one is born twice, the second time being on the occasion when one first falls in love. One is born, then, into a new world--a world of intenser feelings, heightened values, more penetrating insights.” And so on.
In point of actual fact Hubert found this new world a little disappointing. The intenser feelings proved to be rather mild; not by any means up to literary standards.
“I tell thee I am mad In Cressid’s love. Thou answer’st: she is fair; Pour’st in the open ulcer of my heart Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice....”