“Perhaps,” she replied, smiling sadly, and around her the studio darkened, the silhouettes of his mother and sisters faded, as they sat quietly and languidly uninterested in easy chairs, and all colour dissolved silently into shadow. “But I am so weak. You say you are no artist, and I, I am no apostle.”
“Giving direction to one’s life is the difficult thing. Every life has a line, a direction, a way, a path: it is along that line that life must flow into death and what comes after death; and that line is difficult to find. I shan’t find my line.”
“I can’t see my line before me either …”
“Do you know, a restlessness has come over me. Mama, do you hear, a restlessness has come over me. In the past I used to dream in the Forum, I was happy and didn’t think about my line. Mama, do you think about your line, and do my sisters think about theirs?”
His sisters, in the dark, sunk in the deep chairs like cats, giggled a little. Mama got up.
“My dear Duco, you know, I can’t follow you. I admire Cornélie for being able to appreciate your watercolours and for understanding what you mean by that line. My line is the way home now, as it’s getting very late …”
“That is the line of the next moment. But I feel restlessness about my line of the days and weeks afterwards. I’m not living the right way. The Past is very beautiful, and so peaceful because it’s over. But I have lost that calm. The Present is really very small. But the Future … Oh, if only we could find a goal! For the Future …”
They were no longer listening to him; they groped their way down the dark stairs. “Bread?” he wondered.
XII
ONE MORNING when she stayed home, Cornélie reviewed the reading matter that was scattered about her room. And she decided that it was useless for her to read Ovid in order to study a few Roman customs, some of which had alarmed and shocked her; she decided that Dante and Petrarch were too difficult for studying Italian, when it was enough to pick up a few words to make oneself understood in a shop or with the serving staff; she decided Hare’s Walks was too exhausting as a guidebook, since every last stone in Rome did not excite the same interest in her as it had obviously done in Hare. Then she admitted to herself that she would never be able to see Rome the way Duco van der Staal saw it. She never saw the light in the skies and the scudding of clouds as he had in his unfinished watercolour studies. She never saw the ruins glorified as he did in his hours spent dreaming in the Forum and on the Palatine. She saw a painting only with the eyes of a layman; a Byzantine Madonna meant nothing to her. She did like sculpture; passionate love for a lump of mutilated marble such as he felt for the Eros seemed pathological to her, she thought at the time, but “morbid”—though the word made her smile — expressed her view better. Not pathological, but morbid. And she considered an olive a tree that resembled a willow, though Duco had told her that an olive was the loveliest tree in the world.
She did not agree with him, either about the olive or about Eros and yet she felt that from some mysterious perspective that was inaccessible to her, he was right, since it was like a mystical hill amid unbridgeable mystical circles, which he passed through as emotional spheres that were not hers, just as the hill was an unknown throne of feeling and perspective. She disagreed with him and yet she was convinced that he was right in a superior way, had a superior vision, a nobler insight, a deeper feeling; and she was certain that her way of seeing Italy — in the disappointment of her dream — was not noble or good, that the beauty of Italy was escaping her; while for him it was like a tangible and embraceable vision. And she cleared away Ovid, Petrarch and Hare’s guidebook, and locked them in her case and took out the novels and pamphlets that had appeared that year on the Women’s Movement in Holland. She was interested in the issue and it made her feel more modern than Duco, who suddenly appeared to her as if belonging to a past era. Not modern. Not modern. She repeated the word with relish and suddenly felt stronger. Being modern would be her strength. One remark of Duco’s had made a deep impression: that exclamation “Oh, if only we could find a goal! Our life has a line, a path that you must travel …” Being modern, wasn’t that a line? Finding a solution to a modern question, was that not a goal? He, he was right, from his point of view, from which he viewed Italy, but was not the whole of Italy a past, a dream, at least the Italy that Duco saw, a dream paradise of nothing but art. It could not be good to stand and see and dream like that. The Present was there: on the grey horizons there was the rumble of an approaching storm and the modern questions flashed like lightning. Was it not that that she must live for? She felt for Women and Girls: she herself had been a Girl, brought up with nothing but a drawing-room education, in order to shine, beautifully and charmingly, and then to marry. And she had been beautiful, and charming, she had shone and had married, and now she was twenty-three, divorced from that husband, who had once been her only goaclass="underline" now she was alone, lost, in despair and mortal desolation: she had nothing to cling to, she was suffering. She still loved him, blackguard, wretch that he was; and she had thought she was being very strong by setting off on a trip, for the sake of art, to Italy. Oh, how clearly she saw, after those conversations with Duco, that she would never understand art, though she had drawn a little in the past, although she had once had an unglazed terracotta group after Canova in her bedroom: Amor and Psyche, so sweet for a young girl. And how certain she was now that she would not understand Italy, since she did not find an olive tree that beautiful, and had never seen the sky of the Campagna as a fanned phoenix’s wing. No, Italy would never be her life’s consolation …
But what then? She had been through a lot, but she was alive and very young. And again at the sight of those pamphlets, that novel, the longing reawakened in her heart: to be modern, to be modern! To tackle modern problems. To live for the Future! To live for Women, for Girls …
She did not dare look deep inside herself, afraid she might waver. To live for the Future … It separated her a little more from Duco, that new ideal. What did she care, did she love him? No, she didn’t think so. She had loved her husband and did not want to fall immediately for the first nice young man who came along, whom she happened to meet in Rome …
And she read the pamphlets. On the Women’s Question and Love. Then she thought of her husband and then of Duco. And wearily she dropped the pamphlet, thinking how sad it was. People, women, girls. She, a young woman, an aimless woman, how sad she was in her life. And Duco, was he happy? But still he sought the line in his life, still he was on the lookout for his goal. A new restlessness had come over him. And she cried a little, and tossed and turned restlessly on her cushions, and wrung her hands, and prayed unconsciously, to whom she knew not.
“Oh God, tell me what we’re to do!”
XIII
IT WAS SOME DAYS after that Cornélie had the idea of leaving the pensione and taking rooms. Hotel life interfered with her emerging thoughts, like a wind of vanity that kept scorching scarcely formed blossoms, and despite a torrent of abuse from the marchesa, who accused her of having rented for the whole winter, she moved into the room, which she had found after much searching and climbing of stairs with Duco van der Staal. It was in Via dei Serpenti, many flights up, a suite of two spacious but almost completely unfurnished rooms: there were only the bare necessities, and though the view stretched far and wide across the massed houses of Rome to the circular ruin of the Colosseum, the rooms were bleak and cheerless, bare and uninhabitable. Duco had not liked them and said they made him shiver, although they faced the sun, but there was something about the awkwardness of this room that struck Cornélie in her new mood as harmonious. When they parted that day, he thought of her: how little of the artist there is in her; and she thought of him: how un-modern he is! They did not see each other again for days, and Cornélie was very lonely, but did not feel her loneliness, because she was writing a pamphlet about the Social Position of the Divorced Woman. That idea had come to her after she had read a few sentences in a pamphlet on the Women’s Movement, and suddenly, without having thought much about it, she wrote her sentences in a succession of bursts and intuitive leaps, awkward, cool and clear; she wrote in an epistolary style, artlessly, but with conviction and experience, as if to warn girls against having too many illusions about Marriage. She had not made her rooms comfortable; she sat there, high above Rome, looking over the rooftops towards the Colosseum, writing, immersing herself in her suffering, revealing herself in her recalcitrant sentences, bitter, but pouring the gall within her into her pamphlet. Mrs Van der Staal and the girls, who came to visit her, were astonished at her slovenly appearance, at her bleak rooms, the dying embers in the grate, not a flower, no books, no tea, and no cushions, and when they left after a quarter of an hour, on the pretext of having to go shopping, they looked at each other in amazement as they tripped down the endless staircase, utterly confused and mystified by her metamorphosis: from an interesting, elegant young woman, with an aura of poetry about her, and a tragic past — into a ‘free woman’, writing frantically at a pamphlet, with bitter imprecations against society. And when Duco visited her again after a week, and sat with her for a moment, he sat absolutely still, stiff as a board on his chair, without speaking, while Cornélie read him the opening of her pamphlet. He was moved by what he glimpsed of personal suffering and experience, but he was irritated by the lack of harmony between that slim, lily-like woman, with her fractured movements, and the surroundings, in which she now felt at home, totally absorbed in her hatred of society, especially Hague society, which had become hostile to her, because she had not stayed with a blackguard who abused her. And as she read Duco’s thought: she would not write this way if she were not writing everything from the perspective of her own pain. Why doesn’t she turn it into a novella …? Why that generalising of one’s own suffering, and why that admonitory tone … He did not find it beautiful. He found the sound of her voice so harsh, those truths so personal, that bitterness unsympathetic and that hatred of convention so petty. And when she asked him something, he did not say much, shook his head in mild approval, and sat there uncomfortably stiff. He did not know what to reply, he did not know how to admire, he found her un-artistic. And yet a great pity welled up in him, he saw how sweet she would be, what a noble woman, once she had found the line in her life and moved harmoniously along that line with the music of her own movement. Now he saw her taking a wrong path; a path pointed out to her by others, and not taken on an inner impulse. And he felt a deep pity for her. He, as an artist, but especially as a dreamer, sometimes saw things with great clarity, despite his dreams, despite his all-embracing feeling for line and colour and haziness; he, the artist and dreamer, often saw as if clairvoyant the emotion glimpsed beneath people’s pretence, saw the soul, like a light shining through alabaster, and he suddenly saw her lost, searching, wandering; searching for she knew not what; wandering through she knew not what labyrinth; far from her line, her lifeline and the direction in which her soul was moving, which she had never yet found.