When she left, asking Cornélie to call and admire her trousseau, Cornélie said with a smile:
“She’s happy… Happiness means something different to everyone … A trousseau and a title wouldn’t make me happy.”
“Those are the little people,” he said, “whose paths occasionally cross ours. I prefer to avoid them …”
And they did not say, though they both thought it — their fingers intertwined, her eyes gazing into his — that they were happy too, but in a higher, nobler way; and pride swelled in them: and as if in a vision they saw the line of their life winding up a steep hillside, and happiness strewed blossoms and holding their proud heads in the blizzard of blossoms, with the smile and eyes of love, they continued onward in their dream, removed from humanity and reality.
XXVI
THE MONTHS PASSED BY in a dream. And their love caused such a summer to blossom in them, that she ripened in beauty, and he in talent; the pride in them burst outward as self-confidence: in her case blossoming, in his creative energy; her languid charm was transformed into proud slenderness; her form swelled into rounded fullness; a gleam shone in her eyes, happiness around her mouth — his hands trembled with nervous emotion when he took up his brushes, and the skies of Italy created vaulted domes before his eyes like firmaments of love and passionate colour. He created and completed a series of watercolours: hazy evocations of a dream atmosphere, reminiscent of the noblest work of Turner: monuments to nature made of nothing but haze: all the milky blue and pearly mistiness of the Bay of Naples, like a goblet full of light, where a turquoise melts into water — and he sent them to Holland, to London, and he had suddenly found his vocation, his work and his fame: courage, strength, goal and triumph.
She also enjoyed a degree of success with her article: it was reviewed, attacked; her name was mentioned. But she felt a certain indifference when she read her name involved in the Women’s Movement. She shared rather in his life of observation and emotion and often contributed amid the haziness of his vision, in the excessive haze of his tinted dream, a glow of light, an enclosing horizon, a chink of reality, which gave substance to the mistiness of his ideal. With him she learned to distinguish and feel nature, art, the whole of Rome, and when a wave of symbolism came over him, she followed him completely. He drafted a great sketch of a theory of women ascending the climbing winding lifeline: they seemed to be moving from a collapsing city of antiquity, whose columns, linked by the occasional architrave, were wrapped in a shimmer of dusk; they seemed to be freeing themselves from the shadow of the ruin, which on the horizon was already dissolving in the night of oblivion — and they pushed forward, hailing each other with cries, waving to each other with a great outstretching of hands, above them a waving swirl of banners and blazons; with muscular arms they grasped hammers and pickaxes, and the throng moved upwards, along the line, to where the light became whiter and whiter, to where in a haze of light one could discern in the far distance a new city, whose iron buildings shone tall in the white shimmering light in the distance like central stations and Eiffel Towers with a reflection of glass arches and glass roofs, and high in the sky the musical bars of sound and conductivity …
And so the influences of each worked on the other’s soul, so that she learned to see and he learned to think; that she saw beauty, art, nature, haze and emotion and no longer conceived, but felt; that he saw as in his sketch — with its very vague modern city of glass and iron — a modern city rising from his dream haze of Rome’s past, and, in accordance with his own nature and disposition, thought about a modern question. She learned mainly to see and think as a woman in love, with the eyes and heart of the man she loved: he worked out the question in plastic terms. But whatever imperfections there were in the absolute nature of their new spheres of thought and feeling, the interaction that their love engendered brought them a happiness so great, so unified, that at the moment they could not comprehend or contemplate it, that it was almost like a state of ecstasy, a vague unreality in which they dreamed — though it was pure truth and tangible reality. The way they thought, felt and lived was an ideal of reality: ideally entered and achieved along the gradual line of their lives, along the golden thread of their love, and they scarcely registered or comprehended it, since ordinary life still clung to them. But only to an unavoidably small extent. They lived separately, but she would come to see him in the morning and would find him in front of his sketch, and would sit next to him, lean her head on his shoulder, and they would work it out together. He sketched his figures of the theory of woman separately, and he searched for the features and the modelling of the forms: some had the mongoloid quality of the angel of the Annunciation of Memmi; others the slenderness of Cornélie and her later robust, fuller figure; he searched for the folds: in the folds of their peplos robes the women freed themselves from the violet dusk of the ruined city and further on they changed their robes as a masquerade of the centuries: the noble lady’s dress with a train, the veils of the sultans, the woollen dresses of cleaning women, the wimple of the sisters of mercy — with the clothing becoming more modern as the wearer embodied a more modern age … And in that grouping the drawing had such an ethereal and sober quality, the transition from falling drapery to practical tight-fitting clothes was so gradual, that Cornélie could scarcely detect a transition and seemed to see a single style, a single style of dress, though every silhouette was dressed in a different cut and material, with a different line … In the drawing there was a purity recalling the Old Masters, a purity of outline, but modern — highly strung and morbid — and yet without a conventional ideal of symbolic bodily shapes; there was a Raphael-like harmony in the grouping; in the watercolour tint of the first studies the haze of Italy: the ruined city glimmered as she saw the Forum glimmer; the city of glass and iron glittered with its Crystal Palace-like construction, out of a white apotheosis of light, as he had seen around Naples from Sorrento. She felt that he was engaged on a great work and had never been so vitally involved in anything as she was now in his concept and his sketches. She sat still and silent behind him and followed his drawing of the swirling banners and winding blazons, and she held her breath when she saw how with a few smudges of white and dabs of light — as if he had light on his palette — he evoked the dreamlike glass city on the horizon. Then he would ask her something about a figure, put his arm round her waist, pull her towards him, and they would peer endlessly and work out line and concept, till evening fell, the evening chill pervaded the workplace and they slowly got up. They would go out and the Corso would bring them back to real life: sitting silently at Argano’s, they would survey the bustle; and in their little restaurant, looking deep into each other’s eyes, they would eat their simple meal, so visibly harmoniously happy that the Italians, the two who were always at the table furthest from them at the same time, smiled as they greeted them.