“You poor thing,” she said softly and filled his glass from their flask. “But why?”
“Why? Why? You’re demeaning yourself.”
“I’m not that exalted … No, now I want to speak. I’m not on a pedestal. Just because I have a few modern ideas, and a few others that are more liberal than those of the mass of women? Apart from that I’m an ordinary woman. If a man is jovial and witty, it amuses me. No, Duco, I’m speaking. I don’t find the prince a blackguard, I think maybe he’s conceited, but I think he’s jovial and witty. You know that I’m very fond of you too, but you’re neither cheerful nor witty. You’re much more. I won’t even compare il nostro Gilio with you … I don’t want to say anything more about you, otherwise you’ll get pedantic. But you’re not cheerful or witty. And my poor nature sometimes needs those things. What is there in my life? Nothing but you, only you. I am very happy to have your friendship, I am happy to have met you. But why can’t I be cheerful occasionally. Really, there’s a light-hearted side to me, frivolous even … Must I fight against it? Is it bad? Tell me, Duco, am I bad?”
He gave a melancholy smile, a moist sheen lay across his eyes and he did not answer.
“I can fight, if I have to,” she continued. “But is this something to fight against? It’s a moment’s froth. Nothing more. I’ve forgotten about it instantly. I’ve forgotten about the prince instantly. And you I don’t forget.”
He looked at her and beamed.
“Do you understand? Do you feel that I don’t flirt and play the coquette with you? Hold my hand, don’t be angry any more …”
She stretched out her hand to him across the table and he squeezed her fingers.
“Cornélie,” he continued softly. “Yes, I feel that you are genuine. Cornélie, marry me.”
She looked earnestly straight ahead, dropped her head a little and stared straight in front of her. They were no longer eating. The two Italians got up, said goodbye and left. They were alone. The waiter had put out some fruit for them and withdrawn.
They were both silent for a moment. Then she spoke in a very soft voice and with such an air of tender melancholy that he could have burst into sobs of adoration.
“Of course I knew you would ask me that one day. It was in the nature of things. A great friendship like ours led naturally to that question. But it’s impossible, my dear Duco … It’s impossible, my dear boy … I have my ideas … but it’s not that. I’m against marriage …but it’s not that. In some cases a woman betrays all her ideals in a single instant … What is it then …?”
She stared wide-eyed, brushed her forehead, as if she could not see clearly … Still, she continued:
“The thing is … that I’m afraid of marriage. I’ve known it, I know what it is … I can see my husband clearly in front of me right now. I can see that habit, that drudgery in front of me, in which all nuance is erased. That’s what marriage is: habit, drudgery. And now I’ll tell you frankly: I think marriage is disgusting. I think that habit is disgusting. I think passion is beautiful, but marriage isn’t passion. Passion can be noble, and superhuman, but marriage is a human institution of petty human morality and calculation … And I’ve become afraid of such wise moral bonds. I have promised myself—and I think I shall keep that promise—never to marry again. My whole nature has become unsuitable. I am no longer the young girl from The Hague with her soirées and dinners, on the lookout for a husband, together with her parents … My love for him was passion! And in my marriage he wanted to bridle that passion till it became drudgery and habit. I rose up … Don’t let me talk about it. Passion is too short-lived to fill a marriage … Respect afterwards, etcetera? There’s no need to get married for that. I can respect, even unmarried. Of course, there is the question of children, there are all kinds of difficulties …I can’t think that through now. I just feel now, very seriously and calmly, that I am unsuited to marriage, and never want to marry again. I wouldn’t make you happy … Don’t be sad, Duco. I love you, you are dear to me. And perhaps … I’ve met you at the right moment. If I had met you earlier in my Hague days … you would certainly have been too high for me to aspire to. I wouldn’t have come to love you. Now I can understand you, respect you and look up to you. I’m saying this to you quite simply, that I love you and look up to you, look up to you, for all your softness, in a way that I never looked up to my husband, however much he asserted his masculine rights. And you must believe, with great firmness, that I am telling the truth. Flirting … is something I do only with Gilio …”
He looked at her through his silent tears. He got up, called the waiter, paid absent-mindedly, while his eyes were swimming and gleaming. They went out and she hailed a carriage and gave the address of Villa Doria-Pamphili. She remembered that the gardens were open. They drove there in silence, overwhelmed by their thoughts of the future, which opened trembling before them. Sometimes he took deep breaths and shivered all over. Once she squeezed his hand with great emotion. They got out at the gate of the villa, and walked together along its majestic avenues. Down below lay Rome, and they suddenly saw St Peter’s. But they did not talk, and she suddenly sat down on an antique bench and in her weakness began softly weeping. He put his arm round her and consoled her. She dried her tears, smiled and embraced him, returned his kiss … Dusk started to fall and they went back. He gave the address of his studio. She followed him there. And she gave herself to him, in the fullness of her honesty and truth, and with a love so powerful and overwhelming that she thought she would faint in his arms.
XXV
THEY DID NOT CHANGE their life. Duco, though, after a scene with his mother, no longer slept at Belloni, but in a box room, adjoining his studio, which at first had been full of suitcases and junk. Cornélie regretted the scene, since she had always liked Mrs Van der Staal and the girls. But she felt a surge of pride, and despised Mrs Van der Staal for being unable to understand Duco or her. Still, she would have liked to prevent the estrangement. At her suggestion Duco visited his mother again, but she remained cool and rejected him. After that Cornélie and Duco went to Naples. They were not running away, they just did it; Cornélie told Urania and the prince that she was going to Naples for a while and that Van der Staal might follow her. She did not know Naples and would very much appreciate it if Van der Staal could be her guide in and around the city. Cornélie kept on her rooms in Rome. And they spent two weeks of mindless, pure, intense happiness. Their love burgeoned in the golden southern skies of Naples, by the blue waves of Amalfi, Sorrento, Capri and Castellammare, simple, irresistible and calm. They glided gradually along the purple thread of their lives, hand in hand they followed the lines that had merged into a single path, oblivious to people’s laws and ideas, and their attitude was so lofty that their situation was not something shameless, although in themselves they despised the world. But their happiness softened all that pride in their soaring souls, as if it were strewing blossoms around them. They were living as if in a dream, at first among the marbles of the museum, later on the flower-covered cliffs of Amalfi, on the beach at Capri, or on the terrace of the hotel in Sorrento: the rush of the sea at their feet; yonder, in a pearly haze, vaguely white, like smudged chalk, Castellammare and Naples and the ghost of Vesuvius, with its hazy plume of smoke.
They kept away from everyone, from all people, all tourists: they ate at a small table and it was generally thought that they were newly-weds. Those who looked them up in the guest book saw their two names and commented in whispers. But they did not hear, they did not see, they were living their dream, looking into each other’s eyes or at the opal sky, the pearly sea, and the hazy white mountains in the distance, with the towns set in them like chalk patches.
When they had almost run out of money they smiled and returned to Rome and lived there as they had before; she in her rooms, he in his studio, and they had their meals together. But they pursued their dream among the ruins on the Via Appia, around Frascati: beyond the Ponte Molle, on the slopes of Monte Mario and in the gard
ens of the villas, among the statues and paintings, mixing their happiness with the atmosphere of Rome: he interweaving his new love with his love of Rome, she falling in love with Rome for his sake. And that enchantment created a kind of halo around them, so that they did not see ordinary life and did not meet ordinary people.
Finally, one afternoon, Urania found them both at home, in Cornélie’s room, with the fire lit, she staring smiling into the fire, he sitting at her feet, and she with her arm round his neck. And they were obviously giving so little thought to anything but their own love, that neither of them heard the knock, and both suddenly saw her standing in front of them, as an unsuspected reality. Their dream was over for that day. Urania laughed, Cornélie laughed, and Duco pulled up an armchair. And Urania, happy, beautiful, dazzling, told them that she was engaged. Where on earth had the two of them got to? she asked inquisitively. She was engaged now. She had already been to San Stefano and had seen the old prince. And everything was beautiful, good, and sweet: the old castle “a dear old house”, the old man “a dear old man”. She saw everything through the glittering curtain of her forthcoming tide of princess. The date of the wedding had been set, before Easter, so in just over three months. The ceremony was to be in San Carlo, with all the lustre of a great wedding. Her father was coming over for the occasion with her youngest brother. She was obviously apprehensive about their coming. And she couldn’t stop talking; she told them a thousand details about her trousseau, with which the marchesa was helping her. They were to live in Nice, in a large apartment. She was crazy about Nice: it was a good idea of Gilio’s. And in passing, suddenly remembering, she told them that she had become a Catholic. What a burden! But the monsignori were looking after everything, she was being guided by them. And the Pope was to receive her in a private audience, together with Gilio … The problem was her audience outfit, black of course, but velvet or satin? What did Cornélie recommend? She had such good taste. And the black lace veil fastened with diamonds … Tomorrow she was going to Nice with the marchesa and Gilio, to see their apartment …
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.
XXVII
AND HE FELT SUFFUSED with energy: so many thoughts kept looming in his mind that he was constantly finding new motifs and symbolising them in another figure. He sketched, life-size, a woman walking, with that mixture of child, woman and goddess that characterised his figures—and she followed a gradually descending line into gloomy depths without seeing or understanding; her staring eyes were drawn magnetically towards the abyss: indistinct hands hovered around her like a cloud and gently pushed and guided; above, on high rocks, other figures with harps, in bright light, called to her, but she went down into the depths, impelled by the hands; in the abyss strange purple orchids blossomed, like amorous mouths …
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