Duco Van Der Staal had taken a large, vault-like studio, with a chilly
north light, up three flights of stairs in the Via del Babuino. Here
he painted, modelled and studied and here he dragged all the beautiful
and antique objects that he succeeded in picking up in the little shops
along the Tiber or in the Mercato dei Fiori. That was his passion:
to hunt through Rome for a panel of an old triptych or a fragment of
ancient sculpture. In this way his studio had not remained the large,
chilly, vault-like workroom bearing witness to zealous and serious
study, but had become a refuge for dim-coloured remnants of antiquity
and ancient art, a museum for his dreaming spirit. Already as a child,
as a boy, he had felt that passion for antiquity developing; he learnt
how to rummage through the stocks of old Jewish dealers; he taught
himself to haggle when his purse was not full; and he collected first
rubbish and afterwards, gradually, objects of artistic and financial
value. And it was his great hobby, his one vice: he spent all his
pocket-money on it and, later, without reserve, the little that he was
able to earn. For sometimes, very seldom, he would finish something and
sell it. But generally he was too ill-satisfied with himself to finish
anything; and his modest notion was that everything had already been
created and that _his_ art was useless.
This idea sometimes paralysed him for months together, without making
him unhappy. When he had the money to keep himself going--and his
personal needs were very small--he felt rich and was content in his
studio, or would wander, perfectly content, through the streets of
Rome. His long, careless, lean, slender body was at such times clad in
his oldest suit, which afforded an unostentatious glimpse of an untidy
shirt with a soft collar and a bit of string instead of a tie; and
his favourite headgear was a faded hat, battered out of shape by the
rain. His mother and sisters as a rule found him unpresentable, but had
given up trying to transform him into the well-groomed son and brother
whom they would have liked to take to the drawing-rooms of their Roman
friends. Happy to breathe the atmosphere of Rome, he would wander
for hours through the ruins and see, in a dazzling vision of phantom
columns, ethereal temples and translucent marble palaces looming up
in a shimmering sunlit twilight; and the tourists going by with their
Baedekers, who passed this long, lean young man seated carelessly on
the foundations of the Temple of Saturn, would never have believed in
his architectural illusions of harmonious ascending lines, crowned by
an array of statues in noble and god-like attitudes, high in the blue
sky.
But he saw them before him. He raised the shafts of the pillars, he
fluted the severe Doric columns, he bent and curved the cushioned Ionic
capitals and unfurled the leaves of the Corinthian acanthuses; the
temples rose in the twinkling of an eye, the basilicas shot up as by
magic, the graven images stood white against the elusive depths of the
sky and the Via Sacra became alive. He, in his admiration, lived his
dream, his past. It was as though he had known preexistence in ancient
Rome; and the modern houses, the modern Capitol and all that stood
around the tomb of his Forum were invisible to his eyes.
He would sit like this for hours, or wander about and sit down again
and be happy. In the intensity of his imagination, he conjured up
history from the clouds of the past, first of all as a mist, a
miraculous haze, whence the figures stepped out against the marble
background of ancient Rome. The gigantic dramas were enacted before
his dreaming eyes as on an ideal stage which stretched from the
Forum to the hazy, sun-shot azure of the Campagna, with slips that
lost themselves in the depths of the sky. Roman life came into
being, with a toga'd gesture, a line of Horace, a sudden vision of
an emperor's murder or a contest of gladiators in the arena. And
suddenly also the vision paled and he saw the ruins, the ruins only,
as the tangible shadow of his unreal illusion: he saw the ruins as
they were, brown and grey, eaten up with age, crumbled, martyred
mutilated with hammers, till only a few occasional pillars lifted
and bore a trembling architrave, that threatened to come crashing to
the ground. And the browns and greys were so richly and nobly gilded
by splashes of sunlight, the ruins were so exquisitely beautiful in
decay, so melancholy in their unwitting fortuitousness of broken lines,
of shattered arches and mutilated sculpture, that it was as though
he himself, after his airy vision of radiant dream-architecture, had
tortured and mutilated them with an artist's hand and caused them to
burst asunder and shake and tremble, for the sake of their wistful
aftermath of beauty. Then his eyes grew moist, his heart became more
full than he could bear and he went away, through the Arch of Titus by
the Colosseum, through the Arch of Constantine, on and on, and hurried
past the Lateran to the Via Appia and the Campagna, where his smarting
eyes drank in the blue of the distant Alban Hills, as though that would
cure them of their excessive gazing and dreaming....
Neither in his mother nor in his sisters did he find a strain that
sympathized with his eccentric tendencies; and, since that one friend
who died, he had never found another and had always been lonely, within
and without, as though the victim of a predestination which would not
allow him to meet with sympathy. But he had peopled his loneliness
so densely with his dreams that he had never felt unhappy because of
it; and, even as he loved roaming alone among the ruins and along
the country-roads, so he cherished the privacy of his lonely studio,
with the many silent figures on an old panel of some triptych, on a
tapestry, or on the many closely hung sketches all around him, all with
the charm of their lines and colours, all with the silent gesture of
their movement and emotion and all blending together in twilit corners
or a shadowy antique cabinet. And in between all this lived his china
and bronze and old silver, while the faded gold embroidery of an
ecclesiastical vestment gleamed faintly and the old leather bindings of
his books stood in comfortable brown TOWS, ready to give forth, when
his hands opened them, images which mistily drifted upwards, living
their loves and their sorrows in the tempered browns and reds and golds
of the soundless atmosphere of the studio.
Such was his simple life, without much inward doubting, because he
made no great demands upon himself, and without the modern artist's
melancholy, because he was happy in his dreams. He had never, despite
his hotel life with his mother and sisters--he slept and took his meals
at Belloni's--met many people or concerned himself with strangers,
being by nature a little shy of Baedekered tourists, of short-skirted
English ladies, with their persistent little exclamations of uniform
admiration, and feeling entirely impossible in the half-Italian,
half-cosmopolitan set of his rather worldly mother and smart little
sisters, who spent their time dancing and cycling with young Italian
princes and dukes.
And, now that he had met Cornélie de Retz, he had to confess to himself
that he possessed but little knowledge of human nature and that he had
never learnt to believe in the reality of such a woman, who might have
existed in books, but not in actual life. Her very appearance--her
pallor, her drooping charm, her weariness--had astonished him; and her
conversation astonished him even more: her positiveness mingled with
hesitation; her artistic feeling modified by the endeavour to take part
in her period, a period which he failed to appreciate as artistic,
enamoured as he was of Rome and of the past. And her conversation
astonished him, attractive though the sound of it was and offended
as he often was by a recurrent bitterness and irony, followed again
by depression and discouragement, until he thought it over again and
again, until in his musing he seemed to hear it once more on her own
lips, until she joined the busts and torsos in his studio and appeared
before him in the lily-like frailness of her visible actuality, against
the preraphaelite stiffness of line and the Byzantine gold and colour
of the angels and madonnas on canvas and tapestry.
His soul had never known love; and he had always looked on love as
imagination and poetry. His life had never known more than the natural
virile impulse and the ordinary little love-affair with a model. And
his ideals on love swayed in a too wide and unreal balance between a
woman who showed herself in the nude for a few lire and Petrarch's
Laura; between the desire roused by a beautiful body and the exaltation
inspired by Dante's Beatrice; between the flesh and the dream. He had
never contemplated an encounter of kindred souls, never longed for
sympathy, for love in the full and pregnant sense of the word. And,
when he began to think and to think long and often of Cornélie de Retz,
he could not understand it. He had pondered and dreamed for days, for a
week, about a woman in a poem about a woman in real life never.
And that he, irritated by some of her sayings, had nevertheless seen
her stand with her lily-like outline against his Byzantine triptych,
like a wraith in his lonely dreams, almost frightened him, because it
had made him lose his peace of mind.