One morning when Cornélie stayed indoors she went through the books
that lay scattered about her room. And she found that it was useless
for her to read Ovid, in order to study something of Roman manners,
some of which had alarmed and shocked her; she found that Dante and
Petrarch were too difficult to learn Italian from, whereas she had only
to pick up a word or two in order to make herself understood in a shop
or by the servants; she found Hare's _Walks_ a too wearisome guide,
because every cobble-stone in Rome did not inspire her with the same
interest that Hare evidently derived from it. Then she confessed to
herself that she could never see Italy and Rome as Duco Van der Staal
did. She never saw the light of the skies or the drifting of the clouds
as he had seen them in his unfinished water-colour sketches. She had
never seen the ruins transfigured in glory as he did in his hours of
dreaming on the Palatine or in the Forum. She saw a picture merely with
a layman's eye; a Byzantine madonna made no appeal to her. She was very
fond of statues; but to fall head over cars in love with a mutilated
marble torso, in the spirit in which he loved the _Eros_, seemed to her
sickly ... and yet it seemed to be the right spirit in which to see the
_Eros_. Well, not sickly, she admitted ... but morbid: the word, though
she herself smiled at it, expressed her opinion better; not sickly, but
morbid. And she looked upon an olive as a tree rather like a willow,
whereas Duco had told her that an olive was the most beautiful tree in
the world.
She did not agree with him, either about the olive or about the
_Eros_; and yet she felt that he was right from a certain mysterious
standpoint on which there was no room for her, because it was like
a mystic eminence amid impassable sensitive spheres which were not
hers, even as the eminence was to her an unknown vantage-point of
sensitiveness and vision. She did not agree with him and yet she was
convinced of his greater rightness, his truer view, his nobler insight,
his deeper feeling; and she was certain that her way of seeing Italy,
in the disappointment of her disillusion, in the grey light of a
growing indifference, was neither noble nor good; and she knew that
the beauty of Italy escaped her, whereas to him it was like a tangible
and comprehensible vision. And she cleared away Ovid and Petrarch and
Hare's guide-book and locked them up in her trunk and took out the
novels and pamphlets which had appeared that year about the woman
movement in Holland. She took an interest in the problem and thought
that it made her more modern than Duco, who suddenly seemed to her to
belong to a bygone age, not modern, not modern. She repeated the words
with enjoyment and suddenly felt herself stronger. To be modern: that
should be her strength. One phrase of Duco's had struck her immensely,
that exclamation:
"Oh, if we could only find an aim! Our life has a line, a path, which
it must follow...."
To be modern: was that not a line? To find the solution of a modern
problem: was that not an aim in life? He was quite right, from his
point of view, from which he saw Italy; but was not the whole of Italy
a past, a dream ... at least that Italy which Duco saw, a dreamy
paradise of nothing but art? It could not be right to stand like that,
to see like that a dream like that. The present was here: on the grey
horizon muttered an approaching storm; and the latter-day problems
flashed like lightning. Was that not what she had to live for? She
felt for the woman, she felt for the girl: she herself had been the
girl, brought up only as a social ornament, to shine, to be pretty
and attractive and then of course to get married; she had shone and
she had married; and now she was three-and-twenty, divorced from the
husband who at one time had been her only aim and, for her sake, the
aim of her parents; now she was alone, astray, desperate and utterly
disconsolate: she had nothing to cling to and she suffered. She still
loved him, cad and scoundrel though he was; and she had thought that
she was doing something very clever, when she went abroad, to Italy,
to study art. But she did not understand art, she did not feel Italy.
Oh, how clearly she saw it, after those talks with Duco, that she would
never understand art, even though she used to sketch a bit, even though
she used to have a biscuit-group after Canova in her boudoir, _Cupid
and Psyche_: so nice for a young girl! And with what certainty she now
knew that she would never grasp Italy, because she did not think an
olive-tree so very beautiful and had never seen the sky of the Campagna
as a fluttering phoenix-wing! No, Italy would never be the consolation
of her life....
But what then? She had been through much, but she was alive and very
young. And once again, at the sight of those pamphlets, at the sight of
that novel, the desire arose in her soul: to be modern, to be modern!
And to take part in the problem of to-day! To live for the future! To
live for her fellow-women, married or unmarried!...
She dared not look deep down into herself, lest she should waver. To
live for the future!... It separated her a little more from Duco, that
new ideal. Did she mind? Was she in love with him? No, she thought not.
She had been in love with her husband and did not want to fall in love
at once with the first agreeable young man whom she chanced to meet in
Rome....
And she read the pamphlets, about the feminine problem and love. Then
she thought of her husband, then of Duco. And wearily she dropped the
pamphlets and reflected how sad it all was: people, women, girls. She,
a woman, a young woman, an aimless woman: how sad her life was! And
Duco: he was happy. And yet he was seeking the line of his life, yet he
was looking out for his aim. A new restlessness had entered into him.
And she wept a little and anxiously twisted herself on her cushions and
clasped her hands and prayed, unconsciously, without knowing to whom
she was praying:
"O God, tell me what to do!"