It was then, after a few days, that Cornélie conceived the idea
of leaving the boarding-house and going to live in rooms. The
hotel-life disturbed her budding thoughts, like a wind of vanity
that was constantly blighting very vague and fragile blossoms; and,
despite a torrent of abuse from the marchesa, who reproached her with
having engaged to stay the whole winter, she moved into the rooms
which she had found with Duco Van der Staal, after much hunting and
stair-climbing. They were in the Via dei Serpenti, up any number of
stairs: a set of two roomy, but almost entirely unfurnished apartments,
containing only the absolute essentials; and, though the view extended
far and wide above the house-tops of Rome to the circular ruin of
the Colosseum, the rooms were rough and uncomfortable, bare and
uninviting. Duco had not approved of them and said that they made him
shiver, although they faced the sun; but there was something about the
ruggedness of the place that harmonized with Cornélie's new mood.
When they parted that day, he thought how inartistic she was and she
how unmodern he was. They did not meet again for several days; and
Cornélie was very lonely, but did not feel her loneliness, because
she was writing a pamphlet on the social position of divorced women.
The idea was suggested to her by a few sentences in a tract on the
feminist problem; and at once, without wasting much time in thought,
she flung off her sentences in a succession of impulses and intuitions,
rough-hewn, cold and clear; she wrote in an epistolary style, without
literary art, as though to warn girls against cherishing too many
illusions about marriage.
She had not made her rooms comfortable; she sat there, high up over
Rome, with her view across the house-tops to the Colosseum, writing,
writing and writing, absorbed in her sorrow, uttering herself in her
stubborn sentences, feeling intensely bitter, but pouring the wormwood
of her soul into her pamphlet. Mrs. Van der Staal and the girls,
who came to see her, were surprised by her untidy appearance, her
rough-looking rooms, with a dying fire in the little grate and with no
flowers, no books, no tea and no cushions; and, when they went away
after fifteen minutes, pleading urgent errands, they looked at one
another, tripping down the endless stairs, with eyes of amazement,
utterly at a loss to understand this transformation of an interesting,
elegant little woman, surrounded by an aura of poetry and a tragic
past, into an "independent woman," working furiously at a pamphlet full
of bitter invective against society. And, when Duco looked her up again
in a week's time and came to sit with her a little, he remained silent,
stiff and upright in his chair, without speaking, while Cornélie read
the beginning of her pamphlet to him. He was touched by the glimpses
which it revealed to him of personal suffering and experience, but he
was irritated by a certain discord between that slender, lily-like
woman, with her drooping movements, and the surroundings in which
she now felt at her ease, entirely absorbed in her hatred for the
society--Hague society--which had become hostile to her because she
refused to go on living with a cad who ill-treated her. And, while she
was reading, Duco thought:
She would not write like that if she were not writing it all down from
her own suffering. Why doesn't she make a novel of it? Why generalize
from one's personal sorrows and why that bitter, warning voice?...
He did not like it. He thought the sound of that voice was hard, those
truths so personal, that bitterness unattractive and that hatred of
convention so small. And, when she put a question to him, he did not
say much, nodded his head in vague approval and remained sitting in his
stiff, uncomfortable attitude. He did not know what to answer, he was
unable to admire, he thought her inartistic. And yet a great compassion
welled up within him when he saw, in spite of it all, how charming she
would be and what charm and womanly dignity would be hers could she
find the line of her life and move harmoniously along that line with
the music of her own movement. He now saw her taking a wrong road, a
path pointed out to her by the fingers of others and not entered upon
from the impulse of her own soul. And he felt the deepest pity for
her. He, an artist, but above all a dreamer, sometimes saw vividly,
despite his dreaming, despite his sometimes all-embracing love of line
and colour and atmosphere; he, the artist and dreamer, sometimes very
clearly saw the emotion looming through the outward actions of his
fellow-creatures, saw it like light shining through alabaster; and he
suddenly saw her lost, seeking, straying: seeking she herself knew not
what, straying she herself knew not through what labyrinth, far from
her line, the line of her life and the course of her soul's journey,
which she had never yet found.
She sat before him excitedly. She had read her last pages with a
flushed face, in a resonant voice, her whole being in a fever. She
looked as if she would have liked to fling those bitter pages at the
feet of her Dutch sisters, at the feet of all women. He, absorbed
in his speculations, melancholy in his pity for her, had scarcely
listened, nodding his head in vague approval. And suddenly she began
to speak of herself, revealed herself wholly, told him her life: her
existence as a young girl at the Hague, her education with a view to
shining a little and being attractive and pretty, with not one serious
glance at her future, only waiting for a good match, with a flirtation
here and a little love-affair there, until she was married: a good
match, in her own circle; her husband a first lieutenant of hussars, a
fine, handsome fellow, of a good, distinguished family, with a little
money. She had fallen in love with him for his handsome face and his
fine figure, which his uniform showed to advantage, and he with her
as he might have done with any other girl who had a pretty face. Then
came the revelation of those very early days: the discord between
their characters manifesting itself luridly at once. She, spoilt at
home, dainty, delicate, fastidious, but selfishly fastidious and
flying out against any offence to her own spoilt little _ego_; he no
longer the lover but immediately and brutally the man with rights to
this and rights to that, with an oath here and a roar there; she with
neither the tact nor the patience to make of their foundering lives
what could still be made of them, nervous, quick-tempered, quick to
resent coarseness, which made his savagery flare up so violently that
he ill-treated her, swore at her, struck her, shook her and banged her
against the wall.
The divorce followed. He had not consented at first, content, in spite
of all, to have a house and in that house a wife, female to him, the
male, and declining to return to the discomfort of life in chambers,
until she simply ran away, first to her parents, then to friends in
the country, protesting loudly against the law, which was so unjust
to women. He had yielded at last and allowed himself to be accused of
infidelity, which was not beside the truth. She was now free, but stood
as it were alone, looked at askance by all her acquaintances, refusing
to yield to their conventional demand for that sort of half-mourning
which, according to their conventional ideas, should surround a
divorced woman and at once returning to her former life, the gay life
of an unmarried girl. But she had felt that this could not go on, both
because of her acquaintances and because of herself: her acquaintances
looking at her askance and she loathing her acquaintances, loathing
their parties and dinners, until she felt profoundly unhappy, lonely
and forlorn, without anything or anybody to cling to, and experienced
all the depression that weighs down on the divorced woman. Sometimes,
in her heart of hearts, she reflected that by dint of great patience
and great tact she might have managed that man, that he was not wicked,
only coarse, that she was still fond of him, or at least of his
handsome face and his sturdy figure. Love, no, it was not love; but had
she ever thought of love as she now sometimes pictured it? And did not
nearly everybody live more or less so-so, with a good deal of give and
take?
But this regret she hardly confessed to herself, did not now confess to
Duco; and what she did confess was her bitterness, her hatred of her
husband, of marriage, of convention, of people, of the world, of all
the great generalities, generalizing her own feelings into one great
curse against life. He listened to her with pity. He felt that there
was something noble in her, which, however, had been stifled from, the
beginning. He forgave her for not being artistic, but he was sorry that
she had never found herself, that she did not know what she was, who
she was, what her life should be, or where the line of her life wound,
the only path which she ought to tread, as every life follows one path.
Oh, how often, if a person would let herself go, like a flower, like a
bird, like a cloud, like a star which so obediently ran its course, she
would find her happiness and her life, even as the flower or the bird
finds them, even as the cloud drifts before the sun, even as the star
follows its course through the heavens! But he told her nothing of his
thoughts, knowing that, especially in her present mood of bitterness,
she would not understand them and could derive no comfort from them,
because they would be too vague for her and too far removed from her
own manner of thinking. She thought of herself, but imagined that she
was thinking of women and girls and their movement towards the future.
Women's lines ... but had not every woman a line of her own? Only, how
few of them knew it: their direction, their path, their line of life,
their wavering course in the twilight of the future. And perhaps,
because they did not know it for themselves, they were now all seeking
together a broad path, a main road, along which they would march in
troops, in a threatening multitude of women, in regiments of women,
with banners and mottoes and war-cries, a broad path, parallel with the
movement of the men, until the two paths would melt into one, until the
troops of women would mingle with the troops of men, with equal rights
and equal fullness of life....
He said nothing to her. She noticed his silence and did not see how
much was going on within him, how earnestly he was thinking of her,
how profoundly he pitied her. She thought that she had bored him. And
suddenly, around her, she saw the dim, barren room, saw that the
fire was out; and her zeal subsided, her fever cooled and she thought
her pamphlet bad, lacking strength and conviction. What would she not
have given for a word from him! But he sat silent, seemed to take no
interest, probably did not admire her style of writing. And she felt
sad, deserted, lonely, estranged from him and bitter because of the
estrangement; she felt ready to weep, to sob; and, strange to say, in
her bitterness she thought of _him_, of her husband, with his handsome
face. She could not restrain herself, she wept. Duco came up to her,
put his hand on her shoulder. Then she felt something of what was going
on within him and that his silence was not due to coldness. She told
him that she could not remain alone that evening: she was too wretched,
too wretched. He comforted her, said that there was much that was good,
much that was true in her pamphlet; that he was not a good judge of
these modern questions; that he was never clever except when he talked
about Italy; that he felt so little for people and so much for statues,
so little for what was newly building for a coming century and so much
for what lay in ruins and remained over from earlier centuries. He said
it as though apologizing. She smiled through her tears but repeated
that she could not stay alone that evening and that she was coming with
him to Belloni's, to his mother and sisters. And they went together,
they walked round together; and, to divert her mind, he spoke to her
of his own thoughts, told her anecdotes of the Renascence masters. She
did not hear what he said, but his voice was sweet to her ears. There
was something so gentle about his indifference to the modern things
that interested her, he had so much calmness, healing as balsam, in the
restfulness of his soul, which allowed itself to move along the golden
thread of his dreams, as though that thread was the line of his life,
so much calmness and gentleness that she too grew calmer and gentler
and looked up to him with a smile.
And, however far removed they might be from each other--he going along
a dreamy path, she lost in an obscure maze--they nevertheless felt each
other approaching, felt their souls drawing nearer to each other, while
their bodies moved beside each other in the actual street, through
Rome, in the evening. He put his arm through hers to guide her steps.
And, when they came in sight of Belloni's, she thanked him, she did not
know exactly for what: for the look in his eyes, for his voice, for
the walk, for the consolation which she felt inexplicably yet clearly
radiating from him; and she was glad to have come with him this evening
and to feel the distraction of the Belloni _table-d'hôte_ around her.
But at night, alone, alone in her bare rooms, she was overcome by
her wretchedness as by a sea of blackness; and, looking out at the
Colosseum, which showed faintly as a black arc in the black night, she
sobbed until she felt herself sinking to the point of death, derelict,
lonely and forlorn, high up above Rome, above the roofs, above the pale
lights of Rome by night, under the clouds of the black night, sinking
and derelict, as though she were drifting, a ship-wrecked waif on an
ocean which drowned the world and roared its plaint to the inexorable
heavens.