A coolness had arisen between Mrs. Van der Staal and Cornélie; and
Cornélie no longer went to dine at Belloni's. She did not see mevrouw
and the girls again for weeks; but she saw Duco daily. Notwithstanding
the essential differences in their characters, they had grown so
accustomed to being together that they missed each other if a day
passed without their meeting; and so they had gradually come to lunch
and dine together every day, almost as a matter of course: in the
morning at the _osteria_ and in the evening at some small restaurant or
other, usually very simply. To avoid dividing the bill, Duco would pay
one time and Cornélie the next. Generally they had much to talk about:
he taught her Rome, took her after lunch to all manner of churches and
museums; and under his guidance she began to understand, appreciate
and admire. By unconscious suggestion he inspired her with some of his
ideas. She found painting very difficult, but understood sculpture much
more readily. And she began to look upon him as not merely morbid; she
looked up to him, he spoke quite simply to her, as from his exalted
standpoint of feeling and knowledge and understanding, of very exalted
matters which she, as a girl and later as a young married woman, had
never seen in the glorious apotheosis which he caused to rise before
her like the first gleam of a dawn, of a new day in which she beheld
new types of life, created of all that was noblest in the artist's
soul. He regretted that he could not show her Giotto in the Santa
Croce at Florence and the Primitives in the Uffizi and that he had
to teach her Rome straight away; but lie introduced her to all the
exuberant art-life of the Papal Renascence, until, under the influence
of his speech, she shared that life for a single intense second and
until Michael Angelo and Raphael stood out before her, also living.
After a day like this, he would think that, after all, she was not so
hopelessly inartistic; and she thought of him with respect, even after
the suggestion was interrupted and when she reflected on what she had
seen and heard and really, deep down in herself, no longer understood
things so well as she had that morning, because she was lacking in
love for them. But so much glamour of colour arid of the past remained
whirling before her eyes in the evening that it made her pamphlet seem
drab and dull; and the feminist movement ceased to interest her and she
did not care about Urania Hope.
He admitted to himself that he had quite lost his peace of mind, that
Cornélie stood before him in his thoughts, between him and his old
triptychs, that his lonely, friendless, ingenuous, simple life, content
with wandering through and outside Rome, with reading, dreaming and now
and then painting a little, had changed entirely in habit and in line,
now that the line of his life had joined that of hers and they both
seemed to be going one way, he did not really know why. Love was not
exactly the word for the feeling that drew him towards her. And just
very vaguely, inwardly and unconsciously he suspected, though he never
actually said or even thought as much, that it was the line of her
figure, which was marked by something almost Byzantine, the slenderness
of the frame, the long arms, the drooping lily-line of the woman who
suffered, with the melancholy in her grey eyes, overshadowed by their
almost too-long lashes; that it was the noble shape of her hand, small
and pretty for a tall woman; that it was a movement of her neck, as
of a swaying stalk, or a tired swan trying to glance backwards. He
had never met many women and those whom he had met had always seemed
very ordinary; but she was unreal to him, in the contradictions of her
character, in its vagueness and intangibility, in all the half-tints
which escaped his eye, accustomed to half-tints though it was.... What
was she like? What he had always seen in her character was a woman
in a novel, a heroine in a poem. What was she as a living woman of
flesh and blood? She was not artistic and she was not inartistic; she
had no energy and yet she did not lack energy; she was not precisely
cultivated and yet, obeying her impulse and her intuition, she wrote
a pamphlet on one of the most modern questions and worked at it and
revised and copied it, till it became a piece of writing no worse than
another. She had a spacious way of thinking, loathing all the pettiness
of the cliques, no longer feeling at home, after her suffering, in her
little Hague set; and here, in Rome, at a dance, she listened behind
a door to a nonsensical conspiracy, hardly worthy of the name, he
thought, and had gone to Urania Hope to mingle with the confused curves
of smaller lives, curves without importance, of people whom he despised
for their lack of line, of colour, of vision, of haze, of everything
that was dear as life to him and made up life for him.... What was
she like? He did not understand her. But her curve was of importance
to him. She was not without a line: a line of art and line of life;
she moved in the dream of her own indefiniteness before his gazing
eyes; and she loomed up out of the haze, as out of the twilight of his
studio atmosphere, and stood before him like a phantom. He would not
call that love; but she was dear to him like a revelation that was
constantly veiling itself in secrecy. And his life as a lonely wanderer
was, it was true, changed; but she had introduced no inharmonious
habit into his life: he enjoyed taking his meals in a little café or
_osteria_; and she took them with him easily and simply, not squalidly
but pleasantly and harmoniously, with an adaptability and with just
as much natural grace as when she used to dine of an evening at the
_table-d'hôte_ at Belloni's. All this--that contradictory admixture
of unreality, of inconsistency; that living vision of indefiniteness;
that intangibility of her individual essence; that self-concealment of
the soul; that blending of her essential characteristics--had become
a charm to him: a restlessness, a need, a nervous want in his life,
otherwise so restful, so easily contented and calm, but above all a
charm, an indispensable everyday charm.
And, without troubling about what people might think, about what Mrs.
Van der Staal thought, they would one day go to Tivoli together, or
another day walk from Castel Gandolfo to Albano and drive to the Lago
di Nemi and picnic at the Villa Sforza-Cesarini, with the broken
capital of a classic pillar for a table. They rested side by side in
the shadow of the trees, admired the camellias, silently contemplated
the glassy clearness of the lake, Diana's looking-glass, and drove
back over Frascati. They were silent in the carriage; and he smiled as
he reflected how they had been taken everywhere that day for man and
wife. She also thought of their increasing intimacy and at the same
time thought that she would never marry again. And she thought of her
husband and compared him with Duco, so young in the face but with eyes
full of depth and soul, a voice so calm and even, with everything that
he said so much to the point, so accurately informed; and then his
calmness, his simplicity, his lack of passion, as though his nerves
had schooled themselves only to feel the calmness of art in the dreamy
mist of his life. And she confessed to herself, there, in the carriage
beside him, amid the softly shelving hills, purpling away in the
evening, while before her faded the rose-mallow of a pale gold sunset,
that he was dear to her because of that cleverness, that absence of
passion, that simplicity and that accuracy of information--a clear
voice sounding up out of the dreamy twilight--and that she was happy
to be sitting beside him, to hear that voice and by chance to feel his
hand, happy in that her line of life had crossed his, in that their
two lines seemed to form a path towards the increasing brightness, the
gradual daily elucidation of their immediate future....