The months dreamed past. And their happiness caused such a summer to
bloom in them that she ripened in beauty and be in talent; the pride in
them broke into expression: in her it was the blossoming of her being,
in him it was energy; her languid charm became transformed into a proud
slenderness; her contour increased in fullness; a light illumined
her eyes, a gladness shone about her mouth. His hands quivered with
nervous emotion when he took up his brushes; and the skies of Italy
arched firmaments before his eyes like a canopy of love and fervid
colour. He drew and completed a series of water-colours: hazes of
dreamy atmosphere which suggested Turner's noblest creations; natural
monuments of sheer haze; all the milky blue and pearly mistiness of the
Bay of Naples, like a goblet filled with light in which a turquoise
is melted into water; and he sent them to Holland, to London, found
that he had suddenly discovered his vocation, his work and his fame:
courage, strength, aim and conquest.
She too achieved a certain success with her article: it was discussed,
contested; her name was mentioned. But she felt a certain indifference
when she read her name in connection with the feminist movement. She
preferred to live with him his life of observation and emotion; and she
often imparted to all the haze of his vision, to the excessive haziness
of his colour-dream, a lustre of light, a definite horizon, a streak
of actuality which gave realism to the mist of his ideal. She learnt
with him to distinguish and to feel nature, art, all Rome; and, when
a symbolic impulse overmastered him, she surrendered herself to it
entirely. He planned a large sketch of a procession of women, mounting
along a line of life that wound up a hill: they seemed to be moving out
of a crumbling city of antiquity, whose pillars, joined by a single
architrave, quivered on high in a violet haze of evening dusk; they
seemed to be releasing themselves from the shadow of the ruins fading
away on the horizon into the void of night; and they thronged upwards,
calling to one another aloud, beckoning to one another with great
waving streamers and pennants; they grasped hammer and pick-axe with
sinewy arms; and the throng of them moved up and up, along the line,
where the light grew whiter and whiter, until in the hazy air there
dimly showed the distant vista of a new city, whose iron buildings,
like central stations and Eiffel towers in the white glimmer of the
distance, gleamed up very faintly with a reflection of glass arches and
glass roofs and, high in the air, the musical staves of the threads of
sound and accompaniment....
And to so great an extent did their influences work upon each other's
souls that she learnt to see and he learnt to think: she saw beauty,
art, nature, haze and emotion and no longer imagined them but felt
them; he, as in his sketch, a very vague, modern city of glass and
iron, saw a modern city rising out of his dream-haze and thought of
a modern question, in accordance with his own nature and aptitudes.
She learnt above all to see and feel like a woman in love, with the
eyes and heart of the man she loves; he thought out the question
plastically. But whatever the imperfection in the absoluteness of their
new spheres of feeling and thought, the reciprocal influence, through
their love, gave them a happiness so great, so united, that at that
moment they could not contemplate it or apprehend it: it was almost
ecstasy, a faint unreality, in which they dreamed, whereas it was all
pure truth and tangible actuality. Their manner of thinking, feeling
and living was an ideal of reality, an ideal entered and attained,
along the gradual line of their life, along the golden thread of
their love; and they scarcely apprehended or contemplated it, because
the everyday life still clung to them. But only to the smallest,
inevitable extent. They lived apart; but in the morning she went to
him and found him working at his sketch; and she sat down beside him
and leant her head on his shoulder; and they thought it out together.
He sketched each figure in his procession of women separately and
sought for the features and the modelling of the figures: some had the
Mongolian aspect of Memmes angel of the Annunciation, others Cornélie's
slenderness and her later, fuller wholesomeness; he sought for the
folds of the costumes: the women escaped from the violet dusk of the
ruined city in pleated pepli; and farther on their garments altered as
in a masquerade of the ages: the long trains of the medieval ladies,
the veils of the sultanas, the homespun of the workwomen, the caps of
the nursing sisters, the attire becoming more modern as the wearer
personified a more modern age. And in this grouping the draughtsmanship
was so unsubstantial and sober, the transition from drooping folds to
practical stiffness so careful and so gradual, that Cornélie hardly
perceived the transition, that she appeared to be contemplating one
style, one fashion in dress, whereas each figure nevertheless was
clad in a different stuff, of different cut, falling into different
lines.... The drawing displayed an old-mastery purity, a simplicity of
outline, which was nevertheless modern, nervous and morbid, but without
the conventional ideal of symbolical human forms; the grouping showed
a Raphaelite harmony, the water-colour tints of the first studies the
haze of Italy the ruined city loomed in the dusk as he saw the Forum
looming; the city of iron and glass gleamed up with its architecture
of light, such as he had seen from Sorrento shining around Naples. She
felt that he was creating a great work and had never taken so lively an
interest in anything as she now did in his idea and his sketches. She
sat behind him silent and still and followed his drawing of the waving
banners and fluttering pennants; and she did not breathe when she saw
him, with a few dabs of white and touches of light--as though light
were one of the colours on his palette--make the glass city emerge as
from a dream on the horizon. Then he would ask her something about one
of the figures and put his arm around her and draw her to him; and they
would long sit scrutinizing and thinking out lines and ideas, until
evening fell and the evening chill shuddered through the studio and
they rose slowly from their seats. Then they went out and in the Corso
they returned to real life: silently, sitting at Aragno's, they watched
the bustle outside; and in their little restaurant, with their eyes
absorbing each other's glance, they ate their simple dinner and looked
so obviously and harmoniously happy that the Italians, the two who also
always sat at the far table, at that same hour, smiled as they bowed to
them on entering....