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 rows,
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 ideas 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; on 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.