"What do those strangers matter to you?" asked Duco.
They were sitting in his studio: Mrs. van der Staal, Cornélie and the
girls, Annie and Emilie. Annie was pouring out the tea; and they were
discussing Miss Taylor and Urania.
"I am a stranger to you too!" said Cornélie.
"You are not a stranger to me, to us. But Miss Taylor and Urania don't
matter. Hundreds of shadows pass through our lives: I don't see them
and don't feel for them."
"And am I not a shadow?"
"I have talked to you too much in the Borghese and on the Palatine
to look upon you as a shadow."
"Rudyard is a dangerous shadow," said Annie.
"He has no hold over us," Duco replied.
Mrs. van der Staal looked at Cornélie. She understood the enquiring
glance and said, laughing:
"No, he has no hold over me either. Still, if I felt the need of
a religion, I mean an ecclesiastical religion, I would rather be a
Roman Catholic than a Protestant. But, as things are ..."
She did not complete her sentence. She felt safe in this studio,
in this soft, many-coloured profusion of beautiful things, in the
affection of her friends; she felt in harmony with them all: with the
worldly charm of that somewhat superficial mother and her two pretty
girls, a little doll-like and vaguely cosmopolitan and a trifle vain
of the little marquises with whom they danced and bicycled; and with
that son, that brother so very different from the three of them and
yet obviously related to them, as a movement, a gesture, a single
word would show. It also struck Cornélie that they accepted each
other affectionately as they were: Duco, his mother and sisters,
with their stories about the Princesses Colonna and Odescalchi;
mevrouw and the girls and him, with his worn jacket and his unkempt
hair. And, when he began to speak, especially about Rome, when he
put his dream into words, in almost bookish sentences, which however
flowed easily and naturally from his lips, Cornélie felt in harmony
with her surroundings, secure and interested and to some extent
lost that longing to contradict him which his artistic indolence
sometimes aroused in her. And, besides, his indolence suddenly seemed
to her merely apparent and perhaps an affection, for he showed her
sketches and water-colour drawings, not one of them finished, but
every water-colour alive with light before all things, alive with
all that light of Italy: the pearl sunsets over the molten emerald of
Venice; the campanili of Florence drawn vaguely and dreamily against
tender tea-rose skies; Siena fortress-like, blue-black in the bluish
moonlight; the blazing sunshine behind St. Peter's; and, above all,
the ruins, in every kind of light: the Forum in the bright sunlight,
the Palatine by twilight, the Colosseum mysterious in the night;
and then the Campagna: all the dream-like skies and luminous haze of
the glad and sad Campagna, with pale-pink mauves, dewy blues, dusky
violets or the swaggering ochres of pyrotechnical sunsets and clouds
flaring like the crimson pinions of the phoenix. And, when Cornélie
asked him why nothing was finished off, he answered that nothing was
right. He saw the skies as dreams, visions and apotheoses; and on
his paper they became water and paint; and paint was not a thing to
be finished off. Besides, he lacked the self-confidence. And then he
laid his skies aside, he said, and sat down to copy Byzantine madonnas.
When he saw that his water-colours interested her nevertheless, he
went on talking about himself: how he had at first raved over the
noble and ingenuous Primitives, Giotto and especially Lippo Memmi;
how, after that, spending a year in Paris, he had found nothing that
excelled Forain: cold, dry satire in two or three lines; how, next,
in the Louvre, Rubens had become revealed to him, Rubens whose own
talent and whose own brush he used to trace amid all the prentice-work
and imitations of his pupils, until he was able to tell which cherub
was by Rubens himself in a sky full of cherubs painted by four or
five disciples.
And then, he said, he would pass weeks without giving a thought to
painting or taking up a brush and would go daily to the Vatican,
lost in contemplation of the magnificent marbles.
Once he had sat dreaming a whole morning in front of the Eros; once
he had dreamt a poem there, to a very gentle, melodious, monotonous
accompaniment, like an inward incantation. On coming home he had
tried to put both poem and music on paper, but he had failed. Now he
could no longer look at Forain, thought Rubens coarse and disgusting,
but remained faithful to the Primitives:
"And suppose for a moment that I painted a lot and sent a lot of
pictures to exhibitions? Should I be any the happier? Should I feel
satisfied in having done something? I doubt it. Sometimes I do finish
a water-colour and sell it; and then I can go on living for a month
without troubling Mamma. Money I don't care about. Ambition is quite
foreign to my nature.... But don't let us talk about myself. Do you
still think of the future and ... bread?"
"Perhaps," she said, with a melancholy laugh, while the studio around
her grew dusk and dim and the figures of his mother and sisters,
sitting silent, languid and uninterested in their easy-chairs,
gradually faded away and every colour slowly paled. "But I am so
weak-minded. You say that you are not an artist; and I ... I am not
an apostle."
"To give one's life a course: that is the difficulty. Every life
has a line, an appointed course, a road, a path: life has to flow
along that line to death and what comes after death; and that line
is difficult to find. I shall never find my line."
"I don't see my line before me either."
"Do you know, a restlessness has come over me. Mamma, listen, a
restlessness has come over me. I used to dream in the Forum, I was
happy and didn't think about my line, my appointed course. Mamma,
do you think about your line? Do you, girls?"
His sisters giggled in the dark, sunk in their low chairs, like two
pussy-cats. Mamma got up:
"Duco dear, you know I can't follow you. I admire Cornélie for liking
your water-colours and understanding what you mean by that line. My
line is to go home at once, for it's very late."
"That's the line of the next two seconds. But there is a restlessness
about my line that affects it for days and weeks to come. I am not
leading the right life. The past is very beautiful and so peaceful,
because it has been. But I have lost that peace. The present is very
small. But the future! ... Oh, if we could only find an aim ... for
the future!"
They no longer listened; they went down the dark stairs, groping
their way.
"Bread?" he asked himself, wonderingly.