One morning when Cornélie stayed indoors she went through the books
that lay scattered about her room. And she found that it was useless
for her to read Ovid, in order to study something of Roman manners,
some of which had alarmed and shocked her; she found that Dante and
Petrarch were too difficult to learn Italian from, whereas she had
only to pick up a word or two in order to make herself understood in a
shop or by the servants; she found Hare's Walks a too wearisome guide,
because every cobble-stone in Rome did not inspire her with the same
interest that Hare evidently derived from it. Then she confessed to
herself that she could never see Italy and Rome as Duco van der Staal
did. She never saw the light of the skies or the drifting of the clouds
as he had seen them in his unfinished water-colour sketches. She had
never seen the ruins transfigured in glory as he did in his hours of
dreaming on the Palatine or in the Forum. She saw a picture merely
with a layman's eye; a Byzantine madonna made no appeal to her. She
was very fond of statues; but to fall head over ears in love with
a mutilated marble torso, in the spirit in which he loved the Eros,
seemed to her sickly ... and yet it seemed to be the right spirit in
which to see the Eros. Well, not sickly, she admitted ... but morbid:
the word, though she herself smiled at it expressed her opinion better;
not sickly, but morbid. And she looked upon an olive as a tree rather
like a willow, whereas Duco had told her that an olive was the most
beautiful tree in the world.
She did not agree with him, either about the olive or about the
Eros; and yet she felt that he was right from a certain mysterious
standpoint on which there was no room for her, because it was like
a mystic eminence amid impassable sensitive spheres which were not
hers, even as the eminence was to her an unknown vantage-point of
sensitiveness and vision. She did not agree with him and yet she
was convinced of his greater rightness, his truer view, his nobler
insight, his deeper feeling; and she was certain that her way of
seeing Italy, in the disappointment of her disillusion, in the
grey light of a growing indifference, was neither noble nor good;
and she knew that the beauty of Italy escaped her, whereas to him
it was like a tangible and comprehensible vision. And she cleared
away Ovid and Petrarch and Hare's guidebook and locked them up in
her trunk and took out the novels and pamphlets which had appeared
that year about the woman movement in Holland. She took an interest
in the problem and thought that it made her more modern than Duco,
who suddenly seemed to her to belong to a bygone age, not modern,
not modern. She repeated the words with enjoyment and suddenly felt
herself stronger. To be modern: that should be her strength. One
phrase of Duco's had struck her immensely, that exclamation:
"Oh, if we could only find an aim! Our life has a line, a path,
which it must follow...."
To be modern: was that not a line? To find the solution of a modern
problem: was that not an aim in life? He was quite right, from his
point of view, from which he saw Italy; but was not the whole of
Italy a past, a dream, at least that Italy which Duco saw, a dreamy
paradise of nothing but art? It could not be right to stand like
that, see like that a dream like that. The present was here: on
the grey horizon muttered an approaching storm; and the latter-day
problems flashed like lightning. Was that not what she had to live
for? She felt for the woman, she felt for the girl: she herself
had been the girl, brought up only as a social ornament, to shine,
to be pretty and attractive and then of course to get married; she
had shone and she had married; and now she was three-and-twenty,
divorced from the husband who at one time had been her only aim and,
for her sake, the aim of her parents; now she was alone, astray,
desperate and utterly disconsolate: she had nothing to cling to and
she suffered. She still loved him, cad and scoundrel though he was;
and she had thought that she was doing something very clever, when she
went abroad, to Italy, to study art. But she did not understand art,
she did not feel Italy. Oh, how clearly she saw it, after those talks
with Duco, that she would never understand art, even though she used
to sketch a bit, even though she used to have a biscuit-group after
Canova in her boudoir, Cupid and Psyche: so nice for a young girl! And
with what certainty she now knew that she would never grasp Italy,
because she did not think an olive-tree so very beautiful and had
never seen the sky of the Campagna as a fluttering phoenix-wing! No,
Italy would never be the consolation of her life....
But what then? She had been through much, but she was alive and very
young. And once again, at the sight of those pamphlets, at the sight
of that novel, the desire arose in her soul: to be modern, to be
modern! And to take part in the problem of to-day! To live for the
future! To live for her fellow-women, married or unmarried!...
She dared not look deep down into herself, lest she should waver. To
live for the future!... It separated her a little more from Duco,
that new ideal. Did she mind? Was she in love with him? No, she
thought not. She had been in love with her husband and did not want
to fall in love at once with the first agreeable young man whom she
chanced to meet in Rome....
And she read the pamphlets, about the feminine problem and love. Then
she thought of her husband, then of Duco. And wearily she dropped the
pamphlets and reflected how sad it all was: people, women, girls. She,
a woman, a young woman, an aimless woman: how sad her life was! And
Duco: he was happy. And yet he was seeking the line of his life,
yet he was looking out for his aim. A new restlessness had entered
into him. And she wept a little and anxiously twisted herself on her
cushions and clasped her hands and prayed, unconsciously, without
knowing to whom she was praying:
"O God, tell me what to do!"