It was then, after a few days, that Cornélie conceived the idea
of leaving the boarding-house and going to live in rooms. The
hotel-life disturbed her budding thoughts, like a wind of vanity
that was constantly blighting very vague and fragile blossoms;
and, despite a torrent of abuse from the marchesa, who reproached
her with having engaged to stay the whole winter, she moved into
the rooms which she had found with Duco van der Staal, after much
hunting and stair-climbing. They were in the Via dei Serpenti, up any
number of stairs: a set of two roomy, but almost entirely unfurnished
apartments, containing only the absolute essentials; and, though the
view extended far and wide above the house-tops of Rome to the circular
ruin of the Colosseum, the rooms were rough and uncomfortable, bare
and uninviting. Duco had not approved of them and said that they made
him shiver, although they faced the sun; but there was something about
the ruggedness of the place that harmonized with Cornélie's new mood.
When they parted that day, he thought how inartistic she was and
she how unmodern he was. They did not meet again for several days;
and Cornélie was very lonely, but did not feel her loneliness,
because she was writing a pamphlet on the social position of divorced
women. The idea was suggested to her by a few sentences in a tract
on the feminist problem; and at once, without wasting much time in
thought, she flung off her sentences in a succession of impulses and
intuitions, rough-hewn, cold and clear; she wrote in an epistolary
style, without literary art, as though to warn girls against cherishing
too many illusions about marriage.
She had not made her rooms comfortable; she sat there, high up over
Rome, with her view across the house-tops to the Colosseum, writing,
writing and writing, absorbed in her sorrow, uttering herself in
her stubborn sentences, feeling intensely bitter, but pouring the
wormwood of her soul into her pamphlet. Mrs. van der Staal and the
girls, who came to see her, were surprised by her untidy appearance,
her rough-looking rooms, with a dying fire in the little grate and
with no flowers, no books, no tea and no cushions; and, when they went
away after fifteen minutes, pleading urgent errands, they looked at
each other, tripping down the endless stairs, with eyes of amazement,
utterly at a loss to understand this transformation of an interesting,
elegant little woman, surrounded by an aura of poetry and a tragic
past, into an "independent woman," working furiously at a pamphlet full
of bitter invective against society. And, when Duco looked her up again
in a week's time and came to sit with her a little, he remained silent,
stiff and upright in his chair, without speaking, while Cornélie read
the beginning of her pamphlet to him. He was touched by the glimpses
which it revealed to him of personal suffering and experience, but he
was irritated by a certain discord between that slender, lily-like
woman, with her drooping movements, and the surroundings in which
she now felt at her ease, entirely absorbed in her hatred for the
society--Hague society--which had become hostile to her because she
refused to go on living with a cad who ill-treated her. And while
she was reading, Duco thought:
"She would not write like that if she were not writing it all down from
her own suffering. Why doesn't she make a novel of it? Why generalize
from one's personal sorrows and why that admonishing voice?..."
He did not like it. He thought the sound of that voice was hard,
those truths so personal, that bitterness unattractive and that
hatred of convention so small. And, when she put a question to him,
he did not say much, nodded his head in vague approval and remained
sitting in his stiff, uncomfortable attitude. He did not know what to
answer, he was unable to admire, he thought her inartistic. And yet a
great compassion welled up within him when he saw, in spite of it all,
how charming she would be and what charm and womanly dignity would be
hers could she find the line of her life and moved harmoniously along
that line with the music of her own movement. He now saw her taking a
wrong road, a path pointed out to her by the fingers of others and not
entered upon from the impulse of her own soul. And he felt the deepest
pity for her. He, an artist, but above all a dreamer, sometimes saw
vividly, despite his dreaming, despite his sometimes all-embracing
love of line and colour and atmosphere; he, the artist and dreamer,
sometimes very clearly saw the emotion looming through the outward
actions of his fellow-creatures, saw it like light shining through
alabaster; and he suddenly saw her lost, seeking, straying: seeking
she herself knew not what, straying she herself knew not through what
labyrinth, far from her line, the line of her life and the course of
her soul's journey, which she had never yet found.
She sat before him excitedly. She had read her last pages with a
flushed face, in a resonant voice, her whole being in a fever. She
looked as if she would have liked to fling those bitter pages
at the feet of her Dutch sisters, at the feet of all women. He,
absorbed in his speculations, melancholy in his pity for her,
had scarcely listened, nodding his head in vague approval. And
suddenly she began to speak of herself, revealed herself wholly,
told him her life: her existence as a young girl at the Hague, her
education with a view to shining a little and being attractive and
pretty, with not one serious glance at her future, only waiting for
a good match, with a flirtation here and a little love-affair there,
until she was married: a good match, in her own circle; her husband
a first lieutenant of hussars, a fine, handsome fellow, of a good,
distinguished family, with a little money. She had fallen in love with
him for his handsome face and his fine figure, which his uniform showed
to advantage, and he with her as he might have done with any other
girl who had a pretty face. Then came the revelation of those very
early days: the discord between their characters manifesting itself
luridly at once. She, spoilt at home, dainty, delicate, fastidious,
but selfishly fastidious and flying out against any offence to her
own spoilt little ego; he no longer the lover but immediately and
brutally the man with rights to this and rights to that, with an oath
here and a roar there; she with neither the tact nor the patience
to make of their foundering lives what could still be made of them,
nervous, quick-tempered, quick to resent coarseness, which made his
savagery flare up so violently that he ill-treated her, swore at her,
struck her, shook her and banged her against the wall.
The divorce followed. He had not consented at first, content, in
spite of all, to have a house and in that house a wife, female to
him, the male, and declining to return to the discomfort of life in
chambers, until she simply ran away, first to her parents, then to
friends in the country, protesting loudly against the law, which was
so unjust to women. He had yielded at last and allowed himself to
be accused of infidelity, which was not beside the truth. She was
now free, but stood as it were alone, looked at askance by all her
acquaintances, refusing to yield to their conventional demand for that
sort of half-mourning which, according to their conventional ideas,
should surround a divorced woman and at once returning to her former
life, the gay life of an unmarried girl. But she had felt that this
could not go on, both because of her acquaintances and because of
herself: her acquaintances looking at her askance and she loathing
her acquaintances, loathing their parties and dinners, until she felt
profoundly unhappy, lonely and forlorn, without anything or anybody
to cling to, and had felt all the depression that weighs down on the
divorced woman. Sometimes, in her heart of hearts, she reflected that
by dint of great patience and great tact she might have managed that
man, that he was not wicked, only coarse, that she was still fond of
him, or at least of his handsome face and his sturdy figure. Love, no,
it was not love; but had she ever thought of love as she now sometimes
pictured it? And did not nearly everybody live more or less so-so,
with a good deal of give and take?
But this regret she hardly confessed to herself, did not now confess
to Duco; and what she did confess was her bitterness, her hatred of
her husband, of marriage, of convention, of people, of the world,
of all the great generalities, generalizing her own feelings into
one great curse against life. He listened to her, with pity. He
felt that there was something noble in her, which, however, had been
stifled from the beginning. He forgave her for not being artistic,
but he was sorry that she had never found herself, that she did
not know what she was, who she was, what her life should be, or
where the line of her life wound, the only path which she ought to
tread, as every life follows one path. Oh, how often, if a person
would but let herself go, like a flower, like a bird, like a cloud,
like a star which so obediently ran its course, she would find her
happiness and her life, even as the flower or the bird finds them,
even as the cloud drifts before the sun, even as the star follows its
course through the heavens. But he told her nothing of his thoughts,
knowing that, especially in her present mood of bitterness, she would
not understand them and could derive no comfort from them, because they
would be too vague for her and too far removed from her own manner of
thinking. She thought of herself, but imagined that she was thinking
of women and girls and their movement towards the future. The lines
of the women ... but had not every woman a line of her own? Only,
how few of them knew it: their direction, their path, their line of
life, their wavering course in the twilight of the future. And perhaps,
because they did not know it for themselves, they were now all seeking
together a broad path, a main road, along which they would march in
troops, in a threatening multitude of women, in regiments of women,
with banners and mottoes and war-cries, a broad path, parallel with
the movement of the men, until the two paths would melt into one,
until the troops of women would mingle with the troops of men, with
equal rights and equal fullness of life....
He said nothing to her. She noticed his silence and did not see how
much was going on within him, how earnestly he was thinking of her,
how profoundly he pitied her. She thought that she had bored him. And
suddenly, around her, she saw the dim, barren room, saw that the fire
was out; and her zeal subsided, her fever cooled and she thought her
pamphlet bad, lacking strength and conviction. What would she not
have given for a word from him! But he sat silent, seemed to take no
interest, probably did not admire her style of writing. And she felt
sad, deserted, lonely, estranged from him and bitter because of the
estrangement; she felt ready to weep, to sob; and, strange to say, in
her bitterness she thought of him, of her husband, with his handsome
face. She could not restrain herself, she wept. Duco came up to her,
put his hand on her shoulder. Then she felt something of what was
going on within him and that his silence was not due to coldness. She
told him that she could not remain alone that evening: she was too
wretched, too wretched. He comforted her, said that there was much
that was good, much that was true in her pamphlet; that he was not
a good judge of these modern questions; that he was never clever
except when he talked about Italy; that he felt so little for people
and so much for statues, so little for what was newly building for
a coming century and so much for what lay in ruins and remained over
from earlier centuries. He said it as though apologizing. She smiled
through her tears but repeated that she could not stay alone that
evening and that she was coming with him to Belloni's, to his mother
and sisters. And they went together, they walked round together; and,
to divert her mind, he spoke to her of his own thoughts, told her
anecdotes of the Renascence masters. She did not hear what he said,
but his voice was sweet to her ears. There was something so gentle
about his indifference to the modern things that interested her, he had
so much calmness, healing as balsam, in the restfulness of his soul,
which allowed itself to move along the golden thread of his dreams,
as though that thread was the line of his life, so much calmness and
gentleness that she too grew calmer and gentler and looked up to him
with a smile.
And, however far removed they might be from each other--he going along
a dreamy path, she lost in an obscure maze--they nevertheless felt each
other approaching, felt their souls drawing nearer to each other, while
their bodies moved beside each other in the actual street, through
Rome, in the evening. He put his arm through hers to guide her steps.
And, when they came in sight of Belloni's, she thanked him, she did
not know exactly for what: for the look in his eyes, for his voice, for
the walk, for the consolation which she felt inexplicably yet clearly
radiating from him; and she was glad to have come with him this evening
and to feel the distraction of the Belloni table-d'hôte around her.
But at night, alone, alone in her bare rooms, she was overcome by
her wretchedness as by a sea of blackness; and, looking out at the
Colosseum, which showed faintly as a black arc in the black night,
she sobbed until she felt herself sinking to the point of death,
derelict, lonely and forlorn, high up above Rome, above the roofs,
above the pale lights of Rome by night, under the clouds of the
black night, sinking and derelict, as though she were drifting,
a shipwrecked waif on an ocean which drowned the world and roared
its plaints to the inexorable heavens.