A coolness had arisen between Mrs. van der Staal and Cornélie; and
Cornélie no longer went to dine at Belloni's. She did not see mevrouw
and the girls again for weeks; but she saw Duco daily. Notwithstanding
the essential differences in their characters, they had grown so
accustomed to being together that they missed each other if a day
passed without their meeting; and so they had gradually come to
lunch and dine together every day, almost as a matter of course:
in the morning at the osteria and in the evening at some small
restaurant or other, usually very simply. To avoid dividing the bill,
Duco would pay one time and Cornélie the next. Generally they had
much to talk about: he taught her Rome, took her after lunch to all
manner of churches and museums; and under his guidance she began
to understand, appreciate and admire. By unconscious suggestion he
inspired her with some of his ideas. She found painting very difficult,
but understood sculpture much more readily. And she began to look upon
him as not merely morbid; she looked up to him, he spoke quite simply
to her, as from his exalted standpoint of feeling and knowledge and
understanding, of very exalted matters which she, as a girl and later
as a young married woman, had never seen in the glorious apotheosis
which he caused to rise before her like the first gleam of a dawn,
of a new day in which she beheld new types of life, created of all
that was noblest in the artist's soul. He regretted that he could not
show her Giotto in the Santa Croce at Florence and the Primitives in
the Uffizi and that he had to teach her Rome straight away; but he
introduced her to all the exuberant art-life of the Papal Renascence,
until, under the influence of his speech, she shared that life for a
single intense second and until Michael Angelo and Raphael stood out
before her, also living. After a day like that, he would think that
after all she was not so hopelessly inartistic; and she thought of
him with respect, even after the suggestion was interrupted and when
she reflected on what she had seen and heard and really, deep down in
herself, no longer understood things so well as she had that morning,
because she was lacking in love for them. But so much glamour of colour
and the past remained whirling before her eyes in the evening that
it made her pamphlet seem drab and dull; and the feminist movement
ceased to interest her and she did not care about Urania Hope.
He admitted to himself that he had quite lost his peace of mind,
that Cornélie stood before him in his thoughts, between him and his
old triptychs, that his lonely, friendless, ingenuous, simple life,
content with wandering through and outside Rome, with reading,
dreaming and now and then painting a little, had changed entirely
in habit and in line, now that the line of his life had crossed that
of hers and they both seemed to be going one way, he did not really
know why. Love was not exactly the word for the feeling that drew
him towards her. And just very vaguely, inwardly and unconsciously
he suspected, though he never actually said or even thought as much,
that it was the line of her figure, which was marked by something
almost Byzantine, the slenderness of the frame, the long arms, the
drooping lily-line of the woman who suffered, with the melancholy in
her grey eyes, overshadowed by their almost too-long lashes; that it
was the noble shape of her hand, small and pretty for a tall woman;
that it was a movement of her neck, as of a swaying stalk, or a tired
swan trying to glance backwards. He had never met many women and those
whom he had met had always seemed very ordinary; but she was unreal
to him, in the contradictions of her character, in its vagueness
and intangibility, in all the half-tints which escaped his eye,
accustomed to half-tints though it was.... What was she like? What he
had always seen in her character was a woman in a novel, a heroine in
a poem. What was she as a living woman of flesh and blood? She was
not artistic and she was not inartistic; she had no energy and yet
she did not lack energy; she was not precisely cultivated; and yet,
obeying her impulse and her intuition, she wrote a pamphlet on one of
the most modern questions and worked at it and revised and copied it,
till it became a piece of writing no worse than another. She had a
spacious way of thinking, loathing all the pettiness of the cliques,
no longer feeling at home, after her suffering, in her little Hague
set; and here, in Rome, at a dance she listened behind a door to
a nonsensical conspiracy, hardly worthy of the name, he thought,
and had gone to Urania Hope to mingle with the confused curves of
smaller lives, curves without importance, of people whom he despised
for their lack of line, of colour, of vision, of haze, of everything
that was dear as life to him and made up life for him.... What was
she like? He did not understand her. But her curve was of importance
to him. She was not without a line: a line of art and line of life;
she moved in the dream of her own indefiniteness before his gazing
eyes; and she loomed up out of the haze, as out of the twilight of
his studio atmosphere, and stood before him like a phantom. He would
not call that love; but she was dear to him like a revelation that
constantly veiled itself in secrecy. And his life as a lonely wanderer
was, it was true, changed; but she had introduced no inharmonious
habit into his life: he enjoyed taking his meals in a little café or
osteria; and she took them with him easily and simply, not squalidly
but pleasantly and harmoniously, with an adaptability and with just
as much natural grace as when she used to dine of an evening at the
table-d'hôte at Belloni's. All this--that contradictory admixture of
unreality, of inconsistency; that living vision of indefiniteness;
that intangibility of her individual essence; that self-concealment of
the soul; that blending of her essential characteristics--had become
a charm to him: a restlessness, a need, a nervous want in his life,
otherwise so restful, so easily contented and calm, but above all a
charm, an indispensable every-day charm.
And, without troubling about what people might think, about what
Mrs. van der Staal thought, they would one day go to Tivoli together,
or another day walk from Castel Gandolfo to Albano and drive to the
Lago di Nemi and picnic at the Villa Sforza-Cesarini, with the broken
capital of a classic pillar for a table. They rested side by side in
the shadow of the trees, admired the camellias, silently contemplated
the glassy clearness of the lake, Diana's looking-glass, and drove
back over Frascati. They were silent in the carriage; and he smiled
as he reflected how they had been taken everywhere that day for man
and wife. She also thought of their increasing intimacy and at the
same time thought that she would never marry again. And she thought
of her husband and compared him with Duco, so young in the face but
with eyes full of depth and soul, a voice so calm and even, with
everything that he said much to the point, so accurately informed;
and then his calmness, his simplicity, his lack of passion, as though
his nerves had schooled themselves only to feel the calmness of art
in the dreamy mist of his life. And she confessed to herself, there,
in the carriage beside him, amid the softly shelving hills, purpling
away in the evening, while before her faded the rose-mallow of a pale
gold sunset, that he was dear to her because of that cleverness, that
absence of passion, that simplicity and that accuracy of information--a
clear voice sounding up out of the dreamy twilight--and that she was
happy to be sitting beside him, to hear that voice and by chance
to feel his hand, happy in that her line of life had crossed his,
in that their two lines seemed to form a path towards the increasing
brightness, the gradual daily elucidation of their immediate future....