The months dreamed past. And their happiness caused such a summer to
bloom in them that she ripened in beauty and he in talent; the pride in
them broke into expression: in her it was the blossoming of her being,
in him it was energy; her languid charm became transformed into a proud
slenderness; her contour increased in fullness; a light illumined
her eyes, a gladness shone about her mouth. His hands quivered with
nervous emotion when he took up his brushes; and the skies of Italy
arched firmaments before his eyes like a canopy of love and fervid
colour. He drew and completed a series of water-colours: hazes of
dreamy atmosphere which suggested Turner's noblest creations; natural
monuments of sheer haze; all the milky blue and pearly mistiness of the
Bay of Naples, like a goblet filled with light in which a turquoise
is melted into water; and he sent them to Holland, to London, found
that he had suddenly discovered his vocation, his work and his fame:
courage, strength, aim and conquest.
She too achieved a certain success with her article: it was discussed,
contested; her name was mentioned. But she felt a certain indifference
when she read her name in connection with the feminist movement. She
preferred to live with him his life of observation and emotion; and
she often imparted to all the haze of his vision, to the excessive
haziness of his colour-dream a lustre of light, a definite horizon,
a streak of actuality which gave realism to the mist of his ideal. She
learnt with him to distinguish and to feel nature, art, all Rome; and,
when a symbolic impulse overmastered him, she surrendered herself
to it entirely. He planned a large sketch of a procession of women,
mounting along a line of life that wound up a hill: they seemed
to be moving out of a crumbling city of antiquity, whose pillars,
joined by a single architrave, quivered on high in a violet haze
of evening dusk; they seemed to be releasing themselves from the
shadow of the ruins fading away on the horizon into the void of
night; and they thronged upwards, calling to one another aloud,
beckoning to one another with great waving gestures of their hands,
under a mighty fluttering of streamers and pennants; they grasped
hammer and pick-axe with sinewy arms; and the throng of them moved
up and up, along the line, where the light grew whiter and whiter,
until in the hazy air there dimly showed the distant vista of a new
city, whose iron buildings, like central stations and Eiffel towers
in the white glimmer of the distance, gleamed up very faintly with
a reflection of glass arches and glass roofs and, high in the air,
the musical staves of the threads of sound and accompaniment....
And to so great an extent did their influences work upon each other's
souls that she learnt to see and he learnt to think: she saw beauty,
art, nature, haze and emotion and no longer imagined them but felt
them; he, as in his sketch, a very vague, modern city of glass and
iron, saw a modern city rising out of his dream-haze and thought of a
modern question, in accordance with his own nature and aptitudes. She
learnt above all to see and feel like a woman in love, with the
eyes and heart of the man she loves; he thought out the question
plastically. But whatever the imperfection in the absoluteness of
their new spheres of feeling and thought, the reciprocal influence,
through their love, gave them a happiness so great, so united,
that at that moment they could not contemplate it or apprehend it:
it was almost ecstasy, a faint unreality, in which they dreamed,
whereas it was all pure truth and tangible actuality. Their manner
of thinking, feeling and living was an ideal of reality, an ideal
entered and attained, along the gradual line of their life, along
the golden thread of their love; and they scarcely apprehended or
contemplated it, because the every-day life still clung to them. But
only to the smallest, inevitable extent. They lived apart; but in
the morning she went to him and found him working at his sketch; and
she sat down beside him and leant her head on his shoulder; and they
thought it out together. He sketched each figure in his procession
of women separately and sought for the features and the modelling of
the figures: some had the Mongolian aspect of Memmi's angel of the
Annunciation, others Cornélie's slenderness and her later, fuller
wholesomeness; he sought for the folds of the costumes: the women
escaped from the violet dusk of the ruined city in pleated pepli;
and farther on their garments altered as in a masquerade of the ages:
the long trains of the medieval ladies, the veils of the sultanas, the
homespun of the workwomen, the caps of the nursing sisters, the attire
becoming more modern as the wearer personified a more modern age. And
in this grouping the draughtsmanship was so unsubstantial and sober,
the transition from drooping folds to practical stiffness so careful
and so gradual, that Cornélie hardly perceived the transition, that
she appeared to be contemplating one style, one fashion in dress,
whereas each figure nevertheless was clad in a different stuff, of
different cut, falling into different lines.... The drawing displayed
an old-mastery purity, a simplicity of outline, which was nevertheless
modern, nervous and morbid, but without the conventional ideal of
symbolical human forms; the grouping showed a Raphaelite harmony,
the water-colour tints of the first studies the haze of Italy: the
ruined city loomed in the dusk as he saw the Forum looming; the city
of iron and glass gleamed up with its architecture of light, such as
he had seen from Sorrento shining around Naples. She felt that he was
creating a great work and had never taken so lively an interest in
anything as she now did in his idea and his sketches. She sat behind
him silent and still and followed his drawing of the waving banners
and fluttering pennants; and she did not breathe when she saw him,
with a few dabs of white and touches of light--as though light were
one of the colours on his palette--make the glass city emerge as
from a dream on the horizon. Then he would ask her something about
one of the figures and put his arm around her and draw her to him;
and they would long sit scrutinizing and thinking out lines and ideas,
until evening fell and the evening chill shuddered through the studio
and they rose slowly from their seats. Then they went out and in
the Corso they returned to real life: silently, sitting at Aragno's,
they watched the bustle outside; and in their little restaurant, with
their eyes absorbing each other's glance, they ate their simple dinner
and looked so obviously and harmoniously happy, that the Italians,
the two who also always sat at the far table, at that same hour,
smiled as they bowed to them on entering....