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.
CHAPTER XII
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 phœnix-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!”
CHAPTER