The Inevitable. Louis Couperus

XIII

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      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