Inevitable

by Louis Couperus

  “And who else?” asked the prince softly.

  “An English miss,” said the marchesa. “Miss Taylor, she’s sitting over there, in that corner alone … A simple soul … Then the baroness and her daughter … The Dutch woman; a divorcee … And the beautiful American girl.”

  “And what about those two nice Dutch girls?” asked the prince.

  The music blared more loudly and Cornélie could not hear a thing.

  “And the divorced Dutch woman?” the prince continued.

  “No money,” answered the marchesa abruptly.

  “And the young baroness?”

  “No money,” repeated Belloni.

  “So no one but that stocking seller?” asked the prince wearily.

  ‘La Belloni’ became angry, but Cornélie and Duco could not follow the short sentences she rattled off; the music was still booming out.

  “She’s beautiful,” they heard the marchesa say. “She’s worth a fortune. She could be in a top hotel, but she is here, because she was recommended to me as a young girl travelling alone and because it’s cosier here. She has the large drawing-room all to herself and pays fifty lire a day for her two rooms. It makes no difference to her. She pays three times as much for her wood as the others and I even charge her for the wine.”

  “She sells stockings,” murmured the prince reluctantly.

  “Rubbish,” said the marchesa. “Remember that there’s no one else at the moment. Last winter we had rich English people from the nobility, with a daughter, but she was too tall for you. You always find something. You mustn’t be so fussy.”

  “I like the look of those two little Dutch darlings.”

  “They’ve got no money. You’re always attracted to the wrong thing.” “How much has papa promised you, if you …”

  The music swelled.

  “… Wouldn’t matter … If Rudyard talks to her … Taylor is easy… Miss Hope …”

  “I don’t need that many stockings …”

  “… very witty. If you don’t want …”

  “… no …”

  “… then I’ll withdraw … Rudyard will say … How much?”

  “Sixty or seventy thousand: I don’t know exactly.”

  “… Urgent?”

  “Debts are never urgent!”

  “Are you prepared?”

  “All right then. But I’m not selling myself for less than ten million … And… you’ll … get …”

  They both laughed and again the names of Rudyard and Urania rang out.

  “Urania?” he asked.

  “Urania …” replied ‘la Belloni’. “Those Americans are capable. Think of the Countess de Castellane, the Duchess of Marlborough; aren’t they doing honour to their husband’s names? They cut an excellent figure. They are mentioned in every fashion magazine and always with appreciation.”

  “…very well then. I’m tired of all those fruitless winters. But no less than ten million …”

  “Five …”

  “No, ten …”

  The prince and the marchesa had got up. Cornélie looked at Duco. Duco laughed.

  “I couldn’t follow them very well. It’s a joke of course.” Cornélie started.

  “A joke, you think, Mr Van der Staal?”

  “Yes, they’re fantasising.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I do.”

  “Do you understand people?”

  “Oh no, not at all.”

  “I’m slowing beginning to. I think Rome can be dangerous and that a marchesa with a hotel, a prince and a Jesuit …”

  “What then?”

  “Can also be dangerous, if not for your sisters, since they have no money, then for Urania Hope …”

  “I don’t believe a word of it … It was all nonsense. And it doesn’t interest me. But what do you think of Praxiteles’ Eros? Oh, I think it’s the most divine sculpture I’ve ever seen. Oh, the Eros, the Eros …! That is love, true love; the inescapability, the fatality of love that begs forgiveness for the suffering it inflicts …”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “No. I don’t understand people and I’ve never been in love. You’re always so decisive. Dreams are beautiful, statues are wonderful and poetry is everything. Eros is everything, in love. I would never be able to love in reality as beautifully as Eros the symbol of love … No, knowing people doesn’t interest me, and a dream of Praxiteles, still surviving in a torso of mutilated marble, is more noble than anything that calls itself love in the world.”

  She frowned and looked sombre.

  “Let’s go into the ballroom,” she said. “We’re all by ourselves here.”

  X

  THE DAY AFTER THE BALL, Cornélie had a strange feeling; suddenly, as she savoured her superb Genzano, ordered by Rudyard, she realised that it was no coincidence that she was sitting with the baroness and her daughter, Urania and Miss Taylor; realised that the marchesa definitely had an ulterior motive with that arrangement. Rudyard, always polite, thoughtful, always attentive, always with a ticket or an introduction in his pocket that was difficult to obtain, or at least so he led them to believe, and talked the whole time, recently mainly with Miss Taylor, who went faithfully to listen to all the lovely church music and always came home in raptures. The pale, simple, skinny English lady, who was at first enthralled by museums, ruins and sunsets on the Aventine or Monte Mario, and was always tired from her wanderings through Rome, henceforth devoted herself entirely to the hundreds of churches, viewed and studied every one, and especially attended religiously all musical services and was ecstatic about the choir of the Sistine Chapel and the trembling glories of the male sopranos.

  Cornélie talked to Mrs Van der Staal and Baroness Von Rothkirch about what she had caught of the conversation between the marchesa and her nephew through the chink in the door but neither of them, although intrigued, took the words of the marchesa seriously, and regarded them as simply a frivolous ball conversation between a scatterbrained woman, who was keen to match-make, and her reluctant nephew. It struck Cornélie how unwilling people are to believe in seriousness, but the baroness was very nonchalant, said that Rudyard would not do her any harm and still always gave her tickets, and Mrs Van der Staal, who had been long in Rome and used to pensione intrigues, thought that Cornélie was getting too worked up about the fate of the beautiful Urania. However, Miss Taylor had suddenly disappeared from table. People thought she was ill, when it emerged that she had left the Pensione Belloni, but after a few days it was common knowledge through the whole pensione that Miss Taylor had converted to Catholicism and moved into a pensione recommended to her by Rudyard: a boarding-house frequented by many monsignori and where there was a spiritual atmosphere. Her disappearance gave something forced to the conversation between Rudyard, the German ladies and Cornélie and the latter, during a week that the baroness spent in Naples, changed her place and joined her compatriots at table. The Rothkirchs also changed—because of the draught, as the baroness assured the management; new guests took their places: and among those new elements Urania was left alone at table with Rudyard for lunch and dinner. Cornélie blamed herself and on one occasion had a serious talk with the American girl and warned her. But she did not dare tell her what she had overheard at the ball, and her warning made no impression on Urania. And when Rudyard had obtained the privilege of a private audience with the Pope for Miss Hope, Urania refused to hear another bad word said about Rudyard and found him the kindest man she had ever met, Jesuit or not.

  But a pall of mystery continued to cloak Rudyard in the hotel, and people could not agree whether he was a jesuit or even whether he was a priest or a layman.

  XI

  “WHAT DO YOU CARE about those strange people?” he asked.

  They were sitting in his studio, Mrs Van der Staal, Cornélie and the girls, Annie and Emilie. Annie poured tea and they talked about Miss Taylor and Urania.

  “I’m a stranger to you too!” replied Cornélie.

&
nbsp; “You’re not a stranger to me, to us … But I couldn’t care less about Miss Taylor or Urania. Hundreds of ghosts haunt our lives: I don’t see them and feel nothing for them …”

  “And aren’t I a ghost?”

  “I’ve talked to you too much in Borghese and on the Palatine to think you a ghost.”

  “Rudyard is a dangerous ghost,” said Annie.

  “He has no hold over us,” replied Duco.

  Mrs Van der Staal looked at Cornélie. She understood the look and said, with a laugh,

  “No, he has no hold over me either … Yet, if I had had need of religion—I mean church religion—I’d rather be Roman Catholic than Calvinist. But now …”

  She did not finish her sentence. She felt safe in this studio, in this soft, multicoloured swirl of beautiful objects, in their sympathetic presence: she felt in harmony with all of them: with the charming and worldly air of the rather superficial mother and her two beautiful girls: a little doll-like and vaguely cosmopolitan, quite vain about young marquesses with whom they danced and cycled, and with the son, the brother, so completely different from the three women and yet visibly related in a movement, a gesture, the occasional word. It also struck Cornélie that they accepted each other lovingly as they were; Duco his mother and sister with their stories about the Princesses Golonna and Odescalchi; Mrs Van der Staal and the girls, him, with his old jacket and dishevelled hair. And when he began talking, especially talking about Rome, when he put his dream into words, in words that were almost fit for a book, but which flowed so gradually and naturally from his lips, Cornélie felt harmonious, felt safe, interested, and lost a little of the urge to contradict that his artistic indolence sometimes awakened in her. And apart from that his indolence suddenly seemed to her only apparent, and perhaps affectation, since he showed her sketches, watercolours, none of them finished, but each watercolour vibrant with light, especially with light, with the light of all Italy: the pearly sunsets across the fluid emerald of Venice; Florence’s towers drawn with dreamy vagueness in tender rose-coloured skies; fortress-like Siena blue-black in bluish moonlight; orange sunflares behind St Peter’s, and especially the ruins and in every light: the Forum in fierce sunlight, the Palatine in the evening twilight, the Colosseum mysterious in the night, and then the Campagna: the dream skies and hazy light of the cheerful and sad Campagna, with soft pink mauves, dewy blues, dusky violet, of the brash ochres of pyrotechnic sunsets, and fanning clouds like purple phoenix wings. And when Cornélie asked him why nothing was finished, he replied that nothing was any good. He saw the skies as dreams, visions and apotheoses, and on paper they were water and paint, and paint could be finished. And then he lacked self-confidence. And then he abandoned his skies, he said, and copied Byzantine Madonnas.

  When he saw that his watercolours nevertheless interested her, he went on talking about himself, telling her how he first enthused about the noble and naive Primitives, Giotto and especially Lippo Memmi … How subsequently, spending a year in Paris, he had found that nothing compared with Forain: dry, cool satire in two or three lines; how then, in the Louvre, Rubens had revealed himself: Rubens, whose unique talent and unique brush he had traced among all the imitation and apprentice work of his numerous pupils, until he was able to say which cherub was by Rubens himself in a sky full of cherubs painted by four or five pupils.

  And then, he said, he did not think about painting for weeks, and did not pick up a paintbrush, and went to the Vatican every day and was totally absorbed by the noble marbles.

  Once he had spent a whole morning sitting dreaming in front of Eros, once he had dreamed up a poem accompanied by a very faint monotonous melody, like a devout incantation: at home he had wanted to put down the poem and the music on paper, but had not been able. He could no longer stand Forain, found Rubens disgusting and coarse, and had remained loyal to the Primitives.

  “And suppose I painted a lot and sent a lot to exhibitions? Would I be happier? Would I feel satisfaction at having done something? I don’t think so. Sometimes I finish a watercolour, sell it, and I can survive for a month without troubling mama. I don’t care about money. Ambition is totally alien to me! But don’t let’s talk about me. Are you still thinking about the future and … bread?”

  “Perhaps,” she replied, smiling sadly, and around her the studio darkened, the silhouettes of his mother and sisters faded, as they sat quietly and languidly uninterested in easy chairs, and all colour dissolved silently into shadow. “But I am so weak. You say you are no artist, and I, I am no apostle.”

  “Giving direction to one’s life is the difficult thing. Every life has a line, a direction, a way, a path: it is along that line that life must flow into death and what comes after death; and that line is difficult to find. I shan’t find my line.”

  “I can’t see my line before me either …”

  “Do you know, a restlessness has come over me. Mama, do you hear, a restlessness has come over me. In the past I used to dream in the Forum, I was happy and didn’t think about my line. Mama, do you think about your line, and do my sisters think about theirs?”

  His sisters, in the dark, sunk in the deep chairs like cats, giggled a little. Mama got up.

  “My dear Duco, you know, I can’t follow you. I admire Cornélie for being able to appreciate your watercolours and for understanding what you mean by that line. My line is the way home now, as it’s getting very late …”

  “That is the line of the next moment. But I feel restlessness about my line of the days and weeks afterwards. I’m not living the right way. The Past is very beautiful, and so peaceful because it’s over. But I have lost that calm. The Present is really very small. But the Future … Oh, if only we could find a goal! For the Future …”

  They were no longer listening to him; they groped their way down the dark stairs. “Bread?” he wondered.

  XII

  ONE MORNING when she stayed home, Cornélie reviewed the reading matter that was scattered about her room. And she decided that it was useless for her to read Ovid in order to study a few Roman customs, some of which had alarmed and shocked her; she decided that Dante and Petrarch were too difficult for studying Italian, when it was enough to pick up a few words to make oneself understood in a shop or with the serving staff; she decided Hare’s Walks was too exhausting as a guidebook, since every last stone in Rome did not excite the same interest in her as it had obviously done in Hare. Then she admitted to herself that she would never be able to see Rome the way Duco van der Staal saw it. She never saw the light in the skies and the scudding of clouds as he had in his unfinished watercolour studies. She never saw the ruins glorified as he did in his hours spent dreaming in the Forum and on the Palatine. She saw a painting only with the eyes of a layman; a Byzantine Madonna meant nothing to her. She did like sculpture; passionate love for a lump of mutilated marble such as he felt for the Eros seemed pathological to her, she thought at the time, but “morbid”—though the word made her smile—expressed her view better. Not pathological, but morbid. And she considered an olive a tree that resembled a willow, though Duco had told her that an olive was the loveliest tree in the world.

  She did not agree with him, either about the olive or about Eros and yet she felt that from some mysterious perspective that was inaccessible to her, he was right, since it was like a mystical hill amid unbridgeable mystical circles, which he passed through as emotional spheres that were not hers, just as the hill was an unknown throne of feeling and perspective. She disagreed with him and yet she was convinced that he was right in a superior way, had a superior vision, a nobler insight, a deeper feeling; and she was certain that her way of seeing Italy—in the disappointment of her dream—was not noble or good, that the beauty of Italy was escaping her; while for him it was like a tangible and embraceable vision. And she cleared away Ovid, Petrarch and Hare’s guidebook, and locked them in her case and took out the novels and pamphlets that had appeared that year on the Women’s Movement in Holland. She was interested in
the issue and it made her feel more modern than Duco, who suddenly appeared to her as if belonging to a past era. Not modern. Not modern. She repeated the word with relish and suddenly felt stronger. Being modern would be her strength. One remark of Duco’s had made a deep impression: that exclamation “Oh, if only we could find a goal! Our life has a line, a path that you must travel …” Being modern, wasn’t that a line? Finding a solution to a modern question, was that not a goal? He, he was right, from his point of view, from which he viewed Italy, but was not the whole of Italy a past, a dream, at least the Italy that Duco saw, a dream paradise of nothing but art. It could not be good to stand and see and dream like that. The Present was there: on the grey horizons there was the rumble of an approaching storm and the modern questions flashed like lightning. Was it not that that she must live for? She felt for Women and Girls: she herself had been a Girl, brought up with nothing but a drawing-room education, in order to shine, beautifully and charmingly, and then to marry. And she had been beautiful, and charming, she had shone and had married, and now she was twenty-three, divorced from that husband, who had once been her only goal: now she was alone, lost, in despair and mortal desolation: she had nothing to cling to, she was suffering. She still loved him, blackguard, wretch that he was; and she had thought she was being very strong by setting off on a trip, for the sake of art, to Italy. Oh, how clearly she saw, after those conversations with Duco, that she would never understand art, though she had drawn a little in the past, although she had once had an unglazed terracotta group after Canova in her bedroom: Amor and Psyche, so sweet for a young girl. And how certain she was now that she would not understand Italy, since she did not find an olive tree that beautiful, and had never seen the sky of the Campagna as a fanned phoenix’s wing. No, Italy would never be her life’s consolation …