Inevitable

by Louis Couperus

  But what then? She had been through a lot, but she was alive and very young. And again at the sight of those pamphlets, that novel, the longing reawakened in her heart: to be modern, to be modern! To tackle modern problems. To live for the Future! To live for Women, for Girls …

  She did not dare look deep inside herself, afraid she might waver. To live for the Future … It separated her a little more from Duco, that new ideal. What did she care, did she love him? No, she didn’t think so. She had loved her husband and did not want to fall immediately for the first nice young man who came along, whom she happened to meet in Rome …

  And she read the pamphlets. On the Women’s Question and Love. Then she thought of her husband and then of Duco. And wearily she dropped the pamphlet, thinking how sad it was. People, women, girls. She, a young woman, an aimless woman, how sad she was in her life. And Duco, was he happy? But still he sought the line in his life, still he was on the lookout for his goal. A new restlessness had come over him. And she cried a little, and tossed and turned restlessly on her cushions, and wrung her hands, and prayed unconsciously, to whom she knew not.

  “Oh God, tell me what we’re to do!”

  XIII

  IT WAS SOME DAYS after that Cornélie had the idea of leaving the pensione and taking rooms. Hotel life interfered with her emerging thoughts, like a wind of vanity that kept scorching scarcely formed blossoms, and despite a torrent of abuse from the marchesa, who accused her of having rented for the whole winter, she moved into the room, which she had found after much searching and climbing of stairs with Duco van der Staal. It was in Via dei Serpenti, many flights up, a suite of two spacious but almost completely unfurnished rooms: there were only the bare necessities, and though the view stretched far and wide across the massed houses of Rome to the circular ruin of the Colosseum, the rooms were bleak and cheerless, bare and uninhabitable. Duco had not liked them and said they made him shiver, although they faced the sun, but there was something about the awkwardness of this room that struck Cornélie in her new mood as harmonious. When they parted that day, he thought of her: how little of the artist there is in her; and she thought of him: how un-modern he is! They did not see each other again for days, and Cornélie was very lonely, but did not feel her loneliness, because she was writing a pamphlet about the Social Position of the Divorced Woman. That idea had come to her after she had read a few sentences in a pamphlet on the Women’s Movement, and suddenly, without having thought much about it, she wrote her sentences in a succession of bursts and intuitive leaps, awkward, cool and clear; she wrote in an epistolary style, artlessly, but with conviction and experience, as if to warn girls against having too many illusions about Marriage. She had not made her rooms comfortable; she sat there, high above Rome, looking over the rooftops towards the Colosseum, writing, immersing herself in her suffering, revealing herself in her recalcitrant sentences, bitter, but pouring the gall within her into her pamphlet. Mrs Van der Staal and the girls, who came to visit her, were astonished at her slovenly appearance, at her bleak rooms, the dying embers in the grate, not a flower, no books, no tea, and no cushions, and when they left after a quarter of an hour, on the pretext of having to go shopping, they looked at each other in amazement as they tripped down the endless staircase, utterly confused and mystified by her metamorphosis: from an interesting, elegant young woman, with an aura of poetry about her, and a tragic past—into a ‘free woman’, writing frantically at a pamphlet, with bitter imprecations against society. And when Duco visited her again after a week, and sat with her for a moment, he sat absolutely still, stiff as a board on his chair, without speaking, while Cornélie read him the opening of her pamphlet. He was moved by what he glimpsed of personal suffering and experience, but he was irritated by the lack of harmony between that slim, lily-like woman, with her fractured movements, and the surroundings, in which she now felt at home, totally absorbed in her hatred of society, especially Hague society, which had become hostile to her, because she had not stayed with a blackguard who abused her. And as she read Duco’s thought: she would not write this way if she were not writing everything from the perspective of her own pain. Why doesn’t she turn it into a novella …? Why that generalising of one’s own suffering, and why that admonitory tone … He did not find it beautiful. He found the sound of her voice so harsh, those truths so personal, that bitterness unsympathetic and that hatred of convention so petty. And when she asked him something, he did not say much, shook his head in mild approval, and sat there uncomfortably stiff. He did not know what to reply, he did not know how to admire, he found her un-artistic. And yet a great pity welled up in him, he saw how sweet she would be, what a noble woman, once she had found the line in her life and moved harmoniously along that line with the music of her own movement. Now he saw her taking a wrong path; a path pointed out to her by others, and not taken on an inner impulse. And he felt a deep pity for her. He, as an artist, but especially as a dreamer, sometimes saw things with great clarity, despite his dreams, despite his all-embracing feeling for line and colour and haziness; he, the artist and dreamer, often saw as if clairvoyant the emotion glimpsed beneath people’s pretence, saw the soul, like a light shining through alabaster, and he suddenly saw her lost, searching, wandering; searching for she knew not what; wandering through she knew not what labyrinth; far from her line, her lifeline and the direction in which her soul was moving, which she had never yet found.

  She sat excitedly in front of him, having read her final pages, face flushed, voice resonating, her whole being feverish. It was as if she wanted to fling those pages full of bitterness at the feet of her Dutch sisters, at the feet of all women. Lost in his reflections, melancholy in his pity for her, he had scarcely listened, and shook his head in vague approval. And suddenly she spoke about herself, gave herself completely, told the story of her life: her young lady’s existence in The Hague, the upbringing designed to make her shine a little and be pleasant and beautiful, without one serious look at her future, simply awaiting a good match, with a flirtation here, and a crush there until she was married; a good marriage in her own circle; her husband a lieutenant in the hussars, a handsome strapping fellow, good distinguished family, a little money, with whom she had fallen in love because of his handsome face, and the dashing figure he cut in uniform, which suited him; who had fallen in love with her, as he might have fallen in love with another girl, because she had a pretty face: then, the revelation of those very first days: the immediate eruption of disharmony between their characters. She, spoiled at home, fine, delicate, sensitive, but egoistically sensitive, but irritable about her own spoiled ego; he, no longer paying court, but immediately and crudely the husband with rights to this and rights to that, now with curses, now with fulminations; she, without any tact, without any of the patience needed to make the best of their lives that were headed for disaster: nervous, passionate, pitching passion against coarseness, which made his violence flare up to the point where he abused her, swore at her, hit her, shook her and slammed her against the wall …

  Then her divorce; he at first unwilling, despite everything happy to have a home, and in that home a wife, a little woman for the master of the house, and not wanting to return to the wretchedness of living in rooms, until she simply left, went to her parents, to friends out of town, inveighing against the law, so unjust to women … He had finally given in, allowed himself to be charged with adultery, which was not far from the truth. Then she was free, but she stood as if alone, looked at askance by everyone she knew, unwilling to bow to their conventional insistence on that kind of semi-mourning that according to their conventional notions should surround a divorced woman, and returning immediately to her earlier young girl’s glittering existence. But she had felt that it could not go on like that, neither for her friends nor for herself: the friends looking askance at her, and she disgusted by them, their receptions and their dinners, until she had become deeply unhappy, lonely, lost, without anything, without anybody, and had experienced the p
ressure that weighs on the divorced woman. Deep down she had occasionally thought that with great patience and tact she might have been able to control her husband, that he was not bad, just coarse, that she still loved him, or at least his handsome face and strong body. It wasn’t love, but had she ever thought about love, in the way she now had occasional premonitions of it? And didn’t everyone compromise more or less in their lives, adapting to what they had been given? But she scarcely admitted that regret to herself, did not even admit it to Duco, though she did admit her bitterness, her hatred for her husband, for marriage, convention, people, the world: for all the great abstractions, generalising her own feeling into a single curse against life. He listened to her, with pity. He felt that there was something noble in her, but that it had been stifled from the outset. He forgave her for not being artistic, but it pained him that she had never found herself, that she did not know who she was, what her life should be like, where the line of her life was winding to, the only path that she must follow, as every life follows one path. Oh, how often, if people simply let themselves go, like a flower, like a bird, like a cloud, like a star, which orbited obediently, they would find their happiness and their life, as the flower and the bird found them, as the cloud drifted in the sun and the star followed its orbit. But he told her nothing of what he was thinking, knowing that particularly in her mood of bitterness she would not understand and would derive no support from it, that it would be too vague for her, and too alien to her own thoughts. She was thinking of herself, but she thought that she was thinking of Women, Girls and their movement towards the Future. The lines of women … But did not each woman have her own line? But how few knew it, their direction, their path, their lifeline, its meandering course through the twilight of the future. And perhaps, because they did not know for themselves, they were now looking for a wide path for all of them, a main highway, along which hosts of them could advance, a surging throng of women, regiments of women, with slogans and banners and war cries, a broad path, parallel to the men’s movement, until the paths merged into one, till the hosts of women mixed with the hosts of men, with equal rights and freedom to live as they chose …

  He said nothing of this to her. She noticed his silence, and did not see how much was going on inside him, how deeply he was thinking about her, how deeply he pitied her. She thought she had bored him. And suddenly, she saw around her the bare room with the light fading, the fire extinguished, and her enthusiasm deflated, her fever cooled, and she thought her pamphlet inferior, without force or conviction. How much a word from him would have meant! But he sat there without a word, seemingly uninterested: probably he did not like her style. And she felt sad, desolate, alone, alienated from him, and bitter about that alienation, she felt ready to cry, to sob, and—strangely—in her bitterness she thought of him, her husband, with his handsome face. And she could not stop herself: she wept. He went up to her, laid his hand on her shoulder. She felt something of what was going on inside him, and that his silence was not cold. She told him that she would not be able to stay alone that evening, too awful, too awful … He comforted her; said that there were a lot of good and true things in her pamphlet, that he was not a good judge of such modern questions; that he was only clever when talking about Italy; that he cared so little for people and so much for statues; so little for the new things that were being built for centuries to come, and so much for the ruins that remained of previous centuries. He said this as if apologising. She smiled through her tears, but repeated that she could not stay alone, and that she was going with him to Belloni, to his mother and sisters. And they went out together and walked around together; and he told her, in order to take her mind off things, about his own thoughts, told her anecdotes about Renaissance masters. She did not hear what he was saying, but his voice soothed her. The was something so gentle about his indifference to the modern, which interested her: he had such calm, soothing as balm, in the calm of his soul, which abandoned itself to the golden thread of his dreams—as if that thread were the direction of his life—such calm and softness, that she too became calmer, and looked up at him and smiled.

  And however far they were from each other, he following his dream line, she lost in a dark labyrinth—they felt themselves coming closer together, felt their souls coming closer, while their bodies moved side by side along a real street, across Rome in the evening. He put his arm through hers, but despite that gesture supported her.

  And as they approached Belloni, she thanked him, without knowing exactly why: for his eyes, for his voice, for their walk, for the comfort that she felt inexplicably, but distinctly emanating from him, and she was glad to have to have gone with him that evening, and to feel the distraction of Belloni’s set dinner around her.

  But at night, alone, alone in her bleak rooms, her wretchedness washed over her like a black sea, and looking out at the Colosseum—a dimly discernible arch in the dark night—she sobbed, feeling herself sinking into death-like depths, being washed away, abandoned and alone, sinking and being washed away so high above Rome, above the rooftops, above the dim lights of the nocturnal city, under the clouds of the dark night, as if drifting like a shipwrecked mariner on an ocean that was drowning the whole world and was roaring in lament at the inexorable sky.

  XIV

  STILL A CALM CAME OVER CORNÉLIE now that her pamphlet was written. She unpacked her cases, made her rooms a little more comfortable and, feeling calmer, she copied out the pamphlet and as she did so improved her style, and even her ideas. After she had worked in the morning, she usually lunched in a little osteria and almost always met Duco van der Staal there, and ate with him at the same table. Usually she dined at Belloni, with the Van der Staals, as a distraction for the evening. At first the marchesa had not acknowledged her, though she tolerated her for dinner at three lire an evening, and slowly she began saying hello to Cornélie, with a bitter-sweet smile, having meanwhile re-let the two rooms on more favourable terms. And Cornélie, in her calmer mood, enjoyed dressing up in the evenings, going to Belloni, seeing Mrs Van der Staal and the girls, hearing stories about the drawing-rooms of Rome, and running her eye over the long tables. And she saw that the guests were different ones, as in a kaleidoscope of transient people. Rudyard had disappeared, owing the marchesa money, no one knew where. The Rothkirchs had gone to Greece, but Urania Hope was still there and sat next to the Marchesa Belloni and with on her other side the nephew, the Prince of Forte-Braccio, Duke of San Stefano, who dined regularly at Belloni. And Cornélie saw that it was like a conspiracy: the marchesa and the prince beleaguering the vain little American from both sides. On a later occasion Cornélie saw two monsignori sitting at the marchesa’s table in animated conversation with Urania, while the marchesa and the prince nodded in agreement. All the guests were talking about it, all eyes were looking in that direction, everyone spied on the manoeuvring and enjoyed the romance.

  Only Cornélie was not amused; she had wanted to warn Urania about the marchesa, the prince and the monsignori who had taken Rudyard’s place, but especially about Marriage, even to a prince-duke. And becoming excited she talked to Mrs Van der Staal and the girls, repeating the words of her pamphlet, glowing, bright red with her young hatred against society and the world and people.

  Dinner had ended; still talking animatedly she accompanied the Van der Staals—Mrs Van der Staal and the girls and Duco—to the drawing-room, sat down in a corner, continued her conversation, burst out at Mrs Van der Staal, who contradicted her, until she suddenly saw a fat lady—the girls had already nicknamed her the satin frigate—approaching and saying from a distance,

  “I beg your pardon, but I wanted to say something … Look, I’ve been coming regularly to Belloni every winter for ten years, from November to Easter, and every evening after dinner—but only after dinner—I sit in this corner, at this table, in this place. So please excuse me, but would you mind if I sat in my usual place …”

  And the ‘satin frigate’ smiled sweetly, but when the Van de
r Staals and Cornélie got up in speechless amazement, she flopped on to the couch with a rustle of satin, bobbed up and down on the springs for a moment, put her crochet work on the table as if planting an English flag on a colony, and said with her most charming smile:

  “Very much obliged, thank you very much.”

  Duco burst out laughing, the girls giggled, but the ‘satin frigate’ smiled benevolently at them. And still not quite aware what was happening, astonished but cheerful, they sat in another corner, the girls with irrepressible giggles. The two aesthetic ladies, in evening dress and woollens, who were sitting reading at the centre table closed their two books simultaneously, got up and left indignantly, because of all the laughter and talking in the drawing-room.

  “It’s shameful!” they said aloud, and angular, arrogant and shabby they flounced out.

  “Strange pair!” thought Duco smiling: “ghosts of people … their lines swirl through ours like arabesques. Why do they cross our lines with their petty movements, and why do those who might be most welcome to our soul never cross our path …”

  He always accompanied Cornélie back to Via dei Serpenti in the evenings. They walked slowly through the silent deserted streets. Sometimes it was late, sometimes it was immediately after dinner, and then they walked down the Corso and he usually asked her to sit for a while at Aragno’s. She agreed and they had a cup of coffee together, in the cheerful, brightly-lit café, looking out at the evening bustle in the street. They said little, distracted by the passers-by and the customers in the café, but they both enjoyed being together for a moment, and felt in tune. Duco obviously did not give a thought to their liberal behaviour, but Cornélie thought of Mrs Van der Staal, and of how she would not approve and would not let either of her daughters do it: sit alone in a café with a gentleman at night. And Cornélie thought too of The Hague and smiled at the thought of her Hague acquaintances. And she looked at Duco … He sat calmly, happy to be sitting with her, and drank his coffee, said the occasional word and pointed out a passing character or beautiful woman … One evening, after dinner, he suggested going to the ruins; there was a moon, it was enchanting … But Mrs Van der Staal was frightened of malaria, and the girls of robbers; so they went alone, Duco and Cornélie. The streets were abandoned, the Colosseum loomed up like a black fortress in the night, but they went in, and through the open arches shone the moonlit blue of the night: in the circular pit of the arena, on one side black, in shadow, while on the other the moonlight poured in, like a white flood, like a waterfall, and it was as if the night were full of ghosts as though the Colosseum and the whole of Rome’s past were full of ghosts: emperors, gladiators and martyrs; shadows slunk around like prowling wild animals, a patch of light was like a naked woman, and the galleries seemed to roar with the throng … And yet there was nothing and they were alone, Duco and Cornélie, in the depths of the lofty gigantic ruin, half in shadow and half in light, and though she was not afraid, she was awed by the vast ghostly presence of the past, and moved closer to him and squeezed his arm and felt small, very small. He squeezed her hand for a moment, in his simple, easy way, as if to reassure her. And the night frightened her, the ghostliness oppressed her, the moon seemed to be at a dizzy height in the sky and to be growing to gigantic proportions and to be revolving like a silver wheel. He said nothing, he was in his dream, he saw the past before him … And silently they left, and he led her into the Forum through the arch of Titus. On the left rose the ruins of the imperial palaces, and around them stood the black fragments, the few remaining columns pointed upwards and the white moon stream flowed down like a ghostly sea from the sky. They met no one, but she was afraid and gripped his arm tighter. When they sat down for a moment on a piece of the foundations, she shivered with the cold. He was startled, said she must be sure not to catch cold, and they went on and left the Forum. He took her home, and she went up the stairs alone, striking a match to give some light in the dark stairwell. In her room she reflected that it was dangerous to go wandering through the ruins at night. She thought of how little Duco had said, not thinking of danger, lost in his nocturnal dream, peering into the awesome ghostly depths … Why … had he not gone alone? Why had he asked her along? She fell asleep after her thoughts had churned chaotically: the prince and Urania; the fat satin lady, the Colosseum and the martyrs, and Duco and Mrs Van der Staal … His mother was so ordinary, his sisters sweet but banal, and he … so odd! So simple, so without pretension, giving himself as he was; and for that reason so odd … He would be impossible in The Hague, among her friends … She smiled when she thought what he had said and how he had said it and he could be calmly silent, for minutes at a time, with a smile playing round his mouth, as if he were thinking of something beautiful …