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Inevitable

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<h2 class="main">CHAPTER VIII</h2> Duco van der Staal had taken a large, vault-like studio, with a chilly north light, up three flights of stairs in the Via del Babuino. Here he painted, modelled and studied and here he dragged all the beautiful and antique objects that he succeeded in picking up in the little shops along the Tiber or in the Mercato dei Fiori. That was his passion: to hunt through Rome for a panel of an old triptych or a fragment of ancient sculpture. In this way his studio had not remained the large, chilly, vault-like workroom bearing witness to zealous and serious study, but had become a refuge for dim-coloured remnants of antiquity and ancient art, a museum for his dreaming spirit. Already as a child, as a boy, he had felt that passion for antiquity developing; he learnt how to rummage through the stocks of old Jewish dealers; he taught himself to haggle when his purse was not full; and he collected first rubbish and afterwards, gradually, objects of artistic and financial value. And it was his great hobby, his one vice: he spent all his pocket-money on it and, later, without reserve, the little that he was able to earn. For sometimes, very seldom, he would finish something and sell it. But generally he was too ill-satisfied with himself to finish anything; and his modest notion was that everything had already been created and that his art was useless. This idea sometimes paralysed him for months together, without making him unhappy. When he had the money to keep himself going—and his personal needs were very small—he felt rich and was content in his studio or would wander, perfectly content, through the streets of Rome. His long, careless, lean, slender body was at such times clad in his oldest suit, which afforded an unostentatious glimpse of an untidy shirt with a soft collar and a bit of string instead of a tie; and his favourite headgear was a faded hat, battered out of shape by the rain. His mother and sisters as a rule found him unpresentable, but had given up trying to transform him into the well-groomed son and brother whom they would have liked to take to the drawing-rooms of their Roman friends. Happy to breathe the atmosphere of Rome, he would wander for hours through the ruins and see, in a dazzling vision of phantom columns, ethereal temples and translucent marble palaces looming up in a shimmering sunlit twilight; and the tourists going by with their Baedekers, who passed this long lean young man seated carelessly on the foundations of the Temple of Saturn, would never have believed in his architectural illusions of harmonious ascending lines, crowned by an array of statues in noble and god-like attitudes, high in the blue sky. But he saw them before him. He raised the shafts of the pillars, he fluted the severe Doric columns, he bent and curved the cushioned Ionic capitals and unfurled the leaves of the Corinthian acanthuses; the temples rose in the twinkling of an eye, the basilicas shot up as by magic, the graven images stood white against the elusive depths of the sky and the Via Sacra became alive. He, in his admiration, lived his dream, his past. It was as though he had known preexistence in ancient Rome; and the modern houses, the modern Capitol and all that stood around the tomb of his Forum were invisible to his eyes. He would sit like this for hours, or wander about and sit down again and be happy. In the intensity of his imagination, he conjured up history from the clouds of the past, first of all as a mist, a miraculous haze, whence the figures stepped out against the marble background of ancient Rome. The gigantic dramas were enacted before his dreaming eyes as on an ideal stage which stretched from the Forum to the hazy, sun-shot azure of the Campagna, with slips that lost themselves in the depths of the sky. Roman life came into being, with a toga’d gesture, a line of Horace, a sudden vision of an emperor’s murder or a contest of gladiators in the arena. And suddenly also the vision paled and he saw the ruins, the ruins only, as the tangible shadow of his unreal illusion: he saw the ruins as they were, brown and grey, eaten up with age, crumbled, martyred, mutilated with hammers, till only a few occasional pillars lifted and bore a trembling architrave, that threatened to come crashing to the ground. And the browns and greys were so richly and nobly gilded by splashes of sunlight, the ruins were so exquisitely beautiful in decay, so melancholy in their unwitting fortuitousness of broken lines, of shattered arches and mutilated sculpture, that it was as though he himself, after his airy vision of radiant dream-architecture, had tortured and mutilated them with an artist’s hand and caused them to burst asunder and shake and tremble, for the sake of their wistful aftermath of beauty. Then his eyes grew moist, his heart became more full than he could bear and he went away, through the Arch of Titus by the Colosseum, through the Arch of Constantine, on and on, and hurried past the Lateran to the Via Appia and the Campagna, where his smarting eyes drank in the blue of the distant Alban Hills, as though that would cure them of their excessive gazing and dreaming.... Neither in his mother nor in his sisters did he find a strain that sympathized with his eccentric tendencies; and, since that one friend who died, he had never found another and had always been lonely within and without, as though the victim of a predestination which would not allow him to meet with sympathy. But he had peopled his loneliness so densely with his dreams that he had never felt unhappy because of it; and, even as he loved roaming alone among the ruins and along the country-roads, so he cherished the privacy of his lonely studio, with the many silent figures on an old panel of some triptych, on a tapestry, or on the many closely hung sketches, all around him, all with the charm of their lines and colours, all with the silent gesture of their movement and emotion and all blending together in twilit corners or a shadowy antique cabinet. And in between all this lived his china and bronze and old silver, while the faded gold embroidery of an ecclesiastical vestment gleamed faintly and the old leather bindings of his books stood in comfortable brown rows, ready to give forth, when his hands opened them, images which mistily drifted upwards, living their loves and their sorrows in the tempered browns and reds and golds of the soundless atmosphere of the studio. Such was his simple life, without much inward doubting, because he made no great demands upon himself, and without the modern artist’s melancholy, because he was happy in his dreams. He had never, despite his hotel life with his mother and sisters—he slept and took his meals at Belloni’s—met many people or concerned himself with strangers, being by nature a little shy of Baedekered tourists, of short-skirted English ladies, with their persistent little exclamations of uniform admiration, and feeling entirely impossible in the half-Italian, half-cosmopolitan set of his rather worldly mother and smart little sisters, who spent their time dancing and cycling with young Italian princes and dukes. And, now that he had met Cornélie de Retz, he had to confess to himself that he possessed but little knowledge of human nature and that he had never learnt to believe in the reality of such a woman, who might have existed in books, but not in actual life. Her very appearance—her pallor, her drooping charm, her weariness—had astonished him; and her conversation astonished him even more: her positiveness mingled with hesitation; her artistic feeling modified by the endeavour to take part in her period, a period which he failed to appreciate as artistic, enamoured as he was of Rome and of the past. And her conversation astonished him, attractive though the sound of it was and offended as he often was by a recurrent bitterness and irony, followed again by depression and discouragement, until he thought it over again and again, until in his musing he seemed to hear it once more on her own lips, until she joined the busts and torsos in his studio and appeared before him in the lily-like frailness of her visible actuality, against the preraphaelite stiffness of line and the Byzantine gold and colour of the angels and madonnas on canvas and tapestry. His soul had never known love; and he had always looked on love as imagination and poetry. His life had never known more than the natural virile impulse and the ordinary little love-affair with a model. And his ideas on love swayed in a too wide and unreal balance between a woman who showed herself in the nude for a few lire and Petrarch’s Laura; between the desire roused by a beautiful body and the exaltation inspired by Dante’s Beatrice; between the flesh and the dream. He had never contemplated an encounter of kindred souls, never longed for sympathy, for love in the full and pregnant sense of the word. And, when he began to think and to think long and often of Cornélie de Retz, he could not understand it. He had pondered and dreamed for days, for a week about a woman in a poem; on a woman in real life never. And that he, irritated by some of her sayings, had nevertheless seen her stand with her lily-like outline against his Byzantine triptych, like a wraith in his lonely dreams, almost frightened him, because it had made him lose his peace of mind. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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