Inevitable (25 page)

N
OW SHE SAT ALONE
in the train. By tipping generously they had been able to travel alone at night and no one had disturbed them in their compartment. They had not spoken, but had sat close together, hand in hand, eyes focused far ahead, as if staring at the approaching point of separation. The gloomy thought of that separation did not leave them, but raced along with the rattling train. Sometimes she thought of a train crash, and of how welcome it would be to die together. But inexorably the lights of Genoa had appeared. The train had come to a halt. And he had opened his arms and they had kissed, for the last time. As she clung to him, she had felt his pain. Then he had let go of her and hurried away without looking round. She watched him go, but he had not looked round and she saw him disappear into the morning fog, shot through with points of light that hung about the station. She had seen him disappear among the other people, seen him dissolve into the haze of fog. Then her silent despair and desolation had grown so great that she had not even been able to cry. Her head slumped forward, her arms went limp. Like an inert thing she allowed the roaring, rattling train to carry her further.

A white pre-dawn had risen on the left over the mirrorlike sea and as the first daylight imparted a blue colour to the water, the horizon became discernible. The train continued for hours, while she sat motionless,
looking out to sea and feeling almost numb with desolation and irresponsibility. She was now going to allow life, her husband, the train to do as they wanted with her. As if in a weary dream she thought of the gradualness of everything, and of her own unconscious self, of the first rebellion against her husband’s dominance, of the illusion of her independence, the pride of her sense of self and all the happiness of the gentle ecstasy, all the gladness of harmony achieved … Now it was over; now all question of free will was vain. The train was taking her to where Rudolf was calling her, and life had been around her, not very roughly, with a gentle pressure of ghostlike hands, which pushed and guided and pointed …

And she stopped thinking. The weary dream dissolved in the increasing blue of the day and she felt that she was approaching Nice. She was returning to a small reality. She felt that she looked a little travel-worn and sensing unconsciously that it would be better if Rudolf’s first glimpse of her were not so unappealing, she slowly opened her bag, washed herself with a handkerchief sprinkled with eau de Cologne, combed her hair, powdered her face, brushed herself off and carefully drew a white veil over her face, and put on a pair of new gloves. At a station she bought a couple of yellow roses and stuck them in her belt. She did all this unconsciously, without thinking that it was right, sensible to do so, for Rudolf to see her again with that aura of a beautiful woman. She felt that from now on her main task was to be beautiful, and that nothing else really mattered. And when the train rumbled into the station, when she recognised Nice, she was calm, because the conflict was over, because she was submitting
to all the superior forces. The carriage door was pulled open, and in the station, which at that hour was not very full, she saw him at once: large, sturdy, with an easy manner, with his ruddy male face, his light summer suit, straw hat, yellow shoes. He gave an impression of healthy solidity and mainly of broad-shouldered masculinity and notwithstanding that broadness a ‘gentleman’ from head to toe, immaculately turned out without a suggestion of the dandy. And the ironically smiling moustache and the firm gaze of his handsome grey eyes, always on the
lookout
for women gave him a powerful and certain air of being able to do what he wanted, of being able to dominate, if he so wished. An ironic pride in his handsome strength, with a hint of contempt for the others who were not so handsome and powerful, so healthily animal and yet aristocratic, and in particular a sarcastic condescension towards all women, since he knew women and knew what they really counted for—this was expressed by his eyes, his bearing, his gestures. That was how she knew him. In the past it had often sparked rebellion in her, but now she felt resigned, and a little frightened too.

He had come over to her and helped her alight. She could see that he was angry, that he intended to give her a rough reception; then that his moustache curled into a smile, as if scoffing because he was the strongest … But she said nothing, calmly took his hand and got off the train. He took her out of the station and in the carriage she waited a moment for the suitcase. His eyes surveyed her. She was wearing an old blue linen skirt and a blue linen jacket, but despite the old clothes and the weary resignation she looked like an elegant, beautiful woman.

“I’m pleased you’ve finally seen the virtue of following my wishes,” he said at last.

“I thought it was best,” she said softly.

He was struck by her tone and he observed her closely from the side. He did not understand her, but he was pleased she had come. She was tired now from the emotion and from the train, but he thought she looked most charming, even though she was not as glamorous as at Mrs Uxeley’s ball, when he had spoken to his ex-wife for the first time.

“Are you tired?” he asked.

“I’ve had a bit of a temperature for a few days, and of course I did not sleep last night,” she said, as if apologising.

The suitcase had been loaded and they drove off, to the Hôtel Continental. They said nothing else in the carriage. They were also silent as they entered the hotel and the lift and he took her to his room. It was an ordinary hotel room, but she found it strange to see his brushes lying on the table, to see his jackets and trousers hanging on the hooks, things with a shape and creases that she remembered from before, with which she seemed familiar. In a corner she recognised his suitcase.

He opened the windows wide. She had sat down on a chair, in an attitude of wait and see. She felt slightly faint and closed her eyes, dazzled by the stream of sunlight.

“I expect you’re hungry,” he said. “What shall I order for you?”

“I’d like some tea and bread and butter.”

Her suitcase was brought in and he ordered her breakfast.

“Take your hat off,” he said.

She got up. She took off her jacket. Her cotton blouse was creased and she did not like it. In front of the mirror she pulled the pin out of her hat and very naturally combed her hair with his comb, which she saw lying on the table. And she folded the silk ribbon round her linen collar. He had lit up a cigar and was calmly standing smoking. A waiter brought breakfast. Silently she had something to eat and drank a cup of tea.

“Have you already had breakfast?” she asked.

“Yes.”

They fell silent again and she ate.

“Shall we talk a bit now?” he asked, standing smoking.

“Very well.”

“I don’t want to talk about your running off,” he said. “At first I was going to give you a piece of my mind: it was a damn idiotic thing for you to do …”

She said nothing. She just looked up at him and her lovely eyes took on a new expression—one of gentle resignation. Again he was silent, obviously restraining himself, choosing his words.

“As I say, I don’t want to talk about it again. For a moment you didn’t know what you were doing, you weren’t responsible for your actions. But there’s got to be an end to it now: that’s how I want it. Of course I know that in the eyes of the law I haven’t the slightest claim on you. But we’ve already talked about that, and I’ve already written to you. You were my wife, and now I see you again I feel very clearly that, despite everything, I look on you as my wife. You must have had the same impression of our reunion here in Nice.”

“Yes,” she said calmly.

“You admit it?”

“Yes,” she repeated.

“That’s all right then. That’s all I want from you. From now on don’t let’s think about the past, our divorce, the things you did afterwards. From now on we’ll blot all that out. I look on you as my wife and you’ll be my wife again. According to the law we can’t remarry, but that doesn’t matter. I regard our legal divorce as an interlude, a formality that as far as possible we shall render null and void. If we have children, we shall legitimise them. I’ll consult a lawyer about all that and take all the necessary steps, including financial ones. So our divorce will be nothing but a formality, with no force at all for us and only minimal force for the world and the law. And then I shall leave the army. I wouldn’t have wanted to stay in for ever anyway, and so I can leave sooner than I planned. Besides, you won’t enjoy living in Holland, and it doesn’t appeal to me either.”

“No,” she murmured.

“Where would you like to live?”

“I don’t know …”

“In Italy?”

“No …” the tone was pleading.

“Shall we stay here?”

“I’d rather not … to begin with.”

“I was thinking of Paris. Would you like to live in Paris?”

“Fine…”

“That’s agreed then. We’ll go to Paris as soon as possible, look for an apartment and get settled in. It’ll soon be spring and that’ll make a good start in Paris.”

“Fine …”

He threw himself into an armchair, which groaned under him.

“Tell me, what are you thinking, deep down?”

“What do you mean?”

“I wanted to know what you were thinking about this husband of yours. Did you think he was ridiculous?”

“No …”

“Come and sit on my knee.”

She got up and went over to him. She did as he wanted and sat on his knee, and he pulled her towards him. He put his hand on her head: that gesture that left her unable to think. She closed her eyes and snuggled up to him, resting her head against his cheek.

“You didn’t forget me completely, did you?”

She shook her head.

“We should never have divorced, should we?”

Again she shook her head.

“We were hot-headed back then, both of us. You mustn’t be hot-headed any more. It makes you nasty and ugly. You’re much sweeter and more beautiful as you are now.”

She smiled faintly.

“I’m glad to have you back,” he whispered, giving her a long kiss on the mouth.

She closed her eyes as he kissed her, while his moustache bristled against her skin and his lips pressed on hers.

“Are you still tired?” he asked. “Do you want to rest a little?”

“Yes,” she said. “I want to put on something more comfortable.”

“You should go to bed for a bit,” he said. “Oh, and I was going to tell you: your friend the princess is coming here this evening.”

“Isn’t Urania angry …?”

“No. I’ve told her everything, she knows the whole story.”

She was glad that Urania wasn’t angry, that she still had a friend.

“And I saw Mrs Uxeley too.”

“She
is
angry with me, I expect.”

He laughed.

“Poor old thing! No, not angry. She’s put out that she’ll have to do without you. She was very fond of you. She likes beautiful people around her, she told me. She can’t stand an ugly lady’s companion, with no class. Come on, get undressed and lie down for a bit. I’ll leave you alone and find somewhere to sit downstairs.”

They had got up. His eyes had a golden sparkle and an ironic smile played beneath his moustache. He swept her into his arms.

“Corrie,” he said hoarsely. “It’s wonderful to have you back. Tell me, are you mine, are you mine?”

He hugged her to him, almost stifling her, both arms around her, weighing on her.

“Tell me, are you mine?”

“Yes …”

“What was your name for me—when you loved me?”

She hesitated.

“What did you call me?” he insisted, gripping her still tighter. Pushing at his shoulders she fought for breath.

“My Rudy …” she murmured. “My beautiful, gorgeous Rudy …”

Mechanically she cradled his head in her arm. With what seemed a great effort, he let go of her.

“You undress,” he said, “and try to get some sleep. I’ll come back later.”

He left, while she undressed and brushed her hair with his brush, and put some drops of the toilet water he used into the bowl. She closed the top curtains, behind which the afternoon sun was shining, plunging the room into a downy, wine-red gloom. And she crept into the big bed and waited for him, trembling. Her head was empty of thoughts. There was no pain and no memory in her. All that was in her was a single expectation of the slow but inexorable course of life. She felt nothing but a bride, though not an ignorant bride, and in her deepest core she felt herself the wife, in her deepest core the wife of the man she was waiting for. In her mind’s eye, dreamlike, she saw the figures of children … If she were to be truly his wife, she wanted to be not only his lover, but also the mother of his children … She knew that despite his rough manners, he loved the softness of children, and she would want them in her second marriage, as a precious consolation in the times when she was no longer beautiful, no longer young … In her mind’s eye, dreamlike, she saw the figures of children … And she waited for him, listened for his step, longed for him to come, her body quivering in expectation. When he came in and approached her, her arms closed round him in a gesture of deep and conscious certainty, and without a doubt, against his chest, in his arms, she had a sure sense of his male dominance, while the dream of her life—Rome, Duco, the studio—submerged in a vortex of black melancholy …

L
OUIS
C
OUPERUS
was born in The Hague in 1863 into a family with a distinguished tradition of government service in the Netherlands East Indies, where he spent part of his childhood. Returning to Europe, he obtained a teaching qualification in Dutch, but his real ambitions lay elsewhere. After his early poetry was ridiculed by the literary avant-garde, he turned to fiction with
Eline Vere
(1889), creating a rich Tolstoyan panorama of
upper-class
Hague life, against which is set the downfall of his hypersensitive and maladjusted heroine. This was the beginning of a prolific and successful career, in the course of which he produced over twenty novels, as well as numerous collections of stories and travelogues.

In 1891 Couperus married his cousin Elisabeth Baud, a lover of literature and occasional translator, who gave him lifelong companionship and loyal emotional as well as practical support. The marriage remained childless, and much in Couperus’ work is strongly suggestive of a homosexual or at least bisexual orientation. On occasion his prose style betrays his thwarted poetic aspirations, leading one commentator to lament a tendency to overwrite:

Nevertheless Couperus’ wide and continuing appeal to readers is easy to understand: his great gift for narrative, characterisation and dialogue is allied to a compelling fatalistic vision.

The outbreak of World War I brought four years of enforced confinement within the neutral borders of his native Netherlands, and put a brake on Couperus’ growing reputation in the English-speaking world, where since the 1890s he had enjoyed critical and popular success with a string of translations. As early as 1891
Footsteps of Fate
(
Noodlot
, 1890) had appealed to Oscar Wilde and his circle,
Old People and the Things that Pass
(
Van oude mensen de dingen die voorbijgaan,
1906) was praised, albeit faintly, by D H Lawrence, and the ambitious four-novel cycle
The Books of the Small Souls
(
De boeken der kleine zielen
, 1901–1903) won the endorsement of Katherine Mansfield.

Once hostilities ceased the priority was his reintroduction to an international audience. Deciding which of his books was best suited to inaugurate such a relaunch was no easy task: both the brilliant and perceptive colonial novel
De stille kracht
(
The Hidden Force
,
1901) and the explicit homosexuality of
De berg van licht
(
The Mountain of Light
, 1905–1906), centring on the downfall of the androgynous boy-emperor Heliogabalus, were too controversial for the contemporary moral and political climate in the target countries. Though
The Hidden Force
eventually appeared
with some success in a slightly censored version in the UK in 1922 and in 1924 in the US, where the film rights were also sold, the latter novel, in some ways the fictional counterpart of the languid classical tableaux of the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) and cited in Mario Praz’s classic study
The Romantic Agony
as an exemplary decadent novel, remains untranslated.

The final choice was the 1900 novel
Langs lijnen van geleidelijkheid
, which was published first in America as
Inevitable
in 1920, in the version by Couperus’ regular translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, and the following year in the UK under the (even more) portentous title
The Law Inevitable
. This study of a young upper-class divorcee’s attempt to build a new, emancipated and culturally fulfilling life in Italy and her eventual return to her ex-husband received rapturous reviews in the US, where the author’s skill, power and versatility and his creation of a “beautiful and passionate” protagonist were widely admired. In Britain, however, the reception was more mixed. There were two main reservations: firstly, the novel’s erotic explicitness and specifically the concluding bedroom scene (which was discreetly bowdlerised in the UK edition); secondly, the title’s suggestion that Cornélie’s story is exemplary and universal. The latter stricture stems from a misapprehension caused by the English title, particularly in its expanded form. In fact Couperus’ Dutch title means something more like ‘slowly but surely’ or ‘little by little’, highlighting the specific, slow-acting chemistry between the heroine and her (ex-)husband.

On a literary level,
Inevitable
represents an interesting variation on some of Couperus’ major themes, including
the complex underlying factors determining human character and action, and the contrast between Northern and Southern Europe—the former representing grey gloom, repression and convention, the latter sunshine, warmth and self-fulfilment. Present-day readers may detect echoes of Henry James (especially the story
Daisy
Miller
of 1878) in both setting and tone, and be reminded of E M Forster’s evocations of Italian boarding-house life in
A Room with a View
(1908). Aspects of the ending suggest a comparison with D H Lawrence. The vagaries of a woman’s attempt at self-liberation recall a novel like H G Wells’
Ann Veronica
(1909), though the optimism of the latter book is lacking.

Contemporary Dutch readers will have inevitably recognised the novel’s allusions to real life in the shape of the aristocratic women’s rights activist and writer Cecile Goekoop-de Jong van Beek en Donk (1866–1944), one of the principal organisers of the epoch-making Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labour held in The Hague in 1898. The heroine of her militantly feminist novel
Hilda van Suylenburg
(1897) combines a happy marriage with a successful career as a lawyer. The author’s own life fell somewhat short of this emancipated ideal: having left her rich husband in 1898 and fled to Italy, she was briefly reconciled with him after he followed her abroad, but was divorced in 1899, later remarrying and converting to Catholicism.

This biographical and literary link with contemporary feminism raises the question whether Couperus’ book is to be read as a fictional counterblast to
Hilda van Suylenburg
and its message that women “can have it all”. A commentator
like Marianne Braun, for example, in her study of the first wave of feminism in the Netherlands, sees Couperus’s novel as an “antipode” to the earlier book. This, though, would seem a rather crude reading of a generally empathetic and balanced work. Certainly it would be simplistic to view Cornélie’s final submission to Brox as a pre-Lawrentian recipe for “sexual bliss ever after”; there is a heavy price to pay for Couperus’ character: her independence, her political engagement, and the cultural and intellectual affinity as well as the love she had shared in Rome with Duco. The Dutch critic Herman Verhaar has pointed to Couperus’s debt to
Madeleine Férat
(1868), an early novel by his revered model Zola, while stressing the Dutch writer’s commitment to individual psychology over the deterministic theories of “first impregnation” that loom large in Zola’s vision. Ton Anbeek stresses the fact that Couperus’ fatalism is never crudely physical or psychological, but has from the outset a mystical dimension, for most of his career classical in flavour, though in his last period coloured increasingly by oriental beliefs. Anbeek quotes a passage early in the novel (Chapter II), which seems to present Cornélie
one-dimensionally
as a product of her social class:

Certainly, the socio-economic consequences of an upbringing that has left her unfit for “menial” shop work
in Rome are clearly spelt out (for example in Chapter XLII). It is no accident that Mrs Holt, the English feminist who urges Cornélie, as the author of an influential pamphlet, to rejoin the struggle, should be wealthy (Chapter XLVI). But realistic elements can be contrasted with a less tangible expression of her quandary when she is forced to leave Duco (Chapter XLIII):

Couperus is too great an artist to content himself with a purely programmatic treatment of his heroine’s predicament, though such charged passages, of which there are many in the novel, may seem to border on mystification. Today’s reader may wish to supply his or her own question mark to the English title (which, it must be stressed, was not the author’s choice).

PAUL VINCENT