Inevitable (8 page)

F
OR SOME TIME
it had been an
idée fixe
of Cornélie’s that she must speak to Urania Hope, and one morning she wrote a note asking to see her that afternoon. Miss Hope agreed and at five o’clock Cornélie found her at home in her beautiful, expensive apartment at Belloni: a blaze of light, flowers everywhere; Urania, hammering on the piano, in a house-dress of Venetian lace, while a sumptuous tea of cakes, sandwiches and sweets had been laid out. Cornélie had written in her note that she wished to speak to Miss Hope alone on an important subject and asked immediately if they would be alone, undecided now that Urania received her so grandly. But Urania put her mind at rest: she was only at home to Mrs De Retz and was very curious to know what Cornélie wished to talk to her about. Cornélie reminded Urania of her first warning and when Urania laughed she took her hand and gave her such a serious look, that she made an impression on the American’s girl’s light-hearted nature and Urania became intrigued. Now she suddenly found it very important—a secret, an intrigue, a danger in Rome!—and the two whispered together. And Cornélie, no longer afraid in this atmosphere of increasing familiarity, confessed to her what she had overheard at the Christmas ball through the chink in the door: the machinations of the
marchesa
and her nephew, whom she was determined to marry off to a rich heiress for the sake
of the prince’s father, who appeared to have promised her a considerable sum for such a marriage. Then she spoke about the conversion of Miss Taylor, engineered by Rudyard, who seemed unable to exert his influence on her, Urania—being unable to gain a hold over her unsuspecting but airy butterfly nature, and—as Cornélie suspected—as a result had incurred the disapproval of his clerical superiors, and had disappeared, without being able to pay what he owed the
marchesa
. Now he seemed to have been replaced by the two
monsignori
, who looked more distinguished, more worldly, and were more emollient, with more smiles. And Urania, staring this danger in the face, at those layers hidden beneath her feet, which Cornélie suddenly revealed to her, was now truly alarmed, went pale and promised to be on her guard. In fact she would have preferred to tell her chambermaid to pack at once in order to leave Rome as soon as possible, and go to another town to another
pensione
, where the nobility was well represented: the nobility was so adorable! And Cornélie, seeing that she had made an impact, went on, talked about herself, talked about marriage, and said that she had written a pamphlet against marriage and about the Social Situation of the Divorced Woman. And she talked of the unhappiness she had been through, and of the Women’s Movement in Holland. And once she got into the swing, she could no longer hold herself in check, and became more and more impassioned and intense, until Urania found her very clever—a very clever girl—to be able to reason like that and write about a “
question brulante
”. She put a heavy emphasis on the first syllables of the French words and
admitted that she would like to have the vote, and as she spoke unfolded the long train of her lace tea-gown. Cornélie spoke of the injustice of the law, which leaves a woman nothing, but takes everything from her, forces her completely into the power of the man, and Urania agreed with her and offered her the dish of fine sweets. And over a second cup of tea they talked excitedly, both at the same time, the one not hearing what the other was arguing, and Urania said that it was a shame. From a general discussion, they returned to their own interests: Cornélie described the character of her husband, too coarse to understand a woman’s nature, unable to accept that a woman should stand alongside him and not below him. And again she returned to the Jesuits, on the dangers lurking in Rome for rich girls on their own, to that crone of a
marchesa
, and to that prince: titled bait, cast out by the Jesuits, to win a soul and to improve the finances of an impoverished Italian house—one that had remained loyal to the Pope and did not serve the king. They were both so heated and excited that they did not hear a knock at the door, and only looked up when the door slowly opened. They started, looked up, and both went pale when they saw the Prince of Forte-Braccio enter. He apologised with a smile, said that he had seen the light on in Miss Urania’s drawing-room, that the doorman had tried to bar his way but that he had forced his way in. He sat down and despite everything they had just discussed, Urania was delighted that the prince was sitting there and had accepted a cup of tea and consented to eat a cake.

Urania showed them her album of coats-of-arms—the prince had already printed his own in it—and then
her album of samples of the queen’s evening gowns. The prince laughed and produced an envelope from his pocket: he opened it and carefully took out a scrap of blue brocade decorated with silver pearls. “What was it?” asked Urania in delight. And he said that he was bringing her a sample of Her Majesty’s most recent outfit; his cousin—not Black like himself but White; not a Papist, but a Monarchist lady-in-waiting—had been able to secure this scrap for Urania’s album. Urania would see for herself: the queen would wear this outfit at the court ball in a week’s time. He was not going, he did not even go officially to see his cousin, nor to their reception, but he still saw her because of the family tie, out of friendship. Now he begged Urania not to betray him: it might harm his career (what career? Cornélie wondered), if it were known that he saw his cousin a lot, but he had visited her frequently recently, for Urania, to get hold of that sample.

And Urania was so grateful that she forgot all about the social position of girls and women, married or unmarried, and she would willingly have sacrificed her vote for such a sweet Italian prince. Cornélie was annoyed, got up, greeted the prince with a cool nod of the head, and pulled Urania with her towards the door.

“Don’t forget our conversation,” she warned. “Be on your guard.”

And she saw the prince, while they were whispering, looking at them sarcastically, suspecting, that they were talking about him, suspecting a dislike in that Dutch woman, but proud of the power of his personality and his title and his attentions over the daughter of an American stocking manufacturer.

T
HERE WAS AN ESTRANGEMENT
between Mrs Van der Staal and Cornélie, and Cornélie no longer came to dine at Belloni. She did not see the mother and her daughters for weeks, but she saw Duco every day. Despite their essential difference in character, they were so used to meeting that they missed each other if they went a day without contact, and gradually they had naturally come to breakfast and dine with each other every day: in the mornings in the
osteria
, in the afternoons in some little café, usually very simply. So as not to have to settle up between them, Duco and Cornélie would take turns to pay. Usually they had lots to talk about; he taught her Rome, took her round churches and museums after lunch, and under his guidance she began to understand, to appreciate and find things beautiful. Unconsciously, he communicated some of his ideas to her: painting she found very difficult, but she understood sculpture much more quickly. And she began to find him more than merely “morbid”; she looked up to him, he spoke simply to her from his lofty vantage point of sentiment and knowledge, about exalted things, which she as a young girl and later as a young woman had never seen in the noble light of glorification, that he lit for her like the first glow of a dawn; a new day, in which she contemplated new things in life, created from the most noble part of the artist’s soul. He regretted not being able to show
her Giotto in Santa Croce in Florence, the Primitives in the Uffizi, and that he had to teach her about Rome at once, but he guided her through all the exuberant artistic life of the Papal Renaissance, until, through his words, she experienced for a single intense moment, and Michelangelo, Raphael, stood before her as if alive. He thought, after one such day: she is not really all that un-artistic, and she thought of him with respect, even when the spell was broken, and she thought things over and, actually deep inside, no longer understood as well as that morning, because she lacked love for those things. And yet so much radiance and colour and times past still swirled before her eyes, that her pamphlet seemed dull, that the Women’s Movement did not interest her, and she could not care less about Urania Hope.

He admitted to himself that he had completely lost his composure, that the figure of Cornélie was present in his thoughts, coming between him and his ancient triptychs; that his life, solitary, without friends, naive and simple, content to wander through and around Rome, reading, dreaming, and now and then painting, had changed completely in habit and line, now that the line of his life had crossed her lifeline and they seemed to be following a single path; he did not really know why. He could not call the feeling that attracted him to her love … And only very vaguely, deep inside, unconsciously did he suspect, still inarticulately, and not even thought out, that it was the line of her body, almost something Byzantine; the frailty of the figure, the long arms, the broken lily line of the woman of sorrow, the melancholy in her grey eyes, shaded by the eyelashes that were almost too long; that
it was the nobility of her hand, small and dainty for a tall woman; that it was a movement of hers, like a bending stalk, a swan that was tired and looked round behind it. He had never met many women, and those that he had met had always seemed very ordinary, but she was strange to him, in the contradictions of her character, with its vagueness and elusiveness, in all the semi-tones which escaped his eye, though it was accustomed to
half-tints
… What was she like? … He had always seen a woman in a book, a heroine in a poem in her character. What was she like, a living woman, flesh and blood? She was not artistic; she had no energy, yet she was not lacking in vitality, she was not highly educated, and she wrote, on impulse and with intuition, a pamphlet on one of the issues of the moment, and she finished and it became a text, no worse than any other. She had a breadth of thought and hated the narrowness of coteries, no longer felt at home in her circle in The Hague after her sorrow, and here in Rome she listened at a door to some innocent intrigue—scarcely an intrigue, he thought—and had gone to Urania Hope, to become involved in the confused twists and turns of inferior lives, without importance, of people whom he despised for their lack of line, colour, dream, of aura, of everything that was dearest to him and made life worthwhile for him … What was she like? He did not understand her, but the twists and turns of
her
life mattered to him. She did not lack a line, either an artistic line or a lifeline; she moved through the dream of her own vagueness before his peering eyes, and she loomed up from the haze, from the gloom of his studio atmosphere, and stood before him like a phantom. He
could not call it love, but she was precious to him as a revelation, which constantly veiled itself in mystery. And his life of a lonely wanderer had certainly changed, but she had not brought any unharmonious habits into his life: he liked eating in a little café or
osteria
, with the ordinary people of Rome around him, and she shared that with him easily and simply, not acting as if it were beneath her but companionable, harmonious, adapting with great ease, with the same natural grace with which she dined at Belloni. All that, the interplay of oddness, contradiction, and that living vision of vagueness, that elusiveness of her individuality, that hiding of her soul, that merging of her essences, had come to enchant him: a restlessness, a need, a nervousness in his life, usually so peaceful, with his modest contentedness and calm—but most of all enchantment, indispensable everyday enchantment.

And without worrying about what Mrs Van der Staal thought of it, they sometimes went to Tivoli together for the day; on another day they walked from Castel-Gandolfo to Albano, and drove to the lake of Nemi, and breakfasted with an ancient capital as a table in Villa Sforza-Cesarini. They rested together in the shade of the trees, they admired the camellias, looked silently at the glassy clarity of Lake Nemi, the mirror of Diana—and drove back via Frascati. In the carriage they were silent, and, smiling, he thought how everywhere that day they had been taken for man and wife. She also thought about their growing intimacy, and thought also that she would never remarry. And she thought of her husband and compared him to Duco. So young facially, but eyes full of
depth, soul, dream, his voice so measured, what he said so clever, so knowing, and then his calm, his naivety, his lack of passion, as if his nerves had been formed only for feeling the calm of art, in the dreamlike haze of his life. And she admitted to herself, there in the carriage beside him—around them the gently rolling hills, fading purple into the evening, ahead of them the fading, mauvish pink of a scarcely golden sunset—that he was precious to her because of that calm, that lack of passion, that naivety, that knowingness: a clear voice resounding from dreamy twilight—and that she was happy sitting beside him, hearing that voice, and accidentally feeling his hand … happy that her lifeline had crossed his, and both lines seemed to form a single path, towards the dimly looming outline, every day brighter, of their immediate future …

C
ORNÉLIE NO LONGER
saw anyone but Duco. Mrs Van der Staal had fallen out with her and no longer wanted her daughters to see Cornélie socially. Relations had also cooled between mother and son. Cornélie saw no one but Duco, and occasionally Urania Hope. The American girl visited her from time to time and told her about Belloni: there was much talk about Cornélie and Duco and many comments on their relationship. Urania was glad to feel above hotel gossip, but still wanted to warn Cornélie. There was something spontaneous and friendly in her words, which Cornélie found sympathetic. But when Cornélie asked about the prince she fell silent and obviously did not want to say much. Then, after the court ball—where the queen really had worn the sequined brocade!—Urania visited Cornélie again and admitted over a cup of tea that she had promised the prince that morning to visit him at his residence. She said it quite simply, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Cornélie was alarmed and asked how on earth she could have promised such a thing …

“Why not?” replied Urania. “What’s wrong with it? I receive his visits … why should I, if he asks me to come and see his rooms—he lives in Palazzo Ruspoli—if he wants to show me some paintings, miniatures and antique lace … why should I refuse to go? Why should I make such a fuss about it? I’m above such petty-mindedness.

We American girls behave very freely with our
gentlemen
. And what about you? You walk with Mr Van der Staal, you dine and breakfast with him, you go on excursions with him, you go to his studio …”

“I’ve been married,” replied Cornélie. “I don’t have to answer to anyone. You have your parents … What you’re contemplating is rash and reckless … Tell, is the prince thinking … of marriage?”

“If I become a Catholic …”

“And …?”

“I think … I will … I’ve written to Chicago,” she said hesitantly.

She closed her lovely eyes for a moment and went pale as she had a vision of the title of princess-duchess.

“It’s just …” she began.

“What …?”

“Life won’t be much fun. The prince is one of the Blacks. They are in permanent mourning for the Pope. Scarcely anything happens in their coterie, no balls or parties. If we got married, I’d like him to come to America with me. His father is very proud, inaccessible and taciturn. I’ve heard that from various sides. What am I to do, Cornélie? I love Gilio very much; his name is Virgilio. And you know the title is an old Italian one:
principe di Forte-Braccio, duca di San Stefano
… But you see, that’s all there is, all. San Stefano is a hole. That’s where his papa lives. They sell wine and that is what they live on. And olive oil: but they don’t make any money from it. My father manufactures stockings but he has made a fortune from it. They haven’t many family jewels. I’ve made inquiries … His cousin, the Countess di Rosavilla,
the queen’s lady-in-waiting, is sweet … but we would not see her officially. I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. It seems to me a rather boring prospect …”

Cornélie responded vehemently, burst out and repeated her slogans: against marriage in general and against this marriage in particular, purely for the sake of a title. Urania agreed: it was just a title … but it was also Gilio: he was sweet and she loved him. But Cornélie didn’t believe a word, and told her straight. Urania wept: she did not know what to do.

“And when were you supposed to visit your prince?”

“Tonight …”

“Don’t go.”

“No, no, you’re right, I won’t go.”

“Do you give me your word?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Don’t go, Urania.”

“No, I won’t go. You are a dear girl. You’re right: I won’t go. I swear to you I won’t go …”