<h2 class="main">CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
<p class="first">The months dreamed past. And their happiness caused
such a summer to bloom in them that she ripened in beauty and he in
talent; the pride in them broke into expression: in her it was the
blossoming of her being, in him it was energy; her languid charm became
transformed into a proud slenderness; her contour increased in
fullness; a light illumined her eyes, a gladness shone about her mouth.
His hands quivered with nervous emotion when he took up his brushes;
and the skies of Italy arched firmaments before his eyes like a canopy
of love and fervid colour. He drew and completed a series of
water-colours: hazes of dreamy atmosphere which suggested
Turner’s noblest creations; natural monuments of sheer haze; all
the milky blue and pearly mistiness of the Bay of Naples, like a goblet
filled with light in which a turquoise is melted into water; and he
sent them to Holland, to London, found that he had suddenly discovered
his vocation, his work and his fame: courage, strength, aim and
conquest.</p>
<p>She too achieved a certain success with her article: it was
discussed, contested; her name was mentioned. But she felt a certain
indifference when she read her name in connection with the feminist
movement. She preferred to live with him his life of observation and
emotion; and she often imparted to all the haze of his vision, to the
excessive haziness of his colour-dream a lustre of light, a definite
horizon, a streak of actuality which gave realism to the mist of his
ideal. She learnt with him to distinguish and to feel
nature, art, all Rome; and, when a symbolic impulse overmastered him,
she surrendered herself to it entirely. He planned a large sketch of a
procession of women, mounting along a line of life that wound up a
hill: they seemed to be moving out of a crumbling city of antiquity,
whose pillars, joined by a single architrave, quivered on high in a
violet haze of evening dusk; they seemed to be releasing themselves
from the shadow of the ruins fading away on the horizon into the void
of night; and they thronged upwards, calling to one another aloud,
beckoning to one another with great waving gestures of their hands,
under a mighty fluttering of streamers and pennants; they grasped
hammer and pick-axe with sinewy arms; and the throng of them moved up
and up, along the line, where the light grew whiter and whiter, until
in the hazy air there dimly showed the distant vista of a new city,
whose iron buildings, like central stations and Eiffel towers in the
white glimmer of the distance, gleamed up very faintly with a
reflection of glass arches and glass roofs and, high in the air, the
musical staves of the threads of sound and accompaniment....</p>
<p>And to so great an extent did their influences work upon each
other’s souls that she learnt to see and he learnt to think: she
saw beauty, art, nature, haze and emotion and no longer imagined them
but felt them; he, as in his sketch, a very vague, modern city of glass
and iron, saw a modern city rising out of his dream-haze and thought of
a modern question, in accordance with his own nature and aptitudes. She
learnt above all to see and feel like a woman in love, with the eyes
and heart of the man she loves; he thought out the question
plastically. But whatever the imperfection in the absoluteness of their
new spheres of feeling and thought, the reciprocal influence, through their love, gave them a
happiness so great, so united, that at that moment they could not
contemplate it or apprehend it: it was almost ecstasy, a faint
unreality, in which they dreamed, whereas it was all pure truth and
tangible actuality. Their manner of thinking, feeling and living was an
ideal of reality, an ideal entered and attained, along the gradual line
of their life, along the golden thread of their love; and they scarcely
apprehended or contemplated it, because the every-day life still clung
to them. But only to the smallest, inevitable extent. They lived apart;
but in the morning she went to him and found him working at his sketch;
and she sat down beside him and leant her head on his shoulder; and
they thought it out together. He sketched each figure in his procession
of women separately and sought for the features and the modelling of
the figures: some had the Mongolian aspect of Memmi’s angel of
the Annunciation, others Cornélie’s slenderness and her
later, fuller wholesomeness; he sought for the folds of the costumes:
the women escaped from the violet dusk of the ruined city in pleated
pepli; and farther on their garments altered as in a masquerade of the
ages: the long trains of the medieval ladies, the veils of the
sultanas, the homespun of the workwomen, the caps of the nursing
sisters, the attire becoming more modern as the wearer personified a
more modern age. And in this grouping the draughtsmanship was so
unsubstantial and sober, the transition from drooping folds to
practical stiffness so careful and so gradual, that Cornélie
hardly perceived the transition, that she appeared to be contemplating
one style, one fashion in dress, whereas each figure nevertheless was
clad in a different stuff, of different cut, falling into different
lines.... The drawing displayed an old-mastery purity, a simplicity
of outline, which was nevertheless modern,
nervous and morbid, but without the conventional ideal of symbolical
human forms; the grouping showed a Raphaelite harmony, the water-colour
tints of the first studies the haze of Italy: the ruined city loomed in
the dusk as he saw the Forum looming; the city of iron and glass
gleamed up with its architecture of light, such as he had seen from
Sorrento shining around Naples. She felt that he was creating a great
work and had never taken so lively an interest in anything as she now
did in his idea and his sketches. She sat behind him silent and still
and followed his drawing of the waving banners and fluttering pennants;
and she did not breathe when she saw him, with a few dabs of white and
touches of light—as though light were one of the colours on his
palette—make the glass city emerge as from a dream on the
horizon. Then he would ask her something about one of the figures and
put his arm around her and draw her to him; and they would long sit
scrutinizing and thinking out lines and ideas, until evening fell and
the evening chill shuddered through the studio and they rose slowly
from their seats. Then they went out and in the Corso they returned to
real life: silently, sitting at Aragno’s, they watched the bustle
outside; and in their little restaurant, with their eyes absorbing each
other’s glance, they ate their simple dinner and looked so
obviously and harmoniously happy, that the Italians, the two who also
always sat at the far table, at that same hour, smiled as they bowed to
them on entering.... </p>
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