Elective Affinities (20 page)

CHAPTER THREE

I
T
is so pleasant a sensation to occupy yourself with something you can only half do that you should never reproach the dilettante if he engages in an art he will never learn or blame the artist if he feels inclined to go beyond the boundaries of his art into a neighbouring field.

It is with such accommodating thoughts as these that we observe the architect’s arrangements for painting the chapel. The colours were ready, the measurements taken, the sketches drawn. He had renounced all claim to originality, he kept close to his outlines, all he was concerned with was to distribute the sitting and hovering figures over the blank space so that they would tastefully decorate it.

The scaffolding was up, the work was progressing and, since he had already completed something worth looking at, he could not object to Charlotte’s coming with Ottilie to see it. The living angel faces and the flowing garments against the blue background of heaven were a delight to the eye, and the quiet piety of their demeanour engendered composure and a feeling of great tenderness in the heart.

The women had climbed up to him on the scaffolding, and Ottilie took paint and brush and, following his directions, painted a pleated robe. She painted skilfully and with neat clean lines. She seemed all at once to have command of everything she had learned in her school lessons. She hardly noticed how easy it was.

Charlotte, who was always happy to see Ottilie in any way occupied and distracted, left the couple to themselves and went away to ponder her own thoughts and to work out for herself the cares and worries she could share with no other.

When ordinary people get passionately worked up over the
common difficulties of everyday we can only give them a pitying smile, but we regard with reverence a soul in which the seed of a great destiny has been sown, which must await the unfolding of this conception, and which cannot and must not seek to accelerate either the good or the evil, the happiness or the unhappiness, which is to arise from it.

Eduard had sent Charlotte a reply by the courier she had sent to him in his solitude. His reply had been friendly and sympathetic, but composed and serious rather than confiding and affectionate. Shortly afterwards he had disappeared and Charlotte could get no news of him, until eventually she chanced to see his name in the gazette, where he was cited with honours among those who had distinguished themselves in a major incident of the war. She now knew what path he had chosen. She learned that he had come through great dangers, but she was at the same time convinced he would seek out greater. She could see all too clearly that he was hardly going to be kept from going to extremes in any sense of that word. She kept these cares, which were always with her, to herself, and they went round and round in her mind, but however she considered them she could not lay them to rest.

Ottilie, suspecting nothing of all this, had meanwhile been seized by the greatest enthusiasm for the work in the chapel and she had no difficulty at all in getting Charlotte’s permission to continue with it regularly. Now it went rapidly forward and the azure heaven was soon populated with inhabitants worthy of it. Practice on the earlier pictures had given Ottilie and the architect greater facility, and the later pictures were obviously better. And the faces, which were left for the architect alone to paint, gradually took on a very singular quality: they all began to look like Ottilie. The young man had had no preconceived faces in his mind, whether drawn from nature or from art, and what must have happened is that the proximity of the beautiful child must have made so
lively an impression on his soul that what his eye had seen his hand was gradually able to depict with nothing lost in the process, until finally both eye and hand were acting in unison. Be that as it may, one of the last of the little faces was a complete success, so that it seemed as if Ottilie herself were looking down from the vault of heaven.

The ceiling was now finished. It had been decided to leave the walls and simply to paint them over a lighter brown than they were already. The delicate columns and sculptured ornamentation were to be picked out in a darker brown. But as in matters of this sort one thing always leads to another, it was decided to add hanging clusters of fruit and flowers, which were supposed, so to speak, to link heaven and earth. Here Ottilie was altogether in her element. The gardens provided the finest examples they could desire and, although the garlands were very liberally fitted out, the work was completed sooner than they had expected.

But everything still looked disordered and unfinished. The scaffolding was still in position, the planks were thrown one on top of the other, the uneven floor was even more disfigured by the spilt paint. The architect now asked the ladies to give him a week and during that time not to enter the chapel. At length, one fine evening he invited them both to betake themselves there; and he begged to be excused accompanying them, and bowed himself out.

‘Whatever surprise he may have prepared for us,’ Charlotte said when he had gone, ‘I do not at the moment feel like going down there. You go on your own and tell me all about it. He is certain to have arranged something very nice. I shall enjoy it first in your description, and then I shall be glad to go and see it in reality.’

Ottilie, who well knew that Charlotte had to be careful about what she did, avoided all emotional excitement, and guarded especially against being taken by surprise, at once set off alone. She instinctively looked around for the architect, but
he was nowhere to be seen and must have hidden himself. She found the church door open and went in. The church had been completed, cleaned and consecrated earlier on. She went to the door of the chapel, its ponderous brass-studded weight swung back easily before her, and she halted in surprise at the unexpected appearance of the familiar room.

A grave many-coloured light was coming through the single high window, which had been set with stained glass, giving the whole interior a strange glow and evoking a peculiar atmosphere. The beauty of the vault and the walls was enhanced by the decoration of the floor, which now consisted of tiles specially shaped and laid after a handsome pattern and joined together with plasterwork. The architect had had these tiles, together with the stained-glass panes, prepared in secret and had been able to have them installed very quickly. There were also seats in the chapel now: a number of finely carved choir stalls had been discovered among the antiquities of the church and these were now disposed very becomingly around the chapel walls.

Ottilie was delighted to see things familiar to her thus brought together into an unfamiliar whole. She stood, walked back and forth, looked and examined. At length she sat in one of the stalls, and as she gazed up and around it seemed to her that she was and was not, she felt her existence and did not feel it, she felt that all this before her might vanish away and that she too might vanish away, and only when the sun ceased to illumine the window did Ottilie come to herself and hurry back to the mansion.

She did not hide from herself at what special epoch this unexpected event had befallen her. It was the eve of Eduard’s birthday. She had indeed hoped to celebrate it very differently from this: how brightly everything was to have been adorned for this celebration! But still the whole wealth of autumn flowers stood ungathered. The sunflowers still turned their faces to the sky, the asters still gazed ahead in modest
stillness, and those flowers that had been bound in garlands had been used to decorate a place which, if it was not to remain a mere artist’s whim, if it was to be put to any sort of use, seemed to be fit only to be a communal tomb.

She could not help recalling the bustling which had attended Eduard’s celebration of her own birthday, she could not help thinking of the newly erected pavilion under whose roof they had promised themselves so much pleasure. The fireworks exploded again before her eyes and in her ears; the lonelier she was, the more she lived in imagination; yet the more she lived in imagination, the more alone she felt. She leaned upon his arm no more, and had no hope of ever being able to lean on it again.

From Ottilie’s Journal

I must make a note of a remark made by the young artist: The case of the craftsman and the sculptor supplies the clearest evidence that man is least able to make his own that which most completely belongs to him. His works desert him as the bird deserts the nest in which it was hatched.

The architect above all has in this the strangest of destinies. How often he employs his whole mind and his whole love in the production of rooms from which he himself must be excluded. Kingly halls owe to him their splendour, but he cannot enjoy them at their most effective. In temples, he fixes a boundary between himself and the holy of holies, he may no longer mount the steps he himself has erected, just as the goldsmith may worship only from afar the monstrance he has made. The architect hands over to the rich man with the keys of his palace all the ease and comfort to be found in it without being able to enjoy any of it himself. Must the artist not in this way gradually become alienated from his art, since his work, like a child that has been provided for and left home, can no longer have any effect upon its father? And how beneficial it must have been for art when it was intended to be concerned almost exclusively with what was public property, and belonged to everybody and therefore also to the artist!

Ancient peoples had a solemn conception which can seem dreadful to us. They imagined their ancestors as sitting in great caverns on a circle of thrones in silent converse with one another. When a newcomer came in they stood up, if he was worthy of it, and bowed a welcome to him. When I was sitting in the chapel yesterday, and saw the other stalls ranged around the one I was sitting on, this idea seemed to me a very pleasing one. ‘Why can’t you go on sitting here,’ I thought to myself, ‘go on sitting here quietly and turned in upon yourself, for a long long time, until at last your friends come and you rise for them and show them to their places with a friendly bow?’ The stained glass turns the day to solemn twilight, and somebody ought to install an ever-burning lamp, so that the night too should not be wholly dark.

However you imagine yourself, you always think of yourself as seeing. I believe people have dreams only so as not to stop seeing. It may well be that one day the inner light will come forth out of us, so that we shall then no longer need any other light.

The year is dying. The wind blows across the stubble and finds there is nothing left for it to shake. Only the red berries on their slender trees still seem to want to remind us of something merrier, and the beat of the thresher awakens in us the thought of how much life and nourishment lies hidden in the cut-down ear of corn.

CHAPTER FOUR

H
OW
strangely then, after such events as these, after the rise of this sensation of transcience and passing away, was Ottilie affected by the news, which could no longer be kept concealed from her, that Eduard had delivered himself over to the varying fortunes of war. She was, alas, spared none of the reflections to which such news could be expected to give rise. But happily a human being can comprehend misfortune only up to a certain degree; what goes beyond this degree destroys him or leaves him indifferent. There are situations in which fear and hope become one, annul one another, and are lost in a black numbness and apathy. How otherwise could we know that those we love best stand in hourly danger of death and yet go on living our ordinary lives?

So it was as if a benevolent spirit had taken Ottilie into its care when it suddenly brought into this silence, into which she seemed in her lonely idleness to be sinking, a wild throng of young people, a crowd which, by keeping her thoroughly occupied and rousing her out of herself, excited in her the feeling of her own powers.

Charlotte’s daughter Luciane had hardly left the boarding-school and gone out into the great world, had hardly taken her place among the numerous company which frequented her aunt’s house, before her desire to attract really did attract someone and a young man, a very rich one, was taken with a violent desire to possess her. His great wealth gave him the right to take the best of everything for his own, and it seemed to him that all he lacked was a perfect wife on whose account he would be the envy of the world as he already was in every other respect.

It was this family affair which had been keeping Charlotte so busy. She had been devoting all her thoughts and all her correspondence to it, in so far as these were not engaged in trying to get more detailed news of what Eduard was doing; and it was the reason Ottilie had lately been left more to herself. She knew Luciane would be coming, she had been making necessary preparations in the house, but she did not realize she would be coming so soon. She still had a lot left to arrange and discuss when the storm suddenly broke over the mansion and over Ottilie.

Maidservants and manservants, baggage-carts with trunks and chests, came driving up; you would have thought you already had a houseful of guests, but the actual guests were only now arriving: the great-aunt with Luciane and her lady friends, the young man likewise not alone. The entrance hall was now full of cases, valises and other leather containers, it was a problem to sort out whose box was whose, there was no end to the dragging about of baggage. In the meantime there was a violent downpour, which did nothing to reduce the discomfort. Ottilie faced this tumult with equanimity; she went calmly to work, and her cheerful competence in fact showed itself at its finest, for it was not very long before she had reduced everything to order. They were all installed in their rooms, they were all comfortable in their own fashion, and they all thought they were being well looked after because they were not hindered from looking after themselves.

After a very hard journey they would all now have liked to relax, the future son-in-law would have liked time to ingratiate himself with his future mother-in-law – but Luciane could not rest. She had at last attained the happiness of being allowed to ride a horse. The future bridegroom possessed some beautiful horses and they had to be mounted straight away. Wind and weather, rain and storm, were of no account: it was as if you lived only to get wet and dry yourself again. If
she fancied going out on foot she did not bother what clothes she had on or what shoes she was wearing: she simply had to go and see the park of which she had heard so much. What could not be reached on horseback had to be scoured on foot. Soon she had seen everything and passed judgement on it. With the vivacity of her temperament she was not easy to contradict. The company had a lot to put up with from her, especially the maidservants, who were never finished with washing and ironing, mending and stitching.