'Si com' ad Arli ove 'l Rodano stagna.'
She laughed uneasily, with a half shudder. The tombs are moved aside now from the Aliscamps, into the little secluded Allée des Tombeaux, where they line both sides of the way, empty stone trough after empty stone trough, with here and there a more pompous sarcophagus. There is a quiet path between them, which she did not even like to walk in, leading to the canal and the bowling-green; and in the evening the old men creep out and sit among the tombs.
At first there was bright sunshine every day, but the sun scorched; and then it set in to rain. One night a storm wakened her, and it seemed to her that she had never heard such thunder, or seen such lightning, as that which shook the old roof under which she lay, and blazed and flickered at the window until it seemed to be licking up the earth with liquid fire. The storm faded out in a morning of faint sunshine; only the rain clung furtively about the streets all day.
Day after day it rained, and Livia sat in the house, listlessly reading the novels which she had brought with her, or staring with fierce impatience out of the window. The rain came down steadily, ceaselessly, drawing a wet grey curtain over the city. Roserra liked that softened aspect which came over things in this uncomfortable weather; he walked every day through the streets in which the water gathered in puddles between the paving-stones, and ran in little streams down the gutters; he found a kind of autumnal charm in the dripping trees and soaked paths of the Aliscamps; a peaceful, and to him pathetic and pleasant, odour of decay. Livia went out with him once, muffled in a long cloak, and keeping her whole face carefully under the umbrella. She wanted to know where he was taking her, and why; she shivered, sneezed, and gave one or two little coughs. When she saw the ground of the Aliscamps, and the first trees began to drip upon her umbrella with a faint tap-tapping on the strained silk, she turned resolutely, and hurried Roserra straight back to the house.
After that she stayed indoors day after day, getting more irritable every day. She took up one book after another, read a little, and then laid it down. She walked to and fro in the narrow room, with nothing, as she said, to think about, and nothing to see if she looked out of the window. There was the square, every stone polished by the rain; the other houses in the square, most of them shuttered; the little church in the corner, with its monotonous bell, its few worshippers. She knew them all; they were mostly women, plain, elderly women; not one of them had any interest, or indeed existence, for her. She wondered vaguely why they went backwards and forwards, between their houses and the church, in such a regular way. Could it really amuse them? Could they really believe certain things so firmly that it was worth while taking all that trouble in order to be on the right side at last? She supposed so, and ended her speculations.
When Roserra was with her, he annoyed her by not seeming to mind the weather. He would come in from a walk, and, if she seemed to be busy reading, would sit down cheerfully by the stove, and really read the book which he had in his hand. She looked at him over the pages of hers, hating to see him occupied when she could not fix her mind on anything. She felt imprisoned; not that she really wanted to go out: it was the not being able to that fretted her.
About the time when, if she had been in London, she would have had tea, the uneasiness came over her most actively. She would go upstairs to her room, and sit watching herself pityingly in the glass; or she would try on hat after hat, hats which had come from Paris, and were meant for Paris or London, hats which she could not possibly wear here, where her smallest and simplest ones seemed out of place. Sometimes she brought herself back into a good temper by the mere pleasurable feel of the things; and she would run downstairs forgetting that she was in Arles.
One afternoon, when she was in one of her easiest moods, Roserra persuaded her to attend Benediction with him at the church of Notre Dame la Major, in the corner of the square. The church was quite dark, and she could only dimly see the high-altar, draped in white, and with something white rising up from its midst, like a figure mysteriously poised among the unlighted candles. Hooded figures passed, and knelt with bowed heads; presently a light passed across the church, and a lamp was let down by a chain, lighted, and drawn up again to its place. Then a few candles were lighted, and only then did she see the priest kneeling motionless before the altar. The chanting was very homely, like that in a village church; there was even the village church's harmonium; but the monotony of one air repeated over and over again brought even to Livia some sense of a harmony between this half-drowsy service and the slumbering city outside. They waited until the service was over, the priests went out, the lamps and the candles were extinguished, and the hooded figures, after a little silence, began to move again in the dimness of the church.
Sometimes she would go with Roserra to the cloisters of St. Trophime, where Arles, as he said, seemed to withdraw into its most intimate self. The oddness of the whole place amused her. Every side was built in a different century: the north in the ninth, the east in the thirteenth, the west in the fourteenth, and the south in the sixteenth; and the builders, century by century, have gathered into this sadly battered court a little of the curious piety of age after age, working here to perpetuate, not only the legends of the Church, but the legends that have their home about Arles. Again and again, among these naïve sculptures, one sees the local dragon, the man-eating Tarasque who has given its name to Tarascon. The place is full of monsters, and of figures tortured into strange dislocations. Adam swings ape-like among the branches of the apple-tree, biting at the leaves before he reaches the apple. Flames break out among companies of the damned, and the devil sits enthroned above his subjects. A gentle Doctor of the Church holding a book, and bending his head meditatively sideways, was shown to Livia as King Solomon; with, of course, in the slim saint on the other side of the pillar, the Queen of Sheba. Broken escutcheons, carved in stone, commemorate bishops on the walls. There is no order, or division of time; one seems shut off equally from the present and from any appreciable moment of the past; shut in with the same vague and timeless Autumn that has moulded Arles into its own image.
But it was just this, for which Roserra loved Arles above all other places, that made Livia more and more acutely miserable. Wandering about the streets which bring one back always to one's starting-point, or along the boulevards which suggest the beginning of the country, but set one no further into it, nothing seems to matter very much, for nothing seems very much to exist. In Livia, as Roserra was gradually finding out, there was none of that sympathetic submissiveness to things which meant for him so much of the charm of life. She wanted something definite to do, somewhere definite to go; her mind took no subtle colour from things, nor was there any active world within her which could transmute everything into its own image. She was dependent on an exterior world, cut to a narrow pattern, and, outside that, nothing had any meaning for her. He began to wonder if he had made the irremediable mistake, and, in his preoccupation with that uneasy idea, everything seemed changed; he, too, began to grow restless.