by George Moore
She spied him sitting in the far corner, and wondered when he would look in her direction, and then remembering what he had said about the transmission of thought between sympathetic affinities, she sought to reach him with hers. She closed her eyes so that she might concentrate her will sufficiently for it to penetrate his brain. She sat tense with her desire, her hands clenched for more than a minute, but he did not answer to her will, and its tension relaxed in spite of herself. “He sits there listening to the music as if he had never heard a note of it before. Why does he not come to me?” As if in answer, Ulick got out of his stall and walked toward the entrance, seemingly in the intention of leaving the theatre. Evelyn felt that she must speak to him, and she was about to call to one of the chorus and ask him to tell Mr. Dean that she wanted to speak to him, but a vague inquietude seemed to awaken in him, and he seemed uncertain whether to go or stay, and he looked round the theatre as if seeking someone. He looked several times in the direction of Evelyn’s box without seeing her, and she was at last obliged to wave her hand. Then the dream upon his face vanished, and his eyes lit up, and his nod was the nod of one whose soul is full of interesting story.
He had one of those long Irish faces, all in a straight line, with flat, slightly hollow cheeks, and a long chin. It was clean shaven, and a heavy lock of black hair was always falling over his eyes. It was his eyes that gave its sombre ecstatic character to his face. They were large, dark, deeply set, singularly shaped, and they seemed to smoulder like fires in caves, leaping and sinking out of the darkness. He was a tall, thin young man, and he wore a black jacket and a large, blue necktie, tied with the ends hanging loose over his coat. Evelyn received him effusively, stretching both hands to him and telling him she was so glad he had come. She said she was delighted with his melodies, and would sing them as soon as she got an occasion. But he did not seem as pleased as he should have done; and sitting, his eyes fixed on the floor — now and then he muttered a word of thanks. His silence embarrassed her, and she felt suddenly that the talk which she had been looking forward to would be a failure, and she almost wished him out of her box. Neither had spoken for some time, and, to break an awkward silence, she said that she had been that morning at St. Joseph’s. He looked up; their eyes met unexpectedly, and she seemed to read an impertinence in his eyes; they seemed to say, “I wonder how you dared go there!” But his words contradicted the idea which she thought she had read in his eyes. He asked her at once eagerly and sympathetically, if she had seen her father. No, he was not there, and, growing suddenly shy, she sought to change the conversation.
“You are not a Roman Catholic, I think.... I know you were born a Catholic, but from something you said the other day I was led to think that you did not believe.”
“I cannot think what I could have said to give you such an idea. Most people reproach me for believing too much.”
“The other day you spoke of the ancient gods Angus and Lir, and the great mother Dana, as of real gods.”
“Of course I spoke of them as real gods; I am a Celt, and they are real gods to me.”
Now his face had lighted up, and in clear, harmonious voice he was arguing that the gods of a nation cannot die to that nation until it be incorporated and lost in another nation.
“I don’t see how you reconcile Angus and Lir with Christianity, that is all.”
“But I don’t try to reconcile them; they do not need reconciliation; all the gods are part of one faith.”
“But what do you believe ... seriously?”
“Everything except Atheism, and unthinking contentment. I believe in Christianity, but I am not so foolish as to limit myself to Christianity; I look upon Christianity as part of the truth, but not the whole truth. There is a continuous revelation: before Christ Buddha, before Buddha Krishna, who was crucified in mid-heaven, and the Gods of my race live too.”
She longed to ask Ulick so many questions that she could not frame one, so far had the idea of a continuous revelation carried her beyond the limits of her habitual thoughts; and while she was trying to think out his meaning in one direction, she lost a great deal of what he said subsequently, and her face wore an eager, puzzled and disappointed look. That she should have been the subject of this young man’s thoughts, that she should have suggested his opera of Grania, and that he should have at last succeeded, by means of an old photograph, in imagining some sort of image of her, flattered her inmost vanity, and with still brightening eyes she hoped that he was not disappointed in her.
“When did you begin to write opera? You must come to see me. You will tell me about your opera, and we will go through the music.”
“Will you let me play my music to you?”
“Yes, I shall be delighted.”
At that moment she remarked that Ulick’s teeth were almost the most beautiful she had ever seen, and that they shone like snow in his dark face.
“Some afternoon at the end of the week. We’re friends — I feel that we are. You are father’s friend; you were his friend when I was away. Tell me if he missed me very much. Tell me about him. I have been longing to ask you all the time. What is he doing? I have heard about his choir. He has got some wonderful treble voices.”
“He is very busy now rehearsing the ‘Missa Brevis.’ It will be given next Sunday. It will be splendidly done ... You ought to come to hear it.”
“I should like to, of course, but I am not certain that I shall not be able to go to St. Joseph’s next Sunday. How did you and father become acquainted?”
“Through an article I wrote about the music of St. Joseph’s. Mr. Innes said that it was written by a musician, and he wrote to the paper.”
“Asking you to come to see him?”
“Yes. Your father was the first friend I made in London.”
“And that was some years ago?”
“About four years ago. I had come over from Ireland with a few pounds in my pocket, and a portmanteau full of music, which I soon found no one wanted.”
“You had written music before you had met father?”
“Yes, I was organist at St. Patrick’s in Dublin for nearly three years. There’s no one like your father, Miss Innes.”
“No one, is there?” she replied enthusiastically. “There’s no one like him. I’m so glad you are friends. You see him nearly every day, and you show him all your music.” Then after a pause, she said, “Tell me, did he miss me very much?”
“Yes, he missed you, of course. But he felt that you were not wholly to blame.”
“And you took my place. I can see it all. It was father and son, instead of father and daughter. How well you must have got on together. What talks you must have had.”
The silence was confidential, and though they both were thinking of Mr. Innes, they seemed to become intimately aware of each other.
“But may I venture to advise you?”
“Yes. What?”
“I’m sure you ought to go and see him, or at least write to him saying you’d like to see him.”
“I know — I know — I must go. He’ll forgive me; he must forgive me. But I wish it were over. I’m afraid you think me very cowardly. You will not say you have seen me. You promise me to say nothing.”
Ulick gave her the required promise, and she asked him again to come to see her.
“I want you,” she said, “to go through Isolde’s music with me.”
“Do you think I can tell you anything about the music you don’t know already?”
“Yes, I think you can. You tell me things about myself that I did not know. I hardly knew that I acted as you describe in Margaret. I hope I did, for I seemed very good in your article. I read it over again this morning in bed. But tell me, did father come?”
“You must not press me to answer that question. My advice to you is to go and see your father. He will tell you what he thought of your singing if he came here.... The act is over,” he said suddenly, and he seemed glad of the interruption. “I wonder what your Elizabeth wil
l be like?”
“What do you think?”
“You’re a clever woman; you will no doubt arrive at a very logical and clear conception of the part, but—”
“But we cannot act what is not in us. Is that what you were going to say?”
“Something like that.”
“You think I shall arrive at a logical and clear conception. Is that the way you think I arrived at my Margaret? Did it look like that? I may play the part of Elizabeth badly, but I sha’n’t play it as you think I shall. This frock is against me. I’ve a mind to send you away.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
INSTEAD OF RUSHING wildly from side to side according to custom, she advanced timidly, absorbed in deep memory; at every glance her face expressed a recollection; she seemed to alternate between a vague dread and an unconquerable delight; she seemed like a dim sky filled with an inner radiance, but for a time it seemed uncertain which would prevail — sunlight or shadow. But, like the sunlight, joy burst forth, scattering uncertainty and alarm, illuminating life from end to end; and her emotion vented itself in cries of April melody, and all the barren stage seemed in flower about her; she stood like a bird on a branch singing the spring time. And she sang every note with the same ease, each was equally round and clear, but what delighted Ulick was the perfect dramatic expression of her singing. It seemed to him that he was really listening to a very young girl who had just heard of the return of a man whom she had loved or might have loved. A bud last night slept close curled in virginal strictness, with the morning light it awoke a rose. But the core of the rose is still hidden from the light, only the outer leaves know it, and so Elizabeth is pure in her first aspiration; she rejoices as the lark rejoices in the sky, without desiring to possess the sky. Ulick could not explain to himself the obsession of this singing; he was thrall to the sensation of a staid German princess of the tenth century, and the wearing of a large hat with ostrich feathers, and tied with a blue veil, hindered no whit of it. And the tailor-made dress and six years of liaison with Owen Asher was no let to the mediæval virgin formulated in antique custom. In the duet with Tannhäuser she was benign and forgiving, the divine penitent who, having no sins of her own to do penance for, does penance for the sins of others.
It was then that Ulick began to understand the secret of Evelyn’s acting; in Elizabeth she had gone back to the Dulwich days before she knew Asher, and was acting what she then felt and thought. She believed she was living again with her father, and so intense was her conviction that it evoked the externals. Even her age vanished; she was but eighteen, a virgin whose sole reality has been her father and her châtelaine, and whose vision of the world was, till now, a mere decoration — sentinels on the drawbridge, hunters assembling on the hillside, pictures hardly more real to her than those she weaves on her tapestry loom.
Ulick leaned out of the box and applauded; he dared even to cry encore, and, following suit, the musicians laid aside their instruments and, standing up in the orchestra, applauded with him. The conductor tapped approval with his stick on the little harmonium, the chorus at the back cried encore. It was a curious scene; these folk, whose one idea at rehearsal is to get it over as soon as possible, conniving at their own retention in the theatre.
The applause of her fellow artistes delighted her; she bowed to the orchestra, and, turning to the chorus, said that she would be pleased to sing the duet again if they did not mind the delay; and coming down the stage and standing in front of the box, she said to Ulick —
“Well, are you satisfied?... Is that your idea of Elizabeth?”
“So far as we have gone, yes, but I shall not know if your Elizabeth is my Elizabeth until I have heard the end of the act.”
Turning to Mr. Hermann Goetze, she said —
“Mr. Dean has very distinct ideas how this part should be played.”
“Mr. Dean,” answered the manager, laughing, “would not go to Bayreuth three years ago because they played ‘Tannhäuser.’ But one evening he took the score down to read the new music, and to his surprise he found that it was the old that interested him. Mr. Dean is always making discoveries; he discovers all my singers after he has heard them.”
“And Mr. Hermann Goetze discovers his singers before he has heard them,” cried Ulick.
Mr. Hermann Goetze looked for a moment as if he were going to get angry, but remembering that Dean was critic to an important weekly, he laughed and put his handkerchief to his jaw, and Evelyn went up the stage to meet the Landgrave — her father — and she sang a duet with him. As soon as it was concluded, the introduction to the march brought the first courtiers and pages on the stage, and with the first strains of the march the assembly, which had been invited to witness the competitions, was seated in the circular benches ranged round the throne of the Landgrave and his daughter.
Having consulted with his stage manager and superintended some alterations in the stage arrangements, Mr. Hermann Goetze, whose toothache seemed a little better again, left the stage, and coming into the box where Ulick was sitting, he sat beside him and affected some interest in his opinion regarding the grouping, for it had occurred to him that if Evelyn should take a fancy to this young man nothing was more likely than that she should ask to have his opera produced. With the plot and some of the music he was already vaguely acquainted; and he had gathered, in a general way, that Ulick Dean was considered to be a man of talent. The British public might demand a new opera, and there had been some talk of Celtic genius in the newspapers lately. Dean’s “Grania” might make an admirable diversion in the Wagnerian repertoire — only it must not be too anti-Wagnerian. Mr. Goetze prided himself on being in the movement. Now, if Evelyn Innes would sing the title rôle, “Grania” was the very thing he wanted. And in such a frame of mind, he listened to Ulick Dean. He was glad that “Grania” was based on a legend; Wagner had shown that an opera could not be written except on a legendary basis. The Irish legends were just the thing the public was prepared to take an interest in. But there was one thing he feared — that there were no motives.
“Tell me more about the music? It is not like the opera you showed me a year or two ago in which instead of motives certain instruments introduce the characters? There is nothing Gregorian about this new work, is there?”
“Nothing,” Ulick answered, smiling contemptuously — nothing recognisable to uneducated ears.”
“Plenty of chromatic writing?”
“Yes, I think I can assure you that there is plenty of modulation, some unresolved dissonances. I suppose that that is what you want. Alas, there are not many motives.”
“Ah!”
Ulick waited to be asked if he could not introduce some. But at that moment Tannhäuser’s avowal of the joys he had experienced with Venus in Mount Horsel had shocked the Landgrave’s pious court. The dames and the wives of the burgesses had hastened away, leaving their husbands to avenge the affront offered to their modesty. The knights drew their swords; it was the moment when Elizabeth runs down the steps of the throne and demands mercy from her father for the man she loves. The idea of this scene was very dear to Ulick, and his whole attention was fixed on Evelyn.
He was only attracted by essential ideas, and the mysterious expectancy of the virgin awaiting the approach of the man she loves was surely the essential spirit of life — the ultimate meaning of things. The comedy of existence, the habit of life worn in different ages of the world had no interest for him; it was the essential that he sought and wished to put upon the stage — the striving and yearning, and then the inevitable acceptation of the burden of life; in other words, the entrance into the life of resignation. That was what he sought in his own operas, and from this ideal he had never wavered; all other art but this essential art was indifferent to him. It was no longer the beautiful writing of Wagner’s later works that attracted him; he deemed this one to be, perhaps, the finest, being the sincerest, and “Parsifal” the worst, being the most hypocritical. Elizabeth was the essential penitent, she who d
oes penance not for herself, she has committed no sin, but the sublime penitent who does penance for the sins of others. Not for a moment could he admit the penitence of Kundry. In her there was merely the external aspect. “Parsifal” was to Ulick a revolting hypocrisy, and Kundry the blot on Wagner’s life. In the first act she is a sort of wild witch, not very explicit to any intelligence that probes below the surface. In the second, she is a courtesan with black diamonds. In the third, she wears the coarse habit of a penitent, and her waist is tied with a cord; but her repentance goes no further than these exterior signs. She says no word, and Ulick could not accept the descriptive music as sufficient explanation of her repentance, even if it were sincere, which it was not, and he spoke derisively of the amorous cries to be heard at every moment in the orchestra, while she is dragging herself to Parsifal’s feet. Elizabeth’s prayer was to him a perfect expression of a penitent soul. Kundry, he pointed out, had no such prayer, and he derisively sang the cries of amorous desire. The character of Parsifal he could admit even less than the character of Kundry. As he would say in discussion, “If I am to discuss an artistic question, I must go to the very heart of it. Now, if we ask ourselves what Siegfried did, the answer is, that he forged the sword, killed the dragon and released Brunnhilde. But if, in like manner, we ask ourselves what Parsifal did, is not the answer, that he killed a swan and refused a kiss and with many morbid, suggestive and disagreeable remarks? These are the facts,” he would say; “confute them who may, explain them who can!” And if it were urged, as it often was, that in Parsifal Wagner desired the very opposite to what he had in Siegfried, the Parsifal is opposed to Siegfried as Hamlet is opposed to Othello, Ulick eagerly accepted the challenge, and like one sure of his adversary’s life, began the attack.
