by George Moore
On her singing nights she dined at half-past five, and the interval after dinner she spent in looking through her part, humming bits of it to herself, but to-day Lady Duckle was quick to remark the score of “Tannhäuser” in her hand. She sat with it on her knees, looking at it only occasionally, for she was thinking how the music would appeal to her father, and how her mother would have sung it. But she had to abandon these vain speculations. She must play the part as she felt it, to tamper with her conception would be to court failure. To please herself was her only chance of pleasing her father; if he did not like her reading of the part, if her singing did not please him, it was very unfortunate, but could not be helped. And when the carriage came to take her to the theatre, she was not sure that she would not be glad to receive a telegram saying that he was prevented from coming. She was very nervous while dressing, and on coming downstairs she stood watching the stage-box where he was sitting. She could distinguish his handsome, grave face through the shadows, and the orchestra was playing that rather rhetorical address to the halls which neither she nor Ulick cared much about. She waited, forgetful of her entrance, and she had to hurry round to the back of the stage.
But the moment the curtain went up, she became the mediæval German princess; her other life fell behind her, and her father was but a little shadow on her brain. Yet he was the inspiration of her acting, and that night the whole theatre consisted for Evelyn of one stage-box. Her eyes never wandered there, but she knew that there sat her ultimate judge, one whom no excess or trick could deceive. He would not judge her by the mere superficial appearance she presented on the stage, by the superficial qualities of her voice or her acting; he would see to the origin of the idea, whence it had sprung, and how it had been developed. He did not know this particular opera, but he knew all music, and would judge it and her not according to the capricious taste of the moment, but in its relation and her relation to the immutable canons of art, from the plain chant to Palestrina, from Palestrina to Bach and Beethoven. Her singing of every phrase would be passed as it were through the long tradition of the centuries; it would not be accepted as an isolated fact, it would be judged good, indifferent or bad, by learned technical comparison. That she was his daughter would weigh not a hair’s weight in the scale, and the knowledge of this terrible justice raised her out of herself, detached her more completely from the superficial and the vulgar. She sang and acted as in a dream, hypnotised by her audience, her exaltation steeped in somnambulism and steeped in ecstasy.
The curtain was raised several times, but that night the only applause or censure she was minded to hear awaited her in her dressing-room. She sent her maid out of the room, and waited for some sound of footsteps in the corridor, and at the first sound she rushed to the door and flung it open. It was her father, Merat was bringing him along the corridor, and they stood looking at each other; her clear, nervous eyes were trembling with emotion. His face seemed to tell her that he was pleased; she read upon it the calm exaltation of art, yet she could not however summon sufficient courage to ask him, and they sat down side by side. At last she said —
“Why don’t you speak? Aren’t you satisfied? Was I so bad?”
“You are a great artist, Evelyn. I wish your mother were here to hear you.”
“Is that really true? Say it again, father. You are satisfied with me. Then I have succeeded.”
He told her why she had sung well, and he knew so well. It was like walking with a man with a lantern; when he raised the light, she could see a little farther into the darkness. But she had still the prayer to sing to him. She wanted to know what he would think of her singing of the prayer. The voice of the call-boy interrupted them. She sang the prayer more purely than ever, and the flutes and clarionettes led her up a shining road, and when she walked up the stage she seemed to disappear amid the palpitation of the stars.
Her father was waiting for her, and on their way to the station she could see that he was absorbed in her art of singing. His remarks were occasional and disparate, but she guessed his train of thought, supplying easily the missing links. His praise was all inferential, and this made it more delicate and delicious. On bidding him good-night he asked her to come to choir practice. She would have liked to, but her accompanist was coming at half-past ten.
There were few days when she was not singing at night that she dispensed with her morning’s work. She considered herself like a gymnast, bound to go through her feats in private, so as to assure herself of her power of being able to go through them in public. Even when she knew a part, she did not like to sing it many times without studying it afresh. She believed that once a week was as often as it was possible to give a Wagner opera, and even then an occasional rehearsal was indispensable if the first high level of excellence was to be maintained.
With her morning’s work she allowed no one to interfere. Owen was often sent away, or retained for such a time as his criticism might be of use. But to-day she was expecting Ulick; he had promised to go through the music with her; so when Merat came to tell her that the pianist had arrived, she hesitated, uncertain whether she should send him away. But after a moment’s reflection she decided not to forego her serious study of the part. She only wished to talk to Ulick about the music, to sing bits of it here and there, to question him regarding certain readings, to get at his ideas concerning it. All that was very interesting and very valuable in a way, but it was not hard work, and she felt, moreover, that hard work was just what she wanted before the rehearsals of “Tristan” began; there were certain passages where she was not sure of herself. She thought of the cry Isolde utters in the third act when Tristan falls dead. The orchestra comes in then in a way very perplexing for the singer, and she had not yet succeeded in satisfying herself with those few bars.
“Tell the young man that I shall be with him in half an hour.”
And when she had had her bath and her hair was dressed, she tied a few petticoats round her waist and slipped on a morning wrapper; that was enough, she paid no heed to her accompanist, treating him as if he were her hairdresser. She sang sitting close to his elbow, her arm familiarly laid upon the back of his chair, a little grey woollen shawl round her shoulders. In the passages requiring the whole of her voice, she got up and sang them right through, as if she were on the stage, listened to by five thousand people. Owen, accustomed as he was to her voice, sometimes couldn’t help wondering at the power of it; the volume of sound issuing from her throat drowned the piano, threatening to break its strings. Her ear was so fine that it detected any slightest tampering with the text. “You have given me a false chord,” she would say; and sure enough, the pianist’s fingers had accidentally softened some harshness. Sometimes he ventured a slight criticism. “You should hold the note a little longer.” Then she would sing the passage again.
After singing for about two hours she had lunch. That day she was lunching with Lady Ascott, and did not get away until after three o’clock. Owen came to fetch her, and they went away to see pictures. But more present than the pictures were Ulick’s dark eyes, and Owen noticed the shadow passing constantly behind her eyes. Twice she asked him what the time was, and she told him she would have to go soon.
At last she said, “Now I must say good-bye.”
She could see he was troubled, and that she grieved him, and at one moment it was uncertain whether she would not renounce her visit and send Ulick a telegram. But she remembered that he had probably seen her father, and would be able to tell her more of what her father thought of her Elizabeth. It was that feeble excuse that sufficed to decide her conduct, and she bade him good-bye.
Standing on the threshold of her drawing-room, Evelyn admired its symmetry and beauty. The wall paper, a delicate harmony in pale brown and pink roses, soothed the eye; the design was a lattice, through which the flowers grew. An oval mirror hung lengthwise above the white marble chimney piece, and the Louis XV. clock was a charming composition of two figures. A Muse in a simple attitude leaned a little
to the left in order to strike the lyre placed above the dial; on the other side, a Cupid listened attentive for the sound of the hour, presumably his hour. There was a little lyrical inevitableness in the lines of this clock, and Owen could not come into the room without admiring it. On the chimney piece there were two bowls filled with violets, and the flowers partly hid the beautiful Worcester blue and the golden pheasants. And on either side of the clock were two Chelsea groups, factitious bowers made out of dark green shell-like leaves, in which were seated a lady in a flowered silk and a beribboned shepherd playing a flute.
They had spent long mornings seeking a real Sheraton sofa, with six or eight chairs to match. For a long time they were unfortunate, but they had happened upon two sofas, certainly of the period, probably made by Sheraton himself. A hundred and twenty years had given a beautiful lustre to the satinwood and to the painted garlands of flowers, and the woven cane had attained a rich brown and gold; and the chairs that went with the sofa were works of art, so happy were the proportions of their thin legs and backs, and in the middle of the backs the circle of harmonious cane was in exquisite proportion.
For a long while the question for immediate decision had become what carpet should be there. Evelyn had happened upon an old Aubusson carpet, a little threadbare, but the dealer had assured her that it could be made as good as new, and she had telegraphed to Owen to go to see its pale roses and purple architecture. He had written to her that its harmony was as florid, and yet as classical as an aria by Mozart. He was still more pleased when he saw it down, and he had spent hours thinking of what pictures would suit it, would carry on its colour and design. The Boucher drawing which he had bought at Christie’s had seemed to him the very thing. He had brought it home in a cab.
She was proud of her room, but she was doubtful if it would please Ulick, and was curious to hear what he would think of it. She remembered that Owen had said that such exquisite exteriorities were only possible in a pagan century, when man is content to look no farther than this strip of existence for the reason of his existence and his birthright. And while waiting for Ulick she wondered what his rooms were like, and if she would ever go there. She expected him about five, and she sat waiting for him by her tea-table amid the eighteenth century furniture, a little to the right of the Boucher.
She watched him as he came towards her, expecting and hoping to see him cast a quick glance at the picture. He shook hands with her vaguely, and sat down on a Sheraton chair and fixed his eyes on the Aubusson carpet. She thought for some time that he was examining it, but at last the truth dawned; he did not see it at all, he was maybe a thousand years away, lost in some legendary past. Had she not seen him before pass from such remote mood and become suddenly animated and gay, she would have despaired of any pleasure in his visit. Above everything else she was minded to ask him if he had seen her father, and if her father had spoken to him about her Elizabeth. But shyness prevented her, and she spoke to him about ordinary things, and he answered her questions perfunctorily, and without any apparent reason he got up and walked about the room; but not looking at any object, he walked about, with hanging head, absorbed in thought. “If he won’t look at me he might look at my room, I’m sure that is pretty enough,” and she sat watching him with smiling eyes. When she asked him what he thought of the Boucher, he said that no doubt it was very graceful, but that the only art he took interest in, except Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci and some German Primitives, was Blake. Then he seemed to forget all about her, and she had begun to think his manner more than usually unconventional, and, having made all the ordinary remarks she could think of, she asked him suddenly if he had seen her father, and if he had said anything to him about her Elizabeth.
“I went to Dulwich on purpose to hear.”
She blushed, and was very happy. It was delicious to hear that he was sufficiently interested in her to go to Dulwich on purpose to inquire her father’s opinion of her Elizabeth.
“I wonder if he will like my Isolde as well.”
He did not answer, and his silence filled her with inquietude.
“I have been thinking over what you said regarding your conception of the part.”
She waited for him to tell her what conclusion he had come to, but he said nothing. At last he got up, and she followed him to the piano. When she came to the passage where Isolde tells Brangäne that she intended to kill Tristan, he stopped.
“But she is violent; hear these chords, how aggressive they are. The music is against you. Listen to these chords.”
“I know those chords well enough. You don’t suppose I am listening to them for the first time. I admit that there are a few places where she is distinctly violent. The curse must be given violently, but I think it is possible to make it felt that her violence is a sexual violence, a sort of wish to go mad. I can’t explain. Can’t you understand?”
“Yes, I think I do; you want to sing the first part of the act languidly. There is more in the music which supports your reading than I thought. In the passage where Isolde says to Brangäne, but really to herself, ‘To die without having been loved by that man!’ the love motive appears here for the first time, but more drawn out, broader than elsewhere.”
She declared that Wagner had emphasised his meaning in this passage as if he had anticipated all the misreadings of this first act, and was striving to guard himself against them. She grew excited in the discussion. She had merely followed her instinct, but she was glad that Ulick had challenged her reading, for as they examined the music clause by clause, they found still further warrant for her conception.
“Ah, the old man knew what he was doing,” she said; “he had marked this passage to be sung gloomily, and by gloomily he meant infinite lassitude.” But this intention had not been grasped, and the singers had either sung it without any particular expression, or with a stupid stage expression which meant if possible something less than nothing. “Then, you see, if I sing the first half of the first act as wearily as the music allows me, I shall get a contrast — an Isolde who has not drunk the love potion. The love potion is of course only a symbol of her surrender to her desire.”
Ulick would have liked to have gone through the whole of the music of the act with her. It was only in this way that he could get an idea of how her reading would work out. But in that moment each read in the other’s eyes an avowal of which they were immediately ashamed, and which they tried to dissimulate.
“I am tired. We won’t have any more music this evening.”
His thoughts seemed to pass suddenly from her, and then, without her being aware how it began, she found herself listening intently to him. He was talking in that strange, rhythmical chant of his about the primal melancholy of man, and his remote past always insurgent in him. Although she did not quite understand, perhaps because she did not quite understand, she was carried away far out of all reason, and it seemed to her that she could listen for ever. Nor could she clearly see out of her eyes, and she felt all power of resistance dissolve within her. He might have taken her in his arms and kissed her then; but though sitting by her, he seemed a thousand miles away; his remoteness chastened her, and she asked him of what he was thinking.
“When your father used to speak of you, I used to see you; sometimes I used to fancy I heard you. I did hear you once sing in a dream.”
“What was I singing? Wagner?”
“No; something quite different. I forgot it all as I awoke except the last notes. I seemed to have returned from the future — you seemed in the end to lose your voice.... I cannot tell you — I forget.”
“It is very sad; how sad such feelings are.”
“But I never doubted that I should meet you, that our destinies were knit together — for a time at least.”
She wanted to ask him by what signs do we recognise the moment that we are destined to meet the one that is more important to us than all the world. But she could find no way of asking this question that would not betray her. She could not pu
t it so that Ulick would fail to read some application of the question to herself, and to himself. So it seemed strange indeed that he should, as if in answer to her unexpressed thought, say that the instinct of man is to consult the stars. She remembered the evenings when she used to go into the patch of black garden and gaze at the stars till her brain reeled. She used even to gather the daffodils and place them on the wall in homage to the star which she felt to be hers. She could not refrain from this idolatrous act; but in her bed at night, thinking of the flowers and the star, she had believed herself mad or very wicked; for nothing in the world would she have had anyone know her folly, and she remembered the agony it had been to her to confess it. But now she heard that she had been acting according to the sense of the wisdom of generations. As he had said, “according to the immortal atavism of man.”
With her ordinary work-a-day intelligence, she felt that the stars could not possibly be concerned in our miserable existence. But deep down in her being someone who was not herself, but who seemed inseparable from her, and over whom she had no slightest control, seemed to breathe throughout her entire being an affirmation of her celestial dependency. She could catch no words, merely a vague, immaterial destiny like distant music; and her ears filled with a wailing certitude of an inseverable affinity with the stars, and she longed to put off this shameful garb of flesh and rise to her spiritual destiny of which the stars are our watchful guardians. It was like deep music; words could not contain it, it was a deep and indistinct yearning for the stars — for spiritual existence. She was conscious of the narrowness of the prison-house into which Owen had shut her, and looking at Ulick, she felt the thrill of liberation; it was like a ray of light dividing the dark. Looking at Ulick, she was startled by the conviction of his indispensability in her life, and the knowledge that she must repel him was an acute affliction, a desolate despair. It seemed cruel and disastrous that she might not love him, for it was only through love that she could get to understand him, and life without knowledge of him seemed failure.
