by George Moore
The grey background, in which a casual ray of sunlight awoke tints more beautiful than in any eighteenth-century watered silks, delighted the eyes and held the mind prisoner; and out of all this miraculous grey the figure seemed to have arisen like an incantation, seemed to have grown as naturally as a rose grows among its leaves. Out of a grey tint and a rose tint a permanent music had been made, and Owen often remembered the seeming accident which had got him to bring Evelyn to see the great painter, whose genius he had recognised always.
The portrait was one of the most beautiful; it was not as complete as an Old Master, but Owen’s connoisseurship rose above such difficulties. Things which the painter had not observed, things which had not interested him, he had omitted; he had not tried to rival the completeness of nature; he had been content to paint a portrait, which, Owen often said to himself, would be like her when the gold faded from her hair, and no pair of stays would discover her hips.
He had painted the essential, a young woman of genius, who had gone to Paris on the mission of her genius, and in the eyes he had fixed the untamable light of genius, and in the thin small mouth a thirst which no spiritual Paradise could wholly allay. It was all this to Owen, but Owen’s friends, who saw only the superficial appearance, said it was merely a very unflattering portrait of an attractive woman.
One morning Evelyn had happened to sit on the edge of a chair in the same attitude as the painter had seen her sit in by the side of her accompanist one morning, and he had told her not to move; remembering her grey shawl, he had hurriedly fetched a shawl and had placed it about her shoulders. And this seemed to most critics a most commonplace and inartistic way of painting the portrait of a great singer. But she was very probable in this picture; her past and perhaps her future was in this disconcerting compound of the commonplace and the rare, and the confusion which this had created in the mind of Owen’s friends was aggravated by the strange elliptical execution. The face had been achieved with a shadow and a light, the light faintly gradated with a delicate shade of rose; and in the midst of this almost ungradated colour, the right eye had been drawn without the help of any shadow. In a bad light the picture looked ridiculous, and the loose drawing, which was inseparable from the genius of the painting, fretted the eye, but with a ray of light the beauties of the picture reappeared.
Owen knew well that it proclaimed the room in which it hung to be the room of a man of taste. And with his eyes fixed on the picture, his thoughts wandered back and forward from the past when she was his, to the future when she might be his again. He wondered what she was doing now, where she was, and if she would write to him again; for she sometimes wrote to him, being unwilling, as he thought, to abandon her power over him.
One evening, wondering at his own credulity, he strove to throw his will out to reach her brain, to overpower her will with his, and force her to come to see him. The next post brought him a letter from Evelyn, and though his subsequent experiments in telepathy were not so successful, he retained sufficient belief in the possibilities of influencing another’s mind to try again. Having nothing else to do, he strove to cultivate a visionary power, and he sometimes thought that he saw her; but the room or landscape he saw her in soon reverted to some room or landscape familiar to him, and he sat wondering if it were the collective will of the convent which thwarted and rendered him unable to reach and influence Evelyn.
He began to believe she was dead. He drove the thought out of his mind, but it returned, and he felt that he must get news of her. From no one except Mr. Innés could he get news of Evelyn. Six years ago he had gone away with his daughter. But what had he done for Evelyn — he had made her a great success, he had made her an artist. Mr. Innes would appreciate that. He remembered, and with satisfaction; that he had asked Evelyn to marry him. His conduct had been irreproachable; and seeing things in a new light he wondered why he had not gone to Mr. Innés long ago. Perhaps Mr. Innes would help him to get Evelyn back again; and conscious of his rectitude he went to Dulwich.
“Mr. Innes,” he said; as he came into the room before the door had closed behind him; “I have come to you for news of Evelyn. She never writes to me now; and I am overborne with anxiety.”
“Evelyn is in London; but she has retired from the world; and has asked me not to give her address to anyone; that is why she is not here.”
“I am sorry that I prevent your daughter from coming to live with you; but you can tell her that I will not try to seek her out; and will you ask her to write to me sometimes; and if that is impossible will you write to me? If you will do this; Mr. Innes; you will confer an obligation. I know that — But you know the whole story; she has told it to you; and truthfully; no doubt; there was no reason why she should not; moreover; she was always very truthful.”
“Yes; I think I know the whole story; and I am sorry for you.”
They spent the afternoon talking of her; and Owen felt that with her father for an ally he might induce Evelyn to marry him. The afternoon had been a charming one; not once had Mr. Innes rebuked him — yes, once, when he had asked him if Evelyn sang as well as her mother. And Owen reflected how strangely her art had been driven out by another instinct.
The idea of inherited tendency at once interested him, and he began to invent for her a religious grandmother. He came of a scientific generation, and the idea of a sudden revelation did not occur to him. If Ulick had suggested it to him — this would have been Ulick’s explanation of Evelyn’s conversion — Owen would have repudiated it as ridiculous. And as he walked away from Dowlands he wavered between a grandmother and a great-aunt, and the idea did not leave his thoughts until his attention was attracted by the chestnut bloom which was shedding upon the pavement. These trees were to him Evelyn’s trees, and he stopped to think of the first time he had seen her cross the road. She wore an old dress. She had a letter in her hand, and she had been ashamed of her house slippers.
But at that moment Ulick, who was going to Dowlands, caught sight of this tall, meditative man, and he hurried to the other side of the street. Owen hurried after him, and encouraged by his success with Mr. Innés, he attempted to win Ulick over. He began by asking him if he might walk back with him as far as Dowlands, and on the way there he spoke against doctrinal Christianity and the monastic idea so sympathetically that Ulick was led into the conversation, and he communicated several ideas on the subject.
Owen’s appearance was distasteful to Ulick — the varnished boots, the turned-up trousers, though the day was dry, the large shirt cuffs, the scarf pin, and some few other suggestions of careful dressing annoyed Ulick, and he wondered how a man could waste so much time on his appearance. At the same moment Owen wondered at Ulick’s rough suit of clothes; they were creased, but they looked well upon him, and Owen was not wholly displeased by Ulick’s rough appearance. He could not imitate it, habit was too strong, but he could admire it. There were moments when Owen was broad minded. He understood how Evelyn could admire this young man better than Ulick could understand how she could have liked a man whose chief concern, if not his whole concern, was with things rather than with ideas. It seemed to him difficult to believe that Owen should have any serious love of music. But his belief on this point was subsequently modified by the very sincere admiration which Owen showed for nearly all Ulick’s compositions. He talked of them, and with conviction, because he liked them and because it seemed to him of the very first importance that he should see Ulick again. The desire of the moment was with Owen the most important desire, and he was so anxious for Ulick to come to dinner that he pressed him almost indecorously to accept the invitation. To pass the evening with Owen Asher, he knew, would be disagreeable, but Ulick was always prone to find a soul of goodness in evil things; and Owen’s sorrow had put him into a favourable light for Ulick’s eyes to see him, and Ulick had suddenly begun to think that he might awaken in Owen some spiritual aspiration; and it was in this absurd hope that he nodded his head when Owen said, —
“Then at quarte
r-past eight.”
If he had said eight, the hour would not have brought into view their hostility, which circumstances had, for the moment, hidden from them. It was the quarter after that reminded Ulick that he would have to wear evening clothes, and he wrote to Owen asking that he might be excused going, giving as a reason that he never wore evening clothes. The letter astonished Owen. It was difficult for him to believe that anyone ever sat down to dinner except in evening clothes, at least, anyone whom he could ask to dine with him. But he was so anxious to see Ulick that he wrote a letter saying he might come in any clothes he liked, and he sent his valet with it.
Ulick had said in his letter that he had not a suit of clothes, and the tone of the letter, though polite, showed Owen that Ulick was indifferent to the honour of Sir Owen’s friendship. Owen’s face darkened for a moment, but he put the thought aside, for the temptation of the moment was always an irresistible temptation for him, and he desired Ulick’s company, for he felt he must find someone to whom he could talk of Evelyn, of her beautiful voice, and the mysterious scruples which had led her away from art and love. Moreover, Ulick was an accomplished musician, and he would be able to ask his opinion about some songs he had just finished, in which there were a few passages which Ulick would put right in a moment.
The meeting of the men was very formal. Owen had put on a smoking suit, so that the discrepancy between his appearance and Ulick’s would not be too marked, and he asked, —
“Have you been writing much lately, Mr. Dean?”
The conversation then turned upon Wagner and Mr. Innes’s concerts, and a few minutes after the butler announced dinner was ready. They sat down in a shadowy room, with two footmen besides a butler attending upon them. The footmen moved mysteriously in the shadows of the sideboard, obeying signs and whispered words, and it seemed to Ulick as if they were assisting at some strange ritual.
The conversation halted many times, for both men were thinking of Evelyn, and it seemed to Owen that, for the present, at least, her name must not be mentioned. The butler’s voice acquired a strange resonance in the still room; he offered Ulick many different kinds of wine, and Owen intervened in vain — Ulick only drank water. At last Evelyn’s name was mentioned, and the conversation at once became more animated, and it seemed to Ulick that even the servants must feel a relief. Nevertheless, Owen had only mentioned Miss Innes’s Elsa, and he passed rapidly on to the inferiority of the tenor, and the inadequacy of the scenery in the second act. But the ice had been broken, and when they left the diningroom and lit their cigarettes, Owen felt that he must speak unconstrainedly.
“But can nothing be done?” he said. “Why don’t you go to her and tell her that in the interests of art she must return to the stage? That is a matter which interests you more than anyone, for are you not writing an opera on the subject of Grania, and who could play Grania but she?”
He was ashamed of his curiosity, for he burned to know if Evelyn had loved Ulick as passionately as she had loved him, and he studied the young man, trying to solve the enigma of personal attraction.
“She talked so much about you,” he said, “I know she liked you very much,” the words caused him an effort to speak, and yet it was a relief to speak them. “She liked your opera and was enthusiastic about it. I wish you would use your influence. I think you might persuade her from that infernal convent.”
That he was afraid she would never return to the stage was the only answer Owen could get from Ulick, and as he showed no desire to continue the conversation, Owen told Ulick how Evelyn had studied the part of Leonore. “She used to sit reading and re-reading the music, until she became possessed of the character, and when she went on the stage, every look, every gesture, every intonation was inspired.”
Owen spoke like one speaking in a dream; and as if awaking to its echo, Ulick compared Evelyn’s spontaneous acting to the beautiful movement of clouds and trees and to the growth of flowers, and turning over the leaves of an album Owen read from it an article by a German critic.
“‘ Her nature intended her for the representation of ideal heroines, whose love is pure, and it does not allow her to depict the violence of physical passion, and the delirium of the senses. She is an artiste of the peaks, whose feet may not descend into the plain and follow its ignominious route;’ and then here, ‘He who has seen her as the spotless spouse of the son of Parsifal standing by the window has assisted at the mystery of the chaste soul awaiting the coming of the predestined lover,’ and ‘he who has seen her as Elizabeth ascending the hillside has felt the nostalgia of the skies awaken in his heart.’ Then he goes on to say that her special genius and her antecedents led her to ‘Fidelio’ and designed her as the perfect embodiment of Leonore’s soul, that pure, beautiful soul made wholly of sacrifice and love. But you never saw her as Leonore, so you can form no idea of what she really was.” But seeing that Ulick was far away, he wondered how this ambiguous young man thought of her. He divined Ulick’s thoughts very nearly, if allowance be made for the translation, which had necessarily caught something of the tone of his mind. “He thinks of her as some legendary heroine, some abstraction, and not as a real woman to be looked upon with delight and kissed with rapture.”
So far he was right that Ulick hardly thought of her at all as a woman to be kissed, though he remembered her mouth and recognised that the senses had enabled him to understand a great deal that he would not have otherwise understood. But in him sensual remembrance was now merged in a spiritual glamour. He thought of her as an eternal loveliness in life, one of the immortal essences which, as it put off its vesture of sense and circumstance, as it passed beyond the obscuration of the sensual illusion, he could see more clearly and understand more devoutly. The difference in their present appreciation of her was merely a slight difference in form. She had become to both what the heart ponders and the imagination perceives, rather than what the flesh enjoys.
“I will read to you what she wrote me when she was studying ‘Fidelio.’ ‘Beethoven’s music has nothing in common with the passion of the flesh; it lives in the realms of noble affections, pity, tenderness, love, spiritual yearnings for the life beyond the world, and its joy in the external world is as innocent as a happy child’s. It is in this sense classical — it lives and loves and breathes in spheres of feeling and thought removed from the ordinary life of men. Wagner’s later work, if we except some scenes from The Ring, notably the scenes between Wotan and Brunnhilde, is nearer to the life of the senses; its humanity is fresh in us, deep as Brunnhilde’s, for essential man lives not in the flesh but in the spirit. The desire of the flesh is more necessary to the life of the world than the aspirations of the soul, yet the aspirations of the soul are more human. The root is more necessary to the plant than its flower, but it is by the flower and not by the root that we know it.’”
“Is it not amazing that a woman who could think like that should be capable of flinging up her art — the art which I gave her — on account of the preaching of that wooden-headed Mostyn?” Suddenly sitting down, he opened a drawer, and taking out her photograph, he said, “Here she is as Leonore; but you should have seen her, this gives you no idea of her; but you have not looked at her picture, I suppose it means nothing to you — the most beautiful thing that Manet ever painted — the most beautiful in the room, and there are a great many beautiful things in the room.”
Surprised by a discriminating remark, Owen was encouraged to take Ulick round the room, and explain to him his pictures, his furniture, and his china; but their thoughts were not with these things, but with Evelyn, and they were glad when they got back to their armchairs in front of her portrait.
“Yes, she must have been wonderful as Leonore,” Ulick said, waking from his reveries, and getting up from his chair, and forgetful of Owen, he began to walk up and down the room. Owen watched him, silent with anticipation, anxious to hear him tell the tale of his grief. But Ulick paced to and fro, seemingly forgetful of Owen’s presence, until at last Ow
en’s patience was over. “She is mad beyond doubt; no one who was not would give up the stage because that wooden-headed Mostyn thought it was wrong. Don’t you agree with me?” he said.
At last, in reply to Owen’s importunities whether he could tell Evelyn’s future, he said that she had fallen into an entanglement of that most material of all spiritualities — Catholicism, and he seemed to doubt if she would be able to set herself free for a long time. “Monsignor’s influence will not endure,” he said suddenly. “Twice she sailed forth, and he or she who adventures twice will adventure a third time.”
“But this third time; what will the third adventure be?”
“We may know that certain things will happen, but we cannot tell how they will happen. After Bran returned from the islands of many delights he was warned that if he set foot on earthly shores he would be turned to dust, so he sailed the ship along the coast of his native land, but did not leave the ship.”
When Ulick had gone Owen sat thinking, wondering what he had meant by Bran who had sailed the ship close to the shore but had not dared to leave the ship. The first adventure was, as Ulick had put it, in quest of earthly experience; the second was in quest of spiritual peace — what would the third be? But it was past two o’clock, and still conjecturing what the third would be he went to bed. He wished these evenings to happen frequently. He was weary of society, of shooting and hunting and all the pleasures of his class, and whenever he had an evening to spare he sent his valet to Bloomsbury with a note asking Ulick if he would dine with him.
