by George Moore
“Look at the face,” he said to Harding, “achieved with shadow and light, the light faintly graduated with a delicate shade of rose.”
He compared the face to a jewel the most beautiful in the world, and the background to eighteenth-century watered silk.
“The painter conjures,” Harding said, “and she rises out of that grey background.”
“Quite so, Harding.”
Owen sat, his eyes fixed on the picture, his thoughts far away, thinking that it would be better, perhaps, if he never saw her again. Not to see her again! The words sounded very gloomy; for he was thinking of his ancestors at Riversdale, in their tomb, and himself going down to join them.
“I think, Asher, it is getting late; I must go now.”
The friends bade each other good-night among the footmen who closed the front door.
In his great, lonely bedroom, full of tall mahogany furniture, Owen lay down; and he asked himself how it was that he had left America without seeing her. His journey to America was one of the uncanniest things that had ever happened in his life. Something seemed to have kept him from her, and it was impossible for him to determine what that thing was, whether some sudden weakening of the will in himself or some spiritual agency. But to believe in the transference of human thought, and that the nuns could influence his action at three thousand miles distance, seemed as if he were dropping into some base superstition. Between sleeping and waking a thought emerged which kept him awake till morning: “Why had Evelyn returned to the stage?” When he saw her last at Thornton Grange her retirement seemed to be definitely fixed. Nothing he could say had been able to move her. She was going to retire from the stage…. But she had not done so. Now, who had persuaded her? Was it Ulick Dean? Were these two in America together? The thought of Evelyn in New York with Ulick Dean, going to the theatre with her, Ulick sitting in the stalls, listening, just as he, Owen, had listened to her, became unendurable; he must have news of her; only from her father could he get reliable news. So he went to Dulwich, uncertain if he should send in his card begging for an interview, or if he should just push past the servant into the music-room, always supposing Innes were at home.
“Mr. Innes is at home,” the servant-girl answered.
“Is he in the music-room?”
“Yes, sir. What name?”
“No name is necessary. I will announce myself,” and he pushed past the girl…. “Excuse me, Mr. Innes, for coming into your house so abruptly, but I was afraid you mightn’t see me if I sent in my name, and it would be impossible for me to go back to London without seeing you. You don’t know me.”
“I do. You are Sir Owen Asher.”
“Yes, and have come because I can’t live any longer without having some news of Evelyn. You know my story — how she sent me away. There is nothing to tell you; she has been here, I know, and has told you everything. But perhaps you don’t know I have just come from the desert, having gone there hoping to forget her, and have come out of the desert uncured. You will tell me where she is, won’t you?”
Innes did not answer for some while.
“My daughter went to America.”
“Yes, I know that. I have just come from there, but I could not see her. The last time we met was at Thornton Grange, and she told me she had decided definitely to leave the stage. Now, why should she have gone back to the stage? That is what I have come to ask you.”
This tall, thin, elderly man, impulsive as a child, wearing his heart on his sleeve, crying before him like a little child, moved Innes’s contempt as much as it did his pity. “All the same he is suffering, and it is clear that he loves her very deeply.” So perforce he had to answer that Evelyn had gone to America against the advice of her confessor because the Wimbledon nuns wanted money.
“Gone to sing for those nuns!” Owen shrieked. And for three minutes he blasphemed in the silence of the old music-room, Innes watching him, amazed that any man should so completely forget himself. How could she have loved him?
“She is returning next week; that is all I know of her movements… Sir Owen Asher.”
“Returning next week! But what does it matter to me whether she returns or not? She won’t see me. Do you think she will, Mr. Innes?”
“I cannot discuss these matters with you, Sir Owen,” and Innes took up his pen as if anxious for Sir Owen to leave the room so that he might go on copying. Owen noticed this, but it was impossible for him to leave the room. For the last twelve years he had been thinking about Innes, and wanted to tell him how Evelyn had been loved, and he wanted to air his hatred of religious orders and religion in general.
“I am afraid I am disturbing you, but I can’t help; it,” and he dropped into a chair. “You have no idea, Mr. Innes, how I loved your daughter.”
“She always speaks of you very well, never laying any blame upon you — I will say that.”
“She is a truthful woman. That is the one thing that can be said.”
Innes nodded a sort of acquiescence to this appreciation of his daughter’s character; and Owen could not resist the temptation to try to take Evelyn’s father into his confidence, he had been so long anxious for this talk.
“We have all been in love, you see; your love story is a little farther back than mine. We all know the bitterness of it — don’t we?”
Innes admitted that to know the bitterness of love and its sweetness is the common lot of all men. The conversation dropped again, and Owen felt there was to be no unbosoming of himself that afternoon.
“The room has not changed. Twelve years ago I saw those old instruments for the first time. Not one, I think, has disappeared. It was here that I first heard Ferrabosco’s pavane.”
Innes remembered the pavane quite well, but refused to allow the conversation to digress into a description of Evelyn’s playing of the viola da gamba. But if they were not to talk about Evelyn there was no use tarrying any longer in Dulwich; he had learned all the old man knew about his daughter. He got up…. At that moment the door opened and the servant announced Mr. Ulick Dean.
“How do you do, Mr. Innes?” Ulick said, glancing at Owen; and a suspicion crossed his mind that the tall man with small, inquisitive eyes who stood watching him must be Owen Asher, hoping that it was not so, and, at the same time, curious to make his predecessor’s acquaintance; he admitted his curiosity as soon as Innes introduced him.
“The moment I saw you, Sir Owen, I guessed that it must be you. I had heard so much about you, you see, and your appearance is so distinctive.”
These last words dissipated the gloom upon Owen’s face — it is always pleasing to think that one is distinctive. And turning from Sir Owen to Innes, Ulick told him how, finding himself in London, he had availed himself of the opportunity to run down to see him. Owen sat criticising, watching him rather cynically, interested in his youth and in his thick, rebellious hair, flowing upwards from a white forehead. The full-fleshed face, lit with nervous, grey eyes, reminded Owen of a Roman bust. “A young Roman emperor,” he said to himself, and he seemed to understand Evelyn’s love of Ulick. Would that she had continued to love this young pagan! Far better than to have been duped by that grey, skinny Christian. And he listened to Ulick, admiring his independent thought, his flashes of wit.
Ulick was telling stories of an opera company to which it was likely he would be appointed secretary. A very unlikely thing indeed to happen, Owen thought, if the company were assembled outside the windows, within hearing of the stories which Ulick was telling about them. Very amusing were the young man’s anecdotes and comments, but it seemed to Owen as if he would never cease talking; and Innes, though seeming to enjoy the young man’s wit, seemed to feel with Owen that something must be done to bring it to an end.
“We shall be here all the afternoon listening to you, Ulick. I don’t know if Sir Owen has anything else to do, but I have some parts to copy; there is a rehearsal to-night.”
Ulick’s manner at once grew so serious and formal that Innes feared he
had offended him, and then Owen suddenly realised that they were both being sent away. In the street they must part, that was Owen’s intention, but before he could utter it Ulick begged of him to wait a second, for he had forgotten his gloves. Without waiting for an answer he ran back to the house, leaving Uwen standing on the pavement, asking himself if he should wait for this impertinent young man, who took it for granted that he would.
“You have got your gloves,” he said, looking disapprovingly at the tight kid gloves which Ulick was forcing over his fingers. “Do you remember the way? As well as I remember, one turns to the right.”
“Yes, to the right.” And talking of the old music, of harpsichords and viols, they walked on together till they heard the whistle of the train.
“We have just missed our train.”
There was no use running, and there was no other train for half an hour.
“The waiting here will be intolerable,” Owen said. “If you would care for a walk, we might go as far as Peckham. To walk to London would be too far, though, indeed, it would do both of us good.”
“Yes, the evening is fine — why not walk to London? We can inquire out the way as we go.”
XI
“A CURIOUS ACCIDENT our meeting at Innes’s.”
“A lucky one for me. Far more pleasant living in this house than in that horrible hotel.”
Owen was lying back in an armchair, indulging in sentimental and fatalistic dreams, and did not like this materialistic interpretation of his invitation to Ulick to come to stay with him at Berkeley Square. He wished to see the hand of Providence in everything that concerned himself and Evelyn, and the meeting with this young man seemed to point to something more than the young man’s comfort.
“Looked at from another side, our meeting was unlucky. If you hadn’t come in, Innes would have told me more about Evelyn. She must have an address in London, and he must know it.”
“That doesn’t seem so sure. She may intend to live in Dulwich when she returns from America.”
“I can’t see her living with her father; even the nuns seem more probable. I wonder how it was that all this time you and she never ran across each other. Did you never write to her?”
“No; I was abroad a great deal. And, besides, I knew she didn’t want to see me, so what was the good in forcing myself upon her?”
It was difficult for Owen to reprove Ulick for having left Evelyn to her own devices. Had he not done so himself? Still, he felt that if he had remained in England, he would not have been so indifferent; and he followed his guest across the great tessellated hall towards the dining-room in front of a splendid servitude.
The footmen drew back their chairs so that they might sit down with the least inconvenience possible; and dinner at Berkeley Square reminded Ulick of some mysterious religious ceremony; he ate, overawed by the great butler — there was something colossal, Egyptian, hierarchic about him, and Ulick could not understand how it was that Sir Owen was not more impressed.
“Habit,” he said to himself.
At one end of the room there was a great gold screen, and “in a dim, religious light” the impression deepened; passing from ancient Thebes to modern France, Ulick thought of a great cathedral. The celebrant, the deacon and the subdeacon were represented by first and second footmen, the third footman, who never left the sideboard, he compared to the acolyte, the voice of the great butler proposing different wines had a ritualistic ring in it; and, amused by his conception of dinner in Berkeley Square, Ulick admired Owen’s dress. He wore a black velvet coat, trousers, and slippers. His white frilled shirt and his pearl studs reminded Ulick of his own plain shirt with only one stud, and he suspected vulgarity in a single stud, for it was convenient, and would therefore appeal to waiters and the middle classes. He must do something on the morrow to redeem his appearance, and he noticed Owen’s cuffs and sleeve-links, which were superior to his own; and Owen’s hands, they, too, were superior — well-shaped, bony hands, with reddish hair growing about the knuckles. Owen’s nails were beautifully trimmed, and Ulick determined to go to a manicurist on the morrow. A delicious perfume emerged when Owen drew his handkerchief from his coat pocket; and all this personal care reminded Ulick of that time long ago when Owen was Evelyn’s lover and travelled with her from capital to capital, hearing her sing everywhere. “Now he will never see her again,” he thought, as he followed Owen back to his study, hoping to persuade him into telling the story of how he had gone down to Dulwich to write a criticism of Innes’s concert, and how he had at once recognised that Evelyn had a beautiful voice, and would certainly win a high position on the lyric stage if she studied for it.
It was a solace to Owen’s burdened heart to find somebody who would listen to him, and he talked on and on, telling of the day he and Evelyn had gone to Madame Savelli, and how he had had to leave Paris soon after, for his presence distracted Evelyn’s attention from her singing-lessons. “In a year,” Madame Savelli had said, “I will make something wonderful of her, Sir Owen, if you will only go away, and not come back for six months.”
“He lives in recollection of that time,” Ulick said to himself, “that is his life; the ten years he spent with her are his life, the rest counts for nothing.” A moment after Owen was comparing himself to a man wandering in the twilight who suddenly finds a lamp: “A lamp that will never burn out,” Ulick said to himself. “He will take that lamp into the tomb with him.”
“But I must read you the notices.” And going to an escritoire covered with ormolu — one of those pieces of French furniture which cost hundreds of pounds — he took out a bundle of Evelyn’s notices. “The most interesting,” he said, “were the first notices — before the critics had made up their mind about her.”
He stopped in his untying of the parcel to tell Ulick about his journey to Brussels to hear her sing.
“You see, I had broken my leg out hunting, and there was a question whether I should be able to get there in time. Imagine my annoyance on being told I must not speak to her.”
“Who told you that?”
“Madame Savelli.”
“Oh, I understand I You arrived the very day of her first appearance?”
Owen threw up his head and began reading the notices.
“They are all the same,” he said, after reading half a dozen, and Ulick felt relieved. “But stay, this one is different,” and the long slip dismayed Ulick, who could not feel much interest in the impression that Evelyn had created as Elsa — he did not know how many years ago.
“‘Miss Innes is a tall, graceful woman, who crosses the stage with slow, harmonious movements — any slight quickening of her step awakening a sense of foreboding in the spectator. Her eyes, too, are of great avail, and the moment she comes on the stage one is attracted by their strangeness — grave, mysterious, earnest eyes, which smile rarely; but when they do smile happiness seems to mount up from within, illuminating her life from end to end. She will never be unhappy again, one thinks. It is with her smile she recompenses her champion knight when he lays low Telramund, and it is with her smile she wins his love — and ours. We regret, for her sake, there are so few smiles in Wagner: very few indeed — not one in ‘Senta’ nor in ‘Elizabeth.’” The newspaper cutting slipped from Owen’s hand, and he talked for a long time about her walk and her smile, and then about her “Iphigenia,” which he declared to be one of the most beautiful performances ever seen, her personality lending itself to the incarnation of this Greek idea of fate and self-sacrifice. But Gluck’s music was, in Owen’s opinion, old-fashioned even at the time it was written — containing beautiful things, of course, but somewhat stiff in the joints, lacking the clear insight and direct expression of Beethoven’s. “One man used to write about her very well, and seemed to understand her better than any other. And writing about this performance he says — Now, if I could find you his article.” The search proved a long one, but as it was about to be abandoned Owen turned up the cutting he was in search of.
&n
bsp; “‘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 artist 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 her 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,”
“I will read you what she wrote 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; but essential man lives 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.”
