by George Moore
“And then all our meetings in the garden under the cedar-tree?”
“You used to say we looked like a picture by Marcus Stone when we sat under it.”
“Never mind what we looked like. Think of it! Of our journey to Paris, and my visit to Brussels to hear you sing.”
“And Madame Savelli, who wouldn’t let me speak to you; she said I might tire my voice.”
“Yes, how I hated her and Olive that day! You sang ‘Elizabeth,’ and when you walked up, to the sound of flutes and clarionettes,’ seemingly to the stars, there was something in the way you did it that put a fear into my heart. It was all predestined from the beginning.”
“So you believe, Owen, that the end is fated, and that I was created to come back after many wanderings to help these poor little crippled boys?”
“Is that the meaning of it all, Evelyn?”
“Maybe — who knows? — that meaning as well as another.” And through the dusk he could see her eyes shining with something of their old light.
“Was it fated from the beginning that I should only, meet you here to part with you again? Is that the meaning you read in the song of the nightingale, in the stare of the moon and the perfume of the garden? There is a meaning, Evelyn, in our lives for certain, but are you reading it aright?”
For a moment the meaning of their lives seemed clear to them. Life had a meaning! for a moment, they were both sure of it; they had met for something, there was a design in life, and though they were separated on earth they seemed to move in celestial circles, just as the stars moved in that great design above them, each sphere rolling on, filled with love for its sister sphere, guided and controlled each by the other, yet always apart. Owen walked thinking how, billions of years hence, all those lights might wax into one light, all souls to one soul, all ends to one end. For one moment he Height possess Evelyn’s soul as he had never been able to possess it on earth… perhaps.
“I love you now just as much as I loved you before, perhaps more, for there is memory to aid me.”
“You are in love with memory, not with me.”
Her words went to his heart, as the thorn of the rose is said to go to the nightingale’s heart, and, unable to answer her, he listened. “How wonderfully the bird sings, the interpreter of the primal melancholy from which we never escape… since the beginning of time, its interpreter.”
“Is he telling his own story, or is he telling ours?”
“Both, for all love songs are as ours, made of the same intense passionate melancholy. Why is love the most melancholy of all joys? With what passionate melancholy he enchants her who is sitting in the nest close by! The origin of art is sex; woman is a reed, and our desire—”
“Hush! Listen to the nightingale! His discourse is better than yours.”
“How absorbed he is in his song, stave after stave; he seems to say, ‘You want more tunes? If that is all, you shall have more.’ Hush!” And they listened to the rich warble, sounding so strange in the midst of the lonely country. “A love-call of three notes, which he repeats before passing into cadenzas. Hush!” The bird started again, and this time as if encouraged by the success of his last efforts.
“What flutings! What trills! What runs! Pearls and jewels scattered. Little tunes of three or four notes, casting a spell about the hillside, followed by passionate cadenzas.”
Another bird answered far away out of the stillness, the same sweet strain it was; and listening, they seemed to hear the same strain within their hearts — a silent, mysterious song. All the world seemed singing the same sweet strain of melancholy, now when the moon passed out of the dusk — shining high up in the heavens, with stars above and beneath — Owen thought of some mysterious music-maker. Flocks of various coloured stars, flaming Jupiter high up in the sky, red Mars low down in the horizon, the Great Bear beautifully distinct, the polar star at an angle — the star whereby Owen used to steer. All the world seemed to be going to the same sweet strain, the soul, seemingly freed, rose to the lips, and, in her pride, sought words wherewith to tell the passionate melancholy of the night and of life. But the soul could not tell it; only the nightingale, who, without knowing it, was singing what the soul may only feel.
“The bird is telling me what your voice used to tell me long ago.”
The lovers wandered through the garden, suffused with delicate scents, and Owen told her of the legend of the nightingale and the swallow, a legend coming down from some barbaric age, from a king called Pandion, who, despite his wife’s beauty, fell in love with her sister, and ravished her in some town in Thessaly, the name of which Owen could not remember. Fearing, however, that his lust would reach his wife’s ears, Pandion cut out the girl’s tongue. This barbarous act, committed before Greece was, had been redeemed by the Grecian spirit, which had added that the girl; though without tongue to tell the cruel deed, had, nevertheless, hands wherewith to weave it. The weft of her misfortune only inspired another barbarous deed: Pandion killed both sisters and his son Italus. Again the Grecian spirit touched the legend, changing the tongueless girl into a swallow, a bird with a little cry, and fleet wings to carry its cry all over the world, and the unhappy wife into the bird “which sleeps all day and sings all night.” “Sophocles,” Owen said, “speaks of the nightingale as moaning all the night in ivy clusters, moaning or humming. A strange expression his seems to us, our musical sense being different from that of the antique world, if the antique world really possessed any musical sense.” The lovers wandered round the house, listening to the bird’s sweet singing, stopping at the hill’s steep side so that they might listen better.
“Now the bird is telling of sorrows other than ours — isn’t that so, Evelyn? I don’t seem to recognise anything of ourselves in its song; it is singing a new song.”
“Perhaps,” Evelyn answered, “now it is singing the sadness of the mother under the hill for her son.”
“I went to see her, she is not unhappy; she is happy that her son is With you.”
“But another child died last year; and for her, if she is listening, the bird is certainly singing the death of that child.”
When they had completed once more the round of the garden, the bird seemed to have again changed his intervals; a gaiety seemed to have come into his singing, and Owen said:
“Now his music is lighter; he is singing an inveigling little story, the story of first love. Look, Evelyn, do you see that boy and girl walking under the hedge with their arms entwined? They, too, have stopped to listen to the nightingale, but the song they really hear comes out of their own hearts.”
Then the song changed, suddenly acquiring a strange, voluptuous accent, which carried Owen’s thoughts back to a night when he had been awakened out of his sleep by a woman’s voice singing, and, starting up in bed, he had listened, rousing himself sufficiently from sleep to distinguish that the voice he was listening to was Evelyn’s. The song was a love-call, and, believing it to be such, he had thrown aside the curtain, and had found her leaning out of her window, singing the Star Song, not to the evening star, as in the opera, but to the morning star shining white like a diamond out of the dawning of the sky. The valley under the castle walls was submerged in mist, and the distant hillside was indistinguishable. The castle seemed to stand by the side of some frozen sea, so intense was the silence. He had always looked back upon this morning as one of the great moments of his life, and going to her room like going to some great religious rite. Each man must worship where he finds the Godhead.
“Who knows,” he said to Evelyn, “that the bird in the nest close by does not listen with the same rapture—”
“As you, in the box, used to listen to me on the stage? For the comparison to hold good, I should have sung Italian music, roulades. Listen to those cadenzas!”
“How melancholy are their gaieties!”
“Yes, aren’t they?” she answered. “How poignant the two notes! — with which il commence son grand air.”
“But our love-call
ended years ago,” she said, with an accent of regret in her voice. And they walked towards the house, Owen dreading that some sudden impulse might throw her into his arms and her mind might be unhinged again, and he would lose her utterly. So he spoke to her of the first; thing that came into her mind, and what came first was a memory of Moschus’s lament for Bion and the brevity of human life as contrasted with the long life of the world.
“‘The mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley—’ how does it go?” And he tried to remember as they went upstairs. “‘The mallows wither in the garden—’ no, that is not how it begins. ‘Ah me! when the mallows wither in the garden, and the green parsley, and the curled tendrils of the anise, on a later day these live again and spring in another year; but we men, we, the great and mighty, or wise, when once we have died in the hollow earth we sleep, gone down into silence, a fight long and endless and unawakening sleep.”
“Begin, ye Sicilian Muses, begin the Dirge!”
And Evelyn listened, saying, “How very beautiful! how very wonderful!”
“But you believe, Evelyn, that we do live again?”
“It is too late to argue that question; it is nearly midnight. I hope you will like your room. Eliza has unstrapped your portmanteau, I see. Your bed is comfortable, I think.”
It surprised him that she should follow him into his room, and stand there talking to him, talking even about the bed he was to sleep in. It would have been easy to lay his hands upon her shoulder, saying, “Evelyn, are we to be parted?” but something held him back. And he listened to her story of the buying of the bed, hearing that it had been forgotten in the interest excited by the rumour of certain portfolios filled with engravings supposed to be of great value. The wardrobe, too, had been bought at the same auction, and he looked into its panels, praising them.
“But you want more light.” She went over and lighted the candles on the dressing-table, accomplishing the duties of hostess quite unconcerned, ignoring the past. “One would think she had forgotten it,” he said to himself. “Are we to part like this? But it is for her to decide. So quiet, so self-contained; it doesn’t seem even to occur to her.” He waited, incapable of speech or action, paralysed, till she bade him good-night. As soon as the door closed, or a moment after, he began to realise his mistake. What he should have done was to lay his hand upon her shoulder and lead her to the window-seat, and sit with her there till a greyness came into the sky and a cold air rustled in the trees. “Of course, of course,” he muttered, for he could see himself and her in the dawn together, united again and tasting again in a kiss infinity. In her kiss he had tasted that unity, that binding together of the mortal to the immortal, of the finite to the infinite, which Paracelsus — He tried to recall the words, “He who tastes a crust of bread has tasted of the universe, even to the furthest star.” She had always been his universe, and he had always believed that she had come out of the star-shine like a goddess when it pleases Divinity to lie with a mortal. Of this he was sure, that he had never kissed her except in this belief…. This had sanctified their love, whereas other men knew love as an animal satisfaction. It had always seemed to him that there was something essential in her, something which had always been in human nature and which always would be. This light, this joy, and this aspiration he had seen in certain moments: when she walked on the stage as Elizabeth or Elza, she had always seemed to reflect a little of that light which floats down through the generations … illuminating “the liquid surface of man’s life.” But a change had come, darkening that light, causing it to pass, at least into eclipse. He drew his hand across his eyes — a phase of her life was hidden from him; yet it, too, may have had a meaning…. We understand so little of life. No, no, it had no meaning in his mind, and we are only concerned with our own minds. All the same, the fact remained — she had had to seek rest in a convent; and the idea that had driven her there, though now lying at the bottom of her mind, might be brought to the surface — any chance word; he had had proof. Perhaps it was as well that he had not laid his hand upon her shoulder and asked her to stay with him, for by what spectacle of remorse, of terror, might he not have been confronted to-morrow or the next day? Cured! Nobody is ever cured. Never again would she be the same woman as had left Dulwich to go to Paris with him, he knew that well enough; and he, too, was very far indeed from being the same Owen Asher who had gone to Dulwich to hear a concert of Elizabethan music.
A period for every one, for every one a season. The gates of love open, and we pass into the garden and out of it by another gate, which never opens for us again. To linger by a closed or a closing gate is not wise: the tarrying lover is a subject for contempt and jeers; better to pass out quickly and to fare on, though it requires courage to fare on through the autumn, knowing that after autumn comes winter. True, the winds would grow harder. The autumn of their lives was not over, the skies were still bright above them, and the winds soft and low. The winds would grow harder, but they must still fare on through the snow. But there is a joy by the hearth when the yule-log is burning. So thanking God that he had not attempted to detain her, he wandered to the window to watch the stars, which seemed to him like a golden net; and he asked who had cast that net, and if he and she were parcel of some great draught which, at some indefinite date, would be drawn out of the depths, and if, when that time came, they would remember the joy and sorrow they had endured upon earth, or if all would be swept into forgetfulness. At some indefinite date they might meet among the stars, but what stellar infinities might be drawn together mattered little to him; his sole interest was in this lag end of their journey — if their lives should be united henceforth or lived separately.
Nothing repeats itself, so it was well he had not asked her to stay with him. Of mistress and lover a fitting end had been written long ago, just as the end of those stars was written long before the stars came into being; but it might well be that they might take the road, this lag end of it, together as husband and wife. If he didn’t marry — he could marry nobody but her — what would he do with his life? what sort of end? He had no heart for further travels, and feared to wear away the years amid books and pictures, collecting rare porcelain and French furniture; there is very little else for an old man. With her the lag end of the journey would be delectable. In the same house together, leading her in the evenings to the piano! Even if she had lost part of her voice, sufficient remained to recall the old days when he used to journey thousands of miles to hear her; and he lay quite still, listening to the sweet thought of marriage, singing like a bird in the acacia-tree, trill after trill, and then a run — delicious crescendos reaching to the stars, diminuendos sinking into the valley.
The bird suddenly ceased, and with its song in his brain Owen dozed, awakening at dawn, remembering her, how she had built herself a cottage, and settled her life here among four or five little crippled boys. Could she undo her life to follow him? Uprooted, transplanted, her brain might give way again, and this time without hope of recovery. Or was he cheating himself, trying to find reasons for not asking her to marry him — perhaps his manifest duty towards her. Owen looked into his soul, asking himself if he were acting from a selfish or an unselfish motive.
Sleep seemed as far away as ever, and, getting out of bed, he drew the curtains, seeking the landscape, still hidden in the mist, only a few tree-tops showing over the grey vapour — the valley filled with it — and over the hidden hill one streak of crimson. A rook cawed and flew away into the mist, leaving Owen to wonder what the bird’s errand might be; and this rook was followed by others, and seeing nothing distinctly, and knowing nothing of himself or of this woman whom he had loved so long, he returned to his bed frightened, counting his years, asking himself how many more he had to live.
A knock! Only Eliza bringing his bath water. Good heavens! he had been asleep. “Eliza, what time is it?”
“Half-past eight, Sir Owen. Miss Innes will be soon home from Mass to give the little boys their breakfast.”
There was no Catholic gentleman within a mile of Riversdale, he was thankful to say, and his thankfulness on the point was proof to him of how years and circumstances had estranged him from Evelyn; for, though he would not obstruct or forbid, it would be impossible for him to keep a sneer out of his face when she told him she had been to the sacraments or refrained from meat on Friday. “What a strange notion it is to think that a priest can help one,” he said, thinking then that his presence would be a sneer, however he might control his tongue or his face; she would feel that he held her little observances in contempt, and her, too, just a little. How could it be otherwise? How could he admire one who slipped her neck into a spiritual halter and allowed herself to be led? Yet he loved her — or was it the memory of their love that he loved? Which? He loved her when he saw her among the crippled children distributing porridge and milk, or maybe it was not love, but admiration.
“My dear, I didn’t know you would be down so soon. If you will only go into the garden and wait for me, I shan’t be long.”
“Now then, children, you must hurry with your porridge; Sir Owen is waiting for his breakfast.”
“My dear Evelyn, I am not in a hurry. Let the children take their time.”
And he went into the garden to think if life at Riversdale would suit her as well as this life. It would be impossible for him to accompany her to chapel, and if he did not do so there would be an estrangement…. Nor could he allow Riversdale to be turned into an orphanage. Perhaps he would allow her to do anything; that pleased her; all the same, she would feel that the permission did not come out of his instinct, only out of a desire to please her.
“Well, Owen,” she said as soon as he had finished breakfast, “I don’t want to hurry you, but if you are to catch that train we must start at once.”
