On getting outside the church, they were surprised to find that it had
been raining. The shower had laid the dust, freshened the air, and upon
the sky there was a beautiful flowerlike bloom; the white clouds hung in
the blue air unlifting fugitive palace and tower, and when Evelyn and
Ulick looked into this mysterious cloudland, their hearts overflowed
with an intense joy.
She opened her parasol, and told him that her father was lunching with
the Jesuits. But he and she were going to dine together at Dowlands; and
after dinner they were not to forget to practise the Bach sonata which
was in the programme for the evening concert. She thought of the long
day before them, and with mixed wonderment and pleasure of how much
better they would know each other at the end of the day. She wanted to
know how he thought and felt about things; and it seemed to her that he
could tell her all that she yearned to know, though what this was she
did not know herself.
There were strange hills and valleys and fabulous prospects in the great
white cloud which hung at the end of the suburban street, and it seemed
to her that she would like to wander with him there among the white
dells, and to stand with him upon the high pinnacles. She was happy in
an infinite cloudland while he told her of her father's struggle to
obtain mastery in St. Joseph's. But she experienced a passing pang of
regret that she had not been present to witness the first struggles of
the reformation.
She was interested in the part that Ulick had played in it. He told her
how almost every week he had written an article developing some new
phase of the subject, and Evelyn told him how her father had told her of
the extraordinary ingenuity and energy with which he had continued the
propaganda from week to week. When her father was called away to
negotiate some financial difficulty, Ulick had taken charge of the
rehearsals. Mr. Innes had told Evelyn that Ulick had displayed an
unselfish devotion, and she added that he had been to her father what
Liszt had been to Wagner, and while paying this compliment she looked at
him in admiration, thanking him with her eyes. Had it not been for him,
her father might have died of want of appreciation, killed by Father
Gordon's obstinacy.
"But you came to him," she said, speaking unwillingly, "when I
selfishly left him."
Ulick would not concede that he was worthy of any distinction in the
victory of the old music; it would have achieved its legitimate triumph
without his aid. He had merely done his duty like any private soldier in
the ranks. But from first to last all had depended upon Monsignor. Mr.
Innes had shown more energy and practical intelligence than anyone, not
excepting Evelyn herself, would have credited him with; he had
interested many people by his enthusiasm, but nevertheless he had
remained what he was--a man of ideas rather than of practice, and
without Monsignor the reformation would have come to naught. Evelyn was
strangely interested to know what Ulick thought of Monsignor, and she
waited eager for him to speak. She would have liked to hear him
enthusiastic, but he said that Monsignor was no more than an Oxford don
with a taste for dogma and for a cardinal's hat. He was not a man of
ideas, but a man that would do well in an election or a strike. He was
what folk call "a leader of men," and Ulick held that power over the
passing moment was a sign of inferiority. Shakespeare and Shelley and
Blake had never participated in any movement; they were the movement
itself, they were the centres of things. Christ, too, had failed to lead
men, he was far too much above them; but St. Paul, the man of inferior
ideas, had succeeded where Christ had failed. Mostyn, he maintained, was
much more interested in dogma than in religion; he abhorred mysticism,
and believed in organisation. He considered his Church from the point of
view of a trades union. An unspiritual man, one much more interested in
theology than in God--an able shepherd with an instinct for lost sheep
whose fixed and commonplace ideas gave him command over weak and exalted
natures, natures which were frequently much more spiritual than his own.
Evelyn listened, amused, though she could not think of Monsignor quite
as Ulick did. Monsignor had said that if we ask ourselves to what our
unhappiness is attributable, we find that it is attributable to having
followed the way of the world instead of the way of Christ.
It seemed to her impossible that a man of inferior intelligence such as
Ulick described could think so clearly. She reminded Ulick of these very
sentences which had so greatly moved her, and it flattered her to hear
him admit it, that the idea which had so greatly struck her was
penetrating and far-reaching, but he denied that it was possible that it
could be Monsignor's own. It was something he had got out of a book, and
seeing the effect that could be made of it, he had introduced it into
his sermon. In support of this opinion, he said that all the rest of the
sermon was sententious commonplace about the soul, and obedience to the
Church.
"But you will be able to judge for yourself. He is coming to the
concert to-night."
"Then I must have a dress to wear, I suppose he would like me to wear
sackcloth. But I am going to wear a pretty pink silk, which I hope you
will like. Call that hansom, please."
It was amusing to watch her write the note, hear her explain to the
cabman: if he brought back the right dress he was to get a sovereign. It
was amusing to stroll on through the naked Sunday streets, talking of
the music they had just heard and of Monsignor, to find suddenly that
they had lost their way and could see no one to direct them. These
little incidents served to enhance their happiness. They were nearly of
the same age, and were conscious of it; a generation is but a large
family, united by ties of impulse and idea. Evelyn had been brought up
and had lived outside of the influence of her own generation. Now it was
flashed upon her for the first time, and under the spell of its
instincts she ran down the steps to the railway and jumped into the
moving train. Owen would have forbidden her this little recklessness,
but Ulick accepted it as natural, and they sat opposite each other,
their thoughts lost in the rustle and confusion of their blood. She was
conscious of a delicious inward throbbing, and she liked the smooth
young face, the colour of old ivory, and the dark, fixed eyes into which
she could not look without trembling; they changed, lighting up and
clouding as his thought came and went. She found an attraction in his
occasional absent-mindedness, and wondered of what he was thinking.
Looking into his eyes, she was aware of a mystery half understood, and
she could not but feel that this enigma, this mystery, was essential to
her. Her life seemed to depend upon it; she seemed to have come upon the
secret at last.
It was amusing to walk home to dinner together this bright summer's day,
and to tell this young man, to whose intervention it pleased her to
think that she owed her reconciliation to her father, how it was by
pretending not to understand the new harpsichord that she had inveigled
her father into speaking to her.... But it was only one o'clock--an hour
still remained before dinner would be ready at Dowlands, and they were
glad to dream it under the delicious chestnut trees. She sat intent,
moving the tiny bloom from side to side with her parasol, thinking of
her father. Suddenly she told Ulick of the Wotan and Brunnhilde scene,
which she had always played, while thinking of the real scene that one
day awaited her at her father's feet, and this scene she had at last
acted, if you could call reality acting. She was dimly aware of the old
Dulwich street, and that she had once trundled her hoop there, and the
humble motion of life beneath the chestnut trees, the loitering of stout
housewives and husbands in Sunday clothes, the spare figures of
spinsters who lived in the damp houses which lay at the back of the
choked gardens was accepted as a suitable background for her happiness.
Her joy seemed to dilate in the morning, in the fluttering sensation of
the sunshine, of summer already begun in the distant fields. Inspired by
the scene, Ulick began to hum the old English air, "Summer is a-coming
in," and without raising her eyes from the chestnut blooms that fell
incessantly on the pavement, Evelyn said--"That monk had a beautiful
dream."
And for a while they thought of that monk at Reading composing for his
innocent recreation that beautiful piece of music; they hummed it
together, thinking of his quiet monastery, and it seemed to them that it
would be a beautiful thing if life were over, if it might pass away, as
that monk's life had passed, in peace, in aspiration whether of prayer
or of art. Thinking of the music she had heard over night, that she had
hummed through and that her father had played on the harpsichord, she
said--"And you, too, had a beautiful dream when you wrote 'Connla and
the Fairy Maiden'?"
"Ah, your father showed it to you; you hadn't told me."
Then, absorbed in his idea, never speaking for effect, stripping himself
of every adventitious pleasure in the service of his idea, he told her
of the change that had come upon his æstheticism in the last year. He
had been organist for three years at St. Patrick's, and since then had
been interested in the modes, the abandoned modes in which the plain
chant is written. These modes were the beginning of music, the original
source; in them were written, no doubt, the songs and dances of the folk
who died two, three, four, five thousand years ago, but none of this
music had been preserved, only the religious chants of this distant
period of art have come down to us, and from this accident his sprung
the belief that the early modes are only capable of expressing religious
emotion. But the gayest rhythms can be written in these modes as easily
as in the ordinary major and minor scales. It was thought, too, that the
modes did not lend themselves to modulation, but by long study of them
Ulick had discovered how they may be submitted to the science of
modulation.
"I see," Evelyn replied pensively. "The first line written in one of the
ancient modes, and underneath the melody, chromatic harmonies."
"No, that would be horrible," Ulick cried, like a dog whose tail has
been trodden upon. "That is the infamous modern practice. I seek the
harmony in the sentiment of the melody I am writing, in the tonality of
the mode I am writing."
And then, little by little, they entered the perilous question of the
ancient modes. There were several, and three were as distinctive and as
rich sources of melody and harmony as the ordinary major scale, for
modern music limited itself to the major scale, the minor scale being a
dependency. The major and minor modes or scales had sufficed for two or
three centuries of music, but the time of their exhaustion was
approaching, and the musicians of the future would have to return to the
older scales. He refused to admit that they did not lend themselves to
modulation, and he answered, when Evelyn suggested that the introduction
of a sharp or a flat was likely to alter the character of the ancient
scales, that she must not judge the ancient scales by what had already
been written in them; it was nowise his intention to imitate the
character of the plain chant melodies; she must not confuse the
sentiment of these melodies with the modes in which they were written.
It might be that in adding a sharp or a flat the musician destroyed the
character of the mode which he was leaving and that of the mode he was
passing into, but that proved nothing except his want of skill. His
opera was written not only in the three ancient modes, but also in the
ordinary major and minor scales, and he believed that he had enlarged
the limits of musical expression.
He was not the first young man she had met with schemes for writing
original music. So far as she was capable of judging, his practice was
better than his theory. But his music was not the origin of her interest
for him. What really interested her were his beliefs; her personal
interest in him had really begun when he had said that he believed in a
continuous revelation. Of this revelation he had argued that Christ was
only a part. These ideas, which she heard for the first time, especially
interested her. Owen's agnosticism had given her freedom and command of
this world, but it had made a great loneliness in her life which Owen
was no longer able to fill. Life seemed a desert without some form of
belief, and notwithstanding her success, her life was often intolerably
lonely. She had often thought of the world's flowers and fruits as mere
semblance of things without true reality, and what seemed a bountiful
garden, a mere hard, dry, brilliant desert. It was only at certain
moments, of course, that she thought these things, but sometimes these
thoughts quite unexpectedly came upon her, and she could no longer
conceal from herself the fact that she was lonely in her soul, and that
she was growing lonelier. She was wearying a little of all the visible
world, beginning to hunger for the invisible, from which she had closed
her eyes so long, but which, for all that, had never become wholly
darkened to her.
Hearing Ulick speak of foreseeing and divinations by the stars was, too,
like sweet rain in a dying land; and as they returned to Dowlands, she
spoke to him of Moy Mell where Boadag is king, of the Plain of the Ever
Living, of Connla and the Fairy Maiden gliding in the crystal boat over
the Western Sea, and during dinner she longed to ask him if he believed
in a future life.
It was difficult for her, who had never spoken on such subjects before,
to disentangle his philosophy, and it was not until he said that we
must not believe as religionists do, that one day the invisible shall
become the visible, that she began to understand him. Such doctrine, he
said, is paltry and materialistic, worthy of the theologian and the
agnostic. We must rather, he said, seek to raise and purify our natures,
so that we may see more of the spiritual element which resides in
things, and which is visible to all in a greater or less degree as they
put aside their grosser nature and attain step by step to a higher point
of vision. She had always imagined there was nothing between the
materialism of Owen and the theology of Monsignor. Ulick's ideas were
quite new to her; they appealed to her imagination, and she thought she
could listen for ever, and was disappointed when he reminded her that
she must practise the Bach sonata for the evening's concert.
It did not, however, detain them long, for she found to her great
pleasure that she had not lost nearly as much of her playing as she
thought.
The evening lengthened out into long, clear hours and thoughts of the
green lanes; and to escape from hauntings of Owen--the music-room it
seemed still to hold echoes of his voice--she asked him to walk out with
her. They wandered in the cloudless evening. They sauntered past the
picture gallery, and the fact that she was walking with this strange and
somewhat ambiguous young man provoked her to think of herself and him as
a couple from that politely wanton assembly which had collected at
eventide to watch a pavane danced beneath the beauty of a Renaissance
colonnade, and to accentuate the resemblance Evelyn fluttered her
parasol and said, pointing across the yellow meadows--
"Look at those idle clouds, the afternoon is falling asleep."
She walked for some time touched with the sentiment that the evening
landscape inspired, a little uncertain whether he would like to talk
further about his spiritual nature, and whether she should rest
contented with what she knew on that subject. "It is only curiosity, but
I wonder how he would make love--how he'd begin? I wonder if he cares
for women?" It was some time before she could get Ulick to talk of
himself; he seemed to strive to change the conversation back to artistic
questions. He seemed absorbed in himself; it seemed difficult to awaken
him out of his absent-mindedness. At last he spoke suddenly, as was his
habit, and she learned that the scene of his first love-making was a
beautiful Normandy park. He was more explicit about the park than the
lady, and he seemed to lay special stress on the fact that the great
saloon in the castle was hung with a faded tapestry. The story seemed to
Evelyn a little obscure, but she gathered that Ulick had been tragically
separated from her, whether by the intervention of another woman or
through his own fault did not seem clear. The story was vague as a
legend, and Evelyn was not certain that Ulick had not invented the park
and the tapestries as characteristic decorations of a love story as it
should happen to him, if it did happen.
Love as a theme did not seem to suit him; he seemed to fade from her; he
was only real when he spoke of his ideas, and a fleeting comparison
between him and herself passed across her mind. She remembered that she
was no longer truly herself except when speaking of sexual emotion.
Everything else had begun to seem to her trivial, trite and
uninteresting. She could no longer take an interest in ordinary topics
of conversation. If a man was not going to make love to her, she soon
began to lose interest.... A long sequence of possibilities rose in her
mind, and died away in the distance like flights of birds. Suddenly she
began to sing, and they had a long and interesting talk about her
rendering of Isolde in the first act. For a moment the love potion
seemed as if it would carry the conversation back to their individual
experiences of the essential passion; but they drifted instead into a
discussion regarding the practice of sorcery in the middle ages. She was
surprised to learn that she was not only a believer, but was apparently
an adept in all the esoteric arts. But the subject being quite new to
her, she followed with difficulty his account of a very successful
evocation of the spirit of a mediæval alchemist, a Fleming of the
fourteenth century, and wonder often interrupted her attention. She
could not reconcile herself to the belief that he was serious in all he
said, and he often spoke of the Kabbala, which apparently was the secret
ritual of a sect of which he was a member, perhaps a priest. Between
whiles she thought of the indignation with which Owen would hear such
beliefs. Then tempted as by the edge of an abyss, she admired Ulick's
strange appearance, which helped to make his story credible. She could
no longer disbelieve, so simply did he tell his tales, his white teeth
showing, and his dark eyes rapidly brightening and clouding as he
mentioned different spells and their effects. But so illusive were his
narratives that she never quite understood; he seemed always a little
ahead of her; she often had to pause to consider his meaning, and when
she had grasped it, he was speaking of something else, and she had
missed the links. To understand him better she attempted to argue with
him, and he told her of the incredible explanation that Charcot, the
eminent hypnotist, had had to fall back upon in order to account
materialistically for some of his hypnotic experiments, and she was
forced to admit that the spiritualistic explanation was the easier to
believe.
She was most interested when he spoke of the College of Adepts and the
Rosicrucians. Life as he spoke seemed to become intense and exalted, and
the invisible seemed on the point of becoming visible when he told her
how the brotherhood greeted each other with, "Man is God, and son of
God, and there is no God but man." He repeated all he could remember of
their terrible oath. The College of Adepts, she learned, was the
antithesis of the monastery. The monastery is passive spirituality, the
College of Adepts is active spirituality; the monastery abases itself
before God, the Adepts seek to become as gods. "There is a spiritual
stream," he said, "that flows behind the circumstance of history, and
they claim that all religions are but vulgarisations of their doctrine.
The Adept, by conquering passion and ignorance, attains a mastery over
change, and so prolongs his life beyond any human limit."
She begged Ulick not to forget to bring the book of magic which
contained the oath of the Rosicrucians.
It was now after eight, and they returned home, watching the white mists
creeping up the blue fields. The sky was lucent as a crystal, and the
purple would not die out of the west until nearly midnight. Evelyn would
have liked to have stayed with him in the twilight, for as the landscape
darkened, his strange figure grew symbolic, and his words, whether by
beauty of verbal expression or the manner with which they were spoken,
seemed to bring the unseen world nearer. The outside world seemed to
slip back, to become subordinate as earth becomes subordinate to the sky
when the stars come. Evelyn felt the life of the flesh in which Owen had
placed her fall from her; it became dissipated; her life rose to the
head, and looking into the mists she seemed to discover the life that
haunts in the dark. It seemed to whisper and beckon her.
Her father was in the music-room when they returned, and at sight of him
she forgot Ulick and his enchantments.
"Father, dear, I am so proud of you." Standing by him, her hand on his
shoulder, she said, "Your choir is wonderful, dear. Palestrina has been
heard in London at last!"
She told him that she had heard the Mass in Rome, but had been
disappointed in the papal choir, and she explained why she preferred his
reading to that of the Roman musician. But he would not be consoled, and
when he mentioned that the altos were out of tune, Ulick looked at
Evelyn.
"Father, dear, Ulick and I have had an argument about the altos. He says
they were wrong in the Kyrie. Were they?"
"Of course they were, but the piano has spoilt your ear. What was I
saying last night?"
He took down a violin to test his daughter's ear, and the results of the
examination were humiliating to her.
According to Mr. Innes, Bach was the last composer who had distinguished
between A sharp and B flat. The very principle of Wagner's music is the
identification of the two notes.
She ran out of the room, saying that she must change her dress, and Mr.
Innes looked at Ulick interrogatively. He seemed a little confused, and
hoped he had not hurt her feelings, and Ulick assured him that
to-morrow she would tell the incident in the theatre, that she would be
the first to see the humour of it. The news that she was staying at
Dowlands, and the presumption that she would sing at the concert, had
brought many a priest from St. Joseph's, and all the painters, men of
letters, and designers of stained glass, and all the old pupils, the
viol players, and the madrigal singers, and when Evelyn came downstairs
in her pink frock, she was surrounded by her old friends.
"Do come, girls; can you come on Thursday night? I'll send you seats. It
would be such a pleasure to me to sing to you, but not to-night;
to-night I want to be like old times. I am going to play the viola da
gamba."
"But you used to sing Elizabethan songs in old times."
"Yes, but father thinks I have lost my ear; I shall not sing to-night."
Ulick laughed outright; the others looked at Evelyn amazed and a little
perplexed, and the consumptive man who wore brown clothes and who had
asked her to marry him came forward to congratulate her. But while
talking to him, her eyes were attracted by the tall, spare ecclesiastic
who stood talking to her father. She thought vaguely of Ulick's
depreciation. In spite of herself she felt herself gravitating towards
him. Several times she nearly broke off the conversation with the
consumptive man: her feet seemed to acquire a will of their own. But
when her eyes and thought returned to the consumptive man, her heart
filled with plaintive terror, for she could not help thinking of the
little space he had to live, and how soon the earth would be over him.
She met in his eyes a clear, plaintive look, in which she seemed to
catch sight of his pathetic soul. She seemed to be aware of it, almost
in contact with it, and through the eyes she divined the thought passing
there, and it was painful to her to think that it was of her health and
success he was thinking. She could see how cruelly she reminded him of
his folly in asking her to marry him, and she was quite sure that he was
thinking now how very lucky for her it was that she had refused him.
Pictures were formulating, she could see, in his poor mind of how
different her life would have been in the home he had to offer her, and
all this seemed to her so infinitely pathetic that she forgot Ulick,
Monsignor and everything else. Her father called her.
"Evelyn," he said, "let me introduce you to Monsignor."
The sight of a priest always shocked her; the austere face and the
reserved manner, the hard yet kind eyes, that appearance of
frequentation of the other world, at least of the hither side of this,
impressed her, and she trembled before him as she had trembled six years
ago when she met Owen in the same room. And when the concert was over,
when she lay in bed, she wondered. She asked herself how it was that a
little ordinary conversation about church singing--Palestrina, plain
chant, the papal choir, and the rest of it--should have impressed her so
vividly, should have excited her so much that she could not get to
sleep.
She remembered the discontent when it began to be perceived that she did
not intend to sing, and how Julia had said, when it came to her to sing,
that she did not dare. Julia had fixed her eyes on her, and then
everyone seemed to be looking at her. The consumptive man was emboldened
to demand "Elsa's Dream," but she had refused to sing for him. She was
determined that nothing would induce her to sing that night, but
suddenly Monsignor had said--
"I hope you will not refuse to sing, Miss Innes. Remember that I cannot
go to the opera to hear you."
"If you wish to hear me, Monsignor, I shall be pleased indeed."
It was impossible for her to refuse Monsignor; it was out of the
question that she should refuse to sing for him. If he had wished it,
she would have had to sing the whole evening. All that was quite true,
but there seemed to be another reason which she could not define to
herself. It had given her infinite pleasure to sing to Monsignor, a
pleasure she had never experienced before, not at least for a very long
while, and wondering what was about to happen, she fell asleep.