Dreams was the first of the five, but the music that haunted belonged to
the third song. She could not quite remember a single phrase, nor any
words except "pining flowers." She had thought of sending for it, but
such vague memory suited her mood better than an exact text. If she had
the song she would go to the piano, and she did not wish to move from
the Sheraton sofa, made comfortable with pale blue cushions. But again
the music stirred her memory like wind the tall grasses, and out of the
slowly-moving harmonies there arose an invocation of the strange pathos
of existence; no plaint for an accidental sorrow, something that
happened to you or me, or might have happened, if our circumstances had
been different; only the mood of desolate self-consciousness in which
the soul slowly contemplates the disaster of existence. The melancholy
that the music exhales is no querulous feminine plaint, but an
immemorial melancholy, an exalted resignation. The music goes out like a
fume, dying in remote chords, and Evelyn sat absorbed, viewing the world
from afar, like the Lady of Shallott, seeing in the mirror of memory the
chestnut trees of the Dulwich street, and a little girl running after
her hoop; and then her mother's singing classes, and the expectation she
had lived in of learning to sing, and being brought upon the stage by
her mother. If her mother had lived, she would have been singing "Romeo
and Juliet" and "Lucia." ... Her father would have deemed her voice
wasted; but mother always had had her way with father. Then she saw
herself pining for Owen, sick of love, longing, hungry, weak, weary,
disappointed, hopeless. Her thoughts turned from that past, and her
mother's face looked out of her reverie, grey and grave and watchful,
only half seen in the shadows. She seemed aware of her mother as she
might be of some idea, strangely personal to herself, something near and
remote, beyond this span of life, stretching into infinity. She seemed
to feel herself lifted a little above the verge of life, so that she
might inquire the truth from her mother; but something seemed to hold
her back, and she did not dare to hear the supernatural truth. She was
still too thrall to this life of lies, but she could not but see her
mother's face, and what surprised her was that this grey shadow was more
real to her than the rest of the world. The face did not stir, it
always wore the same expression. Evelyn could not even tell if the
expression of the dim eyes was one of disapproval. But it needs must
be--she could have no doubt on that point. What was certain and sure was
that she seemed in a nearer and more intimate, in a more essential
communication with her mother, than with her father who was alive.
Nothing seemed to divide her from her mother; she had only to let her
soul go, and it could mingle with her mother's spirit, and then all
misunderstandings would be at an end.
She was tempted to free herself from this fettering life, where all is
limitation and division. Its individualism appeared to her particularly
clear when she thought of Owen. They had clasped and kissed in the hope
to become part of the other's substance. They had sought to mingle, to
become one; now it was in the hope of a union of soul that Owen sought
her, his kisses were for this end. She had read his desire in his eyes.
But the barrier of the flesh, which at first could barely sunder them,
now seemed to have acquired a personal life, a separate entity; it
seemed like some invisible force thrusting them apart. The flesh which
had brought them together now seemed to have had enough of them; the
flesh, once gentle and persuasive, seemed to have become stern,
relentless as the commander in "Don Juan." She thought of it as the
forest in "Macbeth"; of something that had come out of the inanimate,
angry and determined--a terrible thing this angry, frustrated flesh.
Like the commander, it seemed to grasp and hurry her away from Owen, and
she seemed to hear it mutter, "This vain noise must cease." The idea of
the flesh was not their pleasure, but the next generation; the
frustrated flesh was now putting them apart. She hummed the music, and
the life she had lived continued to loom up and fall back into darkness
like shapes seen in a faded picture. She had loved Owen, and sung a few
operas, that was all. She remembered that everything was passing; the
notes she sang existed only while she sang them, each was a little past.
A moment approaches; it is ours, and no sooner is it ours than it has
slipped behind us, even in the space of the indrawing of a breath. No
wonder, then, that men had come to seek reality beyond this life; it was
natural to believe that this life must be the shadow of another life
lying beyond it, and she leaned forward, pale and nervous, in the pale
grace of the Sheraton sofa.
Her depression that morning was itself a mystery. What did it mean?
Whence did it proceed? She had not lost her voice. Owen did not love her
less. Ulick was coming to see her; but within her was an unendurable
anxiety. It proceeded from nothing without; it was her own mind that
frightened her. But just now she had been exalted and happy in the
memory of that deeply emotional music. She tried to remember the exact
moment when this strange, penetrating sorrow had fallen upon her.
Whence had it come, and what did it mean? A few minutes ago it was not
with her. She knew that it would not always be with her, yet it did not
seem as if it would ever leave her. She could not think of herself as
ever being happy again. But Ulick would distract this misery from her
brain. She would send him to the piano, and the exalted sorrow in the
music, which she could but faintly remember, would raise her above
sorrow, would bear her out of and above the circle of personal
despondency. Ulick might help her; she could not help herself. She was
incapable of going to the piano, though she was fully conscious that her
mood would pass away in music. She walked across the room, her eyes
contracted with suffering, and she stretched herself like one who would
rid herself of a burden.
She felt as if she could resign with a little smile the part that she
had to play in life. Not the past, that was no longer hers either to
preserve or to blot out; she could not wish herself different from what
she had been; but the future--was that to be the same as the past? Then,
with an apparent contradiction to what she had been thinking a few
moments before regarding the worthlessness of life, she began to think
that her unhappiness was possibly the result of her eccentric life. She
had lived in defiance of rules, governed by individual caprice.
Apparently it had succeeded, but only apparently. Underneath the surface
of her life she had always been unhappy. All her talent, all her
intelligence had not been able to save her. And Owen? All that pride of
intelligence had resulted in unhappiness in his case as in hers. Both
had disobeyed the law which we feel to be right when we look into the
very recesses of our soul, and that these laws seem foolish and
illogical when criticised by the light of reason does not prove their
untruth. There is something beyond reason, and to become concentric, to
enter into the conventions, seemed to her in a vague and distant manner
to be indispensable. She was weary of living in the inhospitable regions
outside of prejudice and authority.... She felt that it was prejudice
and authority that gave a meaning, or a sufficient semblance of a
meaning, to life as it was; she was a helpless atom tossed hither and
thither by every gust of passion as a leaf in a whirlwind, and she
longed to understand herself and her mission in life.
In her present attitude towards life, nothing mattered except the
present reality, the satisfaction of the moment; her present conception
of life only counselled sacrifice of personal desires for the sake of
larger desires. But these larger satisfactions did not differ in kind
from the lesser, and all went the same way, the pleasure we take in a
bunch of violets, or that which a love story brings, and both pass, but
one leaves neither remorse nor bitterness behind. A thought told her
that she was, while in the midst of these moral reflections, preparing
herself to be Ulick's mistress. She denied the thought and put it
behind her angrily, attributing its intrusion to her nerves, and to
separate herself from it she allowed thoughts on the mutability of
things to again exclusively occupy her. If she were to get up from the
sofa she would create another division in her life, and to-morrow she
would not remember her mood of to-day; it would have vanished as if it
had never been. She asked, What do we live for? and rose nervously from
the sofa, and then stood still. That half-hour was now behind her; again
her place in life had been shifted. Yesterday, too, was gone, and with
it the pleasure of her walk with Ulick. She had walked with him
yesterday in the Green Park, in the still crystal evening. She could
almost see the two figures, she could see them at one spot, but if she
looked too long they disappeared from her eyes. She remembered nothing
of what they had said, only that the colour of the evening was pale
blue, with a little east wind in it, and that was yesterday! They had
talked and walked, and been tremulously interested in each other; but
she remembered nothing that had been said until they turned to go home.
Then arose an exact vision of herself and Ulick walking under the
graceful trees which overhung the Piccadilly railings. There the park
had been shaped into little dells, and it had reminded her of the
picture in the Dulwich Gallery. There his pleading was more passionate.
He had begged her to go away with him, and she had had to answer that
she could not give Owen up. She had felt that it was better to speak
frankly, though she was sorry to have to say things that would give him
pain. She had told him the truth, and was glad she had done so, but she
liked him very much, and had said it was a pity they had not met
earlier. "I missed you by about a year," he answered. His words came
back to her, and she wondered if there was a cause for the accident, and
if it could have been predicted. They had walked slowly up the pathways,
and seeing the young summer in the sky and trees, they had walked as
upon air, borne up by the sadness of finding themselves divided. They
had thought of what forms and colours their lives would have taken if
she had waited a few months, if she had not gone away with Owen; or,
better still, if she had never met Owen. She was conscious that such
thoughts amounted to an infidelity, and she knew that she did love Ulick
as she loved Owen. But the temptation was cruelly intense, and she could
not wrench herself out of its grip. Their voices had fallen, they
suffocated in the silence. Ulick had mentioned Blake's name, and she had
accepted an artistic discussion as an escapement, but their hearts were
overloaded, and it was in answer to his own thoughts that Ulick had
spoken of the eighteenth-century mystic. For the question had arisen in
him whether the passions of the flesh are not destructive of spiritual
exaltation, and he told her that exaltation was the gospel according to
Blake. We must seek to exalt ourselves, to live in the idea; sexual
passion was a merely inferior state, but mean content was the true
degradation.
"Then passion is the highest plane to which the materialist can rise?"
asked Evelyn, thinking of Owen.
"Yes; I don't think I'm wrong in admitting that, in the main, that is
Blake's contention."
But at this point he had broken off his discourse, and told an anecdote
in his half-witty, half-wistful way about an article which he had
written on Blake and which had somehow strayed into the hands of a man
and his wife living in Normandy. This couple were at the time engaged in
continuing the tradition of Bastien Lepage. They laboriously copied what
they saw in the fields--grey days, hobnailed boots and the rest of it.
His article had, however, awakened them to the vanity of realism; and
they had taken their pictures to a neighbouring tower, and at the top of
it made a holocaust of all their abominable endeavour. And a few days
after, two faded human beings had presented themselves at Ulick's
lodgings in Bloomsbury, seemingly at once unhappy and excited, and
professing their complete willingness to accept the gospel of life
according to Blake. It was the man who did the talking, the woman, who
was dressed in olive-green garments, acquiesced in what he said. They
were tired of materialism; they had trudged that bleak road till they
were weary, and now they desired Blake, submission to Blake, and were
therefore disappointed when Ulick explained that Blake's doctrine was
not subordination to Blake, but the very opposite, the development of
self, the cultivation of personal will.
"It was clear to me," Ulick said, "that the woman had abased herself
before the man, that she ate what he ate, drank what he drank, thought
what he thought, so I decided that we should begin with first
principles; that the woman should decide for herself, without referring
to her husband, what she should eat for dinner. But after some efforts
to attain sufficient personal will, she confessed her incapacity, and I
therefore proposed to the husband that she should be kept in her room
until she had regained her will. They went away hopeful, but he called a
few days after to tell me that the experiment had failed. For after
striving for many hours to decide between soles and plaice, she had
burst into tears, and I felt I could not advise him further."
It had seemed a pity to ask Ulick how much of this story was true, how
much invention; and it was a remembrance of the will-less lady in the
olive-green gown that caused Evelyn's face to light up into smiles as
she stood at the window watching for his coming.
Her excuse for not marrying Owen was that she would have to retire from
the stage. But she was not convinced that that was the real reason.
There seemed to be another reason at the back of her mind which her
reason could not drag out. She tried again and again, but it eluded
her, and it was frightening to find that she had so little knowledge of
the motives that had determined her life. Feeling that she must change
her thoughts, she asked herself what a man like Ulick, of spiritual
temperament, but uninfected with religious dogma, would think of her
relations with Owen. "Ah, that was the front door bell!" She waited in a
delicious tremble of expectation, and the servant announcing Sir Owen
awoke her, and with a shock as painful as if she had been struck on the
nape of the neck.