And when Merat called her in the morning, she was dreaming of love. She
turned over, and, closing her eyes, strove to continue her dream, but it
fled like moonshine from her memory, and was soon so far distant that
she could not even perceive the subject of it. And she awoke in spite of
herself, and sat up in bed sipping her chocolate; and then lay back upon
the pillow with Ulick for the inner circle of her thought. It seemed
that she could think of him for hours; the romance of his personality
carried her on and on. At one moment she dwelt on the gold glow in his
dark eyes, the paint-like blackness of his hair, and his long thin
hands. At another her fancy liked to evoke his superstitions. For him
the past, present and future were not twain, but one thing. And every
time she saw him, she was more and more interested. Every time she
discovered something new in him--he did not exist on the surface of
things, but deep in himself; and she wondered if she would ever know
him.
Her thoughts paused a moment, and then she remembered something he had
said. It had struck her at the time, but now it appeared to her more
than ever interesting. Catholicism, he had said, had not fallen from
him--he had merely learnt that it was only part of the truth; he had
gone further, he had raised himself to a higher spirituality. It was not
that he wanted less, but more than Catholicism could give him. In
religion, as in art, there were higher and lower states. We began by
admiring "Faust," and went on to Wagner, hence to Beethoven and
Palestrina. Catholicism was the spiritual fare of the multitude; there
was a closer communion with the divine essence. She had forgotten what
came next.... He held that we are always warned of our destiny and it
had been proved that in the hypnotic sleep, when the pulse of life was
weakest, almost at pause, there was a heightening of the powers of
vision and hearing. A patient whose eyes had been covered with layers of
cotton wool had been able to read the newspaper. Another patient had
been able to tell what was passing in another mind, and at a distance of
a mile. The only explanation that Charcot could give of this second
experiment was that the knowledge had been conveyed through the rustling
of the blood in the veins, which the hypnotic sleep had enabled the
patient to hear. And Ulick submitted that this scientific explanation
was more incredible than any spiritual one. There was much else. There
was all Ulick's wonderful talk about the creation of things by thought,
and his references to the mysterious Kabbala had strangely interested
her. But suddenly she remembered that perchance his spiritualism was
allied to the black art of the necromancers; and her Catholic conscience
was mysteriously affrighted, and she experienced the attraction of
terror. Was it possible that he believed that all the accidents, or what
we suppose are accidents, have been earned in a preceding life? Did he
really believe that lovers may tempt each other life after life, that a
group of people may come together again?
"Mademoiselle, it is half-past ten."
"Very well, Merat, I will get up. I will ring for you when I have had my
bath."
"Lady Duckle has gone out, and will not be home for lunch."
There was not even a letter, and the day stretched out before her. Ulick
might call, but she did not think he would. She thought of a visit to
her father, but something held her back, and Dulwich was a long way.
After breakfast she went to the piano and sang some of Ulick's music;
stopping suddenly in the middle of a bar, she thought she would send him
a note asking him to come to lunch. But what should she do till two
o'clock? it was now only eleven. Suddenly it struck her that she might
take a hansom and go and see him. She had never seen his rooms, and to
visit him there would be more amusing than for him to come to Park Lane;
and she imagined his surprise and delight at seeing her. Her thoughts
went to the frock she would wear--a new one had come home
yesterday--this would be an excellent opportunity to wear it. She would
take him to lunch with her at some restaurant! She was in excellent
humour. Her thoughts amused her, and she reflected that she had done
well to choose the pale shot silk with green shades in it. It was
trimmed with black lace, and she selected a large black hat with black
ostrich feathers to wear with it.
And seeing the people in the streets as she drove past, she wondered if
they were as happy as she was. She speculated on their errands, and
wondered if many of the women were going, like her, to their lovers. She
wondered what their lovers were like, and she laughed at her thoughts.
Seeing that she was passing through a very mean street, she hoped that
Ulick's rooms were not too Bohemian, and felt relieved when she found
that the street she dreaded led into a square. A square, she reflected,
always means a certain measure of respectability. And the faded,
old-fashioned neighbourhood pleased her. Some of the houses seemed as if
they had known more fashionable days; and the square exhaled a tender
melancholy; it suggested a vision of dreamy lives--lives lived in
ideas, lives of students who lived in books unaware of the externality
of things.
But the cabman could not find the number, and Evelyn impatiently
inquired it from the vagrant children. There were groups of them on the
wide doorstep, and Evelyn imagined the interior of the house, wide
passages, gently-sloping staircase, its heavy banisters. It surprised
and amused her to find that she had imagined it quite correctly; and
when she reached the landing to which she had been directed, she
stopped, hearing his voice. He was only talking to himself; she pushed
the door and called to him.
"Oh, it is you?" he said; "you have come sooner than I expected."
"Then you expected me, Ulick?"
"Yes, I expected you."
"Expected me ...to-day! But, Ulick, what were you saying when I came
in?"
"Only some Kabbalistic formula," he replied, quite naturally.
"But you don't really believe in such superstitions, and it surely is
very wrong."
He looked at her incredulously, as he might at some beautiful apparition
likely at any moment to vanish from his sight, then reverentially drew
her towards him and kissed her. Her hand was laid on his shoulder, and
in a delicious apprehension she stood looking at him.
"Where shall we sit?"
He threw some books and papers from a long cane chair, and she lay down
in it. He sat on the arm, and then tried to talk.
"Let me take your hat."
She unpinned it, and he placed it on the piano.
His room was lighted by two square windows looking on the open space in
front of the square, where the vagrant children gathered in noisy groups
round a dripping iron fountain. The floor was covered with grey-green
drugget, and near the fireplace, drawn in front of the window, was a
large oak table covered with papers of various kinds. Against the end
wall there was a bookcase, and there were shelves filled with books.
There were two arm-chairs, a piano, and some prints of Blake's
illustrations to Dante on the wall. The writing table, covered with
manuscript music, roused Evelyn's curiosity. She glanced down a page of
orchestration, and then picked up the first pages of an article, and
having read them she said--
"How severe you are in your articles. You are gentler in your music,
more like yourself; but I see your servant does not waste her time
dusting your books ...and that is your bedroom, may I see it?"
He looked at her abashed. "I am afraid my room will seem to you very
unluxurious. I have read of prima donnas' bed-rooms."
But the bare simplicity of the room did not displease her; it seemed to
her more natural to sleep in a low, narrow bed like his, than in fine
linen and eiderdown quilts, and she liked the scant, bleak furniture,
the two chairs, the iron wash-hand stand, and the window curtained with
a bit of Indian muslin. They stood talking, hardly knowing what they
were saying. Her eyes embarrassed him, and she stopped in the middle of
a sentence.
"Now, Ulick," she said, turning towards the door, "I want you to take me
to lunch. We'll go to the Savoy."
He had to admit he had not sufficient money. Three shillings and
sixpence were what remained until he received the cheque from one of his
newspapers.
"But I am not going to have you pay for my lunch, Ulick. I am asking
you. Be nice, don't refuse; what does it matter? What does money matter
to me? It comes in so fast that I don't know what to do with it."
It was at the end of the season, and there were not many people in the
low-ceilinged dining-room. All the waiters knew Evelyn, and she was
conducted ceremoniously to a table. And as she passed up the room, she
wondered what was being thought of Ulick. He was so different from the
exquisite, foppish elegance of the man she was usually seen with. He was
strange-looking, but Ulick was as distinguished as Owen, only the
distinction was of another kind.
He always remembered how at the end of lunch she took out her gold
knitted purse, and emptied its contents on the tablecloth. And he was
astonished at the casualness with which she spent money in every shop
that caught her fancy. The afternoon included a visit to the saddler's,
where she had to make inquiries about bits and bridles. She called at
two jewellers, where she had left things to be mended. She ordered a
dozen pair of boots, and purchased a large quantity of stationery after
a long discussion about dies, stamps and monograms. And when all this
was finished, she proposed they should have tea in Kensington Gardens.
Ulick knew very little of London. He knew Victoria Station, for he took
the train there to Dulwich; the Strand, for he went there to see
editors; and Bloomsbury, because he lived there. But he had never been
to the park, and seemed puzzled when Evelyn spoke of the Serpentine and
the round pond. It was surprising, he said, to find forest groves in the
heart of London. They had tea at a little table set beneath huge
branches, and after tea they sat on a sloping lawn facing the long
water. She wondered if he were aware of the beauty of things, the wonder
of life, the blue of the sky, the romance of the clouds. But she was
bent on hearing of the invisible world apparently always so visible to
him, and she tried to win his thoughts away from the park, and to lead
him to speak of his visions. She did not know if she believed in them,
but she pined for exaltation, for, an unloosening of the materialistic
terror in which Owen had tied her, and in this mood Ulick's dreams
floated up in her life, like clouds in a cloudless sky. He sat talking,
lost in his dreams, and she sat listening like one enchanted. Now their
talk had strayed from the descriptions of visions beheld by folk who
lived in back parlours in Bloomsbury squares to the philosophy of his
own belief; and she smiled for delight at seeing the Druid in him. The
ancient faiths had survived in him, and it seemed natural and even right
that he should believe that after death men pass to the great plain of
the land over the sea, the land of the children of Dana. Men lived
there, he said, for a while, enjoying all their desires, and at the end
of this period they are born again. Man lives between two desires--his
desire of spiritual peace and happiness, and his desire of earthly
experience.
"Oh, how true that is!"
"Man's desire of earthly experience," Ulick continued, "draws him to
re-birth, and he is born into a form that fits his nature as a glove
fits a hand; the soul of a warrior passes into the robust form of a
warrior; the soul of a poet into the most sensitive body of a poet; so
you see how modern science has only robbed the myths of their beauty."
He spoke of the old Irish legend of Mongan and the Bard, and Evelyn
begged of him to tell it her.
"Mongan," he said, "had been Fin MacCool two hundred years before. When
he was Fin he had been present at the death of a certain king. The bard
was singing before Mongan, and mis-stated the place of the king's death.
Mongan corrected him, and the Bard was so incensed at the correction
that he threatened to satirise the kingdom so that it should become
barren. And he would only agree to withhold his terrible satire if
Mongan would give him his wife.
"Mrs. Mongan?"
"Yes, just so," Ulick replied, laughing. "Mongan asked for three days'
delay to consider the dreadful dilemma in which the Bard's threat had
placed him. And during that time Mongan sat with his wife consoling her,
saying, "A man will come to us, his feet are already upon the western
sea." And at the time when the Bard stood up to claim the wife, a
strange warrior came into the encampment, holding a barbless spear. He
said that he was Caolte, one of Fin's famous warriors, that the king
whose place of death was in dispute was killed where Mongan had said,
that if they dug down into the earth they would find the spear-head,
that it would fit the shaft he held in his hand, that it was the
spear-head that had killed the king."
"Go on, and tell me some more stories. I love to listen to you--you are
better than any play."
And she wondered if he were indeed an ancient Druid come to life again,
and that the instinct of the ancient rites lingered in him. However this
might be, he could answer all her questions, and she was much interested
when at the end of another tale he told her of Blake's visions and
prophetic books. She knew little about Blake, and listened to Ulick's
account of his visions and prophecies. Evelyn thought of Owen, and to
escape from the thought she spoke of a legend which Ulick had once
mentioned to her.
"You did not tell it to me, only the end; the very last phrase is all I
know of it, 'and the further adventures of Bran are unknown.'"
"Bran, the son of Feval, is the story of a man who went to the great
plain, the land over the sea, the land of the children of Dana. He was
sitting in his court when a beautiful woman appeared, and she told him
to man his ship and sail to the land of the Gods, the land where no one
dies, where blossoms fall for ever.... I have forgotten the song, what a
wonderful song it is. Ah, I remember, 'Where music is not born, but
continually is there, where' ... no, I can't remember it. Bran sails
away, and after sailing for some days he meets a man driving a chariot
over the waves. This man says, 'To my eyes you are sailing over the tops
of a forest,' and in many other ways makes clear to him that all things
are but appearances, and change with the eye that sees them."
"How true that is. At Lady Ascott's ball I was enjoying myself,
delighted with the brilliancy of the dresses, the jewellery and the
flowers, and in a moment they all passed away; I only saw a little
triviality and heard a voice crying within me, 'Why are you here, why
are you doing these things? This ball means nothing to you.'"
"That was the voice of your destiny; your life is no longer with Owen."
"With whom is it, Ulick? Tell me, you can see into the future."
"I know no more than I told you last night. I am your destiny for
to-day."
They looked at each other in fear and sadness--and though both knew the
truth, neither could speak it.
"Then what happens to Bran, the son of Feval?"
"Bran visits many islands of many delights, but wishing to see his
native land once more, he sails away, but the people of those islands
have told him that he must not set foot on any earthly shore, or he will
perish. So he sails close to his native land, but does not leave the
ship. The inhabitants ask him who he is; he tells them, and they reply,
'The voyage of Bran, son of Feval, is among our most ancient stories.'
One man swims ashore, and the moment his foot touches earth he becomes a
heap of dust. Bran sails away, and the story ends with a phrase which
you already know--'The further adventures of Bran are unknown.'"
"How true! how true! the stories of our lives are known up to a certain
point, and our further adventures are unknown."
They were glad of a little silence, and Evelyn sat striving to read her
own destiny in the legend. Bran visited many islands of many delights,
but when he wished to return to his native land he was told that he must
do no more than to sail along its coast, that if he set foot on any
earthly shore he would perish. But what did this story mean, what
meaning had it for her? She had visited many islands of many delights,
and had come home again! What meaning had this story for her? why had
she remembered the last phrase? why had she been impelled to ask Ulick
to tell her this story? She looked at him--he sat with his eyes on the
ground absorbed in thought, but she did not think he was thinking of the
legend, but of how soon he would lose her, and she shuddered in the warm
summer evening as from a sudden chill. It was now nearly seven
o'clock--she would soon have to go home to dress for dinner. They were
dining out, she and Lady Duckle, and she would meet once more Lady
Ascott, Lady Summersdean, those people whose lives she had begun to feel
had no further concern for her.
The hour was inexpressibly calm and alluring; the blue pallor of the sky
and the fading of the sunset behind the tall Bayswater houses raised the
soul with a tingling sense of exalted happiness and delicious
melancholy? She did not ask herself if she loved Ulick better than Owen;
she only knew that she must act as she was acting--that the moment had
not come when she would escape from herself. They walked by the water's
edge, their souls still like the water, and like it, full of calm
reflections. They were aware of the evening's sad serenity, and the
little struggling passions of their lives. Very often Nature seemed on
the very point of whispering her secret, but it escaped her ears like an
echo in the far distance, like a phantom that disappears in the mist.
"Will you come and see me to-morrow?" he asked suddenly.
"We had better not see each other every day," she said; "still, I don't
see there would be any harm if you came to see me in the afternoon."
Her conscience drowsed like this heavy, somnolent evening, and a red
moon rose behind the tall trees.
"The time will come," he said, "when you will hate me, Evelyn."
"I don't think I shall be as unjust as that. Good-bye, dear, the
afternoon has passed very pleasantly."