The opera began at half-past eight, and Eva, in her note to Reggie, had
mentioned "seven sharp" as the hour for dinner, because she wanted to
hear the overture. Reggie had routed up an "arrangement" of the music
that afternoon, and had got his mother to play it to him, but whether it
was that Mrs. Davenport's musical education had been conducted in her
youth on the same principles of æsthetics that used to instil into the
young idea the system of "touches" to indicate foliage, or that Reggie
did not attend much--in any case, he pronounced it totally
unintelligible, and, in his mind, reconsidered his previous verdict of
it.
Reggie's "seven sharp" partook of the nature of "seven," but in a less
degree of the nature of "sharp," and Jim Armine had already arrived and
was talking to Eva. As he opened the door--he was already sufficiently
at home to dispense with the formula of being shown up--Eva felt her
resolve waver, but determined, if she could, to do what she had
intended. She wheeled her chair a few inches further round, so as to be
with her back to the door, and began talking in a hard, cold voice.
"Of course, there will be a tremendous scandal about it," she said to
Jim, "but you know what the woman is like. Didn't you see her here a
fortnight ago? Hayes thought her divine. Of course, men are always blind
in such matters. If a woman is beautiful enough, they think she must be
good. Now, women do just the opposite. If a woman is beautiful enough,
they think she must be a villain. They are, probably, much more likely
to be right than men. Ah! Reggie, you've come, have you? I know what
your seven sharp is."
Reggie shook hands with her, and looked inquiring.
"Whom were you talking about?" he demanded.
"Oh! it would have been applicable to most women," said Eva. "There has
been, or will be, a tremendous scandal about most of us, and it seems to
me that most women have been here during this last fortnight. We have
been having a week of parties, and Hayes will have to sell one of his
villas, I expect. The parties have all been very stupid, but so are the
villas, for that matter. Come, let's go in to dinner. Which of you
gentlemen will take me in? You're the nephew of a marquis, are you not,
Jim? Then you shall go in first, and Reggie and I will follow."
"I've been making my mother play the overture to me," remarked Reggie,
as they sat down, "and I can't understand a note of it."
"Oh! the overture is the epitome to the play," said Eva; "you have to
know the plot, and then the overture is easy enough. Let's see, I'll
give you a little sketch of it. Tannhäuser is a good young man,
Reggie--something like you--and he goes to Venusberg. Well, Venusberg is
not at all the place for a good young man. There is no propriety of any
sort observed there, and they are very lax about etiquette and other
things. Never go to Venusberg, Reggie, or, if you do, take Mrs. Reggie
with you. If she won't come--and I don't expect she will--you had better
not go at all. It is said to be very unsettling."
Jim Armine laughed. Lady Hayes was inclined to be talkative, and he
always thought it worth while listening to her when she was talkative,
because she always had something to say whenever she said anything. He
wondered a little why she had taken it into her head to say this just
now, but she always talked with a purpose, and he was content to assume
the purpose. But Reggie was wofully puzzled. He had not known her like
this, and he very much wanted explanations.
"I don't understand," he said. "You know I'm very stupid. Do tell me
what you mean."
Eva cast one look at his anxious, frowning face, and trifled with her
fish.
"I must do it," she said to herself; "I cannot let things continue as
they have been."
"Oh! it gets easier further on," she continued, "as Humpty Dumpty said;
and you'll understand it all when you hear the overture again, according
to your new lights. Of course, the Venusberg is only an interlude in
Tannhäuser's life, and everyone has interludes in their lives, or else
they would not be human. Tannhäuser is a pilgrim, and the pilgrims march
about to slow music all the time. Venus, of course, does not go about to
slow music--quite the contrary, in fact; and, when you hear the two
together, the contrast is very striking. Tannhäuser goes away from
Venusberg, you know, before the end, and dies in the odour of sanctity."
Eva stopped for a moment, and Jim Armine laughed again.
"You are admirably lucid," he said. "You seldom explain yourself so
well."
"Thanks for the compliment," said Eva. "And you, Reggie, do you find me
lucid?"
Reggie was listening to her with a puzzled air.
"I expect I shall understand better when I've seen it," he said.
"Yes; you can't fail to understand it then," said Eva, "or, if you
don't, you will be even more charming than I thought you. I wonder if
you are capable of it. I am talking nonsense to-night; you must forget
it to-morrow."
"As long as you remember it just during the opera," said Jim
maliciously.
Eva's mind was thoroughly made up, and she choked the rising misgivings.
"He must know some time," she thought, "and it is best I should tell
him."
"You are going to be Adam in the garden of Eden, possibly for the last
time," she said with mock solemnity, which covered her own earnestness;
"to-night the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will
be offered you--"
"By the woman?" asked Jim, indicating Eva.
"On the contrary," said she, "by Augustus Harris. Every man since Adam
has had it offered him sooner or later, Reggie, and the majority of them
eat it. The apple, in this case, is Tannhäuser, accompanied by my
comments on it. It's a funny sort of apple. I'm giving you the core
first, which is rather dry, probably, and the fruit comes afterwards,
like dessert after savouries."
"The core is rather hard," remarked Reggie unceremoniously.
"Oh, it will taste quite different when you chew it up with the fruit."
"Give us some more of the core," asked Jim.
"Well, there's Venus, of course," said Eva, "about whom I haven't told
you anything yet. She is just the opposite to the pilgrim's march; she
regards things from an entirely different standpoint, you know. I'm
always a little sorry for Venus. Tannhäuser goes away just when she has
got very fond of him."
Eva stopped a moment and looked at Reggie.
"But, of course, you mustn't consider her at all. Tannhäuser is usually
done on Saturdays, you know, and Venus would not go at all well with
Sunday morning service. Poor dear, how the Litany would bore her! She
stops in the porch, when you go into church, and when you come out she
is gone. She hasn't gone, really, you know; she is only having a stroll,
and she always comes back, very often before Monday. If she doesn't come
back, most men go to look for her, and they usually find her again."
Reggie stifled a sudden sense of misgiving with staunch loyalty, and
smiled at Eva.
"I told you I was stupid," he said, "the first time I saw you, and I
confess to being absolutely stupid now. I don't understand you a bit."
Jim regarded Reggie as a successful interloper, and could not resist the
temptation to be slightly malicious.
"After all, it is the most delightful thing in the world to be able to
keep up our mysteries," he said. "Nothing intelligible is so charming as
what is mysterious. When you understand anything, the charm is gone."
"Nonsense, Jim," said Eva; "don't pay any attention to what he says,
Reggie. It is very easy to be unintelligible."
"Yes, it seems to be," said Reggie, rather absently, but resenting Jim's
remark, which savoured of patronising.
Eva laughed.
"You won't get any change out of him, Jim," she said. "He has often
assured me he is very stupid, which no stupid person is capable of
doing. I must go and put on a cloak. There is just time for you to smoke
a cigarette before the carriage comes."
Eva got up and left the room, and Reggie lit a cigarette, and strolled
to the window. He had no particular liking for Jim Armine, and Eva's
words had disturbed him. He was growing more conscious of the fact that
his life was beginning to find a new centre, and a mystery which was
quite new to it. His strong, genuine liking and admiration for Gertrude
had not diminished a whit, but he did not conceal from himself that he
thought with more excitement about Eva. But he felt himself able to
retain both these interests without any sense of compromise. He was
engaged to marry Gertrude, and he would have been genuinely puzzled if
it had been suggested to him that such an engagement, to some minds,
limited his liberty in becoming indefinitely interested in another
woman. In fact, the extreme simplicity of his character appeared to be
going to land him among some perilously complicated and unknown shoals.
He was young, ardent and unreflective, and these divine gifts are
capable of dealing back-handed blows in the most inopportune and
unexpected ways.
But Eva's words this evening had startled and perplexed him, and his
bewilderment was touched with distrust. He expected, as Eva had told
him, to find the key to his perplexity in the opera to-night, and he
half realised that the explanation might be appallingly significant.
Years afterwards he remembered those few minutes, which he spent looking
out of the window, with much greater clearness than he remembered what
followed. A mental, like a physical shock, often produces a dimness in
the memory. Men who have been in great peril of death will remember with
great vividness the most insignificant circumstances just before that
peril; how they were walking round the slippery corner of rocks coated
with ice, how a little purple gentian grew just above the crevice where
they found a handhold, how at their feet was a trickle of water, where
the sun had melted the snow. Then came the slip, and the activity of the
mind seems suddenly quiescent. As they slid powerlessly down the icy
stair, they noticed nothing, even the bitterness of death was
passed--they were inanimate arrows from the bow of natural laws.
In the same way the little details of those few minutes when he waited
for Eva to put on her opera cloak were engraved indelibly on Reggie's
mind. Years afterwards the faint, acrid smell of red geraniums brought
back the whole evening with a throb of sudden awakening. The window was
open, and the flower-box outside was in full scent and colour. A canary
creeper climbed the trellis-work at the sides of the windows, and twined
its green, muscular stalks round the painted wooden squares. Between, a
row of gaudy geraniums grew up from a groundwork of low mignonette, not
yet in full flower, and in the front of the box a fringe of dark blue
lobelias shivered on their hair-like stalks in the evening air. Beyond
lay the grimy, dusty, square garden, and over the road, between the
house and it, bowled silent, smooth-running carriages, within which he
caught sight of the shimmering of silk and jewels, and over all brooded
the hot, weary sky, exhausted with the long, sultry hours, but beginning
to grow a little more serene, a little less stifled in the cool of the
evening.
Reggie looked at these things not knowing he was noticing them, and
forbearing to guess what Eva meant. He was surprised to hear the door in
the room behind open, and to find that Eva was ready, and his cigarette
was nearly smoked out. He had not thought that she had been gone more
than a few seconds.
"Well, Reggie," she said, "have you been thinking it all over? Are you
prepared for the great change. I think it is coming to-night, but, of
course, there is nothing so easy as prophesying, and nothing so
inconclusive. Well! we shall see. At present the carriage is waiting,
and we must be off."
It was still early when they arrived at the opera house, and the
orchestra were just beginning to tune up. The house was still
comparatively empty, but it was beginning to fill rapidly, for all
London had suddenly discovered that Wagner was worth listening to, and
that an overture was not necessarily as dispensable as a preface.
But at last the tuning was over, the violins had caught their A's
correctly, and had hit the "four perfect fifths," the drums had been
screwed up to the necessary tension, and the wind instruments were in
their places, pregnant with the miraculous birth of sound. For these
five strings, these tubes of brass were going not to interpret, but to
present the actual mysteries which passed through the artist's brain.
Music is, as it were, the speaker in the first person, whereas painting
only deals with the vision secondhand. The painter represents a blaze of
light by certain pigments--yellow, red, white--but these are only the
symbols of what he wishes to tell us. He may not take liquid sunlight
and place it on the canvas. His art is but a symbol, an algebra of tints
to express certain other things. No colour he can use is in itself
luminous, the resemblance it bears to light is only imagined by the
spectator, in proportion as the artist presents us with contrasts, with
sombre shadows or brooding clouds, and it is only by the aid of what he
tries to represent that we can see his vision at all. But with the
musician it is different--he deals with his materials direct; he takes
sound pure, not a symbol of sound; his vision is woven of the waves of
air which are eternal and original, not of chemical combinations of
white lead, or the blood of cuttlefish. He mixes pure sound in his
thought, and out of it "frames not a sound but a star." And Wagner,
above all other musicians of all time, has taught an incredulous world
what can be done with sound, his beautiful slave and master, just as
Stevenson taught his faithless generation what could be done with steam.
The emotions and passions of humanity are his harp, and this harp,
touched by a master's finger, tells us what it knows. Thus in
Tannhäuser he has presented us with the great problem of all time--the
war between the lower, the bestial side of man, and something which
mankind itself has declared to be higher--the pure, steadfast soul. He
tears the hearts out of the breasts of Galahad and Messalina, bleeding
and palpitating; he threads them together on his golden string, and
then, the artist's work being over, he tosses them to us, and says
"Choose." The materials for choice are all there, the whole of the data
are before us, and as Tannhäuser chose once, so "chance" has ordained
that each of us should choose, and the same thing called "chance"
ordained that Reggie should choose that night.
There was a pause, a silence after the conductor had entered, and then
the wooden instruments gave out half the problem. The slow, deep notes
of the "Pilgrim's March" rose and fell, walking steadfastly on in
perilous place, weary yet undismayed. Then followed the strange
chromatic passage of transition, without which even Wagner did not dare
to show us the other side of the picture, and then the great animal,
which had lain as if asleep, began to stir; its heart beat with the life
of its waking moments, and it started up. The violins shivered and
smiled and laughed as Venusberg came in sight; they rose and fell, as
the march before had done, but rising higher and laughing more
triumphantly with each fall--careless, heedless, infinitely beautiful.
But below them, not less steadfast than before, moved the pilgrims. The
riot was at its highest, the triumph of Venus and her train seemed
complete, when suddenly Reggie started up. He stood at his full height a
moment, watching the curtain rise on Venusberg.
"I see, I see," he cried.
Then he turned to Eva.
"You are a wicked woman," he said, and next moment the door of the box
closed behind him.
Eva had been seated opposite him, and she had watched his face during
the overture. Before he spoke, she knew what would happen, but she did
not repent of her resolve. As he left the box, she made two hurried
steps as if to follow him, and then stopped, turning round again towards
the stage. The electric light fell full on her diamonds, on the gleam of
her white dress, on her incomparable beauty. The fan that she had held
had slipped down and lay at her feet, and her hands were clenched
together.
"He is right," she said aloud. "Ah, my God! he is quite right."
Jim Armine looked up as Reggie left the box, but as his chair was
towards the stage he saw nothing except that he had gone. But when Eva
rose, he turned half round, and caught her words. It would not have
required much penetration to see that something had happened, and it was
not unnatural that he hesitated to ask Eva what was the matter. But the
next moment she had picked up her fan, and had seated herself in her
old place. She opened her mouth to speak once, and Jim waited, but she
said nothing.
"Where's Reggie gone?" asked he at length.
Eva summoned her wonderful power of self-control, and spoke in her
natural voice.
"I think he has gone home," she said with a certain finality. "Isn't the
scene charming? Really, they mount these things very well in England."
The evening passed on; men from other boxes came and paid their respects
to Lady Hayes, and, as usual, she snubbed some, was a little amused by
others, and appeared indifferent to all.
Towards the end of the third act, Lord Hayes made his appearance and
made some true remarks on the state of the weather and the prevalent
influenza. Eva listened to his remarks with somewhat unusual attention,
and went so far as to inquire how his mother was, who, in spite of her
fortified condition, was "down" with the epidemic. But when the curtain
fell for the last time, and Tannhäuser had died in "the odour of
sanctity," she turned to Jim.
"I wonder if that ending is really natural," she said. "Do you think any
man leaves Venusberg so utterly behind after he has been a _habitué_
there? I wish Reggie had stopped. He would have given us some very
spontaneous criticisms on the subject."
"Do you think spontaneous criticisms are the most valuable?" he asked.
"Perhaps not; but they are very interesting. After all, experience may
vitiate one's judgment as much as it matures it."
"What a very odd doctrine," laughed Jim. "But I don't suppose you really
believe it yourself."
"Oh no, probably I don't," she replied, "but I don't know what I do
believe, and what I don't. Will you give me my cloak? Do you want a
lift? No? Good-night!"
When Eva got home she went straight up to her room, and her husband
followed her and sat down on a chair opposite to her, as if waiting for
her to speak. But Eva had quite as successful a power of silence as he,
and sat saying nothing, till he found it unbearable and, in a fatal fit
of fidgeting, went across to the mantelpiece, where Reggie's photograph
was standing. Eva's eyes followed him slowly, with a still impatience.
He took up the photograph and looked at it for a moment.
"Ah! this is your young friend Reggie Davenport, is it not?"
Eva yawned slightly and nodded assent.
"I thought he was at the opera with you to-night?"
"He was."
"But surely he was not there when I came."
"No, he had gone away."
"Ah! I suppose he got tired of it. It is possible to get tired of
Wagner."
Eva stood up suddenly. Her self-control was beginning to break down, and
the knowledge of what had happened, the entire success of her own scheme
of letting Reggie know the truth about her, was being supplanted in her
own mind by a great sense of loss. She felt reckless, at revolt with the
world, intolerably intolerant of her position. As she stood there,
watching her husband leaning on the back of a chair with the photograph
of Reggie in his hands, the desire to fling the truth of it at him
became too strong to resist.
She made a quick, silent step to his side, and plucked the photograph
out of his hands.
"I should not touch that again if I were you," she said, speaking in a
low, rapid voice. "You had better leave it alone for the future. Oh! my
meaning is clear enough. I am in love with Reggie Davenport. Yes--in
love with him. He is not at all like a second Jim Armine, as you
suggested the other day. No, this is quite a different thing. And he is
in love with me, while he is engaged to that girl whose photograph stood
next his there. It is a sweet position, is it not? Here am I married to
you--in love with a young man who is engaged to someone else who is in
love with him, while he is in love with me. Ah! Hayes, I lost a great
deal when I married you, while you got what you wanted. You wanted to be
my owner, did you not? You wished to be master of my beauty. I know how
beautiful I am; there is not another woman in London who can touch me.
You wanted someone who would give that stamp to your dinner parties and
country house parties that I give it. You have had the best of it. And I
married you because I wanted position, because I wanted to know the
world. That I have got--I know it by heart. It is as dull as a week-old
newspaper. Ah, God! how I know it. I did not know what it was to fall in
love; I was inexperienced, ignorant. No, I don't blame you. I pity
myself."
Eva stopped for a moment, and put Reggie's photograph down on the
mantelpiece again, next Gertrude's. She looked at them for a single
second, and then took the girl's photograph, and, with a sudden,
ungovernable frenzy, tore it to bits, and threw the pieces in the grate.
That wild-animal burst of jealousy would not be smothered. Then she went
on, still speaking rapidly,--
"You need not be afraid of scandal, Hayes, or anything else of that
sort. I have broken with Reggie for good. He thought me kind and good,
and all that is womanly, and so I wished him to know the truth about me.
Have you ever been in love? If so, you will understand it. I shocked him
horribly by explaining to him about Tannhäuser, and at the end of the
overture, he suddenly understood what I meant, and he got up and left
the box, having told me that I was a wicked woman. It was very fine. I
admired him immensely for it. But that sort of thing is rather trying. I
managed to behave decently while the play lasted, but I have broken
down. That is all there is to tell you. I don't really know why I told
you at all."
Lord Hayes listened to his wife with much composure.
"Dear me, how very sensational!" he said, "and how very Quixotic of you.
I should not have thought you were capable of Quixotism. You are a most
remarkable woman. I think I shall go to bed. The new story by Paul
Bourget which I am reading will seem quite flat after your little
romance. Good-night!"
Eva felt a sudden sense that he was justified in his quiet scorn of her.
How was it to be expected, she reasoned to herself, that he should
behave to her, as far as in him lay, otherwise than she behaved to him?
Her regret at all she had lost was not entirely resentment towards him.
For the first time since she had known him, she was generous to him,
showed a willingness to meet him half-way.
"Wait a moment," she said, "I have not quite done."
He paused in an uncompromising attitude with his hand on the handle of
the door, ready for some fine return shot. But Eva's impulse was strong
within her, and she spoke.
"I do not blame you," she said; "I assure you of that. I only blame
myself. You were willing to be very kind to me, and I believe you are
willing still. In fact, I am very sorry for you, just as I am very sorry
for myself. I do not wish to make it worse for either of us. I want to
make a bad job as good as it can be made. I did not tell you what I have
told you, in order to disgust you or pain you. We are travellers in the
same compartment in this very tiresome journey called life. We are
inevitably shut in here until it is time for one of us to get out. Do
not let us quarrel; it will only make the journey worse."
Lord Hayes came a step closer.
"Do you find this journey called life so tiresome?" he asked. "I should
have thought you would have enjoyed it."
"I wish I was dead," said she, simply.
Then, quite suddenly, all her self-control gave way. She dropped her
face in the sofa cushions and sobbed as if her heart would break. Lord
Hayes was by no means a fool, and he saw very plainly what the reason
for this sudden outburst was, and obviously it was not very
complimentary to him, however complimentary it might be to another.
He closed the door quietly, and sat down in a chair a little way from
her. He had no notion of being tender, and he lit a cigarette till she
was herself again. The sobs grew quieter after a while, and in a few
minutes Eva sat up again. Lord Hayes chucked the end of his cigarette
into the fireplace.
"My dear Eva," he said very calmly and quietly, "I know quite well, of
course, what this all means. You are in love with that young fellow, and
that quite accounts for your very--your very extraordinary behaviour.
But I don't mind that at all, I assure you. You may be in love with him
as much as ever you like. The only thing I should mind would be any
scandal on the subject, and I feel quite sure that nothing of the sort
will happen. You have been very candid to me--very candid indeed, and I
will follow your lead. I know perfectly well that your position and
title and wealth are much too dear to you to let you risk any
possibility of losing them. You would lose everything by a scandal, and
I do not believe you would gain anything. This young man is engaged to
another girl, as you say, and he is obviously a very good young man, and
will do nothing he should not. In any case, you would have to live at
Boulogne or Dieppe, or some of those hideous little French towns, among
a set of second-rate people. That is absurd on the face of it. No, I am
sure this 'tedious journey called life,' to quote your own words again,
would be much more tedious there. For the rest, I fail to see how I am
to prevent our quarrelling. It never has been a wish of mine that we
should. So once more, good-night!"
Eva was sitting up looking at her husband, with an intensity that was
not pleasant to contemplate. He felt it perhaps, for once, when he met
her eyes, he looked away again immediately and he faltered in his
speech. The utter, entire absence of generosity, of anything like manly
feeling in what he said, seemed to Eva to be a new revelation of
meanness, the like of which she had never encountered. He turned and
left the room at these last words, and Eva was left sitting there.