Evelyn Innes Part 30

The first thrill, the first impression of the music over, she applied herself to the dissection of it, so that she might be able to discuss it with Ulick and her father afterwards. This beautiful melody, apparently so free, was so exquisitely contrived that it contained within itself descant and harmony. She knew it well; it is a strict canon in unison, and she had heard it sung by two grey-haired men in the Papal choir in Rome, soprano voices of a rarer and more radiant timbre than any woman's s.e.xful voice, and subtle, and, in some complex way, hardly of the earth at all--voices in which no accent of s.e.x transpired, abstract voices aloof from any stress of pa.s.sion, undistressed by any longing, even for G.o.d. They were not human voices, and, hearing them, Evelyn had imagined angels bearing tall lilies in their hands, standing on wan heights of celestial landscape, singing their clear silver music.

These men had sung this "Agnus Dei" as perhaps it never would be sung again, but she knew the boy treble to be incapable of singing this canon properly, so she could hardly resist the impulse to run up to the choir loft and tell her father breathlessly that she would take his place. She smiled at the consternation such an act would occasion. Even if she could get to the choir loft without being noticed, she could not sing this music, her voice was full of s.e.x, and this music required the strange s.e.xless timbre of the voices she had heard in Rome. But the boy sang better than she antic.i.p.ated; his voice was wanting in strength and firmness; she listened, anxious to help him, perplexed that she could not.

The last Gospel was then read, and she followed Ulick out of church.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing moment was a sign of inferiority. Shakespeare and Sh.e.l.ley and Blake had never partic.i.p.ated 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 G.o.d--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 pa.s.s away, as that monk's life had pa.s.sed, 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 advent.i.tious pleasure in the service of his idea, he told her of the change that had come upon his aestheticism 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sembly 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 pa.s.sed across her mind. She remembered that she was no longer truly herself except when speaking of s.e.xual 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 pa.s.sion; 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 mediaeval 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 G.o.d, and son of G.o.d, and there is no G.o.d but man." He repeated all he could remember of their terrible oath. The College of Adepts, she learned, was the ant.i.thesis of the monastery. The monastery is pa.s.sive spirituality, the College of Adepts is active spirituality; the monastery abases itself before G.o.d, the Adepts seek to become as G.o.ds. "There is a spiritual stream," he said, "that flows behind the circ.u.mstance of history, and they claim that all religions are but vulgarisations of their doctrine.

The Adept, by conquering pa.s.sion 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 Ma.s.s 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 a.s.sured 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 gla.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sing 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.