Sister Teresa Part 15

"He lives in recollection of that time," Ulick said to himself, "that is his life; the ten years he spent with her are his life, the rest counts for nothing." A moment after Owen was comparing himself to a man wandering in the twilight who suddenly finds a lamp: "A lamp that will never burn out," Ulick said to himself. "He will take that lamp into the tomb with him."

"But I must read you the notices." And going to an escritoire covered with ormolu--one of those pieces of French furniture which cost hundreds of pounds--he took out a bundle of Evelyn's notices. "The most interesting," he said, "were the first notices--before the critics had made up their mind about her."

He stopped in his untying of the parcel to tell Ulick about his journey to Brussels to hear her sing.

"You see, I had broken my leg out hunting, and there was a question whether I should be able to get there in time. Imagine my annoyance on being told I must not speak to her."

"Who told you that?"

"Madame Savelli."

"Oh, I understand I You arrived the very day of her first appearance?"

Owen threw up his head and began reading the notices.

"They are all the same," he said, after reading half a dozen, and Ulick felt relieved. "But stay, this one is different," and the long slip dismayed Ulick, who could not feel much interest in the impression that Evelyn had created as Elsa--he did not know how many years ago.

"'Miss Innes is a tall, graceful woman, who crosses the stage with slow, harmonious movements--any slight quickening of her step awakening a sense of foreboding in the spectator. Her eyes, too, are of great avail, and the moment she comes on the stage one is attracted by their strangeness--grave, mysterious, earnest eyes, which smile rarely; but when they do smile happiness seems to mount up from within, illuminating her life from end to end. She will never be unhappy again, one thinks. It is with her smile she recompenses her champion knight when he lays low Telramund, and it is with her smile she wins his love--and ours. We regret, for her sake, there are so few smiles in Wagner: very few indeed--not one in 'Senta' nor in 'Elizabeth.'" The newspaper cutting slipped from Owen's hand, and he talked for a long time about her walk and her smile, and then about her "Iphigenia," which he declared to be one of the most beautiful performances ever seen, her personality lending itself to the incarnation of this Greek idea of fate and self-sacrifice. But Gluck's music was, in Owen's opinion, old-fashioned even at the time it was written--containing beautiful things, of course, but somewhat stiff in the joints, lacking the clear insight and direct expression of Beethoven's. "One man used to write about her very well, and seemed to understand her better than any other. And writing about this performance he says--Now, if I could find you his article." The search proved a long one, but as it was about to be abandoned Owen turned up the cutting he was in search of.

"'Her nature intended her for the representation of ideal heroines whose love is pure, and it does not allow her to depict the violence of physical pa.s.sion and the delirium of the senses. She is an artist of the peaks, whose feet may not descend into the plain and follow its ignominious route,' And then here: 'He who has seen her as the spotless spouse of the son of Parsifal, standing by the window, has a.s.sisted at the mystery of the chaste soul awaiting the coming of her predestined lover,' And 'He who has seen her as Elizabeth, ascending the hillside, has felt the nostalgia of the skies awaken in his heart,' Then he goes on to say that her special genius and her antecedents led her to 'Fidelio,' and designed her as the perfect embodiment of Leonore's soul--that pure, beautiful soul made wholly of sacrifice and love,' But you never saw her as Leonore so you can form no idea of what she really was,"

"I will read you what she wrote when she was studying 'Fidelio': 'Beethoven's music has nothing in common with the pa.s.sion of the flesh; it lives in the realms of n.o.ble affections, pity, tenderness, love, spiritual yearnings for the life beyond the world, and its joy in the external world is as innocent as a happy child's. It is in this sense cla.s.sical--it lives and loves and breathes in spheres of feeling and thought removed from the ordinary life of men. Wagner's later work, if we except some scenes from "The Ring"--notably the scenes between Wotan and Brunnhilde--is nearer to the life of the senses; its humanity is fresh in us, deep as Brunnhilde's; but essential man lives in the spirit. The desire of the flesh is more necessary to the life of the world than the aspirations of the soul, yet the aspirations of the soul are more human. The root is more necessary to the plant than its flower, but it is by the flower and not by the root that we know it."

"Is it not amazing that a woman who could think like that should be capable of flinging up her art--the art which I gave her--on account of the preaching of that wooden-headed Mostyn?" Sitting down suddenly he opened a drawer, and, taking out her photograph, he said: "Here she is as Leonore, but you should have seen her in the part. The photograph gives no idea whatever; you haven't seen her picture. Come, let me show you her picture: one of the most beautiful pictures that ---- ever painted; the most beautiful in the room, and there are many beautiful things in this room. Isn't it extraordinary that a woman so beautiful, so gifted, so enchanting, so intended by life for life should be taken with the religious idea suddenly? She has gone mad without doubt. A woman who could do the things that she could do to pa.s.s over to religion, to scapulars, rosaries, indulgencies! My G.o.d! my G.o.d!" and he fell back in his armchair, and did not speak again for a long time. Getting up suddenly, he said, "If you want to smoke any more there are cigars on the table; I am going to bed."

"Well, it is hard upon him," Ulick said as he took a cigar; and lighting his candle, he wandered up the great green staircase by himself, seeking the room he had been given at the end of one of the long corridors.

XII

"Did it ever occur to you," Owen said one evening, as the men sat smoking after dinner, after the servant had brought in the whisky and seltzer, between eleven and twelve, in that happy hour when the spirit descends and men and women sitting together are taken with a desire to communicate the incommunicable part of themselves--"did it ever occur to you," Owen said, blowing the smoke and sipping his whisky and seltzer from time to time, "that man is the most ridiculous animal on the face of this earth?"

"You include women?" Ulick asked.

"No, certainly not; women are not nearly so ridiculous, because they are more instinctive, more like the animals which we call the lower animals in our absurd self-conceit. As I have often said, women have never invented a religion; they are untainted with that madness, and they are not moralists. They accept the religions men invent, and sometimes they become saints, and they accept our moralities--what can they do, poor darlings, but accept? But they are not interested in moralities, or in religions. How can they be? They are the substance out of which life comes, whereas we are but the spirit, the crazy spirit--the lunatic crying for the moon. Spirit and substance being dependent one on the other, concessions have to be made; the substance in want of the spirit acquiesces, says, 'Very well, I will be religious and moral too.' Then the spirit and the substance are married. The substance has been infected--"

"What makes you say all this, Asher?"

"Well, because I have just been thinking that perhaps my misfortunes can be traced back to myself. Perhaps it was I who infected Evelyn."

"You?"

"Yes, I may have brought about a natural reaction. For years I was speaking against religion to her, trying to persuade her; whereas if I had let the matter alone it would have died of inanition, for she was not really a religious woman."

"I see, I see," Ulick answered thoughtfully.

"Had she met you in the beginning," Owen continued, "she might have remained herself to the end; for you would have let her alone.

Religion provokes me... I blaspheme; but you are indifferent, you are not interested. You are splendid, Ulick."

A smile crossed Ulick's lips, and Owen wondered what the cause of the smile might be, and would have asked, only he was too interested in his own thoughts; and the words, "I wonder you trouble about people's beliefs" turned him back upon himself, and he continued:

"I have often wondered. Perhaps something happens to one early in life, and the mind takes a bias. My animosity to religion may have worn away some edge off her mind, don't you see? The moral idea that one lover is all right, whereas any transgression means ruin to a woman, was never invented by her. It came from me; it is impossible she could have developed that moral idea from within--she was infected with it."

"You think so?" Ulick replied thoughtfully, and took another cigar.

"Yes, if she had met you," Owen continued, returning to his idea.

"But if she had met me in the beginning you wouldn't have known her; and you wouldn't consent to that so that she might be saved from Monsignor?"

"I'd make many sacrifices to save her from that nightmare of a man; but the surrender of one's past is unthinkable. The future? Yes. But there is nothing to be done. We don't know where she is. Her father said she would be in London at the end of the week; therefore she is in London now." "If she didn't change her mind." "No, she never changes her mind about such things; any change of plans always annoyed her. So she is in London, and we do not know her address.

Isn't it strange? And yet we are more interested in her than in any other human being."

"It would be easy to get her address; I suppose Innes would tell us.

I shouldn't mind going down to Dulwich if I were not so busy with this opera company. The number of people I have to see, five-and-twenty, thirty letters every day to be written--really I haven't a minute. But you, Asher, don't you think you might run down to Dulwich and interview the old gentleman? After all, you are the proper person. I am n.o.body in her life, only a friend of a few months, whereas she owes everything to you. It was you who discovered her--you who taught her, you whom she loved."

"Yes, there is a great deal in what you say, Ulick, a great deal in what you say. I hadn't thought of it in that light before. I suppose the lot does fall to me by right to go to the old gentleman and ask him. Before you came we were getting on very well, and he quite understood my position."

Several days pa.s.sed and no step was taken to find Evelyn's address in London.

"If I were you, Asher, I would go down to-morrow, for I have been thinking over this matter, and the company of which I am the secretary of course cannot pay her what she used to get ten years ago, but I think my directors would be prepared to make her a very fair offer, and, after all, the great point would be to get her back to the stage."

"I quite agree, Ulick, I quite agree." "Very well, if you think so go to Dulwich." "Yes, yes, I'll go." And Owen came back that evening, not with Evelyn's address, but with the news that she was in London, living in a flat in Bayswater. "Think of that," Owen said, "a flat in Bayswater after the house I gave her in Park Lane. Think of that!

Devoted to poor people, arranging school treats, and making clothes."

"So he wouldn't give you her address?"

"When I asked him, he said, and not unreasonably, 'If she wanted to see you she would write.' What could I answer? And to leave a letter with him for her would serve no purpose; my letter would not interest her; it might remain unanswered. No, no, mine is the past; there is no future for me in her life. If anybody could do anything it is you. She likes you."

"But, my good friend, I don't know where she is, and you won't find out."

"Haven't I been to see her father?"

"Oh, her father! A detective agency would give us her address within the next twenty-four hours, and the engagement must be filled up within a few weeks."

"I can't go to a detective agency and pay a man to track her out--no, not for anything."

"Not even to save her from Monsignor?"

"Not even that. There are certain things that cannot be done. Let us say no more."

A fortnight later Owen was reading in the corner by the window about five o'clock, waiting for Ulick to come home--he generally came in for a cup of tea--and hearing a latchkey in the door, he put down his book.

"Is Sir Owen in?"

"Sir Owen is in the study, sir."

And Ulick came in somewhat hurriedly. There was a light in his eyes which told Owen that something had happened, something that would interest him, and nothing could interest him unless news of Evelyn.