Part 32 (2/2)

She waited for him to tell her what conclusion he had come to, but he said nothing. At last he got up, and she followed him to the piano. When she came to the pa.s.sage where Isolde tells Brangane that she intended to kill Tristan, he stopped.

”But she is violent; hear these chords, how aggressive they are. The music is against you. Listen to these chords.”

”I know those chords well enough. You don't suppose I am listening to them for the first time. I admit that there are a few places where she is distinctly violent. The curse must be given violently, but I think it is possible to make it felt that her violence is a s.e.xual violence, a sort of wish to go mad. I can't explain. Can't you understand?”

”Yes, I think I do; you want to sing the first part of the act languidly. There is more in the music which supports your reading than I thought. In the pa.s.sage where Isolde says to Brangane, but really to herself, 'To die without having been loved by that man!' the love motive appears here for the first time, but more drawn out, broader than elsewhere.”

She declared that Wagner had emphasised his meaning in this pa.s.sage as if he had antic.i.p.ated all the misreadings of this first act, and was striving to guard himself against them. She grew excited in the discussion. She had merely followed her instinct, but she was glad that Ulick had challenged her reading, for as they examined the music clause by clause, they found still further warrant for her conception.

”Ah, the old man knew what he was doing,” she said; ”he had marked this pa.s.sage to be sung gloomily, and by gloomily he meant infinite la.s.situde.” But this intention had not been grasped, and the singers had either sung it without any particular expression, or with a stupid stage expression which meant if possible something less than nothing. ”Then, you see, if I sing the first half of the first act as wearily as the music allows me, I shall get a contrast--an Isolde who has not drunk the love potion. The love potion is of course only a symbol of her surrender to her desire.”

Ulick would have liked to have gone through the whole of the music of the act with her. It was only in this way that he could get an idea of how her reading would work out. But in that moment each read in the other's eyes an avowal of which they were immediately ashamed, and which they tried to dissimulate.

”I am tired. We won't have any more music this evening.”

His thoughts seemed to pa.s.s suddenly from her, and then, without her being aware how it began, she found herself listening intently to him.

He was talking in that strange, rhythmical chant of his about the primal melancholy of man, and his remote past always insurgent in him. Although she did not quite understand, perhaps because she did not quite understand, she was carried away far out of all reason, and it seemed to her that she could listen for ever. Nor could she clearly see out of her eyes, and she felt all power of resistance dissolve within her. He might have taken her in his arms and kissed her then; but though sitting by her, he seemed a thousand miles away; his remoteness chastened her, and she asked him of what he was thinking.

”When your father used to speak of you, I used to see you; sometimes I used to fancy I heard you. I did hear you once sing in a dream.”

”What was I singing? Wagner?”

”No; something quite different. I forgot it all as I awoke except the last notes. I seemed to have returned from the future--you seemed in the end to lose your voice.... I cannot tell you--I forget.”

”It is very sad; how sad such feelings are.”

”But I never doubted that I should meet you, that our destinies were knit together--for a time at least.”

She wanted to ask him by what signs do we recognise the moment that we are destined to meet the one that is more important to us than all the world. But she could find no way of asking this question that would not betray her. She could not put it so that Ulick would fail to read some application of the question to herself, and to himself. So it seemed strange indeed that he should, as if in answer to her unexpressed thought, say that the instinct of man is to consult the stars. She remembered the evenings when she used to go into the patch of black garden and gaze at the stars till her brain reeled. She used even to gather the daffodils and place them on the wall in homage to the star which she felt to be hers. She could not refrain from this idolatrous act; but in her bed at night, thinking of the flowers and the star, she had believed herself mad or very wicked; for nothing in the world would she have had anyone know her folly, and she remembered the agony it had been to her to confess it. But now she heard that she had been acting according to the sense of the wisdom of generations. As he had said, ”according to the immortal atavism of man.”

With her ordinary work-a-day intelligence, she felt that the stars could not possibly be concerned in our miserable existence. But deep down in her being someone who was not herself, but who seemed inseparable from her, and over whom she had no slightest control, seemed to breathe throughout her entire being an affirmation of her celestial dependency.

She could catch no words, merely a vague, immaterial destiny like distant music; and her ears filled with a wailing cert.i.tude of an inseverable affinity with the stars, and she longed to put off this shameful garb of flesh and rise to her spiritual destiny of which the stars are our watchful guardians. It was like deep music; words could not contain it, it was a deep and indistinct yearning for the stars--for spiritual existence. She was conscious of the narrowness of the prison-house into which Owen had shut her, and looking at Ulick, she felt the thrill of liberation; it was like a ray of light dividing the dark. Looking at Ulick, she was startled by the conviction of his indispensability in her life, and the knowledge that she must repel him was an acute affliction, a desolate despair. It seemed cruel and disastrous that she might not love him, for it was only through love that she could get to understand him, and life without knowledge of him seemed failure.

”I'm very fond of you, Ulick, but I mustn't let you kiss me. Can't we be friends?”

He sat leaning a little forward, his head bent and his eyes on the carpet. He represented to her an abysmal sorrow--an extraordinary despair. She longed to share this sorrow, to throw her arms about him and make him glad. Their love seemed so good and natural, she was surprised that she might not.

”Ulick.”

”Yes, Evelyn.”

He looked round the room, saw it was getting late, and that it was time for him to go.

”Yes, it is getting late. I suppose you must go. But you'll come to see me again. We shall be friends, promise me that ... that whatever happens we shall be friends.”

”I think that we shall always be friends, I feel that.”

His answer seemed to her insufficient, and they stood looking at each other. When the door closed after him, Evelyn turned away, thinking that if he had stayed another moment she must have thrown herself into his arms.

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