CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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."