"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.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dreams was the first of the five, but the music that haunted belonged to the third song. She could not quite remember a single phrase, nor any words except "pining flowers." She had thought of sending for it, but such vague memory suited her mood better than an exact text. If she had the song she would go to the piano, and she did not wish to move from the Sheraton sofa, made comfortable with pale blue cushions. But again the music stirred her memory like wind the tall grasses, and out of the slowly-moving harmonies there arose an invocation of the strange pathos of existence; no plaint for an accidental sorrow, something that happened to you or me, or might have happened, if our circumstances had been different; only the mood of desolate self-consciousness in which the soul slowly contemplates the disaster of existence. The melancholy that the music exhales is no querulous feminine plaint, but an immemorial melancholy, an exalted resignation. The music goes out like a fume, dying in remote chords, and Evelyn sat absorbed, viewing the world from afar, like the Lady of Shallott, seeing in the mirror of memory the chestnut trees of the Dulwich street, and a little girl running after her hoop; and then her mother's singing classes, and the expectation she had lived in of learning to sing, and being brought upon the stage by her mother. If her mother had lived, she would have been singing "Romeo and Juliet" and "Lucia." ... Her father would have deemed her voice wasted; but mother always had had her way with father. Then she saw herself pining for Owen, sick of love, longing, hungry, weak, weary, disappointed, hopeless. Her thoughts turned from that past, and her mother's face looked out of her reverie, grey and grave and watchful, only half seen in the shadows. She seemed aware of her mother as she might be of some idea, strangely personal to herself, something near and remote, beyond this span of life, stretching into infinity. She seemed to feel herself lifted a little above the verge of life, so that she might inquire the truth from her mother; but something seemed to hold her back, and she did not dare to hear the supernatural truth. She was still too thrall to this life of lies, but she could not but see her mother's face, and what surprised her was that this grey shadow was more real to her than the rest of the world. The face did not stir, it always wore the same expression. Evelyn could not even tell if the expression of the dim eyes was one of disapproval. But it needs must be—she could have no doubt on that point. What was certain and sure was that she seemed in a nearer and more intimate, in a more essential communication with her mother, than with her father who was alive. Nothing seemed to divide her from her mother; she had only to let her soul go, and it could mingle with her mother's spirit, and then all misunderstandings would be at an end.
She was tempted to free herself from this fettering life, where all is limitation and division. Its individualism appeared to her particularly clear when she thought of Owen. They had clasped and kissed in the hope to become part of the other's substance. They had sought to mingle, to become one; now it was in the hope of a union of soul that Owen sought her, his kisses were for this end. She had read his desire in his eyes. But the barrier of the flesh, which at first could barely sunder them, now seemed to have acquired a personal life, a separate entity; it seemed like some invisible force thrusting them apart. The flesh which had brought them together now seemed to have had enough of them; the flesh, once gentle and persuasive, seemed to have become stern, relentless as the commander in "Don Juan." She thought of it as the forest in "Macbeth"; of something that had come out of the inanimate, angry and determined—a terrible thing this angry, frustrated flesh. Like the commander, it seemed to grasp and hurry her away from Owen, and she seemed to hear it mutter, "This vain noise must cease." The idea of the flesh was not their pleasure, but the next generation; the frustrated flesh was now putting them apart. She hummed the music, and the life she had lived continued to loom up and fall back into darkness like shapes seen in a faded picture. She had loved Owen, and sung a few operas, that was all. She remembered that everything was passing; the notes she sang existed only while she sang them, each was a little past. A moment approaches; it is ours, and no sooner is it ours than it has slipped behind us, even in the space of the indrawing of a breath. No wonder, then, that men had come to seek reality beyond this life; it was natural to believe that this life must be the shadow of another life lying beyond it, and she leaned forward, pale and nervous, in the pale grace of the Sheraton sofa.