Evelyn Innes

by George Moore

"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.