Sacred and Profane Love Part 4

I darted away from him.

'What's that?' I cried, low in a fit of terror.

'Who's there?' he called quietly; but he did not stir.

We gazed at each other.

The knock was repeated, sharply and firmly.

'Who's there?' Diaz demanded again.

'Go to the door,' I whispered.

He hesitated, and then we heard footsteps receding down the corridor.

Diaz went slowly to the door, opened it wide, slipped out into the corridor, and looked into the darkness.

'Curious!' he commented tranquilly. 'I see no one.'

He came back into the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby to shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of our own. The fire was burning brightly, the gla.s.ses and the decanter on the small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other room; one could see nothing within it save a large bra.s.s k.n.o.b or ball, which caught the light of the candle on the piano.

'You were startled,' he said. 'You must have a little more of our cordial--just a spoonful.'

He poured out for me an infinitesimal quant.i.ty, and the same for himself.

I sighed with relief as I drank. My terror left me. But the trifling incident had given me the clearest perception of what I was doing, and that did not leave me.

We sat down a second time to the piano.

'You understand,' he explained, staring absently at the double page of music, 'this is the garden scene. When the curtain goes up it is dark in the garden, and Isolda is there with her maid Brangaena. The king, her husband, has just gone off hunting--you will hear the horns dying in the distance--and Isolda is expecting her lover, Tristan. A torch is burning in the wall of the castle, and as soon as she gives him the signal by extinguis.h.i.+ng it he comes to her. You will know the exact moment when they meet. Then there is the love-scene. Oh! when we arrive at that you will be astounded. You will hear the very heart-beats of the lovers. Are you ready?'

'Yes.'

We began to play. But it was ridiculous. I knew it would be ridiculous.

I was too dazed, and artistically too intimidated, to read the notes.

The notes danced and pranced before me. All I could see on my page was the big black letters at the top, 'Zweiter Aufzug.' And furthermore, on that first page both the theme and the accompaniment were in the ba.s.s of the piano. Diaz had scarcely anything to do. I threw up my hands and closed my eyes.

'I can't,' I whispered, 'I can't. I would if I could.'

He gently took my hand.

'My dear companion,' he said, 'tell me your name.'

I was surprised. Memories of the Bible, for some inexplicable reason, flashed through my mind.

'Magdalen,' I replied, and my voice was so deceptively quiet and sincere that he believed it.

I could see that he was taken aback.

'It is a holy name and a good name,' he said, after a pause. 'Magda, you are perfectly capable of reading this music with me, and you will read it, won't you? Let us begin afresh. Leave the accompaniment with me, and play the theme only. Further on it gets easier.'

And in another moment we were launched on that sea so strange to me. The influence of Diaz over me was complete. Inspired by his will, I had resolved intensely to read the music correctly and sympathetically, and lo! I was succeeding! He turned the page with the incredible rapidity and dexterity of which only great pianists seem to have the secret, and in conjunction with my air in the ba.s.s he was suddenly, magically, drawing out from the upper notes the sweetest and most intoxicating melody I had ever heard. The exceeding beauty of the thing laid hold on me, and I abandoned myself to it. I felt sure now that, at any rate, I should not disgrace myself.'

'Unless it was Chopin,' whispered Diaz. 'No one could ever see two things at once as well as Wagner.'

We surged on through the second page. Again the lightning turn of the page, and then the hunters' horns were heard departing from the garden of love, receding, receding, until they subsided into a scarce-heard drone, out of which rose another air. And as the sound of the horns died away, so died away all my past and all my solicitudes for the future. I surrendered utterly and pa.s.sionately to the spell of the beauty which we were opening like a long scroll. I had ceased to suffer.

The absinthe and Diaz had conjured a spirit in me which was at once feverish and calm. I was reading at sight difficult music full of modulations and of colour, and I was reading it with calm a.s.surance of heart and brain. Deeper down the fever raged, but so separately that I might have had two individualities. Enchanted as I was by the rich and complex concourse of melodies which ascended from the piano and swam about our heads, this fluctuating tempest of sound was after all only a background for the emotions to which it gave birth in me. Naturally they were the emotions of love--the sense of the splendour of love, the headlong pa.s.sion of love, the transcendent carelessness of love, the finality of love. I saw in love the sole and sacred purpose of the universe, and my heart whispered, with a new import: 'Where love is, there is G.o.d also.'

The fever of the music increased, and with it my fever. We seemed to be approaching some mighty climax. I thought I might faint with ecstasy, but I held on, and the climax arrived--a climax which touched the limits of expression in expressing all that two souls could feel in coming together.

'Tristan has come into the garden,' I muttered.

And Diaz, turning his face towards me, nodded.

We plunged forward into the love-scene itself--the scene in which the miracle of love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces, what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common lot of women. I knew that I was living more intensely and more fully than I could have hoped to live. I knew that my experience was a supreme experience, and that another such could not be contained in my life.... And Diaz was so close, so at one with me.... A hush descended on the music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the left hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar, and becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite antic.i.p.ation. The whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought gently and persistently against the rhythm.

'Hear the beating of their hearts,' Diaz' whisper floated over the chords.

It was too much. The obsession of his presence, reinforced by the vibrating of his wistful, sensuous voice, overcame me suddenly. My hands fell from the keyboard. He looked at me--and with what a glance!

'I can bear no more,' I cried wildly. 'It is too beautiful, too beautiful!'

And I rushed from the piano, and sat down in an easy-chair, and hid my face in my hands.

He came to me, and bent over me.

'Magda,' he whispered, 'show me your face.' With his hands he delicately persuaded my hands away from my face, and forced me to look on him. 'How dark and splendid you are, Magda!' he said, still holding my hands. 'How humid and flas.h.i.+ng your eyes! And those eyelashes, and that hair--dark, dark! And that bosom, with its rise and fall! And that low, rich voice, that is like dark wine! And that dress--dark, and full of mysterious shadows, like our souls! Magda, we must have known each other in a previous life. There can be no other explanation. And this moment is the fulfilment of that other life, which was not aroused. You were to be mine. You are mine, Magda!'

There is a fatalism in love. I felt it then. I had been called by destiny to give happiness, perhaps for a lifetime, but perhaps only for a brief instant, to this n.o.ble and glorious creature, on whom the G.o.ds had showered all gifts. Could I shrink back from my fate? And had he not already given me far more than I could ever return? The conventions of society seemed then like sand, foolishly raised to imprison the resistless tide of ocean. Nature, after all, is eternal and unchangeable, and everywhere the same. The great and solemn fact for me was that we were together, and he held me while our burning pulses throbbed in contact. He held me; he clasped me, and, despite my innocence, I knew at once that those hands were as expert to caress as to make music. I was proud and glad that he was not clumsy, that he was a master. And at that point I ceased to have volition....

IV

When I woke up, perplexed at first, but gradually remembering where I was, and what had occurred to me, the realistic and uncompromising light of dawn had commenced its pitiless inquiry, and it fell on the bra.s.s k.n.o.b, which I had noticed a few hours before, from the other room, and on another bra.s.s k.n.o.b a few feet away. My eyes smarted; I had disconcerting sensations at the back of my head; my hair was brittle, and as though charged with a dull electricity; I was conscious of actual pain, and an incubus, crus.h.i.+ng but intangible, lay heavily, like a physical weight, on my heart. After the crest of the wave the trough--it must be so; but how profound the instinct which complains! I listened. I could hear his faint, regular breathing. I raised myself carefully on one elbow and looked at him. He was as beautiful in sleep as in consciousness; his lips were slightly parted, his cheek exquisitely flushed, and nothing could disarrange that short, curly hair. He slept with the calmness of the natural innocent man, to whom the a.s.suaging of desires brings only content.

I felt that I must go, and hastily, frantically. I could not face him when he woke; I should not have known what to say; I should have been abashed, timid, clumsy, unequal to myself. And, moreover, I had the egoist's deep need to be alone, to examine my soul, to understand it intimately and utterly. And, lastly, I wanted to pay the bill of pleasure at once. I could never tolerate credit; I was like my aunt in that.

Therefore, I must go home and settle the account in some way. I knew not how; I knew only that the thing must be done. Diaz had nothing to do with that; it was not his affair, and I should have resented his interference.

Ah! when I was in the bill-paying mood, how hard I could be, how stony, how blind! And that morning I was like a Malay running amok.

Think not that when I was ready to depart I stopped and stooped to give him a final tender kiss. I did not even scribble a word of adieu or of explanation. I stole away on tiptoe, without looking at him. This sounds brutal, but it is a truth of my life, and I am writing my life--at least, I am writing those brief hours of my existence during which I lived. I had always a sort of fierce courage; and as I had proved the courage of my pa.s.sion in the night, so I proved the courage of my--not my remorse, not my compunction, not my regret--but of my intellectual honesty in the morning. Proud and vain words, perhaps. Who can tell? No matter what sympathies I alienate, I am bound to say plainly that, though I am pa.s.sionate, I am not sentimental. I came to him out of the void, and I went from him into the void. He found me, and he lost me.

Between the autumn sunset and the autumn sunrise he had learnt to know me well, but he did not know my name nor my history; he had no clue, no cord to pull me back.

I pa.s.sed into the sitting-room, dimly lighted through the drawn curtains, and there was the score of _Tristan_ open on the piano. Yes; and if I were the ordinary woman I would add that there also were the ashes in the cold grate, and so symbolize the bitterness of memory and bring about a pang. But I have never regretted what is past. The cinders of that fire were to me cinders of a fire and nothing more.

In the doorway I halted. To go into the corridor was like braving the blast of the world, and I hesitated. Possibly I hesitated for a very little thing. Only the women among you will guess it. My dress was dark and severe. I had a simple, dark cloak. But I had no hat. I had no hat, and the most important fact in the universe for me then was that I had no hat. My whole life was changed; my heart and mind were in the throes of a revolution. I dared not imagine what would happen between my aunt and me; but this deficiency in my attire distressed me more than all else. At the other end of the obscure corridor was a chambermaid kneeling down and was.h.i.+ng the linoleum. Ah, maid! Would I not have exchanged fates with you, then! I walked boldly up to her. She seemed to be surprised, but she continued to wring out a cloth in her pail as she looked at me.