CHAPTER XXIV

My friendship with Owen was at present the one quite satisfactory thing in my life. Neither at school nor at home was I particularly successful. I worked very little, merely sufficiently to prevent myself from getting into trouble; I did not play games. I had gone to the School of Art for a few weeks, but as I was never put to draw anything except curves and squares and geometrical flowers, I got sick of this and gave it up.

I saw a good deal of Owen, though not so much as I should have liked. Of course I saw him every day at school, but I had never been inside his house, and I could not ask him to mine. I did not want to let him see the kind of people I had sprung from. I was ashamed of them. On Saturdays and Sundays we usually went for long walks together, during which we threshed out the affairs of the universe, and built it over again. It was all quite new to me, just as was the peculiar type of Owen’s mind, its extraordinary eagerness in the pursuit of ideas. My head already swarmed with an amazing mass of unsettled notions which buzzed in it like bees in a shaken hive. It seemed to me we never discussed anything less serious than the immortality of the soul. Owen was not sure of the existence of God, and I, so far as Christianity was concerned, was an Agnostic also. But to Owen it appeared to make an enormous difference, he was positively unhappy about it; while to me, though I did not let him suspect this, it was a matter of supreme indifference. Levine’s acceptance of Christianity, at the end of “Anna Karénine,” was for Owen an endless source of dissatisfaction and query. We discussed it by the hour. Yet, when actually reading the book, I had been far more struck by the appearance in Wronsky’s and Anna’s dreams of the strange little man, who seems to pass out of vision into reality just before the suicide. What did _that_ mean? Why was he there? Had he, like some added flick of colour in the work of a master, been put in, not because he was there in Nature, but because he was needed for the picture? For me, at any rate, he had the effect of making all the rest more convincing, and, while he appeared to be purely fantastic, of corresponding to some esoteric reality. Or was the apparition at the railway station also only a vision, in that case the vision of a vision? To Owen such a question was of no interest whatever, and it was Owen’s questions that we principally discussed.

Very often I walked home with him and hung swinging on the iron gate while we finished an argument. At such moments he exhibited an exhilarating eagerness, and he was never anxious to get the better of me in merely verbal dispute, as I frequently was of him. It was the thing in itself he saw, and he went at it like a terrier at a rabbit-hole, sending up showers of sand into the air, but never getting to the bottom. Sometimes, when we were talking, he would catch me by my arms and swing me slowly back and forward. Sometimes he would draw me close up to him till my face almost touched his, and his eyes seemed to look straight into my spirit, and then he would suddenly release me. He had a very quick and passionate temper, and was ridiculously sensitive, so that, though I employed infinitely more tact with him than I had ever done with anybody else, I occasionally offended him. Then he would leave me, his face as red as a turkey-cock, and his grey eyes dark and bright. Possibly for the rest of that day he would ignore me utterly; indeed, the first time it happened, I was sure we had quarrelled for ever. But the next morning he came up to me with a shy and shamefaced smile, saying he was sorry. At such times there would come into his voice so charming a gentleness that it was impossible to remain angry with him.

* * * * *

“Will you come to the opera to-night?” he asked me one morning, looking up from an old, ink-stained Virgil. We were sitting in the window-seat, where we always sat together, and which just held two. As Dr. Gwynn, the head Classical-master, was very old, very blind, and rather deaf, it was possible to pass the time quite pleasantly in this retreat.

I had not yet been inside a theatre, and Owen had been but seldom. “What is on?” I asked.

“‘Faust.’”

“‘Faust’? All right.”

“I’ll meet you outside the theatre at a quarter to seven.”

“Very well; I’ll be there.”

I went home straight from school, in order to get my work done for the next day, but when I pushed open the door I became conscious that an altercation between Aunt Margaret and Miss Izzy was in progress in the other shop. They were so busy that they did not even hear me enter, though the shop-bell had rung, and, as I lingered on the threshold, I gathered that the dispute was about a young man, and I guessed who he was. I had seen him; his name was Moore; he travelled in the stationery line, and he admired Miss Izzy.

I heard Aunt Margaret’s familiar “_some_ people,” with an accent on the “some.” It was in this indirect manner that she invariably produced her most disagreeable remarks, and it was very much in the air just now. Miss Izzy displayed an icy dignity by stiff elbows, an erect head, and an elaborate preoccupation with the business of the shop. She seemed all collar and cuffs and freezing silence, which she could not quite keep up, for every now and again she threw out a retort. Aunt Margaret’s ponderous black form filled up the inner doorway. Her large face, her drawn-in mouth, her black, shining eyes, her wig, gave her an alarming and bizarre appearance, but Miss Izzy was not in the least alarmed.

I came in, not wishing to be caught listening. Miss Izzy just cast a glance at me, and tossed her head.

I brushed past Aunt Margaret and went upstairs to my dinner, leaving the parlour door open, however, so that I might still hear the conflict going on below. When the shop-bell rang Aunt Margaret’s voice would cease; then, when the customer had departed, it would begin again. Presently I heard Uncle George shuffling downstairs, and his entrance on the scene was followed by an outburst of both feminine voices together. The noise was becoming exciting, but I could no longer make out the words, though I hung over the balusters to listen. Then I heard Aunt Margaret coming upstairs, and Uncle George following her. She was in a violent passion. “Fool――fool――fool,” she screamed at him all along the passage. Then came confused remonstrances in Uncle George’s quiet voice, but they were interrupted by the banging of a door that shook the whole house. I came out into the lobby once more. I heard Uncle George trying to get into the room, but the door must have been locked from the inside, and through it came a shrill torrent of abuse. Uncle George’s face was white and strange as he turned round and caught me staring at him. He told me to go away, but almost immediately he came after me into the parlour, where I had sat down again to my dinner. He told me Aunt Margaret was not well, that she had had a very bad attack last night, and been kept awake and in pain all night long. I could see that he would have liked to know if I had grasped the nature of several of those words that had come out to him through the closed door, but I continued stolidly to eat my dinner, without giving any sign. When I had finished, I got out my books, but as soon as the coast was clear I slipped downstairs to the shop. Miss Izzy was there alone, and affected not to see me.

“What’s the matter with Aunt Margaret?” I asked; at which ingenuous question Miss Izzy gave a short contemptuous laugh.

A blowzy girl, sucking a sweet, came in to buy a novelette, and when she had gone I informed Miss Izzy that I was going that night to hear “Faust.” Miss Izzy expressed not the faintest interest in this project.

I turned over a book of views in melancholy silence――views of the Linen Hall Library, and of Donegall Place; of the Cave Hill, and the Albert Memorial; and I wondered if it would please Katherine were I to send her a complete set. I looked at the price, written in Miss Izzy’s secret code, on the back, and could not make up my mind.

“When people can’t control themselves there are places where they can have people to look after them,” Miss Izzy announced to a bundle of “Horner’s Penny Stories,” which she next moment swept viciously into a corner.

This cryptic remark I took as referring to Aunt Margaret, but, seeing my expectant face, Miss Izzy unkindly refused to follow it up.

I was disheartened, and began to read aloud advertisements of art books from the back of a magazine I had bought on my way home. The third of these bore the simple title “Michael Angelo,” and Miss Izzy astonished me by saying, “That’s one of Marie Corelli’s.”

I ventured to tell her that Michael Angelo was a great painter and sculptor, but the information was lost on Miss Izzy, who in the midst of it said sharply, “Oh, don’t bother.”

I waited for a while, digesting this snub. Then, “Was she talking about Mr. Moore?” I asked, indiscreetly.

Miss Izzy regarded me at first mildly and absently, but as the sense of my question slowly forced its way through the meshes of her cogitations, suddenly in extreme wrath: “If you’d mind your own business,” she snapped, “you’d hear fewer lies. I don’t know what you’re doing down here at all!”

“I’m doing nothing,” I answered, crestfallen.

“People talk about girls being curious and gossiping,” Miss Izzy went on, scornfully, “but if other boys are like you――――”

I retired upstairs without waiting for the conclusion of the parallel. I worked for an hour and a half, and by then it was tea-time. Aunt Margaret did not appear, and we were told she was lying down. George, who had come home earlier than usual, inquired where I was going to, and when I informed him, asked if he might come too. I did not like to refuse, though I did not want him, and knew he and Owen would not get on together. I told him I was going with Owen.

“Is that the chap you’re so thick with? I don’t suppose he’ll mind me, will he?”

I introduced them to each other at the theatre door. We were early, and had nearly three-quarters of an hour to wait. Owen and I began to talk, but our conversation evidently bored George, who, in the midst of it, introduced a characteristic remark of his own, at which I laughed, though I did not want to. Owen, who did not always see a joke, and who would have detested the best joke in the world of the particular kind George most affected, instantly relapsed into silence. He looked at George for a moment; then he took a copy of the “Golden Treasury” translation of Plato’s “Republic” from his pocket and began to read. I had known well enough something of this sort was bound to happen, and I made no attempt to bridge it over. George nudged me with his elbow and closed his left eye. Owen’s disapproval did not put him about in the least, and he continued to chatter quite unabashed.

Presently the fire-proof curtain went up, the lights were raised, and the band straggled in and began to tune their fiddles. The conductor followed, a fat little German with a bald head which shone like a large ostrich egg. He faced the audience and bowed two or three times to their applause; then, turning round, he tapped the music stand sharply with his baton, and the first phrase was drawn slowly out on the ’cellos.

With the end of the overture the lights were turned down, and the curtain rose on the lonely Faust, seated before a skull, an hour-glass, and a large book, in his study. I had already forgotten Owen, George, and everything but what I saw before me. I was surprised to find that this old, grey-bearded man, who looked, in the dimness, like an Albert Durer print, had a fresh, strong, tenor voice. Outside I heard the singing of the peasants; then followed the rage and despair of Faust, and, in a flaming red light, the apparition of Mephistopheles. Faust pleaded for his lost youth, and Mephistopheles tempted him; the wall of the study suddenly dissolved like a mist, and the vision of Margaret, seated at her spinning-wheel, rose before the unhappy philosopher; and the swinging, sensual phrase, repeated again and again in the orchestra, lulled me to a dreamy languor.

_Faust._――“Heavenly vision!”

_Mephistopheles._――“Shall she love thee?”

There could be but one answer, and I saw Faust yield to the tempter; I saw his rejuvenescence; and a triumphant duet between them brought the act to a close.

I had become lost in this appealing melodrama, and though my mood was broken in the next act, in the third act, in the celebrated garden scene, it was revived and intensified. The sugary sweetness of the music had an almost hypnotic effect upon me, for I had never heard it till now, and the ecstatic sensuality of the duet rapt me into a world of love, where everything else was forgotten. It was all utterly new to me; it thrilled me; it drowned me in erotic dreams that swept me onward like the waves of the sea; and through all, subconsciously, as I listened and watched, I was carrying on another love-making of my own, with which Faust and Margaret had nothing to do. Through the next two acts I followed more closely the fortunes of the unhappy heroine, not without a naïve wonder why so much tragedy, so much remorse, should attend on what appeared to me――but for the intervention of the devil――a quite natural and straightforward courtship. For some reason, possibly the fault of the libretto, more probably because I could only catch about half the words, I could not discover wherein lay the secret of the trouble, nor why the lovers did not get married. I accepted the situation however: I accepted, I think, everything but the absurd “Soldiers’ Chorus,” and the death-scene of Valentine. This latter nearly made me sick at the time, though I forgot all about it when the curtain rose to reveal the wretched Margaret in prison. With enthusiasm I watched her reject her lover and the demon, and fling herself on her knees to pour out her soul in a prayer which finished on the high B. At last I saw her released from all the ills of life, her body stretched on the miserable straw bed. And with that the walls of the prison rolled back, and I had a vision of her soul being borne to heaven by angels. It is true those white-clad, flaxen-haired creatures, with glistening wings and golden crowns, bore a not remote resemblance to several of the livelier persons I had seen mingling with the soldiers and students at an earlier stage of the drama; nevertheless I beheld them, in this pause on their way to heaven, with respect, if not exactly veneration.

“I doubt they’re as near it now as they’ll ever be,” said George, cynically, pulling his cap from his jacket pocket.

And out in the street, under the gas-lamp at the corner, I had to submit to a deluge of criticism from both my companions. I don’t know which I liked least, the scorn of Owen, who revealed the tangible source of Margaret’s woes, and would have had it adopted by the State, or, after Owen had left, the ribald jibes of George, who found Faust a poor creature, requiring a moon, a garden, a casket of jewels, a devil, and several incantations, before he could beguile an innocent rustic maiden who was already in love with him. I resolved that I would go to the opera every night that week, but that I would go alone. Between the acts I had eagerly studied my programme, and the delightful, unfamiliar, romantic names, “Tannhäuser,” “Il Trovatore,” “Aida,” “Lohengrin,” were like syrens singing to me through the darkness, with an irresistible and passionate sweetness.