Ann Veronica (22 page)

They were eating quails when they returned to the topic of love. "What
made you think" he said, abruptly, with the gleam of avidity in his
face, "that love makes people happy?"

"I know it must."

"But how?"

He was, she thought, a little too insistent. "Women know these things by
instinct," she answered.

"I wonder," he said, "if women do know things by instinct? I have
my doubts about feminine instinct. It's one of our conventional
superstitions. A woman is supposed to know when a man is in love with
her. Do you think she does?"

Ann Veronica picked among her salad with a judicial expression of face.
"I think she would," she decided.

"Ah!" said Ramage, impressively.

Ann Veronica looked up at him and found him regarding her with eyes that
were almost woebegone, and into which, indeed, he was trying to throw
much more expression than they could carry. There was a little pause
between them, full for Ann Veronica of rapid elusive suspicions and
intimations.

"Perhaps one talks nonsense about a woman's instinct," she said. "It's
a way of avoiding explanations. And girls and women, perhaps, are
different. I don't know. I don't suppose a girl can tell if a man is in
love with her or not in love with her." Her mind went off to Capes. Her
thoughts took words for themselves. "She can't. I suppose it depends on
her own state of mind. If one wants a thing very much, perhaps one is
inclined to think one can't have it. I suppose if one were to love some
one, one would feel doubtful. And if one were to love some one very
much, it's just so that one would be blindest, just when one wanted most
to see."

She stopped abruptly, afraid that Ramage might be able to infer Capes
from the things she had said, and indeed his face was very eager.

"Yes?" he said.

Ann Veronica blushed. "That's all," she said "I'm afraid I'm a little
confused about these things."

Ramage looked at her, and then fell into deep reflection as the waiter
came to paragraph their talk again.

"Have you ever been to the opera, Ann Veronica?" said Ramage.

"Once or twice."

"Shall we go now?"

"I think I would like to listen to music. What is there?"

"Tristan."

"I've never heard Tristan and Isolde."

"That settles it. We'll go. There's sure to be a place somewhere."

"It's rather jolly of you," said Ann Veronica.

"It's jolly of you to come," said Ramage.

So presently they got into a hansom together, and Ann Veronica sat back
feeling very luxurious and pleasant, and looked at the light and stir
and misty glitter of the street traffic from under slightly drooping
eyelids, while Ramage sat closer to her than he need have done, and
glanced ever and again at her face, and made to speak and said nothing.
And when they got to Covent Garden Ramage secured one of the little
upper boxes, and they came into it as the overture began.

Ann Veronica took off her jacket and sat down in the corner chair, and
leaned forward to look into the great hazy warm brown cavity of the
house, and Ramage placed his chair to sit beside her and near her,
facing the stage. The music took hold of her slowly as her eyes wandered
from the indistinct still ranks of the audience to the little busy
orchestra with its quivering violins, its methodical movements of brown
and silver instruments, its brightly lit scores and shaded lights. She
had never been to the opera before except as one of a congested mass of
people in the cheaper seats, and with backs and heads and women's hats
for the frame of the spectacle; there was by contrast a fine large sense
of space and ease in her present position. The curtain rose out of the
concluding bars of the overture and revealed Isolde on the prow of the
barbaric ship. The voice of the young seaman came floating down from the
masthead, and the story of the immortal lovers had begun. She knew
the story only imperfectly, and followed it now with a passionate and
deepening interest. The splendid voices sang on from phase to phase of
love's unfolding, the ship drove across the sea to the beating rhythm of
the rowers. The lovers broke into passionate knowledge of themselves and
each other, and then, a jarring intervention, came King Mark amidst the
shouts of the sailormen, and stood beside them.

The curtain came festooning slowly down, the music ceased, the lights
in the auditorium glowed out, and Ann Veronica woke out of her confused
dream of involuntary and commanding love in a glory of sound and colors
to discover that Ramage was sitting close beside her with one hand
resting lightly on her waist. She made a quick movement, and the hand
fell away.

"By God! Ann Veronica," he said, sighing deeply. "This stirs one."

She sat quite still looking at him.

"I wish you and I had drunk that love potion," he said.

She found no ready reply to that, and he went on: "This music is the
food of love. It makes me desire life beyond measure. Life! Life and
love! It makes me want to be always young, always strong, always
devoting my life—and dying splendidly."

"It is very beautiful," said Ann Veronica in a low tone.

They said no more for a moment, and each was now acutely aware of the
other. Ann Veronica was excited and puzzled, with a sense of a strange
and disconcerting new light breaking over her relations with Ramage.
She had never thought of him at all in that way before. It did not shock
her; it amazed her, interested her beyond measure. But also this must
not go on. She felt he was going to say something more—something
still more personal and intimate. She was curious, and at the same time
clearly resolved she must not hear it. She felt she must get him talking
upon some impersonal theme at any cost. She snatched about in her mind.
"What is the exact force of a motif?" she asked at random. "Before I
heard much Wagnerian music I heard enthusiastic descriptions of it from
a mistress I didn't like at school. She gave me an impression of a sort
of patched quilt; little bits of patterned stuff coming up again and
again."

She stopped with an air of interrogation.

Ramage looked at her for a long and discriminating interval without
speaking. He seemed to be hesitating between two courses of action. "I
don't know much about the technique of music," he said at last, with his
eyes upon her. "It's a matter of feeling with me."

He contradicted himself by plunging into an exposition of motifs.

By a tacit agreement they ignored the significant thing between them,
ignored the slipping away of the ground on which they had stood together
hitherto....

All through the love music of the second act, until the hunting horns of
Mark break in upon the dream, Ann Veronica's consciousness was flooded
with the perception of a man close beside her, preparing some new thing
to say to her, preparing, perhaps, to touch her, stretching hungry
invisible tentacles about her. She tried to think what she should do in
this eventuality or that. Her mind had been and was full of the thought
of Capes, a huge generalized Capes-lover. And in some incomprehensible
way, Ramage was confused with Capes; she had a grotesque disposition to
persuade herself that this was really Capes who surrounded her, as it
were, with wings of desire. The fact that it was her trusted friend
making illicit love to her remained, in spite of all her effort, an
insignificant thing in her mind. The music confused and distracted her,
and made her struggle against a feeling of intoxication. Her head swam.
That was the inconvenience of it; her head was swimming. The music
throbbed into the warnings that preceded the king's irruption.

Abruptly he gripped her wrist. "I love you, Ann Veronica. I love
you—with all my heart and soul."

She put her face closer to his. She felt the warm nearness of his.
"DON'T!" she said, and wrenched her wrist from his retaining hand.

"My God! Ann Veronica," he said, struggling to keep his hold upon her;
"my God! Tell me—tell me now—tell me you love me!"

His expression was as it were rapaciously furtive. She answered in
whispers, for there was the white arm of a woman in the next box peeping
beyond the partition within a yard of him.

"My hand! This isn't the place."

He released her hand and talked in eager undertones against an auditory
background of urgency and distress.

"Ann Veronica," he said, "I tell you this is love. I love the soles of
your feet. I love your very breath. I have tried not to tell you—tried
to be simply your friend. It is no good. I want you. I worship you. I
would do anything—I would give anything to make you mine.... Do you
hear me? Do you hear what I am saying?... Love!"

He held her arm and abandoned it again at her quick defensive movement.
For a long time neither spoke again.

She sat drawn together in her chair in the corner of the box, at a loss
what to say or do—afraid, curious, perplexed. It seemed to her that
it was her duty to get up and clamor to go home to her room, to protest
against his advances as an insult. But she did not in the least want
to do that. These sweeping dignities were not within the compass of her
will; she remembered she liked Ramage, and owed things to him, and she
was interested—she was profoundly interested. He was in love with
her! She tried to grasp all the welter of values in the situation
simultaneously, and draw some conclusion from their disorder.

He began to talk again in quick undertones that she could not clearly
hear.

"I have loved you," he was saying, "ever since you sat on that gate and
talked. I have always loved you. I don't care what divides us. I don't
care what else there is in the world. I want you beyond measure or
reckoning...."

His voice rose and fell amidst the music and the singing of Tristan and
King Mark, like a voice heard in a badly connected telephone. She stared
at his pleading face.

She turned to the stage, and Tristan was wounded in Kurvenal's arms,
with Isolde at his feet, and King Mark, the incarnation of masculine
force and obligation, the masculine creditor of love and beauty, stood
over him, and the second climax was ending in wreaths and reek of
melodies; and then the curtain was coming down in a series of short
rushes, the music had ended, and the people were stirring and breaking
out into applause, and the lights of the auditorium were resuming. The
lighting-up pierced the obscurity of the box, and Ramage stopped his
urgent flow of words abruptly and sat back. This helped to restore Ann
Veronica's self-command.

She turned her eyes to him again, and saw her late friend and pleasant
and trusted companion, who had seen fit suddenly to change into a lover,
babbling interesting inacceptable things. He looked eager and flushed
and troubled. His eyes caught at hers with passionate inquiries. "Tell
me," he said; "speak to me." She realized it was possible to be sorry
for him—acutely sorry for the situation. Of course this thing was
absolutely impossible. But she was disturbed, mysteriously disturbed.
She remembered abruptly that she was really living upon his money. She
leaned forward and addressed him.

"Mr. Ramage," she said, "please don't talk like this."

He made to speak and did not.

"I don't want you to do it, to go on talking to me. I don't want to hear
you. If I had known that you had meant to talk like this I wouldn't have
come here."

"But how can I help it? How can I keep silence?"

"Please!" she insisted. "Please not now."

"I MUST talk with you. I must say what I have to say!"

"But not now—not here."

"It came," he said. "I never planned it—And now I have begun—"

She felt acutely that he was entitled to explanations, and as acutely
that explanations were impossible that night. She wanted to think.

"Mr. Ramage," she said, "I can't—Not now. Will you please—Not now, or
I must go."

He stared at her, trying to guess at the mystery of her thoughts.

"You don't want to go?"

"No. But I must—I ought—"

"I MUST talk about this. Indeed I must."

"Not now."

"But I love you. I love you—unendurably."

"Then don't talk to me now. I don't want you to talk to me now. There is
a place—This isn't the place. You have misunderstood. I can't explain—"

They regarded one another, each blinded to the other. "Forgive me," he
decided to say at last, and his voice had a little quiver of emotion,
and he laid his hand on hers upon her knee. "I am the most foolish of
men. I was stupid—stupid and impulsive beyond measure to burst upon
you in this way. I—I am a love-sick idiot, and not accountable for my
actions. Will you forgive me—if I say no more?"

She looked at him with perplexed, earnest eyes.

"Pretend," he said, "that all I have said hasn't been said. And let us
go on with our evening. Why not? Imagine I've had a fit of hysteria—and
that I've come round."

"Yes," she said, and abruptly she liked him enormously. She felt this
was the sensible way out of this oddly sinister situation.

He still watched her and questioned her.

"And let us have a talk about this—some other time. Somewhere, where we
can talk without interruption. Will you?"

She thought, and it seemed to him she had never looked so
self-disciplined and deliberate and beautiful. "Yes," she said, "that
is what we ought to do." But now she doubted again of the quality of the
armistice they had just made.

He had a wild impulse to shout. "Agreed," he said with queer exaltation,
and his grip tightened on her hand. "And to-night we are friends?"

"We are friends," said Ann Veronica, and drew her hand quickly away from
him.

"To-night we are as we have always been. Except that this music we have
been swimming in is divine. While I have been pestering you, have you
heard it? At least, you heard the first act. And all the third act is
love-sick music. Tristan dying and Isolde coming to crown his death.
Wagner had just been in love when he wrote it all. It begins with that
queer piccolo solo. Now I shall never hear it but what this evening will
come pouring back over me."