CHAPTER THE NINTH
DISCORDS
Part 1
One afternoon, soon after Ann Veronica's great discovery, a
telegram came into the laboratory for her. It ran:
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| Bored | and | nothing | to | do |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|
| will | you | dine | with | me |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|
| to-night | somewhere | and | talk | I |
|----------|-----------|----------|--------|--------|
| shall | be | grateful | Ramage | |
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Ann Veronica was rather pleased by this. She had not seen Ramage
for ten or eleven days, and she was quite ready for a gossip with
him. And now her mind was so full of the thought that she was in
love--in love!--that marvellous state! that I really believe she
had some dim idea of talking to him about it. At any rate, it
would be good to hear him saying the sort of things he
did--perhaps now she would grasp them better--with this
world--shaking secret brandishing itself about inside her head
within a yard of him.
She was sorry to find Ramage a little disposed to be melancholy.
"I have made over seven hundred pounds in the last week," he
said.
"That's exhilarating," said Ann Veronica.
"Not a bit of it," he said; "it's only a score in a game."
"It's a score you can buy all sorts of things with."
"Nothing that one wants."
He turned to the waiter, who held a wine-card. "Nothing can cheer
me," he said, "except champagne." He meditated. "This," he said,
and then: "No! Is this sweeter? Very well."
"Everything goes well with me," he said, folding his arms under
him and regarding Ann Veronica with the slightly projecting eyes
wide open. "And I'm not happy. I believe I'm in love."
He leaned back for his soup.
Presently he resumed: "I believe I must be in love."
"You can't be that," said Ann Veronica, wisely.
"How do you know?"
"Well, it isn't exactly a depressing state, is it?"
"YOU don't know."
"One has theories," said Ann Veronica, radiantly.
"Oh, theories! Being in love is a fact."
"It ought to make one happy."
"It's an unrest--a longing-- What's that?" The waiter had
intervened. "Parmesan--take it away!"
He glanced at Ann Veronica's face, and it seemed to him that she
really was exceptionally radiant. He wondered why she thought
love made people happy, and began to talk of the smilax and pinks
that adorned the table. He filled her glass with champagne.
"You MUST," he said, "because of my depression."
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."
The lights sank, the prelude to the third act was beginning, the
music rose and fell in crowded intimations of lovers
separated--lovers separated with scars and memories between them,
and the curtain went reefing up to display Tristan lying wounded
on his couch and the shepherd crouching with his pipe.
