A Long Time Ago

by Margaret Kennedy

  These delightful people were highly unconventional. I soon learnt to know them all. The castle on the island became my second home. Often the stars had risen before my boat returned to the cottage, and if I wished to stay all night there was always a bed for me. An irresistible impulse drew me towards them.

  My new friend, Louise, remained the dearest. I discovered that she was indeed the mistress of this charming house. Beautiful and gifted, she was not, I think, entirely happy. An artist at soul, she had sacrificed those sacred impulses to husband and children and I see her always like some lovely captive bird, pining for a freedom that is only half realised. I know that she often envied me my fuller and more vital life. And, as is so often the case with these talented and wasted souls, she offered to her friends the gift of a most perfect sympathy.

  For her husband, an Oxford professor, I soon cherished a deep and affectionate respect. At first, I was chilled by his grave formality; I felt that our hearts would never speak to one another. But as I came to know him better I learned how delicate and gentle a soul was hidden beneath this cold and precise exterior. It was his ambition to introduce me to a study of the classics, and in my conversations with him I began to comprehend for the first time a little of that severe beauty which inspired the poetry of Homer and of Virgil. I have still a beautiful translation of the Idylls of Theocritus which he gave me….

  But everyone in that household was delightful. Louise, with characteristic hospitality, had thrown open her doors to her entire family and their friends, all gifted and beautiful people. So that I found myself suddenly transported from solitude to social life of the pleasantest kind.

  I was a great favourite with the children and spent many hours of the day playing with them. The naïve adoration of these little creatures was a constant source of pleasure to me. They still called me Undine and would never tire of listening to my stories of coral palaces at the bottom of the lake.

  Beautiful summer days! By what spell can I evoke your serenity and your delight? Why do I linger, as I record you?

  “Come now,” I can hear my readers saying, “how tedious this Elissa is being! All that she wishes to tell us may be stated in a single paragraph. In the spring she became melancholy and in bad health. In the summer she went to Ireland, where she recovered. And she made there some new friends.”

  Forgive me, dear reader, but I cannot agree with you. The truth is never told as easily as that.

  During this year I had undergone one of the most important, the most mystical phases which occur in the life of an artist: the sudden and unexplained extinction of my powers, a period of despair, of gradual recovery, and finally of new inspiration. When, eventually, I left Ireland it was to launch upon a magnificent era of new activity and achievement. And all this is a great deal more interesting than if I had only to say that I had sung in London during the Season, that I had been fêted and applauded, that this, or that, distinguished person had done me honour. All that you may read in the newspapers, or it may be written by others about me: what I have to say is that story which only the artist himself can tell.

  You must be patient.

  I was happy, as I have said, yet I was still waiting. I was aware that some new, great emotional climax lay before me. My soul and body were awake and alert; they were already in a tingling ferment of anticipation. I was eagerly desiring this new experience.

  Louise had spoken of the expected arrival of another guest, her brother Dick.

  I must confess that I anticipated very little pleasure from this new acquaintance that I was about to make. I had already formed for myself a picture of this brilliant, unhappy man. I had learned that he was a doctor and this chilled my sympathies. My experience of men in that profession had already made me impatient. They know too much and too little. Their contact with humanity breeds in them a kind of cynicism which the artist instinctively knows to be false.

  Every night, when the evening meal was over, they would entreat me to sing for them. I was delighted to do so. In those days I could scarcely stop singing. I would sing in that great shadowy room, with its windows open to the lake. I would sing until the moon had risen far up into the sky. Upon the piano, standing on a dais at one end of the room, we would place two candles. Louise would permit no other light. To listen in the dark, she said, is an ideal state of things. So I would stand upon the dais, dim and tall in my white dress, and sing song after song, while the glow of the sunset faded, and dusk gathered in the room, and the first rays of the rising moon silvered the edges of the distant mountains. The night was so still that the candle flames burnt steadily upwards, like candles on an altar, upon either side of the pianist.

  Scattered among the shadows of the great room this little group of people would sit silent, dreaming. Sometimes, at the termination of a song, a voice would speak and call to me:

  “Sing this … sing that … sing the Pieta Signore of Stradella … sing the Dove Sono … sing Waldegespracht … La Procession of César Franck … sing Du bist die Ruh….”

  A favourite, this last, with the husband of Louise. I must sing it every night for him, and it was usually the end of the concert. The little murmuring accompaniment flows out into the room and there is a sigh of pleasure from my hidden audience. My still, calm voice floats through the night …

  Du bist die Ruh,

  Der Friede mild!

  Die Sehnsucht du

  Und was sie stillt!

  Thou art the longing and the appeasement! To whom was I singing, then? Who was coming to appease my longing?

  On the soft cadence at the end of the verse I lifted my eyes. A stranger was listening by one of the open windows, leaning his arms upon the low sill. I could see a pale face, beautiful and intent … my eyes were drawn and held by those other eyes which glittered in the darkness. My voice continued:

  Kehr ein bei mir

  Und schliesse du

  Still hinter dir

  Die Pforten zu!

  The listeners in the dark room were forgotten. I had now but one listener and already I was linked to him by a secret current of emotion, a knowledge of mutual need. My voice rose triumphant:

  Dies’ augenzelt

  Von deinem Glanz

  Allein erhellt!

  He for whom I had been waiting had come. My song over, I stood motionless, locked in a gaze that had become an embrace. There was a cry in the room. Louise had risen. She was stumbling towards the window.

  “Oh, Dick! Is it you? Have you come?”

  The stranger smiled and vanished. Somebody brought lights.

  “It is my brother, Elissa! He has come. It is my brother.”

  But my heart cried to me:

  “It is my lover! He has come. It is my lover.”

  For two weeks we were continually together and yet we said nothing of the passion which consumed us.

  What can I write of those weeks? What memory detaches itself from all that fever and anguish?

  Only the sense of rapture delayed and a host of little things: a basket of mushrooms that we gathered—a child’s laughter in the courtyard—a woman sitting on a low bench in the sunshine by the lake with a piece of white needlework in her hands.

  Dick Napier was standing at that time upon the threshold of his great career. Since then honours, distinctions and wealth have been heaped upon him. But when I knew him his brilliance was by no one fully recognised. His beauty, the power and grace of his physique, the fiery intelligence which transfused it, were so remarkable that even now its memory astonishes me. He had a superb body in which was lodged a superb brain, of the scientific type. Louise had already spoken of his amazing promise. As a boy every prize, every scholarship, had been his as if by right.

  But there were other aspects of his personality. That cynicism, of which I have spoken, had taken in his case an aspect of profound melancholy. He appeared to be incapable of happiness. Imprisoned within the fortress of his magnificent intellect he remained for ever beyond the reach of human sympathy. I think
that only the impulse of creative art could have liberated him; but, despite his keen sense of beauty, he had chosen for himself a life of scientific enquiry which could not satisfy his need for self-expression. Drawn to me, as I to him, by an overpowering desire, he never, even after the fulfilment of his passion, he never once achieved the abandon, the exhilaration, of a happy lover. I, to whom such a moment is all-fulfilling, cannot understand these sufferings of the intellectual temperament. I was impatient of them. The intellect was meant to be the servant and not the master of the passions.

  “You will never permit yourself to be carried away,” I told him.

  “But I have very much permitted myself to be carried away, unfortunately.”

  “And why, if you please, ‘unfortunately’?”

  This self-hatred, which some natures have, is a thing that I cannot comprehend. Upon one occasion, when we were living together in my cottage, he called my attention to a passage in a book that he was reading: What I hate, that I do.

  “But that is ridiculous,” I insisted. “To me it is incredible. I never hate what I do. I never do what I hate. All my actions are inspired by emotions which I consider beautiful and sacred. It is only when I have not followed my own impulses that I have felt any regret in my life.”

  “Then you are a fortunate being.”

  Up to the end there was always this chasm of incomprehension between us. And in the beginning it kept us apart, as I have said, for many days.

  Two scenes.

  It is evening and a crimson sky flames in the western end of the lake. I wander beside the water, listening to the sigh of the wind in the reeds, and cooling my fevered body in that soft breeze. In a few minutes it will be supper and we shall all assemble in the great hall where it is already dusk, where the starry candles burn on the table.… At the end of the landing-stage a tall man, immobile as a statue, gazes at the water in a posture of profound contemplation. He does not turn his head to look at me when I call to him. But when we are strolling across the grass to the castle he sighs deeply.

  “At what were you gazing when you stood by the water?”

  “I was watching the fish rise.”

  “You would have done better to come and talk to me.”

  “But I don’t like talking to you, Elissa. To please me you must either sing or be silent.”

  “I bore you, then?”

  “When you talk you do.”

  “Why? Do I say foolish things?”

  “Yes.”

  It is morning and I have gone with Louise to bathe in a secret little cove that we have found. We lie naked in the early sun. There is a splash of oars. A boat is coming round the point. Louise springs up in consternation.

  “Oh, it is Dick. He has come to fish here. Where is my cloak?”

  “But, Louise … you have a beautiful body. Why should you wish to cover it up?”

  “My husband would not like it.”

  “Well, I … I have no husband. I shall remain where I am.”

  The little boat comes into view and the fisherman hails us across the water. Louise is confused. She pulls her cloak more closely round her, and cries out:

  “Go away!”

  She cannot understand that a beautiful woman should not be ashamed of her body. Unable to support the gaze of her brother, she runs away towards the castle. I remain. He draws no nearer to the shore, but, resting on his oars, he contemplates me silently. Between us there is still that chasm and we have no power to cross it.

  It is night. The white light of a full moon pours down upon the world with a dazzling radiance. The trees throw inky shadows. The castle and the island stand up, a silhouette cut in black paper against the faint luminance of the grey mountains behind. My oars, dipping into the water, cause a thousand silver ripples, and their gentle splashing, as I glide towards the island, is the only sound to be heard in all the breathless summer night.

  I have tied up my boat. I steal across the dim grass. And now the night is full of music. The sound of a violin streams from the open window of the drawing-room. I creep closer. I stand at the window where he stood on the first night that he came, leaning my elbows on the sill. I gaze as if hypnotised at the tall flames of the candles, burning so straight and unflickering in the still air. They are playing the Spring Sonata of Beethoven …

  He is standing beside me. He too leans his elbows on the sill: he too gazes into the room.

  The clear river of music flows on its untroubled course. It fills our souls with an aching sweetness.

  It speaks to us, this music, of a time in our lives which will never come again: a time which has never existed, but which might once have been. In our youth the world was never so tender or so gay, but in the deep lake of memory and of regret, where we see our youth reflected, we may perhaps trace these heavenly hues, and know what we have lost. Surely in our youth some lover has passed by us and vanished among the crowded years, some other self in whose arms we could have been thus gay and tender and serene.

  But we forget. That tragic lover has no face …

  His name and form we know not, nor shall know,

  Like the lost Pleiad, seen no more below …

  Was it a passion of regret that spanned, for a moment, the gulf between us?

  I cannot tell. But I know that when we stood, locked in a long embrace beneath the shadowy trees, I was murmuring, brokenly, a name that I had forgotten for many, many years….

  Beside the landing stage my little boat was waiting. And still the fountain of music played on into the night. I caught his hand. We ran like children across the grass. The splash of our oars broke the water into a thousand silver ripples. The black silhouette of the island receded. The sounds of music grew fainter….

  Standing at the door of my cottage a few days later I cried out to Dick:

  “Oh, look! The island has gone!”

  It had indeed vanished behind an impenetrable curtain of mist and driving rain. Nor did I see it again. During the remainder of my visit to Ireland it concealed itself as though to tell me that the part which it had played in the story of my life was now complete. Destiny had drawn me to its shores, and the same inexorable fate was to drive me from it.

  During the first days after we arrived together at the cottage the fine weather came to an end. But we, I must confess, were scarcely aware of this. We were too much occupied with one another. Our passion was not quickly or easily assuaged. We did not hear the howling of the wind or the beating rain.

  These hours, these moments of supreme happiness, do they not solve for us the riddle of existence? For what else were we created? And yet, after a few days, I became once more aware of that overpowering melancholy which overshadowed my lover’s mind. It seemed that the chasm had again opened between us. I felt it, even in his arms. We had nothing to say to one another.

  At heart he was a puritan … His continued, brooding silence began to irritate me. He could not exist merely in the present, as I did; thoughts of the past and the future destroyed the harmony of life for him.

  “We cannot,” he said at last, “remain here for ever.”

  “Most certainly not. This continued rain is intolerable. We will go to-morrow. I think I should like to return at once to Italy. We will take a villa …”

  “But I cannot go to Italy. My work is in London.”

  “Your work! Aha! I was expecting this.”

  Always it has been like this. I have never had a lover who hesitated to sacrifice me and my art upon the altar of his career. The egotism of the masculine temperament is supreme. I could never make them understand that I, too, must have freedom.

  “And what then? How am I to occupy myself while you are receiving your patients? Am I to be hidden away in some little nest behind your consulting room?”

  “God knows, Elissa!”

  “But if you will not come with me to Italy, then I must go with you to London.”

  “Both are impossible.”

  A cold fear, a first premonition of separ
ation, fell across my heart. I wept aloud, and for two or three days we said nothing more about the future.

  I was to be caught up once again in the eternal conflict between my love and my art. My power to sing had returned to me and I was eager to exert it. But if I was to follow that highest call of my soul I must do it at a terrible price—the sacrifice of my woman’s happiness.

  Yet it was he and not I who was faithless.

  He left me.

  It seems that this is a lesson which I shall never learn. To me each love is always eternal until I am made to understand that for a man this is not the case. I would have been faithful to him. It was he, and not I—I repeat it—it was he who broke that sacred bond.

  How could I guess that my beautiful island, where I had found strength and happiness, had changed into an enemy? Hidden behind its curtain of rain and mist it was preparing a blow for me. And yet, I might have known. I might have remembered the shadow which fell across my heart on that first day when I could not land because I was afraid—because I knew that the island was guarded against me. An old woman who looked at me across the water … a malevolent spirit, defying me. Ah, yes, I might have known!

  Wrapped up in my peasant’s cloak, I had been absent from the cottage for some hours. I had gone into the village to buy food.

  “No, no, it is my turn to go,” I had told him. “You do not like the village. You must tend the fire and read your books.”

  Why did I leave him? He had a morbid fear of going to the village or any place where we might encounter our friends from the island. I did not understand this at the time. He knew, better than I, what a terrible influence they could exert.

  We embraced and he remained in the warm shelter of our cottage. When I returned, all was over. They had sent an emissary from the island. He was commanded to return.

  It would have been less cruel if he had gone without a word, while I was away. But he felt obliged to see me once again.