by George Moore
The Bartons were not invited to the next private dance, and they had to look forward to the State ball given on the following Monday. As they mounted the stairway Mrs. Barton said:
“You know we turn to the left this time and enter Patrick’s Hall by this end; the other entrance is blocked up by the dais; and the wall-flowers, you will find, have shifted their camp. It is considered somewhat bad form to stand about the pillars; but the great thing is to get hold of the best men. We shan’t have long to wait, and then we’ll move up to the dais.”
St. Patrick’s Hall was now a huge democratic crush. All the little sharp glances of the “private dance,”
“What, you here!” were dispensed with as useless, for all were within their rights in being at the hall. They pushed, laughed, danced. They met as they would have met in Rotten Row, and they took their amusement with the impartiality of pleasure-seekers jigging and drinking in a market-place on fair-day. On either side of the hall there were ascending benches; these were filled with chaperons and debutantes, and over their heads the white-painted gold-listed walls were hung with garlands of evergreen oak interwoven with the celebrated silver shields, the property of the Cowper family, and in front of the curtains hanging about the dais, the maroon legs of His Excellency, and the teeth and diamonds of Her Excellency, were seen passing to and fro, and up and down to the music of oblivion that Liddell dispensed with a flowing arm.
The darling dream of the Dubliner is to dance in this quadrille — it is the highest honour he can ever hope to attain — but, for the moment, all minds were set on the realisation of a more immediate prospect. About the pillars the three and four-season girls were drawn up in battle array; and, their eyes liquid with invitation, they sought to attract the attention of the men as they went in. The girl in red, the Brennans, the Miss Duffys led the assault; even the honourable Miss Gores were there.
“I declare Olive Barton is here!” whispered the redoubtable Bertha; “this doesn’t look as if the beaux were coming forward in their hundreds. It is said that Lord Kilcarney has given her up for Violet Scully.”
“I’m not a bit surprised,” said the girl in red; “and, now I think of it, all the beauties come to the same end. I’ll just give her a couple more Castle seasons. It is that that will puff the fine feathers out of her.”
But the beauty was soon spied out by some three or four A.D.C.s; an English lord engaged her for a couple of waltzes, and, in triumph, Mrs. Barton made her way up to the dais where she had given appointment to Lord Dungory, Lord Rosshill, and her other admirers. One of them, an old man of sixty, took Alice out for a waltz, and when it was over she was free to listen to her mother’s laughter, and to watch, until her eyes ached, the whirling of white and rose tulle and the pushing of black cloth shoulders. She was not alone. She was but one of the many débutantes who, amid the chaperons, sat wearily waiting on the high benches. Some are but seventeen, and their sweet, clear eyes seem as a bright morning, full of beautiful possibilities.
Alice was beginning to see to the end, and, as the old sad thoughts came back to her, she thought of the resultless life, the life of white idleness that awaited nearly all of them. What were they but snow-flakes born to shine for a moment and then to fade, to die, to disappear, to become part of the black, the foul-smelling slough of mud below? The drama in muslin was again unfolded, and she could read each act; and there was a “curtain” at the end of each. The first was made of young, hopeful faces, the second of arid solicitation, the third of the bitter, malignant tongues of Bertha Duffy and her friend. They are talking now to a pale little martyr who has spoken to no one, who has not even a brother to take her for a walk down the room, or to the buffet for an ice.
“And are not the Castle balls very nice?” said Bertha, “and how are you amusing yourself?”
“Oh, very much indeed,” replied the poor débutante.
“And is it true, Bertha,” asks the fierce aunt, “you know all the news, that Mr. Jones has been transferred to another ship and has gone off to the Cape?”
“Yes, yes,” replied the girl with a coarse laugh; “a nice end to her beau; and after dinnering him up the whole summer too.”
Alice shuddered. Was it possible, she asked herself, that she was listening to the conversation of people who passed for, and who believed themselves to be, ladies? And to think that only a few years are required to degrade a girl full of sweetness and promise to the level of that horrible harlot-like creature with the yellow hair and wide mouth! And by what delicate degrees is the soul befouled in this drama of muslin, and how little is there left for any use of life when, after torture and disgrace, the soul, that was once so young, appears on the stage for the fourth act. Examine the meagre minds of the Ladies Cullen and the Honourable Miss Gores, listen to their narrow bigotries, and think that once these poor old things were fresh, hopeful, full of aspiration. Now if they could rise for a moment out of their living death it would be like the skeleton in Goya’s picture, to lift the tomb and write on the headstone: “Nada.”
An hour passed, and Alice had begun to experience the worst horrors of a Castle ball. She was sick of pity for those around her, and her lofty spirit resented the insult that was offered to her sex. At last Harding came up. Mrs. Barton received him with enthusiasm: she at once called his attention to Alice, and in a way that seemed to imply “For goodness sake take her off; thank heavens there’s someone who can put up with a plain girl.”
“Have you been long here, Miss Barton?” he said, leaning towards her; “I have been looking out for you, but the crowd is so great that it is hard to Cud anyone.”
“I think we arrived about a quarter to eleven,” Alice answered, somewhat eagerly.
Then, after a pause, Harding said:— “Will you give me this waltz?” Alice assented, and, as they made their way through the dancers, he added:— “But I believe you do not care about dancing. If you would prefer it, we might go for a walk down the room. Perhaps you would like an ice? This is the way to the buffet.”
But Alice and Harding did not stop long there; they were glad to leave the heat of gas, the odour of sauces, the effervescence of the wine, the detonations of champagne, the tumult of laughter, the racing of plates, the heaving bosoms, the glittering corsets for the peace and the pale blue refinement of the long blue drawing-room. How much of our sentiments and thoughts do we gather from our surroundings; and the shining blue of the turquoise-coloured curtains, the pale dead blue of the Louis XV. furniture, and the exquisite fragility of the glass chandeliers, the gold mirrors rutilant with the light of some hundreds of tall wax candles, were illustrative of the light dreams and delicate lassitude that filled the souls of the women as they lay back whispering to their partners, the crinolettes lifting the skirts over the edges of the sofas.
Here the conversation seems serious, there it is smiling, and broken by the passing and repassing of a fan.
“Only four days more of Dublin,” said Harding; “I have settled, or rather the fates have settled, that I am to leave next Saturday.”
“And where are you going; to London?”
“Yes, to London. I am sorry I am leaving so soon; but it can’t be helped. I have met many nice people here — some whom I shall not be able to forget.”
“You speak as if it were necessary to forget them — it is surely always better to remember.”
“I shall certainly remember you. Besides, I intend to write, and you have promised to send me some of your work. There is no doubt but that I shall be able to get it published.”
“It is very kind of you,” said Alice, hesitatingly. “I doubt my powers of being able to do anything good enough, but I shall be very glad to hear from you.”
At this moment only one thing in the world seemed to be of much real importance; it was that the man now sitting by her side should not be utterly taken away. To know that he existed, though far from her, would be almost enough, for would he not be to her a sort of beacon-light — a light she might never r
each to, but which would break the darkness she dreaded? In no century have men been loved so implicitly by women as in the nineteenth; nor could this be otherwise, for putting aside the fact that the natural wants of love have become a nervous erethism in the struggle that a surplus population of more than two million women has created, there are psychological reasons that to-day more than ever impel women to shrink from the intellectual monotony of their sex, and to view with increasing admiration the free, the vigorous intelligence of the male. For as the gates of the harem are being broken down, and the gloom of the female mind clears, and grows keenly alive to the sensations and ideas of modern life, it becomes axiomatically sure that Woman brings a loftier reverence to the shrine of Man than she has done in any past age, seeing, as she now does, in him the incarnation of the freedom of which she is vaguely conscious and which she is perceptibly acquiring. So sets the main current that is bearing civilisation along; but beneath the great feminine tide there is an under-current of hatred and revolt. This is particularly observable in the leaders of the movement; women who in the tumult of their aspirations, and their passionate yearnings towards the new ideal, and the memory of the abasement their sex have been in the past, and are still being in the present, subjected to, forget the immutability of the laws of life, and with virulent virtue and protest condemn love — that is to say love in the sense of sexual intercourse — and proclaim a higher mission for woman than to be the mother of men: and an adjuvant, unless corrected by sanative qualities of a high order, is, of course, found in any physical defect. But as the corporeal and incorporeal hereditaments of Alice Barton and Lady Cecilia Cullen were examined fully in the beginning of this chapter, it is only necessary to here indicate the order of ideas — the moral atmosphere of the time — to understand the efflorescence of the two minds, and to realise how curiously representative they are of this last quarter of the nineteenth century.
And it was necessary to make that survey of psychical cause and effect to appreciate the sentiments that actuated Alice in her relationship with Harding. She loved him, but more through the imagination than the heart. She knew he was deceiving her, but to her he meant so much that she had not the force of will to cast him off, and abandoned herself to the intellectual sensualism of his society. It was this, and nothing more. What her love might have been it is not necessary to analyse; in the present circumstances, it was completely merged in the knowledge that he was, to her, light, freedom, and instruction, and that when he left, darkness and ignorance would again close in upon her. They had not spoken for some moments. With a cruelty that was peculiar to him, he waited for her to break the silence.
“And what will you do,” she said, at last, “when you return to London?”
“You mean, what literary work shall I be engaged upon?
I shall first of all finish off my articles on Ireland—”
“I thought they were done long ago.”
“Yes, but I got an order from America — the Americans pay very well — for a series of descriptive sketches. I shall not be long knocking them off, and then I shall do some fiction.”
“What do you call descriptive sketches?”
“Well, my idea is to take a series of representative characters — the landlord, the grazier, the tenant farmer, the moonlighter, the parson, the priest — and tell their history, their manner of life, and their aims and ambitions. There are many curious and interesting things to be said — the last flicker of Protestantism, the gradual absorbing of the glebe lands, and the apparent triumph of Catholicism.”
“Then you think that Catholicism is likewise doomed?”
“Of course I do. The Roman Church is shattered to its base. Christ, if you will, was a radical, but the Church of Christ was built on conservative foundations, in comparison to which those of the House of Lords are socialistic, communistic, and every other ‘istic.’ Now, for the first time, we see the bishops of Rome waving the red flag of revolution. If a cat has nine, superstition has ninety-nine lives; but it is hardly credible that a Church that has existed eighteen hundred years through the vivifying power of one set of principles should be able to gain a new lease of life by the recanting of all its old opinions. The priests have to get their dues, and to get them they have to mount the Land League platform. The need of the moment is the greatest need of all.”
“And you think they will eventually die of the bread they are now eating?”
“Of course republicanism and common-sense will not put up with their nonsense for very long; and it is my firm belief that in fifty — say a hundred — years priests and parsons, in common with other fortune-tellers, will be prosecuted under the Vagrancy Acts.”
One of the many threads that drew Alice, fascinated, towards Harding was the quick flight of his thought, and the rapid and daring way in which he expressed it. She had sufficiently mastered the old weakness of belief, and she was not shocked but only a little startled at his utterances. Now she laughed softly, amused by the wit and epigrammatic force of his conversation.
Harding was not quite sincere. He spoke with a view to effect; he desired to astonish, and, if possible, to have the girl think of him when he was gone as something quite exceptional — something she would never see again. Alice’s thoughts, however, had passed from the literary souvenirs that he was pouring upon her, and she thought now of his departure, and the loneliness it would bring to her. Without seeking a transitional phrase, she raised her eyes to his and said unaffectedly:
“I am sorry you are going away: I am afraid we shall never meet again.”
“Oh, yes, we shall,” he replied: “you’ll get married one of these days and come and live in London.”
“Why should I go to live in London?”
“Watch life as it flows and breaks about us: do you not see that man’s moral temperament leads him sooner or later back to his connatural home? And we must not confuse home with the place of our birth. There are Frenchmen born in England, Englishmen born in France. Heine was a Frenchman born in Germany — and you are a Kensingtonian.
I see nothing Irish in you. Oh, you are very Kensington, and therefore you will — I do not know when or how, but assuredly as a stream goes to the river and the river to the sea, you will drift to your native place — Kensington. Your tastes will bring you there; you’ll be writing novels one of these days in Kensington, I wouldn’t mind betting.”
“I don’t like you to laugh at me.”
“I assure you I am not laughing at you. Have you not promised me to try your hand at an article or two and a short story, which I am going to get published for you?”
“Yes, I said I would try.”
“And you promise to write to me? — I shall be most interested to hear how you are getting on.”
“I shall have to write to you if I send you the story.”
“You might send it without a letter.”
“I should not be so rude as that, And, you must not forget, you promised to give me one of your books.”
“Yes, I’ll bring you one to-morrow. But do you know that I have left the hotel? There were too many people about to do much work, so I took rooms in Molesworth Street — there I can write and read undisturbed. You might come and see me.”
“I should like to very much, but I don’t think I could ask mother to come with me; she is so very busy just now.”
“Well, don’t ask your mother to come; you won’t be afraid to come alone?”
“I am afraid I could not do that.”
“Why not? No one will ever know anything about it.”
“Very possibly, but I don’t think it would be a proper thing to do — I don’t think it would be a right thing to do.”
“Right! I thought we had ceased to believe in heaven and hell.”
“Yes, but does that change anything? There are surely duties that we owe to our people, to our families. The present ordering of things may be unjust, but, as long as it exists, had we not better live in accordance with it?”
/> “A very sensible answer, and I suppose you are right.”
Alice looked at him in astonishment, but she was shaken too intensely in all her feelings to see that he was perfectly sincere, that his answer was that of a man who saw and felt through his intelligence and not his conscience.
The conversation had suddenly come to a pause, and the silence that intervened was full of nervous apprehension. Then it was broken by whispered words, and the abundant laughter that was seemingly used to hide the emotions that oppressed the speakers. Finally they sat down quite close to, but hidden from, Alice and Harding by a screen, and through the paper even their breathing was audible. All the dancers were gone; there was scarcely a white skirt or black coat in the pale blueness of the room. Evidently the lovers thought they were well out of reach of eavesdroppers. Alice felt this, but before she could rise to go, Fred Scully had said —
“Now, May, I hope you won’t refuse to let me come and see you in your room to-night. It would be too cruel if you did. I’ll steal along the passage; no one will hear, no one will ever know, and I’ll be so very good; I promise you I will.”
“Oh, Fred, I’m afraid I can’t trust you; it would be so very wicked.”
“Nothing is wicked when we really love; besides, I only want to talk to you.”
“You can talk to me here.”
“Yes, but it isn’t the same thing; anyone can talk to you here. I want to show you a little poem I cut out of a newspaper to-day for you. I’ll steal along the passage — no one will ever know.”
