by George Moore
O happy moths that now flit and hover
From the blossom of white to the blossom of red,
Take heed, for I was a lordly lover
Till the little day of my life had sped;
As straight as a pine-tree, a golden head,
And eyes as blue as an austral bay.
Ladies, when loosing your evening array,
Reflect, had you lived in my years, my prayers
Might have won you from weakly lovers away —
My love was stronger and fiercer than theirs.
Through the song of the thrush and the pipe of the plover
Sweet voices come down through the binding lead;
O queens that every age must discover
For men, that man’s delight may be fed;
Oh, sister queens to the queens I wed.
For the space of a year, a month, a day,
No thirst but mine could your thirst allay;
And oh, for an hour of life, my dears,
To kiss you, to laugh at your lovers’ dismay —
My love was stronger and fiercer than theirs.
ENVOI
Prince was I ever of festival gay,
And time never silvered my locks with gray;
The love of your lovers is as hope that despairs,
So think of me sometimes, dear ladies, I pray —
My love was stronger and fiercer than theirs.
“It is like all your poetry — merely meretricious glitter; there is no heart in it. That a man should like to have a nice mistress, a girl he is really fond of, is simple enough, but lamentation over the limbo of unborn loveliness is, to my mind, sheer nonsense.”
Mike laughed.
“Of course it is silly, but I cannot alter it; it is the sex and not any individual woman that attracts me. I enter a ball-room and I see one, one whom I have never seen before, and I say, ‘It is she whom I have sought, I can love her.’ I am always disappointed, but hope is born again in every fresh face. Women are so common when they have loved you.”
Startled by his words, Mike strove to measure the thought.
“I can see nothing interesting in the fact that it is natural to you to behave badly to every woman who gives you a chance of deceiving her. That’s what it amounts to. At the end of a week you’ll tire of this new girl as you did of the others. I think it a great shame. It isn’t gentlemanly.”
Mike winced at the word “gentlemanly.” For a moment he thought of resentment, but his natural amiability predominated, and he said —
“I hope not. I really do think I can love this one; she isn’t like the others. Besides, I shall be much happier. There is, I know, a great sweetness in constancy. I long for this sweetness.” Seeing by Frank’s face that he was still angry, he pursued his thoughts in the line which he fancied would be most agreeable; he did so without violence to his feelings. It was as natural to him to think one way as another. Mike’s sycophancy was so innate that it did not appear, and was therefore almost invariably successful. “I have been the lover of scores of women, but I never loved one. I have always hoped to love; it is love that I seek. I find love-tokens and I do not know who were the givers. I have possessed nothing but the flesh, and I have always looked beyond the flesh. I never sought a woman for her beauty. I dreamed of a companion, one who would share each thought; I have dreamed of a woman to whom I could bring my poetry, who could comprehend all sorrows, and with whom I might deplore the sadness of life until we forget it was sad, and I have been given some more or less imperfect flesh.”
“I,” said Frank, “don’t care a rap for your blue-stockings. I like a girl to look pretty and sweet in a muslin dress, her hair with the sun on it slipping over her shoulders, a large hat throwing a shadow over the garden of her face. I like her to come and sit on my knee in the twilight before dinner, to come behind me when I am working and put her hand on my forehead, saying, ‘Poor old man, you are tired!’”
“And you could love one girl all your life — Lizzie Baker, for instance; and you could give up all women for one, and never wander again free to gather?”
“It is always the same thing.”
“No, that is just what it is not. The last one was thin, this one is fat; the last one was tall, this one is tiny. The last one was stupid, this one is witty. Some men seek the source of the Nile, I the lace of a bodice. A new love is a voyage of discovery. What is her furniture like? What will she say? What are her opinions of love? But when you have been a woman’s lover a month you know her morally and physically. Society is based on the family. The family alone survives, it floats like an ark over every raging flood. But you may understand without being able to accept, and I cannot accept, although I understand and love family life. What promiscuity of body and mind! The idea of never being alone fills me with horror to lose that secret self, which, like a shy bird, flies out of sight in the day, but is with you, oh, how intensely in the morning!”
“Nothing pleases you so much as to be allowed to talk nonsense about yourself.”
Mike laughed.
“Let me have those opera-glasses. That woman sitting on the bench is like her.”
The trees of the embankment waved along the laughing water, and in scores the sparrows flitted across the sleek green sward. The porter in his bright uniform, cocked hat, and brass buttons, explained the way out to a woman. Her child wore a red sash and stooped to play with a cat that came along the railings, its tail high in the air.
“They know nothing of Lily Young,” Mike said to himself; and knowing the porter could not interfere, he wondered what he would think if he knew all. “If she comes nothing can save her, she must and shall be mine.”
Waterloo Bridge stood high above the river, level and lovely. Over Charing Cross the brightness was full of spires and pinnacles, but Southwark shore was lost in flat dimness. Then the sun glowed and Westminster ascended tall and romantic, St. Thomas’s and St. John’s floating in pale enchantment, and beneath the haze that heaved and drifted, revealing coal-barges moored by the Southwark shore, lay a sheet of gold. The candour of the morning laughed upon the river; and there came a little steamer into the dazzling water, her smoke heeling over, coiling and uncoiling like a snake, and casting tremendous shadow — in her train a line of boats laden to the edge with deal planks. Then the haze heaved and London disappeared, became again a gray city, faint and far away — faint as spires seem in a dream. Again and again the haze wreathed and went out, discovering wharfs and gold inscriptions, uncovering barges aground upon the purple slime of the Southwark shore, their yellow yards pointing like birds with outstretched necks.
The smoke of the little steamer curled and rolled over, now like a great snake, now like a great bird hovering with a snake in its talons; and the little steamer made pluckily for Blackfriars. Carts and hansoms, vans and brewers’ vans, all silhouetting. Trains slip past, obliterating with white whiffs the delicate distances, the perplexing distances that in London are delicate and perplexing as a spider’s web. Great hay-boats yellow in the sun, brown in the shadow — great hay-boats came by, their sails scarce filled with the light breeze; standing high, they sailed slowly and picturesquely, with men thrown in all attitudes; somnolent in sunshine and pungent odour — one only at work, wielding the great rudder.
“Ah! if she would not disappoint me; if she would only come; I would give my life not to be disappointed…. Three o’clock! She said she would be here by three, if she came at all. I think I could love her — I am sure of it; it would be impossible to weary of her — so frail — a white blonde. She said she would come, I know she wanted to…. This waiting is agony! Oh, if I were only good-looking! Whatever power I have over women I have acquired; it was the desire to please women that gave me whatever power I possess; I was as soft as wax, and in the fingers of desire was modified and moulded. You did not know me when I was a boy — I was hideous. It seemed to me impossible that women could love men. Women seemed to me so beautiful and desirable, men so h
ideous and revolting. Could they touch us without a revulsion of feeling? Could they really desire us? That is why I could not bear to give women money, nor a present of any kind — no, not even a flower. If I did all my pleasure was gone; I could not help thinking it was for what they got out of me that they liked me. I longed to penetrate the mystery of women’s life. It seemed to me cruel that the differences between the sexes should never be allowed to dwindle, but should be strictly maintained through all the observances of life. There were beautiful beings walking by us of whom we knew nothing — irreparably separated from us. I wanted to be with this sex as a shadow is with its object.”
“You didn’t find many opportunities of gratifying your tastes in Cashel?”
“No, indeed! Of course the women about the town were not to be thought of.” Unpleasant memories seemed to check his flow of words.
Without noticing his embarrassment, Frank said —
“After France it must have been a horrible change to come to Ireland. How old were you?”
“About fourteen. I could not endure the place. Every day was so appallingly like the last. There was nothing for me to do but to dream; I dreamed of everything. I longed to get alone and let my fancy wander — weaving tales of which I was the hero, building castles of which I was the lord.”
“I remember always hearing of your riding and shooting. No one knew of your literary tastes. I don’t mind telling you that Mount Rorke often suspected you of being a bit of a poacher.”
Mike laughed.
“I believe I have knocked down a pheasant or two. I was an odd mixture — half a man of action, half a man of dreams. My position in Cashel was unbearable. My mother was a lady; my father — you know how he had let himself down. You cannot imagine the yearnings of a poor boy; you were brought up in all elegance and refinement. That beautiful park! On afternoons I used to walk there, and I remember the very moments I passed under the foliage of the great beeches and lay down to dream. I used to wander to the outskirts of the wood as near as I dared to the pleasure-grounds, and looking on the towers strove to imagine the life there. The bitterest curses lie in the hearts of young men who, understanding refinement and elegance, see it for ever out of their reach. I used to watch the parade of dresses passing on the summer lawns between the firs and flowering trees. What graceful and noble words were spoken! — and that man walking into the poetry of the laburnum gold, did he put his arm about her? And I wondered what silken ankles moved beneath her skirts. My brain was on fire, and I was crazed; I thought I should never hold a lady in my arms. A lady! all the delicacy of silk and lace, high-heeled shoes, and the scent and colour of hair that a coiffeur has braided.”
“I think you are mad!”
Mike laughed and continued —
“I was so when I was sixteen. There was a girl staying there. Her hair was copper, and her flesh was pink and white. Her waist, you could span it. I saw her walking one day on …”
“You must mean Lady Alice Hargood, a very tall girl?”
“Yes; five feet seven, quite. I saw her walking on the terrace with your uncle. Once she passed our house, and I smarted with shame of it as of some restless wound, and for days I remembered I was little better than a peasant. Originally we came, as you know, of good English stock, but nothing is vital but the present. I cried and cursed my existence, my father and the mother that bore me, and that night I climbed out by my window and roved through the dark about the castle so tall in the moonlight. The sky that night was like a soft blue veil, and the trees were painted quite black upon it. I looked for her window, and I imagined her sleeping with her copper hair tossed in the moonlight, like an illustration in a volume of Shelley.
“You remember the old wooden statue of a nymph that stood in the sycamores at the end of the terraces; she was the first naked woman I saw. I used to wander about her, sometimes at night, and I have often climbed about and hung round those shoulders, and ever since I have always met that breast of wood. You have been loved more truly; you have been possessed of woman more thoroughly than I. Though I clasp a woman in my arms, it is as if the Atlantic separated us. Did I never tell you of my first love affair? That was the romance of the wood nymph. One evening I climbed on the pedestal of my divinity, my cheek was pale …”
“For God’s sake, leave out the poetics, and come to the facts.”
“If you don’t let me tell my story in my own way I won’t tell it at all. Out of my agony prayer rose to Alice, for now it pleased me to fancy there was some likeness between this statue and Lady Alice. The dome of leafage was sprinkled with the colour of the sunset, and as I pressed my lips to the wooden statue, I heard dead leaves rustling under a footstep. Holding the nymph with one arm, I turned and saw a lady approaching. She asked me why I kissed the statue. I looked away embarrassed, but she told me not to go, and she said, ‘You are a pretty boy.’ I said I had never seen a woman so beautiful. Again I grew ashamed, but the lady laughed. We stood talking in the stillness. She said I had pretty hands, and asked me if I regretted the nymph was not a real woman. She took my hands. I praised hers, and then I grew frightened, for I knew she came from the castle; the castle was to me what the Ark of the Covenant was to an Israelite. She put her arm about me, and my fears departed in the thrilling of an exquisite minute. She kissed me and said, ‘Let us sit down.’”
“I wonder who she was! What was her name? You can tell me.”
“No, I never mention names; besides, I am not certain she gave her right name.”
“Are you sure she was staying at the castle? For if so, there would be no use for her to conceal her name. You could easily have found it out.”
“Oh, yes, she was staying at the castle; she talked about you all. Don’t you believe me?”
“What, all about the nymph? I am certain you thought you ought to have loved her, and if what Harding says is right, that there is more truth in what we think than in what we do, I’m sure you might say that you had been on a wedding-tour with one of the gargoyles.”
Mike laughed; and Frank did not suspect that he had annoyed him. Mike’s mother was a Frenchwoman, whom John Fletcher had met in Dublin and had pressed into a sudden marriage. At the end of three years of married life she had been forced to leave him, and strange were the legends of the profanities of that bed. She fled one day, taking her son with her. Fletcher did not even inquire where she had gone; and when at her death Mike returned to Ireland, he found his father in a small lodging-house playing the flute. Scarcely deigning to turn his head, he said— “Oh! is that you, Mike? — sit down.”
At his father’s death, Mike had sold the lease of the farm for three hundred pounds, and with that sum and a volume of verse he went to London. When he had published his poems he wrote two comedies. His efforts to get them produced led him into various society. He was naturally clever at cards, and one night he won three hundred pounds. Journalism he had of course dabbled in — he was drawn towards it by his eager impatient nature; he was drawn from it by his gluttonous and artistic nature. Only ten pounds for an article, whereas a successful “bridge” brought him ten times that amount, and he revolted against the column of platitudes that the hours whelmed in oblivion. There had been times, however, when he had been obliged to look to journalism for daily bread. The Spectator, always open to young talent, had published many of his poems; the Saturday had welcomed his paradoxes and strained eloquence; but whether he worked or whether he idled he never wanted money. He was one of those men who can always find five pounds in the streets of London.
We meet Mike in his prime — in his twenty-ninth year — a man of various capabilities, which an inveterate restlessness of temperament had left undeveloped — a man of genius, diswrought with passion, occasionally stricken with ambition.
“Let me have those glasses. There she is! I am sure it is she — there, leaning against the Embankment. Yes, yes, it is she. Look at her. I should know her figure among a thousand — those frail shoulders, that little waist; you coul
d break her like a reed. How sweet she is on that background of flowing water, boats, wharfs, and chimneys; it all rises about her like a dream, and all is as faint upon the radiant air as a dream upon happy sleep. So she is coming to see me. She will keep her promise. I shall love her. I feel at last that love is near me. Supposing I were to marry her?”
“Why shouldn’t you marry her if you love her? That is to say, if this is more than one of your ordinary caprices, spiced by the fact that its object is a nun.”
The men looked at each other for a moment doubtful. Then Mike laughed.
“I hope I don’t love her too much, that is all. But perhaps she will not come. Why is she standing there?”
“I should laugh if she turned on her heel and walked away right under your very nose.”
A cloud passed over Mike’s face.
“That’s not possible,” he said, and he raised the glass. “If I thought there was any chance of that I should go down to see her.”
“You couldn’t force her to come up. She seems to be admiring the view.”
Then Lily left the embankment and turned towards the Temple.
“She is coming!” Mike cried, and laying down the opera-glass he took up the scent and squirted it about the room. “You won’t make much noise, like a good fellow, will you? I shall tell her I am here alone.”
“I shall make no noise — I shall finish my article. I am expecting Lizzie about four; I will slip out and meet her in the street. Good-bye.”
Mike went to the head of the staircase, and looking down the prodigious height, he waited. It occurred to him that if he fell, the emparadised hour would be lost for ever. If she were to pass through the Temple without stopping at No. 2! The sound of little feet and the colour of a heliotrope skirt dispersed his fears, and he watched her growing larger as she mounted each flight of stairs; when she stopped to take breath, he thought of running down and carrying her up in his arms, but he did not move, and she did not see him until the last flight.
“Here you are at last!”
“I am afraid I have kept you waiting. I was not certain whether I should come.”
