by George Moore
More than ever did he seek women, urged by a nervous erethism which he could not explain or control. Married women and young girls came to him from drawing-rooms, actresses from theatres, shop-girls from the streets, and though seemingly all were as unimportant and accidental as the cigarettes he smoked, each was a drop in the ocean of the immense ennui accumulating in his soul. The months passed, disappearing in a sheer and measureless void, leaving no faintest reflection or even memory, and his life flowed in unbroken weariness and despair. There was no taste in him for anything; he had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and with the evil rind in his teeth, wandered an exile beyond the garden. Dark and desolate beyond speech was his world; dark and empty of all save the eyes of the hound Ennui; and by day and night it watched him, fixing him with dull and unrelenting eyes. Sometimes these acute strainings of his consciousness lasted only between entering his chambers late at night and going to bed; and fearful of the sleepless hours, every sensation exaggerated by the effect of the insomnia, he sat in dreadful commune with the spectre of his life, waiting for the apparition to leave him.
“And to think,” he cried, turning his face to the wall, “that it is this ego that gives existence to it all!”
One of the most terrible of these assaults of consciousness came upon him on the winter immediately on his return from London. He had gone to London to see Miss Dudley, whom he had not seen since his return from Africa — therefore for more than two years. Only to her had he written from the desert; his last letters, however, had remained unanswered, and for some time misgivings had been astir in his heart. And it was with the view of ridding himself of these that he had been to London. The familiar air of the house seemed to him altered, the servant was a new one; she did not know the name, and after some inquiries, she informed him that the lady had died some six months past. All that was human in him had expressed itself in this affection; among women Lily Young and Miss Dudley had alone touched his heart; there were friends scattered through his life whom he had worshipped; but his friendships had nearly all been, though intense, ephemeral and circumstantial; nor had he thought constantly and deeply of any but these two women. So long as either lived, there was a haven of quiet happiness and natural peace in which his shattered spirit might rock at rest; but now he was alone.
Others he saw with homes and family ties; all seemed to have hopes and love to look to but he— “I alone am alone! The whole world is in love with me, and I’m utterly alone.” Alone as a wreck upon a desert ocean, terrible in its calm as in its tempest. Broken was the helm and sailless was the mast, and he must drift till borne upon some ship-wrecking reef! Had fate designed him to float over every rock? must he wait till the years let through the waters of disease, and he foundered obscurely in the immense loneliness he had so elaborately prepared?
Wisdom! dost thou turn in the end, and devour thyself? dost thou vomit folly? or is folly born of thee?
Overhead was cloud of storm, the ocean heaved, quick lightnings flashed; but no waves gathered, and in heavy sulk a sense of doom lay upon him. Wealth and health and talent were his; he had all, and in all he found he had nothing; — yes, one thing was his for evermore, — Ennui.
Thoughts and visions rose into consciousness like monsters coming through a gulf of dim sea-water; all delusion had fallen, and he saw the truth in all its fearsome deformity. On awakening, the implacable externality of things pressed upon his sight until he felt he knew what the mad feel, and then it seemed impossible to begin another day. With long rides, with physical fatigue, he strove to keep at bay the despair-fiend which now had not left him hardly for weeks. For long weeks the disease continued, almost without an intermission; he felt sure that death was the only solution, and he considered the means for encompassing the end with a calm that startled him.
Nor was it until the spring months that he found any subjects that might take him out of his melancholy, and darken the too acute consciousness of the truth of things which was forcing him on to madness or suicide. One day it was suggested that he should stand for Parliament. He eagerly seized the idea, and his brain thronged immediately with visions of political successes, of the parliamentary triumphs he would achieve. Bah! he was an actor at heart, and required the contagion of the multitude, and again he looked out upon life with visionary eyes. Harsh hours fell behind him, gay hours awaited him, held hands to him.
Men wander far from the parent plot of earth; but a strange fatality leads them back, they know not how. None had desired to separate from all associations of early life more than Mike, and he was at once glad and sorry to find that the door through which he was to enter Parliament was Cashel. He would have liked better to represent an English town or county, but he could taste in Cashel a triumph which he could nowhere else in the world. To return triumphant to his native village is the secret of every wanderer’s desire, for there he can claim not only their applause but their gratitude.
The politics he would have to adopt made him wince, for he knew the platitudes they entailed; and in preference he thought of the paradoxes with which he would stupefy the House, the daring and originality he would show in introducing subjects that, till then, no one had dared to touch upon. With the politics of his party he had little intention of concerning himself, for his projects were to make for himself a reputation as an orator, and having confirmed it to seek another constituency at the close of the present Parliament. Such intention lay dormant in the background of his mind, but he had not seen many Irish Nationalists before he was effervescing with rhetoric suitable for the need of the election, and he was sometimes puzzled to determine whether he was false or true.
Driving through Dublin from the steamer, he met Frank Escott. They shouted simultaneously to their carmen to stop.
“Home to London. I’ve just come from Cashel. I went to try to effect some sort of reconciliation with Mount Rorke; but — and you, where are you going?”
“I’m going to Cashel. I’m going to contest the town in the Parnellite interest.”
Each pair of eyes was riveted on the other. For both men thought of the evening when Mike had received the letter notifying that Lady Seeley had left him five thousand a year, and Frank had read in the evening paper that Lady Mount Rorke had given birth to a son. Frank was, as usual, voluble and communicative. He dilated on the painfulness of the salutations of the people he had met on the way going from the station to Mount Rorke; and, instead of walking straight in, as in old times, he had to ask the servant to take his name.
“Burton, the old servant who had known me since I was a boy, seemed terribly cut up, and he was evidently very reluctant to speak the message. ‘I’m very sorry, Mr. Frank,’ he said, ‘but his lordship says he is too unwell to see any one to-day, sir; he is very sorry, but if you would write’ … If I would write! think of it, I who was once his heir, and used the place as if it were mine! Poor old Burton was quite overcome. He tried to ask me to come into the dining-room and have some lunch. If I go there again I shall be asked into the servants’ hall. And at that moment the nurse came, wheeling the baby in the perambulator through the hall, going out for an airing. I tried not to look, but couldn’t restrain my eyes, and the nurse stopped and said, ‘Now then, dear, give your hand to the gentleman, and tell him your name.’ The little thing looked up, its blue eyes staring out of its sallow face, and it held out the little putty-like hand. Poor old Burton turned aside, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and walked into the dining-room.”
“And how did you get away?” asked Mike, who saw his friend’s misfortune in the light of an exquisite chapter in a novel. “How sad the old place must have seemed to you!”
“You are thinking how you could put it in a book — how brutal you are!”
“I assure you you are wrong. I can’t help trying to realize your sensations, but that doesn’t prevent me from being very sorry for you, and I’m sure I shall be very pleased to help you. Do you want any money? Don’t be shy about saying yes. I haven’t forgotten
how you helped me.”
“I really don’t like to ask you, you’ve been very good as it is. However, if you could spare me a tenner?”
“Of course I can. Let’s send these jarvies away, and come into my hotel, and I’ll write you a cheque.”
The sum Frank asked for revealed to Mike exactly the depth to which he had sunk since they had last met. Small as it was, however, it seemed to have had considerable effect in reviving Frank’s spirits, and he proceeded quite cheerfully into the tale of his misfortune. Now it seemed to strike him too in quite a literary light, and he made philosophic comments on its various aspects, as he might on the hero of a book which he was engaged on or contemplated writing.
“No,” he said, “you were quite wrong in supposing that I waited to look back on the old places. I got out of the park through a wood so as to avoid the gate-keeper. In moments of great despair we don’t lapse into pensive contemplation.” … He stopped to pull at the cigar Mike had given him, and when he had got it well alight, he said, “It was really most dramatic, it would make a splendid scene in a play; you might make him murder the baby.”
Half an hour after Mike bade his friend good-bye, glad to be rid of him.
“He’s going back to that beastly wife who lives in some dirty lodging. How lucky I was, after all, not to marry.”
Then, remembering the newspaper, and the use it might be to him when in Parliament, he rushed after Frank. When the Pilgrim was mentioned Frank’s face changed expression, and he seemed stirred with deeper grief than when he related the story of his disinheritance. He had no further connection with the paper. Thigh had worked him out of it.
“I never really despaired,” he said, “until I lost my paper. Thigh has asked me to send him paragraphs, but of course I’m not going to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, hang it, after being the editor of a paper, you aren’t going to send in paragraphs on approval. It isn’t good enough. When I go back to London I shall try to get a sub-editorship.”
Mike pressed another tenner upon him, and returning to the smoking-room, and throwing himself into an arm-chair, he lapsed into dreams of the bands and the banners that awaited him. When animal spirits were ebullient in him, he regarded his election in the light of a vulgar practical joke; when the philosophic mood was upon him he turned from all thought of it as from the smell of a dirty kitchen coming through a grating.
CHAPTER XI
DURING THE FIRST session Mike was hampered and inconvenienced by the forms of the House; in the second, he began to weary of its routine. His wit and paradox attracted some attention; he made one almost successful speech, many that stirred and stimulated the minds of celebrated listeners; but for all that he failed. His failure to redeem the expectations of his friends, produced in him much stress and pain of mind, the more acute because he was fully alive to the cause. He ascribed it rightly to certain inherent flaws in his character. “The world believes in those who believe in it. Such belief may prove a lack of intelligence on the part of the believer, but it secures him success, and success is after all the only thing that compensates for the evil of life.”
Always impressed by new ideas, rarely holding to any impression long, finding all hollow and common very soon, he had been taken with the importance of the national assembly, but it had hardly passed into its third session when all illusion had vanished, and Mike ridiculed parliamentary ambitions in the various chambers of the barristers he frequented.
It was May-time, and never did the Temple wear a more gracious aspect. The river was full of hay-boats, the gardens were green with summer hours. Through the dim sky, above the conical roof of the dear church, the pigeons fled in rapid quest, and in Garden Court, beneath the plane-trees, old folk dozed, listening to the rippling tune of the fountain and the shrilling of the sparrows. In King’s Bench Walk the waving branches were full of their little brown bodies. Sparrows everywhere, flying from the trees to the eaves, hopping on the golden gravel, beautifully carpeted with the rich shadows of the trees — unabashed little birds, scarcely deigning to move out of the path of the young men as they passed to and fro from their offices to the library. “That sweet, grave place where we weave our ropes of sand,” so Mike used to speak of it.
The primness of the books, the little galleries guarded by brass railings, here and there a reading-desk, the sweet silence of the place, the young men reading at the polished oak tables, the colour of the oak and the folios, the rich Turkey carpets, lent to the library that happy air of separation from the brutalities of life which is almost sanctity. These, the familiar aspects of the Temple, moved him with all their old enchantments; he lingered in the warm summer mornings when all the Temple was astir, gossiping with the students, or leaning upon the balustrades in pensive contemplation of the fleet river.
But these moods of passive happiness were interrupted more frequently than they had been in earlier years by the old whispering voice, now grown strangely distinct, which asked, but no longer through laughing lips, if it were possible to discern any purpose in life, and if all thoughts and things were not as vain as a little measure of sand. The dark fruit that hangs so alluringly over the wall of the garden of life now met his eyes frequently, tempting him, and perforce he must stay to touch and consider it. Then, resolved to baffle at all costs the disease which he now knew pursued him, he plunged in the crowd of drunkenness and debauchery which swelled the Strand at night. He was found where prize-fighters brawled, and card-sharpers cajoled; where hall singers fed on truffled dishes, and courtesans laughed and called for champagne. He was seen in Lubini’s sprawling over luncheon tables till late in the afternoon, and at nightfall lingering about the corners of the streets, talking to the women that passed. In such low form of vice he sought escape. He turned to gambling, risking large sums, sometimes imperilling his fortune for the sake of the assuagement such danger brought of the besetting sin. But luck poured thousands into his hands; and he applied himself to the ruin of one seeking to bring about his death.
“Before I kill myself,” he said, “I will kill others; I’m weary of playing at Faust, now I’ll play at Mephistopheles.”
Henceforth all men who had money, or friends who had money, were invited to Temple Gardens. You met there members of both Houses of Parliament — the successors of Muchross and Snowdown; and men exquisitely dressed, with quick, penetrating eyes, assembled there, actors and owners of race-horses galore, and bright-complexioned young men of many affections. Rising now from the piano one is heard to say reproachfully, “You never admire anything I wear,” to a grave friend who had passed some criticism on the flower in the young man’s button-hole.
It was still early in the evening, and the usual company had not yet arrived. Harding stood on the white fur hearthrug, his legs slightly apart, smoking. Mike lay in an easy-chair. His eyes were upon Harding, whom he had not seen for some years, and the sight of him recalled the years when they wrote the Pilgrim together.
He thought how splendid were then his enthusiasms and how genuine his delight in life. It was in this very room that he kissed Lily for the first time. That happy day. Well did he remember how the sun shone upon the great river, how the hay-boats sailed, how the city rose like a vision out of the mist. But Lily lies asleep, far away in a southern land; she lies sleeping, facing Italy — that Italy which they should have seen and dreamed together. At that moment, he brushed from his book a little green insect that had come out of the night, and it disappeared in faint dust.
It was in this room he had seen Lady Helen for the last time; and he remembered how, when he returned to her, after having taken Lily back to the dancing-room, he had found her reading a letter, and almost the very words of the conversation it had given rise to came back to him, and her almost aggressive despair. No one could say why she had shot herself. Who was the man that had deserted her? What was he like? Was it Harding? It was certainly for a lover who had tired of her; and Mike wondered how it were possible to weary
of one so beautiful and so interesting, and he believed that if she had loved him they both would have found content.
“Do you remember, Harding, that it was in this room we saw Lady Helen alive for the last time? What a tragedy that was! Do you remember the room in the Alexandra Hotel, the firelight, with the summer morning coming through the Venetian blinds? Somehow there was a sense of sculpture, even without the beautiful body. Seven years have passed. She has enjoyed seven years of peace and rest; we have endured seven years of fret and worry. Life of course was never worth living, but the common stupidity of the nineteenth century renders existence for those who may see into the heart of things almost unbearable. I confess that every day man’s stupidity seems to me more and more miraculous. Indeed it may be said to be divine, so inherent and so unalterable is it; and to understand it we need not stray from the question in hand — suicide. A man is houseless, he is old, he is friendless, he is starving, he is assailed in every joint by cruel disease; to save himself from years of suffering he lights a pan of charcoal; and, after carefully considering all the circumstances, the jury returns a verdict of suicide while in a state of temporary insanity. Out of years of insanity had sprung a supreme moment of sanity, and no one understands it. The common stupidity, I should say the common insanity, of the world on the subject of suicide is quite comic. A man may destroy his own property, which would certainly be of use to some one, but he may not destroy his own life, which possibly is of use to no one; and if two men conspire to commit suicide and one fails, the other is tried for murder and hanged. Can the mind conceive more perfect nonsense?”
“I cannot say I agree with you,” said Harding; “man’s aversion to suicide seems to me perfectly comprehensible.”
