Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  The child was snatched from Patsy, and so violently that the infant began to cry, and Mrs. Egan didn’t know if it was a hurt it had received, for the panting Patsy was unable to answer her.

  ‘The child’s all right,’ he blurted out at last. ‘She said I might take it and welcome, now it was a Protestant.’

  ‘Ah, sure, you great thickhead of a boy! weren’t you quick enough for her?’

  ‘Now, what are you talkin’ about? Hadn’t she half a mile start of me, and the minister at the door just as I was gettin’ over the last bit of a wall!’

  ‘And didn’t you go in after them?’

  ‘What would I be doin’, going into a Protestant church?’

  Patsy’s sense of his responsibility was discussed violently until Father Oliver said:

  ‘Now, I can’t be waiting any longer. Do you want me to baptize the child or not?’

  ‘It would be safer, wouldn’t it?’ said Mrs. Egan.

  ‘It would,’ said Father Oliver; ‘the parson mightn’t have said the words while he was pouring the water.’

  And, going towards the font with the child, Father Oliver took a cup of water, but, having regard for the child’s cries, he was a little sparing with it.

  ‘Now don’t be sparin’ with the water, your reverence, and don’t be a mindin’ its noise; it’s twicest the quantity of holy water it’ll be wanting, and it half an hour a Protestant.’

  It was at that moment Mrs. Rean appeared in the doorway, and Patsy Kivel, who didn’t care to enter the Protestant church, rushed to put her out of his.

  ‘You can do what you like now with the child; it’s a Protestant, for all your tricks.’

  ‘Go along, you old heretic bitch!’

  ‘Now, Patsy, will you behave yourself when you’re standing in the Church of God! Be leaving the woman alone,’ said Father Oliver; but before he got to the door to separate the two, Mrs. Rean was running down the chapel yard followed by the crowd of disputants, and he heard the quarrel growing fainter in the village street.

  Rose-coloured clouds had just begun to appear midway in the pale sky — a beautiful sky, all gray and rose — and all this babble about baptism seemed strangely out of his mind. ‘And to think that men are still seeking scrolls in Turkestan to prove—’ The sentence did not finish itself in his mind; a ray of western light falling across the altar steps in the stillness of the church awakened a remembrance in him of the music that Nora’s hands drew from the harmonium, and, leaning against the Communion-rails, he allowed the music to absorb him. He could hear it so distinctly in his mind that he refrained from going up into the gallery and playing it, for in his playing he would perceive how much he had forgotten, how imperfect was his memory. It were better to lose himself in the emotion of the memory of the music; it was in his blood, and he could see her hands playing it, and the music was coloured with the memory of her hair and her eyes. His teeth clenched a little as if in pain, and then he feared the enchantment would soon pass away; but the music preserved it longer than he had expected, and it might have lasted still longer if he had not become aware that someone was standing in the doorway.

  The feeling suddenly came over him that he was not alone; it was borne in upon him — he knew not how, neither by sight nor sound — through some exceptional sense. And turning towards the sunlit doorway, he saw a poor man standing there, not daring to disturb the priest, thinking, no doubt, that he was engaged in prayer. The poor man was Pat Kearney. So the priest was a little overcome, for that Pat Kearney should come to him at such a time was portentous. ‘It is strange, certainly, coincidence after coincidence,’ he said; and he stood looking at Pat as if he didn’t know him, till the poor man was frightened and began to wonder, for no one had ever looked at him with such interest, not even the neighbour whom he had asked to marry him three weeks ago. And this Pat Kearney, who was a short, thick-set man, sinking into years, began to wonder what new misfortune had tracked him down. His teeth were worn and yellow as Indian meal, and his rough, ill-shaven cheeks and pale eyes reminded the priest of the country in which Pat lived, and of the four acres of land at the end of the boreen that Pat was digging these many years.

  He had come to ask Father Oliver if he would marry him for a pound, but, as Father Oliver didn’t answer him, he fell to thinking that it was his clothes that the priest was admiring, ‘for hadn’t his reverence given him the clothes himself? And if it weren’t for the self-same clothes, he wouldn’t have the pound in his pocket to give the priest to marry him,’

  ‘It was yourself, your reverence—’

  ‘Yes, I remember very well.’

  Pat had come to tell him that there was work to be had in Tinnick, but that he didn’t dare to show himself in Tinnick for lack of clothes, and he stood humbly before the priest in a pair of corduroy trousers that hardly covered his nakedness.

  And it was as Father Oliver stood examining and pitying his parishioner’s poverty it had occurred to him that, if he were to buy two suits of clothes in Tinnick and give one to Pat Kearney, he might wrap the other one in a bundle, and place it on the rocks on the Joycetown side. It was not likely that the shopman in Tinnick would remember, after three months, that he had sold two suits to the priest; but should he remember this, the explanation would be that he had bought them for Pat Kearney. Now, looking at this poor man who had come to ask him if he would marry him for a pound, the priest was lost in wonder.

  ‘So you’re going to be married, Pat?’

  And Pat, who hadn’t spoken to anyone since the woman whose potatoes he was digging said she’d as soon marry him as another, began to chatter, and to ramble in his chatter. There was so much to tell that he did not know how to tell it. There was his rent and the woman’s holding, for now they would have nine acres of land, money would be required to stock it, and he didn’t know if the bank would lend him the money. Perhaps the priest would help him to get it.

  ‘But why did you come to me to marry you? Aren’t you two miles nearer to Father Moran than you are to me?’

  Pat hesitated, not liking to say that he would be hard set to get round Father Moran. So he began to talk of the Egans and the Reans. For hadn’t he heard, as he came up the street, that Mrs. Rean had stolen the child from Mrs. Egan, and had had it baptized by the minister? And he hoped to obtain the priest’s sympathy by saying:

  ‘What a terrible thing it was that the police should allow a black Protestant to steal a Catholic child, and its mother a Catholic and all her people before her!’

  ‘When Mrs. Rean snatched the child, it hadn’t been baptized, and was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant,’ the priest said maliciously.

  Pat Kearney, whose theological knowledge did not extend very far, remained silent, and the priest was glad of his silence, for he was thinking that in a few minutes he would catch sight of the square whitewashed school-house on the hillside by the pine-wood, and the thought came into his mind that he would like to see again the place where he and Nora once stood talking together. But a long field lay between his house and the school-house, and what would it avail him to see the empty room? He looked, instead, for the hawthorn-bush by which he and Nora had lingered, and it was a sad pleasure to think how she had gone up the road after bidding him good-bye.

  But Pat Kearney began to talk again of how he could get an advance from the bank.

  ‘I can back no bill for you, Pat, but I’ll give you a letter to Father Moran telling him that you can’t afford to pay more than a pound.’

  Nora’s letters were in the drawer of his writing-table; he unlocked it, and put the packet into his pocket, and when he had scribbled a little note to Father Moran, he said:

  ‘Now take this and be off with you; I’ve other business to attend to besides you;’ and he called to Catherine for his towels.

  ‘Now, is it out bathing you’re going, your reverence? You won’t be swimming out to Castle Island, and forgetting that you have confessions at seven?’

  ‘I shall be back in
time,’ he answered testily, and soon after he began to regret his irritation; for he would never see Catherine again, saying to himself that it was a pity he had answered her testily. But he couldn’t go back. Moran might call. Catherine might send Moran after him, saying his reverence had gone down to bathe, or any parishioner, however unwarranted his errand, might try to see him out. ‘And all errands will be unwarranted to-day,’ he said as he hurried along the shore, thinking of the different paths round the rocks and through the blackthorn-bushes.

  His mind was on the big wood; there he could baffle anybody following him, for while his pursuer would be going round one way he would be coming back the other. But it would be lonely in the big wood; and as he hurried down the old cart-track he thought how he might while away an hour among the ferns in the little spare fields at the end of the plantation, watching the sunset, for hours would have to pass before the moon rose, and the time would pass slowly under the melancholy hazel-thickets into which the sun had not looked for thousands of years. A wood had always been there. The Welshmen had felled trees in it to build rafts and boats to reach their island castles. Bears and wolves had been slain in it; and thinking how it was still a refuge for foxes, martens and badgers and hawks, he made his way along the shore through the rough fields. He ran a little, and after waiting a while ran on again. On reaching the edge of the wood, he hid himself behind a bush, and did not dare to move, lest there might be somebody about. It was not till he made sure there was no one that he stooped under the blackthorns, and followed a trail, thinking the animal, probably a badger, had its den under the old stones; and to pass the time he sought for a den, but could find none.

  A small bird, a wren, was picking among the moss; every now and then it fluttered a little way, stopped, and picked again. ‘Now what instinct guided its search for worms?’ he asked, and getting up, he followed the bird, but it escaped into a thicket. There were only hazel-stems in the interspace he had chosen to hide himself in, but there were thickets nearly all about it, and it took some time to find a path through these. After a time one was found, and by noticing everything he tried to pass the time away and make himself secure against being surprised.

  The path soon came to an end, and he walked round to the other side of the wood, to see if the bushes were thick enough to prevent anyone from coming upon him suddenly from that side; and when all searches were finished he came back, thinking of what his future life would be without Nora. But he must not think of her, he must learn to forget her; for the time being at least, his consideration must be of himself in his present circumstances, and he felt that if he did not fix his thoughts on external things, his courage — or should he say his will? — would desert him. It did not need much courage to swim across the lake, much more to leave the parish, and once on the other side he must go any whither, no whither, for he couldn’t return to Catherine in a frieze coat and a pair of corduroy trousers. Her face when she saw him! But of what use thinking of these things? He was going; everything was settled. If he could only restrain his thoughts — they were as wild as bees.

  Standing by a hazel-stem, his hand upon a bough, he fell to thinking what his life would be, and very soon becoming implicated in a dream, he lost consciousness of time and place, and was borne away as by a current; he floated down his future life, seeing his garret room more clearly than he had ever seen it — his bed, his washhand-stand, and the little table on which he did his writing. No doubt most of it would be done in the office, but some of it would be done at home; and at nightfall he would descend from his garret like a bat from the eaves.

  Journalists flutter like bats about newspaper offices. The bats haunt the same eaves, but the journalist drifts from city to city, from county to county, busying himself with ideas that were not his yesterday, and will not be his to-morrow. An interview with a statesman is followed by a review of a book, and the day after he may be thousands of miles away, describing a great flood or a railway accident. The journalist has no time to make friends, and he lives in no place long enough to know it intimately; passing acquaintance and exterior aspects of things are his share of the world. And it was in quest of such vagrancy of ideas and affections that he was going.

  At that moment a sudden sound in the wood startled him from his reverie, and he peered, a scared expression on his face, certain that the noise he had heard was Father Moran’s footstep. It was but a hare lolloping through the underwood, and wondering at the disappointment he felt, he asked if he were disappointed that Moran had not come again to stop him. He didn’t think he was, only the course of his life had been so long dependent on a single act of will that a hope had begun in his mind that some outward event might decide his fate for him. Last month he was full of courage, his nerves were like iron; to-day he was a poor vacillating creature, walking in a hazel-wood, uncertain lest delay had taken the savour out of his adventure, his attention distracted by the sounds of the wood, by the snapping of a dry twig, by a leaf falling through the branches.

  ‘Time is passing,’ he said, ‘and I must decide whether I go to America to write newspaper articles, or stay at home to say Mass — a simple matter, surely.’

  The ordinary newspaper article he thought he could do as well as another — in fact, he knew he could. But could he hope that in time his mind would widen and deepen sufficiently to enable him to write something worth writing, something that might win her admiration? Perhaps, when he had shed all his opinions. Many had gone already, more would follow, and one day he would be as free as she was. She had been a great intellectual stimulus, and soon he began to wonder how it was that all the paraphernalia of religion interested him no longer, how he seemed to have suddenly outgrown the things belonging to the ages of faith, and the subtle question, if passion were essential to the growth of the mind, arose. For it seemed to him that his mind had grown, though he had not read the Scriptures, and he doubted if the reading of the Scriptures would have taught him as much as Nora’s beauty. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘woman’s beauty is more important to the world than a scroll.’ He had begun to love and to put his trust in what was natural, spontaneous, instinctive, and might succeed in New York better than he expected. But he would not like to think that it was hope of literary success that tempted him from Garranard. He would like to think that in leaving his poor people he was serving their best interests, and this was surely the case. For hadn’t he begun to feel that what they needed was a really efficient priest, one who would look after their temporal interests? In Ireland the priest is a temporal as well as a spiritual need. Who else would take an interest in this forlorn Garranard and its people, the reeds and rushes of existence?

  He had striven to get the Government to build a bridge, but had lost patience; he had wearied of the task. Certain priests he knew would not have wearied of it; they would have gone on heckling the Government and the different Boards until the building of the bridge could no longer be resisted. His failure to get this bridge was typical, and it proved beyond doubt that he was right in thinking he had no aptitude for the temporal direction of his parish.

  But a curate had once lived in Bridget Clery’s cottage who had served his people excellently well, had intrigued successfully, and forced the Government to build houses and advance money for drainage and other useful works. And this curate had served his people in many capacities — as scrivener, land-valuer, surveyor, and engineer. It was not till he came to Garranard that he seemed to get out of touch with practical affairs, and he began to wonder if it was the comfortable house he lived in, if it were the wine he drank, the cigars he smoked, that had produced this degeneracy, if it were degeneracy. Or was it that he had worn out a certain side of his nature in Bridget Clery’s cottage? It might well be that. Many a man has mistaken a passing tendency for a vocation. We all write poetry in the beginning of our lives; but most of us leave off writing poetry after some years, unless the instinct is very deep or one is a fool. It might well be that his philanthropic instincts were exhausted; and
it might well be that this was not the case, for one never gets at the root of one’s nature.

  The only thing he was sure of was that he had changed a great deal, and, he thought, for the better. He seemed to himself a much more real person than he was a year ago, being now in full possession of his soul, and surely the possession of one’s soul is a great reality. By the soul he meant a special way of feeling and seeing. But the soul is more than that — it is a light; and this inner light, faint at first, had not been blown out. If he had blown it out, as many priests had done, he would not have experienced any qualms of conscience. The other priests in the diocese experienced none when they drove erring women out of their parishes, and the reason of this was that they followed a light from without, deliberately shutting out the light of the soul.

  The question interested him, and he pondered it a long while, finding himself at last forced to conclude that there is no moral law except one’s own conscience, and that the moral obligation of every man is to separate the personal conscience from the impersonal conscience. By the impersonal conscience he meant the opinions of others, traditional beliefs, and the rest; and thinking of these things he wandered round the Druid stones, and when his thoughts returned to Nora’s special case he seemed to understand that if any other priest had acted as he had acted he would have acted rightly, for in driving a sinful woman out of the parish he would be giving expression to the moral law as he understood it and as Garranard understood it. This primitive code of morals was all Garranard could understand in its present civilization, and any code is better than no code. Of course, if the priest were a transgressor himself he could not administer the law. Happily, that was a circumstance that did not arise often. So it was said; but what did he know of the souls of the priests with whom he dined, smoked pipes, and played cards? And he stopped, surprised, for it had never occurred to him that all a man knows of his fellow is whether he be clean or dirty, short or tall, thin or stout. ‘Even the soul of Moran is obscure to me,’ he said— ‘obscure as this wood;’ and at that moment the mystery of the wood seemed to deepen, and he stood for a long while looking through the twilight of the hazels.