by George Moore
A moment after my eyes returned to the priest sitting in the railway carriage, to the thin, refined face in which there was neither cruelty nor kindness, only an impersonal will, the will of the tooth in the cog wheel of the machine, no more than that; and I watched it till pity of Cunningham turned to pity of the priest and a dream began to unwind of the intimate horror that possesses a man when he begins to realise that he is no better than a priest.
The train was stopping and the priest left the train at Castlebar to continue his ministrations where and how I have no knowledge.
CHAPTER 11.
NO PASSENGER FOR Westport entered the carriage at Castlebar to distract my thoughts from Cunningham’s last days, and for some time, how long I cannot say, I was considering how the idea of hanging himself had grown in his mind, taking possession of it till nothing else seemed real, or true, or worth thinking about. At times, I said, lie must have been attracted by the idea of escape, as a hunted animal might be, and there must have been other times when he remembered that to take one’s life is a mortal sin for which there is punishment. Yet despite all the descriptions of hell that his mind had been terrorised with, the fear of John-o’-God’s was greater. But how can one know what passed in that failing brain? He must have suffered vaguely and intensely, as a lost dog suffers who knows not whither his master has gone or if he will ever return, or like the bee that has gotten into this carriage and strives to escape through the sunlit pane. A poor bumble bee, a silly insect compared with the bees that used to work in my garden forming combs with such economy of space that the mathematician is obliged to say it could not be done better. But the silly bumble bee merely makes a round hole, and therefore is not able to lay up sufficient store of honey for the winter. My knowledge of bee life here ended, and my thoughts went to the poor bumble anxious to escape from the train. It has been carried long past its hive, I said, if the bumbles have hives, and will not find its way back. It will wander among the furze of you hill and die at season’s close, but that is better than to be slashed down by the porter’s towel at Westport; and forthright I began a chase of the bee, handkerchief in hand, catching the insect at last and throwing it from the window. A moment after it seemed to be back again, or another bee had come in, and overcoming some reluctance to continue the chase, I began it again and the insect was put out to seek sufficient honey for its life among the low rocky hills; if it could not gather honey, to die as bees die, very much as we do, I said, and in the enjoyment of my satisfied conscience fell to wondering at the natural pity that had compelled me to risk being stung for so faint a result as the prolongation of a bee’s life — a week at most, I said, in some fragile bloom. By some odd connection of ideas the bee recalled to my mind a nun that I had not dared to set free, and to help the time away I summoned the circumstances of the happy sunny morning that I started from Paris to meet a lady who was coming from Etretat. We were to spend the day together at Rouen; and, being an adept in the mystery of time-tables, she had informed me of the departure of a certain train from the Gare St. Lazare which would arrive at Rouen at a few minutes past midday and she hoped to find me waiting for her on the platform.
It had been arranged that we were to breakfast together and visit the Cathedral afterwards, and to this happiness I had been looking forward, and not less eagerly to the hours between the Cathedral and dinner: for our courtship had lasted a long while, delayed by the lady’s sense of sin and its consequences, but of late it had seemed to me that her sense of sin had weakened, and so seriously that there was no saying what might not befall her between Cathedral and dinner unless clerestory, nave, aisle or ambulatory should cast her back again into past and present perplexities of conscience. And with the danger of the Cathedral well in my mind, which could not be avoided, but would have to be faced, I repaired to the railway station and waited in a dusty station, enlivened only by the cackling of peasant women and several crates of ducks and geese. The fowls, being packed too tightly for comfort, cackled in terrified accents, thrusting their heads forth, withdrawing them quickly to avoid the caresses of a small boy; and the same pity that had compelled me to release the bee afflicted me again. I should have liked to have given the fowls their freedom, but this was impossible, and I walked perturbed and wearied by the monotonous cackle of peasant women and fowls, till at last a nun lifted her eyes to mine as she passed me by: a strange glance of inquiry it was, a look that I could not do else than to interpret as the appeal of one human being to another for help. That her look was one of appeal I am certain now, after many years, but in the railway station it was different. I remembered as I walked back and forth that I had heard of prostitutes disguising themselves as nuns, but I did not believe the nun who had raised her eyes to mine was a prostitute. If I had, her image would have worn away like the image of a coin, whereas her image is as clear in my mind as the image on a coin just come from the mint; a long thin pointed oval face, well-shapen grey eyes illuminating a white formal pallor, a long thin nose and a small chin; a plain woman it is true, but her plainness was an interesting plainness. The habit she wore was black, without white forehead band; and I remember the well-wrought cross hanging on her breast; she was a young woman who might be twenty — and was not more certainly than twenty-three or four. She passed without loitering, her eyes inviting speech, with a view, I said, to obtaining my help. It cannot be else. But I shall know for certain the next time she passes, and when we crossed each other again as before her eyes threw out the same inquiry.
There were only a few peasant women in the railway station when I arrived. She must have come in a few minutes after me, I said, and if she looks again I’ll speak, and, on a resolve to offer help to the nun if she should ask for help, my eyes went to the clock: the hands pointed to three minutes to twelve and I said: if my lady were to find me engaged in conversation with a nun, my chances of getting her will be prejudiced maybe.
The nun passed out of the station, and I hesitated whether I should follow her. She can’t deceive me, I said; half-a-dozen words and I shall know all about her. Moreover, it isn’t likely that a Rouenaise would rely on such a romantic deception pour faire un hommey an expression that Balzac appreciates as le sublime argot des filles. Moreover, were she a punk she would not come to an empty railway station to ply her trade; and if she did she’d wait for the express from Etretat to come in. It may be that I did not think quite so clearly at the time as I am thinking now, but I’m certain the woman wasn’t a punk disguised as a nun. The moment was an anxious one, so anxious that I remember the wide rough open thoroughfare rising slightly, with trees on either side, and at the head of the road the bridge which she crossed on her way back to the convent — she left it after long resistance, for she could not believe else than that the impulse compelling her to return to life was but a temptation of the devil. She looked back once and the moment remains on my mind in as clear outline as the face of the nun.
The instinct of life, I said, at last broke the chains of prejudice and convention, the door stood invitingly open; she passed out; her courage carried her to the railway, and what is more likely than that in her soul crisis she forgot she had no money for her journey. Nuns have no money! At sight of me hope blossomed again in her heart. I looked like one who would sympathise, who would understand, and who could lend her the sum of money she needed.
She would have said: as soon as I reached home my relations, my friends, will return you the money you so kindly lent me, and my answer would have been: a letter from you telling me how you fare will be preferable. The debt, if you will let it remain one, will be a gift inestimable.
These words we might have exchanged in the few minutes before the train arrived from Etretat; they would have been treasured like jewels and would have cheered me when myself seemed to myself no more than a shameful incident in the stream of life. The words we would have exchanged would have helped me to remember that I was worth at least one good action, but the good action drifted by me as the saving plank dr
ifts by a swimmer. Nor is it too much to say that her words would have brightened my death-bed. But I missed my adventure, remaining hypnotised by an imaginary fear: my lady would have loved me better for my action when she heard the story, and it would have rendered her immune from the influence of the Cathedral. But why think of her, she is no part of the story that filled my heart to overflowing on the way to Westport.
Her chance gone by for ever, I said, she will return to her convent to weep till her heart becomes dry; the piercing will at first seem unendurable, but it will die down till she feels nothing of the old desire, no faintest echo of it, and she’ll be glad and believe the peace she is enjoying comes from God, unsuspicious that it is the absorption of the individual will in the will of the community.
CHAPTER 12.
WE WERE NOW within three miles of Westport, its hills unveiling crest after crest to eyes that rejoice in outline. How is it, I asked myself, that we can always tell if an artist has drawn a hill badly? — a hill may be of any shape, yet we can say always if a hill in a picture is well drawn. It would not be true to say that the Dublin mountains are ill drawn, though they are as shapeless as pillows and bolsters, in a bad light, and no better than waves in a good. Now if Monet had drawn them — But would he draw what was not laid out for drawing? As there is a great deal in nature that is not laid out for drawing, the first business of the artist is to select; a head, badly placed in the canvas and badly lighted, demands all the skill of a great artist, and even he may not be able to do what Nature has set her face against his doing. We must not, I continued, enter into competition with nature, and all the lack-lustre pictures painted in the eighties rose up before my eyes: the strips of grey sky and the sage-green foregrounds we used to admire. We used to admire Watts, who entered into competition with Titian; but all competition is to be deplored, I cried out, somewhere between Castlebar and Westport, æsthetic reverie after æsthetic reverie helping the time away till a beautiful bridge came in sight of ten or a dozen tall arches spanning a deep valley, the tallest arch rising to at least a hundred feet.
The straight parapet reminded me of Waterloo Bridge. Waterloo Bridge passes into slums, I said, but on the thither side this bridge is engulfed in woods — an admirable bridge, a delightful contribution to a beautiful town, declining, it is true, but are not all neighbourhoods declining? Piccadilly is now a mart consisting principally of tobacco and jewellery shops, interspersed with clubs — the clubs were once the dwellings of the aristocracy of England — Lord Palmerston’s house only ceased to be his house in my boyhood; and for long afterwards Piccadilly was a great residential quarter. Park Lane, once so dandy, has fallen into a vulgar thoroughfare through which many hundreds of buses pass daily. And if we cross the Channel we find the same decadence. The Champs Elysées is a mere show of motor cars, and the Place Vendôme a market for picture bonnets, gowns and jewellery. And let us not think of the great Palais Royal and who lived there, lest we burst into tears at the thought of its ruin. And our café has become the haunt of panders and punks. As all the world declines visibly it would be vain to expect Westport to be exempt from the general declension. But this may be said:
Westport declines beautifully; abandoned mills may be a sad spectacle in the eyes of the merchant, but in the artist’s eyes these warehouses rise up “like palaces in the dusk,” and no ugly one, though the sun be shining and an east wind blowing, for saplings have grown up and birds have discovered a paradise amid the ruins.
A river, spanned in the principal street by stone bridges, flows through Westport, and the stream is lined with noble elms, with seats between the trees for the vagrant, and some beautiful houses for his regalement. The bank was once the house to which the Dowager Lady Sligo was wont to retire on the marriage of her son, and to this day it is known as the Dower House. Her journey, no doubt accomplished in a coach and four, was not a long one, for the gates of the domain faced the little river that proceeds through the domain out into the sea. It is sad that the beautiful house, with as noble a sweep of staircase as any in Merrion Square, should have been turned into a prosaic bank, and we seek consolation and find it in the domain wall, a great piece of feudal masonry that ascends hills and drops into valleys mile after mile.
Westport strikes off to the right and left sporadically, with here and there a house, telling that in former times Westport had some culture; a quiet life of sedate embroideries no doubt flourished behind finely proportioned windows of which only a few remain. About four beautiful houses remain, I said, and the car turned up a street that put the eighteenth century clean out of my mind: here at least, I said, there can have been no declension, for what I see is Ireland in essence — broken pavements with a desolating tide of children, pouring over the thresholds of almost underground dwellings. And the street ends characteristically, I added, in some shards and splinters of cottages.
We passed some school buildings where a pastor was engaged in admonishing the little flock before the lambs returned to the ewes for dinner, and the sight of him reminded me of another pastor, a few hundred yards away, in the street leading up the hill to the rectory. He, too, is anxious, I said, that there shall be no strayings; that the flock shall depart in good order and keep to the straight road.
And this opposition of Catholics and Protestants puts into my mind thoughts of Stevenson in the Cevennes and the aphorism that he so often heard on the lips of the mountaineers — it is a bad thing for a man to change. And so convinced is he of the truth of this aphorism that he repeats it in his narrative two or three times, saying that a man’s religion is the poetry of the man’s experience, the philosophy of the history of his life, and that a man may not vary from his faith unless he can eradicate all memory of the past, and in a strict and not conventional meaning change his mind. The glitter of the words and the sentimentality captivate the reader till he lays aside the book and begins to remember that the Cevennians were Catholics before they were Protestants, and that before they were Catholics they were heathen — facts that disturb his enjoyment of Stevenson’s style, for it would seem impossible to admire words, however prettily they may flourish, if they put forth an untruth.
In his pursuit of style Stevenson seems to have forgotten that for the enjoyment of the religious stagnation he recommends we must wait for the next world; it has never existed in this and would seem to be contrary to the conditions of our mortal life. “We cannot bathe twice in the same river,” a philosopher said long ago, and his disciples added afterwards: “we cannot bathe once in the same river.” Scotsmen are almost proverbially metaphysical, but a great man is an exception in his own country; were it not so Stevenson could not have failed to perceive that Protestantism and Catholicism are states of soul, the possessions of mankind rather than of any particular race or family, rising up in the same country and in the same family spontaneously and without apparent cause. Peter was a Catholic and Paul was a Protestant, and a thousand years before Peter and Paul were born there were Protestants and Catholics. So in the strict sense there is no conversion; we merely discover in our hearts what we brought into the world with us, a disposition leading us to pious practices or an inly sense of divinity.
A striking illustration of a man becoming possessed of a sudden sense of divinity is given by Stevenson in the very pages that I am criticising. Stevenson had cast his camp under some chestnut-trees where he had slept ill, the ground being full of ants; and there being no water in the garden he made his toilet in the waters of the tarn before continuing his journey through a valley, overtaking an old man, who walked beside him talking about the morning and the valley. Connaissez vous le Seigneur? the old man asked. And as if averse from giving a direct answer Stevenson asked him what Seigneur. The peasant only repeated the question and Stevenson answered: now I understand you. Yes, I know him. He is the best of acquaintances; and delighted at this answer the old Plymouth Brother cried, striking his bosom: it makes me happy here. A truly Protestant state of feeling, so much so that the words br
ing a responsive thrill into the heart of every Protestant that reads them. Of this Stevenson seems to have been aware, but he does not seem to have understood that this peasant might have a son who would be more moved by the motion of a priest’s finger giving him a blessing than by the spectacle of the sun-rise.
The old Plymouth Brother follows Stevenson to the inn and listens to him in admiration and delight, feeling for the first time the spiritual intimacy of which he has been long deprived, his lot having been cast in the Catholic village. There are many of us up yonder, he said, none here. Stevenson draws a comparison between his own feelings regarding this man and the feelings of the excellent friar whom he met road-making on the summits leading to the monastery, “Our Lady of the Snows.” I have not got the passage before me, but I think that my memory does not betray me. Stevenson admits that with some reservations he can make common cause with the Plymouth Brother; but he finds himself aloof in the company of the friar, though he is constrained to allow that the friar is as worthy a man as the Plymouth Brother. This seems to me to be true. If a man be of a Protestant kin he is at home and at spiritual communion with all Protestant sects — Congregationalists, Quakers, Methodists and Unitarians. He is not separated from them as he is from Papists. An Agnostic, too, is at home with all Protestant sects. Whether a man stays away from church or goes to church is a matter of no importance. He may be an atheist and still feel himself to be of the same communion as Protestants, for atheism and Protestantism rest on the same foundation — the right of private judgment. Nor can theological difference concern us Protestants very acutely, for no man knows what he believes, moral differences are more important, and it follows that if we surrender our right of private judgment we become if not immoral at least unmoral; and that is why Protestants feel themselves so strangely aloof among Catholics. Any curtailment of the body operates on the mind, and the stinted mind soon begins to put on a different complexion, as none can have failed to notice that keep cats. The Tom from next door is manifestly ill at ease in the company of my Blackie, who has been to the butcher, and I have often thought that the embarrassment he feels is not unlike mine when I happened to drift into the company of Papists.
