by George Moore
The falsetto scream that comes out of Ireland and a certain untrustworthiness in the national character may be traced back to the relinquishment of the right to private judgment; without it a man is not wholly a man, I said, and striving immediately afterwards to mitigate the thought that had come into my mind, I continued: but all is not black or white; grey is the primal colour. There are Protestant Catholics, and there are Catholic Protestants. But are there? I asked. And is grey as interesting in live animals as it is on the painter’s palette? And are the all-buts more interesting than the pure neutrals?
CHAPTER 13.
THE HOUSE STANDS at the foot of the hill between the end of the street and the high wood, hidden behind walls, only its long low roof showing, the passenger along the foot-path getting no more than a glimpse of it through the tall gates, open only for carriages and motors, ourselves coming and going by the wicket. A somewhat gloomy residence it must seem to him who stops before the gates, the charm and life of the house being on the other side, about a lawn shelving steeply, and rising up as steeply to the high wood. A river is heard muttering in the valley, and its banks come into view presently describing a curve so formal that our thoughts are carried back into the eighteenth century, when labour could be obtained for sixpence a day. It was then, we say, the river was deviated from its natural course to make a beautiful little domain.
A foison of briers and ash saplings has grown out of the river’s walls and is pitching them stone by stone into the river, adding to its picturesqueness. And for a week, I say to myself, as I hand the carman his fare, I shall listen to the brown river bubbling past a great cedar; and when I go to the tennis ground I shall cross it by a plank bridge.
From the tennis ground the lawn slants upwards, pleasantly diversified by bunched hawthorns, casting, I say to myself as I wait on the doorstep, having rung the bell, round beautiful shadows about five o’clock in the afternoon.
About the house are tall ash-trees and beeches, and these are filled in June with young rooks trying their wings from branch to branch. If the breeze shakes the branch too violently they fall into the shrubberies, where the parent bird, who would feed them, may seek them and find them. One of the girls shoots the young rooks with a pea rifle as they swing; and this always seems to me a cruelty; for rooks are not eaten in Ireland. It may matter little to the dead birds whether they are thrown to cats or dogs, or whether they are baked in pies; but the same might be said of ourselves, that it matters little to a man whether he lies in a vault or is thrown on a dung-hill; yet we cannot detach our hopes from vaults, wherefore then should not young rooks be prejudiced in favour of internment in pies, for it were surely more honourable to lie with hard-boiled eggs and bacon, under a dome of well-kneaded pastry, than to be dragged about a greensward by a dog — too often the fate of thoughtless young rooks, I said last year, and shall say the same this year as I sit on the shelving lawn convinced that there is nothing in this world more beautiful than the round shadows of hawthorn-trees dropping down a grassy hillside, and of all when the grassy hillside ascends towards a high wood.
Only in this house and on this lawn and during the June weather do I escape from literature, from secretaries, from manuscripts, from proofs, and surrender myself to an almost thoughtless idleness, and to snatches of conversations with my friends, who have too many projects of their own to attend to one who has no project outside of his dreams.
A girl rises from the breakfast-table saying she has a bicycle ride of many miles in front of her; another speaks of a fishing-party, and when the family collects about the dinner-table, one narrating the adventures of her ride, another telling how a fortnight hence she and another girl will be camping out on one of the islands in the bay, I begin to think that I should be a different George Moore if I were married. There would be a difference certainly, and a very real difference, and in this house the difference appeals to me as a subject of a story; the invention of my married self would be a real flight of the imagination, and the struggle between myself and circumstance a piece of literature. The wife I should choose for æsthetical reasons may be revealed to me in a sudden flash as I sit on the sunny lawn if the day be fine, or if it be wet, as I read in the billiard-room looking forward to my walk through the most musical wood in the world, a river tumbling round and over the boulders, a sort of ground-base accompaniment to the songs of blackbirds and thrushes.
A river flowing through a high wood awakens our childhood, not dead but sleeping; our primal imaginations return to us — dragons, giants and elves; and so eager are we to escape from the present back into the past that we begin to feel an annoyance creep up in us as we descend the shelving lawn. The old-fashioned flowers whose names are familiar do not let us from the past, but the flowering bushes — certain pink flowers whose name is perhaps begonia — impede us, and a strange word “calceolaria,” a plant or bush, bearing some ugly yellow flower or berry, we know not which, bars our way, and imprisons us in the present. But the wood will give back our childhood to us; in this moment of crisis we remember at the bend of the river some dark spiky foliage favoured with a name so beautiful that our memory should have retained it without difficulty from one year to the next; but again it has passed out of our mind. But as soon as this dense growth is behind me, I say to myself, I shall be among forest trees, the humble cow-parsley and lowly blue-bells and the winning speedwell running in and out between the tall grasses will set me thinking once again that there is no flower that speaks as plainly as the speedwell, not even the wild geranium which I shall find higher up in the wood overhanging the stream.
As I approach the woodland I continue to enumerate the flowers I shall meet there: the speedwell will brighten my way, and I shall catch sight of rocket here and there amid the tall grasses, and peonies white and pink and purple. Rhododendrons are all through the high wood. I shall see again a tall spray of rhododendron flowering in the lonely twilight of a wooded island, maybe, and for sure I shall walk under pale green foliage filled with noisy rooks, talking of course, but of what? Ah! if we knew.
CHAPTER 14.
MY EVERY STEP produces a clamour of wings in the greenery above me: the jackdaws have nests in the holes in the elm and their caw is softer than the rook’s, and as I walk I regret not being able to take back a jackdaw to London for a pet, for no bird is more inclined to domesticity than he is, quitting his kind for our kind if he received any slight encouragement to do so.
In a moment, and without my being conscious of the departure of rooks and jackdaws, two birds that the gardener told me last year were dippers engage my attention, and I remember that the name he put upon them did not satisfy me, and how pleasurable it was to seek them out in an illustrated book and to discover the almost tailess birds shapen like wrens, with white waist-coats, to be water-ousels — birds that had merely a Wordsworthian reality for me till I saw them in Westport.
It is delightful to meet in life what one is a little weary of meeting in poetry; to watch the rapid beat of their wings as they fly, resting every twenty or thirty yards upon a boulder, now and then plunging into the water, to run along the bottom in search of worms, so the book informed me, and it became a passion in me to try to verify the fact.
The birds go under water in search of food, there could be no doubt of that, since they did not seek their food on land; but the nature of the food they sought could hardly be worms; for worms do not live under water; and standing like a stock I apply myself to the observation of the birds without however gathering a single fact except that their flight is short and rapid like the kingfisher’s; and I say to myself: to note anything new about them I shall have to discover their nest; for they have a nest here surely, though the season is late. One only meets them on the island, if I may call it such. An island it was certainly in the mind of the eighteenth-century designer, but the channel he dug has filled up with mud, but with mud still sufficiently liquid to justify the appellation of island to a very beautiful and romantic spot protected b
y mud on one side and a river on the other from sight-seers beguiled to trespass by the tranquillity of these woods, and the high ruin hanging over the crest of the hill. None knows that island except the water-ousels, I say to myself as I walk thither; and birds who do not frequent trees nest in old walls.
But how beautiful are the trees in their island seclusion; and with unwearying fondness my eyes wander among the tall stems and out upon the branches, admiring the anatomy and the architecture, convinced, and my conviction is ecstatic, that in this world there is nothing so admirable as a tree, or so mysterious. Small wonder, I say, that men have worshipped them; would that I too might worship, and upon the wings of a perfervid desire of worship my thoughts melt into a thoughtless contemplation of an overhanging tree that a boy would have liked to use as a bridge, but being no longer a boy I meditate on the noble gesture, saying to myself: a fallen or falling tree humanises a wood.
The ousels have disappeared into the nest that I shall never find; and I move up the path that I may get a better view of the great white wall of an ancient mill pierced with many windows, through which the sunset will pour as the last train rattles over the viaduct on its way to Achill, emphasising the solitude of the wood as it ascends amid high rock.
It could not have been else than here, I say, that my infantile eyes would have espied dragons, giants and elves in the twilight of overhanging clefts; and who can say they are not here still. ’Tis our former selves that have vanished; we are always losing and winning something; nothing is permanent within or without. In childhood I saw dragons, giants and elves, and now I see high trees, ivy clad, lifting themselves with lovely gesture out of a tangle of hawthorn, with the pale pink rhododendron blossom resting atop of its tall stem in the solitude of a wooded island — the same as last year. Of what have I to complain? — we only change our visions; and my philosophy is confirmed a few yards farther on by a group of laburnums venturing into the river for all the world like a group of golden-haired nymphs.
The hart’s tongue and the Royal Osmunda should do well here, I say, and my eyes begin a search for the tall, pale, reed-like fern of which there is not one about, and I pause, for at that moment an otter slides into the river noiselessly; and seeing the dark animal come up with a fish in its mouth and disappear into the bank, I begin to think of the hungry cubs at the end of a hole about three feet deep, of all I had read about tame otters, and of the stiffness of the ascent up the hill-side — an ascent that a few years hence I shall undertake with some little difficulty, but which to-day is pleasant exercise.
The path leads through tall boles rising like spears, a beech wood; and soon after I find myself beset as of yore by thoughts regarding a wall some twenty feet high descending steeply into a lovely hollow and rising up again as steeply, saying to myself: a strange thought it was surely to build a wall twenty feet high through a wood: but it adds to the mystery of this little domain designed so finely by Nature one that, Le Nôtre would have said, I can neither add to nor curtail.
And on coming out of the wood I find myself on a sort of terrace or terraced walk overlooking the deer park — a deer park of twenty acres! In the eighteenth century a deer park was a necessary adjunct to every gentleman’s residence, and in Ireland the eighteenth century did not end till 1870, therefore, in my boyhood, almost every residence of distinction in Mayo had a deer park — that Moore Hall should be without one was a source of shame and regret to me; and it was not infrequent for me to drop into meditations regarding a possible extension of the Stone Park. As late as the sixties there were deer in Castle Carra; and the great mass of brushwood (through which we used to wend our way with our luncheons — a picnic in the ruined castle was a pleasure looked forward to eagerly) might be purchased from Sir Robert Blosse if one of our race-horses would win a big race. And these dreams of long ago were revived by the miniature deer park of Westport Lodge — a deer park of twenty acres, in which the last stag was shot some years ago on account of his refusal to share his paddock or park with a jackass; the jackass was required for the children, and the stag was an old friend that lived on excellent terms with everybody but the jackass, what was to be done? And the perplexity the stag caused in his life did not end with his death; nobody would eat this noble and affable friend. He was given to the dogs, I believe. But away with such memories.
Above me rises a wall of great height covered with a thick green creeper, heart-shapen papery leaves forming an obscure growth at the foot of the wall, and filled with a blue flower so uninteresting that it is called periwinkle; nor does it deserve a nobler name, and only a man lacking in the finer instincts would stop to consider it on a terrace commanding so admirable a view — the wooded park descending in many beautiful shapes, and beyond its trees the roofs of the town showing against the dark sides of the Westport hills; hill after hill rising up in rugged outlines like bastions designed as if to support the almost too perfect symmetry of St Patrick’s Hill. A peak as regular as the famous volcano that the Japanese painters spent their lives in the eighteenth century drawing and redrawing, and saying to each other: if we live for another fifty years we may produce a drawing that will satisfy us. But in Ireland nobody draws, and popular imagination was satisfied by the building of a tiresome church on the top of it, whither pilgrims go wearing their shoe leather away and emptying their pockets. A Whilom volcano, so it is said, in the back end of time, some five hundred thousand years maybe before the birth of man. I had once thought that with five hundred tons of dynamite the regularity of the peak might be undone, but to-day it seems to me that the peak is all right in its landscape. I would change nothing, not even the church that has been built atop of St Patrick. In God’s good time the people will weary of prayers and turn to drawing, and what a vision of outlines for their pencils. On looking into the gap between the trees and the Westport hills, we see a faint blue line of dentilated hills almost lost to view in about five and twenty of thirty miles of distance, the first chain of the Connemara mountains.
CHAPTER 15.
AT THIS MOMENT Jim comes panting to heel, having failed to get on the trail of a rabbit.
Jim is May’s dog; and I may have been guilty of an error in composition in not having introduced the reader to the lean, long-legged fox terrier who finds it at first difficult to remember me over the long interval of eleven months. He sniffs and sniffs again, his memory returning with every sniff, and at the fifth or sixth he barks, and there is no mistaking the bark; it says as plainly as words: you’re the gentleman who takes me out rabbiting. And from that moment he waits and watches, and when I raise my eyes from the book I catch his eye, and after a time I say: Jim, you’ve been waiting a long time, the book that I’m reading must seem very tiresome to you, let us go. At these words he utters a most joyful bark, and scampers round the billiard-table. If I put on my hat he is nearly sure he is going to be taken out, if I take the stick he is certain, and away we go in the hope of a rabbit.
There is a record, or at least a legend, of Jim having succeeded in catching a rabbit on the hill-side, but within my knowledge the triumph has always been missed, the rabbit succeeding in escaping down the gullet out of which he came from Lord Sligo’s domain.
The first time that I witnessed the escape of the rabbit was about three years ago. Jim, who had brought a fine scent into the world with him, got on the trail of the rabbit at the beginning of the wood, and went away, his nose to the ground, at full gallop without posting me, as he should have done, to cut off the retreat, and being ignorant of the nature of the ground, it fell out that I stopped unhappily at some ten or a dozen yards from the gullet, instead of at the entrance of the gullet itself: ten yards higher up the hill, ten yards nearer to the gullet, I should have been able to turn a rabbit back who seemed no wise in a hurry, the dog having lost the scent, and the rabbit seemingly aware of the loss stopped, meditated a moment, and before I could intervene hopped leisurely into the little drain and passed up the gullet. The dog arrived a few seconds afterwards an
d began the fruitless digging. Poor Jim was disappointed, and it was with difficulty he was persuaded to renounce the task, which in his heart he must have known to be hopeless, of digging out the rabbit. On many other occasions I bade Jim to heel till I was fairly stationed at the gullet and then bade him hunt, but on all these occasions there was no rabbit. It was not till last year that a rabbit bounded out of the undergrowth with Jim after him yelping like a Red Indian on the war-path, and I following down into the dell and up again striving to reach the gullet before the rabbit. It may be that I arrived too late and it may be that the rabbit bounded back and escaped by another gullet, all that can be said definitely is that the rabbit escaped. More than that would be surmise, conjecture.
This year as last year Jim will accompany me, but I shall not lend him my aid to catch the rabbit by standing myself at the gullet, I shall entertain the hope that the rabbit will continue to escape, for were the rabbit taken the hill-side would lose some of its wonder, some of its mystery, some of its adventure. But no such misfortune as the taking of the rabbit will befall us; the rabbit is never taken in Ireland, and let us hope that the future will be like the past, and that the history of Ireland will continue to be marked by the escape of the rabbit; for were the rabbit taken the country would sink into such stupor and lethargy as would frighten God in His high throne in Heaven.
