by George Moore
A story, I said, that would have won its way into Pater’s heart; and I fell to thinking how he would have written it, beginning perhaps:
And oh, the pity of it! the young man returning to the convent of Cuthmore after long years of vain searching for Moling and the three hermits, only to find her grave — her grave and his birthplace (the goatherd had told him that Ligach was buried in the cell in which she had lived all her life) and to stand by it, hopeful, looking on himself as the vindicator of her sad cause, his life devoted to that end — a long knight-errantry — and on the religion he would found as the warrant he needed of her virginity and his own Messiahship!
A beautiful story, I muttered and, catching sight at that moment of Alec’s face, out of which all expression had vanished, I said: when he is not telling a story he is as common, as witless, as any man picked out of the streets of Westport. How very strange! and how unimportant! Not himself but his beautiful story is worth considering — the beautiful story whose origin we must seek further back than the Middle Ages, whose counterparts we shall find certainly amongst the rudiments of the world; in the story of Bacchus, who visited Semele’s grave before he set forth on his pilgrimage to found a new religion, and in the story of Hippolytus, the son of Antiope, the Amazon queen who fell in love with Theseus, King of Athens, for he too believed his mother to have been a virgin who was impregnated by some starry influence as she lay sleeping in a mountain cleft.
Alec, I cried, irritated by the sight of his impassive countenance, your story revives my interest in the Celtic Renaissance, and when I return to Dublin the first person I will tell it to will be dear Edward; it will strengthen his belief in the Renaissance. Who might he be? said Alec.
CHAPTER 32.
ALEC ACCOMPANIED ME to the wicket, and before parting with him I said once again: I’m sorry I shall not see you all next week. You’ve told me some wonderful stories, and without doubt are the great shanachie of Connaught. Many’s the one that has said the same to me, your honour, but if they were right itself, it isn’t much of a brag to be above those going up for the competitions with no more than two and three and a half a story between the lot of them; and the fellow stuttering and stammering them out. But, compared with the shanachies that were in it in the old time, your honour, I’m not so much maybe.
I begged him to believe that he was unjust to his gifts and inspirations, and suppressed the smile that I felt to be at hover about my lips. I’ve never, I said, heard better stories than those you have told me, or a more spirited relation. So much have your stories pleased me that I don’t know how the time will pass while you are away. I’m longing to hear more stories. And what shall I be doing while you’re away? It would be a great honour to me to hear a story from yourself, your honour, and all the week I’m away you can be turning it over in your mind. But you see, Alec, my stories are intended to be read; my stories are eye stories, yours are ear stories, and at an ear story you beat me easily. I’m far from thinking that, your honour, but whichever of us may come out first, I’d like to hear you tell a story.
Alec’s blue, almost forget-me-not, eyes were fixed upon me and, cowed by them, I promised him a story. But you mustn’t expect too much from me, I called down the road, for already I had begun to feel that I should be worsted in the contest.
He lifted his hat and went away, laughing, I thought, as if he were sure I could match his stories. But as I turned in the wicket it seemed to me that Alec had gone away laughing at the thought of my being able to match his grandfather’s stories. Not an easy task, I said, especially the Marban story. An hour remains between now and dinner, I continued, and bethought myself of the high wood as a likely place to find a subject; and turning to Jim, I said: how often have you believed in the rabbit and been disappointed? It may be, however, your luck will be to get the rabbit, and mine to return with nothing in the shape of a story. You can come with me; we’ll go hunting together; and Jim, lean and eager and hopeful, rushed ahead, leaving me to follow after, doubtful and already a little despondent, saying, to myself: to match his stories I shall need a very striking subject.
A story of modern life wouldn’t impress Alec. He’d be more interested in a wonder tale — a legend of fairy tale, a fairy tale being better than a legend. But is there any difference between fairy tales and legends? I asked, and wasted some time considering the question from a literary point of view, awaking from my reverie with the words: a wonder tale, on my lips. A wonder tale it must be, and if I tell him an astonishing story he’ll speak up for me in the ale-houses: no shanachie will be put in front of me, saving himself, of course. Something dramatic will impress him more than a story of everyday life, however good it may be. A murder story! and I bethought myself of a woman whom a verdict of not proven saved from the gallows and imprisonment, leaving her free to pick and choose a husband from out of a crowd of supplicating suitors; and, as if determined to close all possible avenues of further romances, she chose the dowdiest. But it would seem that romance was her lot in life, for after twenty years of virtuous married life her husband became possessed of the belief that she was planning how she might rid herself of him, and the fact that her interest was to keep and not to rid herself of him did not help him.
Day by day and night by night the most trivial accidents of life started his mind on the trail of some fresh suspicion, till at last he was driven to asking his wife to go away whither she pleased so long as she left the county. He gave her the choice of the child she would take with her (there were two), and it was not till the mother and child reached Chicago that her husband drew a happy breath. A striking subject, I said to myself, but one more suited to Nature’s handling than to mine, for it is, shall we say, sufficient in itself. An unliterary subject — the opposite to Esther Waters — and I remembered how a single sentence in a newspaper gave me the subject of Esther Waters. We’re always complaining of the annoyance that servants occasion us, but do we ever think of the annoyance we occasion servants? were the words that set me thinking of a young lady in love with her footman. The subject was rejected as unworthy, and a moment after it seemed to me that somebody anxious to learn a trade was the character that enticed me. A kitchen-maid, I said. A kitchen-maid’s adventure is an illegitimate child. On fourteen pounds a year she cannot and on sixteen pounds she can rear the child. The life of a human being at two pounds is my subject, and before I reached the Law Courts, distant about two hundred yards, the story of Esther Waters was decided upon.
The story of The Brook Kerith discovered itself as quickly one evening in the National Library. John Eglinton spoke to me of something he had been reading in which the theory that Jesus had not died but merely swooned on the cross was put forward, and the dream began instantly that if he did not die on the cross nothing was more likely than that he returned to the Essenes and met, years after, Paul, peradventure, in the cavern above the brook.
Accident furnished me with subjects for both books, but no literary accident may befall me in this lonely wood. My thoughts are wilful; I cannot fix them: the trees are beautiful and lean over the stream with noble gesture. The water tumbles from boulder to boulder merrily; without, however, mooting a story, I said. Blackbirds and thrushes are singing, but of what do they sing, of themselves or of nothing? My thoughts fled out of the high wood, crossed the seas, and in a second I was in Médan seeking a story in an account of a flood that we had just been reading in a newspaper. A whole family was drowned in it, all except an old man of eighty. Zola, impressed by Nature’s indifference, wrote the story, and I wrote it too, but who wrote the better story could not be decided, Zola not knowing English (mine was in English) and I not caring to read his lest I should find it superior to mine.
But I’m now composing a story in competition with Alec Trusselby, and shall not find one if my thoughts will not come to heel.
All night I lay awake; and all the next day I spent in the high wood, seeking a subject, my thoughts distracted constantly in the wood by the beauty of t
he trees, by the birds in the stream and in the branches; and when I emerged from the wood, the hills set me thinking that if they would break their lofty silence they could tell me the tale of a beleaguered castle, with a fair-haired woman ascending the stairs, built between the walls. It is well to be fair-haired but it is not enough; something must happen to her. She must be carried away by a rival chieftain, and the battle must be waged from island to island. An Irish Helen I said, and began to curse myself for wasting time upon tawdry Walter Scott nonsense, as poetical as a story about a burning mill and no jot more so, one in which the author has not forgotten to include a strong love interest.
But sneers at Fleet Street are no help, and at the end of a short walk the story of a burning mill was dismissed as unworthy. The story I need, I continued, is a story not less perfect than those Alec told me, nor less complete, and dropped into a new consideration of the old woman who wouldn’t give her money to the priest to rebuild the walls of his church, her need being a stained glass window. The word “need” reminded me of my own great need of a short story while writing The Brook Kerith — of a short tale complete in itself, relating the adventures of Jesus while in search of a ram of a particular breed. The same fear was upon me then as now; but the needed tale was vouchsafed to me the same afternoon in the train on my way to Epping. But will the needed tale be vouchsafed to me again? I asked, and watched my thoughts scouting at adventure, one of them at last espying an old monk who had just finished telling the story of Lilith on the balcony overlooking the Brook Kerith. A Talmudic tale, I said, a lilt, such as a reaper might sing while reaping — a folk-tale told over the fireside, hardly as much. She is mentioned in Faust Faust asks Mephistopheles: who is that yonder? and he answers: Lilith, Adam’s first wife. Beware of her, for she excels all women in the magic of her locks. If a young man should get entangled in them she will never set him free again.
Michelangelo seems to have painted Lilith as an eternal temptation; Rossetti translated Michelangelo’s design into verse, but neither seems to have perceived the story that the old chronicler’s lilt stands for. As likely as not the old chronicler didn’t guess that a great story lay behind his brief record. The meaning of the story was perchance forgotten when he wrote, and his summary is but a cocoon left over to be unwound by me. And the more I considered the cocoon the more full of thread it seemed to me to be. And all the next day and all the day after were spent in the high wood by the babbling water, unwinding, forgetful of Alec, absorbed in the story, happy in the conviction that were I to search the world over I should never find a woodland more like the Garden of Eden than this one.
These trees, I said, sheltered our first parents: if not these trees their progenitors, and who knows that Lilith and Adam may not have drunken from this stream? If not from this one, from one like it. I am walking in Eden without a doubt of it; the only difference between this wood and the woods of Eden is that there must have been fruit trees in Eden and there is none here, not even a nut bush, some hips and haws only. But it’s easy to imagine a few fruit trees; besides, this is but a corner of the domain that God gave to Adam and into which Lilith came from the underworld. The story is coming, I said, the story is coming, and at the end of the week I went to relate it to Alec in the woods of Hanaidi. A pretty adventure, I said, on my way thither, and I stopped to consider the style in which I was to tell it; and while looking round admiring the far-away air of the plaintive little country, it seemed to me that every language, except its own, the beautiful Anglo-Irish idiom, odorous as the newly upturned clod of earth, would be inappropriate, and knowing myself to be as imitative as a monkey, I asked myself if I should be able to pipe my tune in it: with some outbreaks into Fleet Street, of course, I said. But he’ll be listening to the story and will not hear the outbreaks, and if he does hear them they will seem to him the very thing he should admire, alas!
And in regretful mood I continued walking, but very slowly, for there was a thought at the back of my mind that hesitated to come into words. At last I asked myself if it were wise to translate a Hebrew story into peasant idiom. As well might I translate Congreve’s Comedies into the same, I added, a little further on; derisively, of course: and the passer-by must have descried an expression of perplexity upon my face, for I had begun to think that if I told my story in Anglo-Irish all the characteristics by which Alec knew me would disappear, and, worst of all, he might think I was putting a joke on him. But related in London idiom my story will be like music played on a worn-out piano. Good heavens! I said, I shall make no sort of a match in this competition, and might have run home if Alec, who was before me by the great stone, sacred in my memory, Liadin and Curithir having met there, hadn’t at that moment risen to his feet.
CHAPTER 33.
IT SEEMED AT first as if he had forgotten my promise to relate a story, and I honestly hoped that we might go fern-gathering instead. But at last the words came: have you brought the story with you, your honour? Yes, I answered; I’ve a story to tell you, and it’s of Adam’s first wife. But Adam’s first wife was Eve, he rapped out, and more energetically than I had expected; and to quiet him I said that many stories related to the famous garden, and that the one I was going to tell was from the Talmud. The name at once quelled any rebellious spirit that may have been in him, and he allowed me to inform him that there are two sacred books of the Hebrew law, one known as the Bible, an inspired work, and another work, which is the Talmud, uninspired and four times as large as the Bible. And from the Talmud, Alec, we learn that Adam had a first wife, and there is a broken relation which I have pieced together, the right of every shanachie, as you know well. Who should know better than yourself how stories are spun and woven, you the great shanachie of Connaught? The stories you tell me you learnt from your grandfather: he read them in books, but added to them, and you developed them just as the Hungarian gipsy develops on his fiddle the snatches of song that he hears the reapers singing in the cornfields. I think I understand, sir, Alec said, and without leaving him time for reflection out of which might spring thoughts of his parish priest, who had never heard of Lilith, I began:
A great temptress she was, greater than our neighbour’s wife, greater than the scarlet woman, and the daughters of Baal of whom you have no doubt heard in church. Sorra one of any of them names have I heard of, your honour. But all the same I’d like to hear the story of Adam’s first wife, no matter the book she comes out of. A great trouble, I said gloomily, she always was to Adam, leaving him often without ever saying when she was going to return, going away like a bird, still better as a wreath of mist which melts in the morning sun, and returns when the sun sinks behind the mountains. And once she was gone there was silence, nobody to bid him the hour of the day or to say: here’s a fine fig here, or would you like a rosy peach better? Nor anyone to say: I’m as dry as a limekiln, and could drink a jug of water at a draught, if you’d go to the river for me. His life lay like a lump of lead upon him, and his legs got too shaky to bear his body; he would come tottering down the path, his knees knocking together, not knowing how to bear with his grief, for Lilith had gone once more from him, and as was usual with her, without saying whither she was going or when she was coming back. She has gone, he said to himself, and henceforth the memory of her will be burning in me always; and he walked back and forth, unable to comprehend how he could go on living day after day in this garden, which already had begun to lose its beauty in his eyes, never seeing or hearing of her again.
He could no longer wander through the garden taking pleasure in the graceful trees, the shady dells and sunny glades, for every spot was associated with her. The flowering bank beneath the fig-tree reminded him of many sweet midnight visitations, and he thought that the moss still retained the impress of her head. A great big sigh escaped him, and he turned away from the beautifulest parts of the river, for since her departure the river was running very shallow indeed between long gravel reaches, and he wearied of the pair of ousels that flitted from boulder to boul
der: they are faithful to each other, why did she abandon me? he said, and fell to thinking, asking himself if Lilith came to him from Lucifer’s domain by Iahveh’s order or if she were sent by Lucifer to tempt him from his allegiance. None can answer these questions but Iahveh himself, he said, and he turned into the twisting path that led up the hill-side to the praying stone that he had raised there. Iahveh, Alec, was the first Hebrew God, and I don’t think I’m going too far if I say a sort of tribal God.
Adam threw himself on the ground, and bowed himself three times: my God, hearken to me, for I come to thee in great distress of mind and body, not having seen the golden-haired Lilith for many days, and without her the garden in which thou hast placed me has become a wilderness in my eyes; bid her return to me, else I perish. My God, my God, hear thy servant Adam, for he calls to thee to save him from his wretched plight. My God, my God, hearken to thy servant, again Adam cried out, but he had to cry many times before he could rouse Iahveh, who was dreaming in his golden chair of the last stubborn fight before the archangels were able to shut Lucifer up in hell.
