Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  Well, Biddy, said he, so it would seem that we are to be man and wife in a week, if you’ll do the priest’s bidding and if you won’t be expecting too much. I won’t expect a thing at all, for at your age, and twenty years before your age, a man has more thoughts for a dinner than for a wife. And how do you know that, Biddy? How do I know that! How do I know anything? Amn’t I following a herd of goats since I was a slip of a girl? We’re Christians, Biddy; we’re not goats. And clasping her hips Biddy stood looking at him, putting the fear of God into old Tadhg, so brazen like was she. I’m not to expect too much, you said! I’ll sleep in the draughty hen-house no more, my good man, picking the filth from the pullets out of my eyes; so between this and our marriage let you be nailing up the boards lying about so that we may take our clothes off and pull our clothes on in decency. Now I’ll go to draw the milk for our porridge. Yes, and indeed! she cried back, bending over the goats, I’ve slept long enough and too long in the filth and the wet of the henhouse. I’ll sleep snug from this day out! And he, thinking of decency before all else, began to wonder which of the two beds he’d plant her into. I’ll sleep in Sir Ulick’s bed, he said to himself, and then a change of mind coming upon him without his knowing the meaning of it, if it had a meaning, he said: No. I’ll stick to my own bed, and she can have Sir Ulick’s. And he set to building a screen out of loose planks, working so hard that the house was divided in halves when Biddy came back with two noggins of milk in her hands. You’re the kind man surely! she said. Well, isn’t a bed to yourself the least I could do for you? The least, surely, she answered, and he watched her stirring the porridge, till her voice bidding him good-night startled him. And soon after, hearing her kicking off her clogs, he said: ’Tis I should be stretching back on the bed, for the chopping of them sticks has tired me out. Time was when I’d chop twice over what I did to-day without feeling it, but I am an old man now and there’s no denying it. There was silence in the hut, and after listening to the silence for a while he began to listen to the other side of the planks he had raised up between himself and herself. Is she asleep or awake? And what would she be at now? And thinking he’d like a peep at her in her bed, he rose up, and putting his eye to a chink in the boards he took a peep, and she sitting on the bed combing her hair, like a woman in a story-book.

  XV

  ALEC, I LIKE your story very much so far as it’s gone, and my hope is that the end will not fall short of the beginning. I’m only at the beginning, and it will give me great heart when I hear that your honour begins to think I am making a neat job of it. Old men, I answered, are often more indecent than young, and old men that have resisted temptation for a long time are apt to fall into the very sin they have successfully resisted all their lives; for we never get away from nature, not altogether. And I can imagine Tadhg dreaming over the smoothness and the whiteness of the shoulder he had seen, his enjoyment not lasting very long, for on turning over I’m sure he’d start up a little scared, remembering that Biddy wasn’t his wife yet and that he had been guilty of a sin in watching her. Not a mortal sin, but some venial sins are very near to mortal sins, no doubt, and need long years of purification in purgatory before the sinner can be admitted into heaven. You seem to know him, Alec, as intimately as I do myself, and if I know Tadhg at all, it is not the sin he had committed that would frighten him most, but the conviction deep in himself that he would certainly yield to the temptation to look through the chink again. For it is not the sin committed, Alec, that alarms the sinner, but the knowledge that he will not be able to withstand the Devil when he is by again, and of all, that he cannot pray for grace to resist sin, so ardently does he desire it. I can see my Tadhg — forgive me, Alec, I should have said our Tadhg — gloomy and distressed all the next day, in the midst of a trouble so great that he could not do else but refuse Biddy’s offer to row him over to the monastery when he began to speak to her about the confession that a man was expected to make before his marriage. I am sure he would suspect Biddy of having caught sight of his eye at the chink, and would answer her: No, Biddy, I’ll keep my confession till the day before the wedding. And when Biddy returned from Ballinrobe with a new petticoat and a shawl, the old curiosity would awaken in him again, and he’d hear a voice within him which he couldn’t shut down, saying: I’d like to see that fine smock dropping from her shoulders. He would dread and desire the night, and drop back on his pillow racked with disappointment, there being no stime of light for him to see the dropping of the smock. And next day his conscience would worry him so that he would begin to lose his health and to think that he might die before he was married to Biddy. But I am saying too much, Alec; it may be that you are taking quite a different line. Not a bit different at all, said Alec heartily; my Tadhg and your Tadhg is the self-same lad, whichever of us is telling about him. Then away with you, Alec, and let me hear the end, for I suppose he sees the lank woman sooner or later? Bide a bit, your honour, and let me get the story out in my own way.

  Tadhg was feeling weak, and out of sorts, and out of humour, and when Biddy spoke of rowing over to the Abbey for a priest, he said that he wouldn’t confess to any one else but the Abbot. Very well then, I’ll fetch you the Abbot. He’ll come to confess me if there’s a breath in him, or a kick in him, said Tadhg; and these words seeming good to Biddy, she repeated them as she had heard them, raising a smile of satisfaction into the Abbot’s face. Off then with the two of them for the island, and when they got within twenty perches of the beach Tadhg rose from behind a rock to greet them. You said that you wouldn’t leave the bed, said Biddy. Never mind the bed, Tadhg answered. Be off with you, for my business this day is with his lordship. Are you taking me for a listener! said Biddy. What do I care about your confession? Full sure I am, all the same, that the stories you’ve got to tell are enough to make a goat blush, let alone a priest. Do you hear that, ODorachy? said the Abbot. I do, faith! She’s giving it to me as if I was her husband already. The Abbot and Tadhg walked up the path till they came to a pleasant seat under some tall trees, with a fine piece of meadow land spreading in front of them. Now, said the Abbot, I was sorry to hear that you weren’t well; but you’re looking better than I expected. ’Tis the old mind is sick and sad, my lord. An uneasy conscience? said the Abbot; well, we all of us suffer from that at times, saints as well as sinners. Do they now? said Tadhg. And I wouldn’t say but that the angels get a twinge or two when the anniversary of the great revolt comes round, the ones that sat on the fence, that weren’t for God and weren’t against him either. A man with a sick conscience sees sin in everything, till at last there isn’t a thing but sin in the world, and hell at the heel of the hunt. But you, ODorachy, shouldn’t be suffering from conscience on this healthy island, where there isn’t a chance for any sin of them all to get going. Ah, sin is everywhere, my lord, and last night itself I was a sinner! Now, tell me how you were a sinner; and the Abbot pulled his stole out of his pocket. Well, my lord Abbot, all of yesterday I was building a screen so that Biddy and I should have a room to ourselves and a bed to ourselves; and we both lay down in our beds, she on that side of the screen and me on this one. When I heard her kicking off her clogs I said to myself: ’Tis a fine upstanding woman I’m going to be married to, it is indeed. And I’d like well to have a peep at her, I said to myself. Up I sat in the bed and put my eye to the chink, and I saw her combing her hair. There’s no great harm in that, Tadhg. But, you see, my lord Abbot, I was thinking, if I wasn’t hoping, that I might see more of her than one arm and the tip of her shoulder. Well, it was but a venial sin at the worst, and I don’t think God will treat you badly for it; and you’ll get such a shriving from me that the peep you had of Biddy combing her hair won’t cost you ten minutes in purgatory. All the same....! What is it, my lord Abbot? What you tell surprises me, ODorachy, for ’tis late starting you are, at eighty years of age! You said once, my lord Abbot, that a sick conscience was a conscience with the Devil inside of it, and in a sinner’s old age the Devil bests the guardian angel
easily. But what was it set you peeping through a hole to see what Biddy was like? Well, I’ve been thinking of that, my lord Abbot, and I hope to tell you the truth. You know, ever since the pilgrims got their way with Brother Peter, and got their rights to bring the sick and the halt and the blind to Soracha’s grave to be cured, some of them row over to the island to visit Marban’s tomb, and some come over to see myself, and to hear about Sir Ulick de Burgo, who loved the Princess and was loved by French women. Now, I have never told this to a soul before, but a lot of them come... To hear you play the harp, Tadhg? Why shouldn’t they come to hear the greatest harper in Ireland, Finn Lorcan’s best scholar! I am all that, said Tadhg, and they like well to hear me on the harp; but what they like better is the stories I tell of the women that used to trip down the castle stairs to sit with Sir Ulick, kissing him and being kissed by him, by the marble-rimmed fountains in their gardens. That’s what they like! And if I can throw in a bit of sinfulness they like it twice as well, and tell their friends that I am a better story-teller than I am a harper. Nothing loosens the purse strings like a good story. You never knew it before but let you know it now, that a deal, and a good deal, of the money that comes to Ballintober comes out of the stories I tell the pilgrims. But I’m getting to be an old man now — indeed, I am an old man all out, and I can’t put stories together the way I used to. Sure, the more I tell of the bits of sinfulness the greedier they are for them; and now there isn’t a bit of sinfulness I can make up and they are complaining. You can’t get out of the head what never was in it, and as I’ve never seen a naked woman in my life I thought it would be a chance now to see one. The anniversary of Princess Soracha’s death is coming round, and they’ll all be here in a month’s time looking for stories. But all you saw through the chink was Biddy combing her hair, said the Abbot, a bit of shoulder, a bit of a lifted arm; and you could see nearly as much when she is rowing you in the boat. But her arms and she rowing the boat, aren’t the same thing as her arms and she getting into bed, my lord Abbot. I’m telling you, too, that it would have pleased me greatly to see the smock drop off her shoulders, and I have been waiting to see that same all the week. Well, she’s going to be your wife soon. I’m afraid you are too easy on me, my lord Abbot; not that I’m instructing you. In telling me your sins you’re not instructing me. It’s hard to reveal it all to a priest, who knows no more than a babe about the wickedness of those that haven’t got the sacraments, or only one in a blue moon. It’s a wicked thing to look at a woman the way I looked at Biddy, for mind you, she’s not my wife yet. She will be to-morrow, said the Abbot; and I’ll give in to you this much, that you might have waited a week or two. It would have done no harm; it would perhaps have been better. Now, when I am married to her, will it be a sin for me to ask her to drop her smock before me? That’s what I want to know, for if I got one eyeful of her, and she naked, I think it would be a real help to the stories I do be telling the pilgrims. My brother Peter is more learned in theology than I am, said the Abbot, and I think that this is what he would say. He would say: A man may kiss his wife whenever he likes, and he may clasp her if he is minded to put her in child. But if he doesn’t want to put her in child, or if he couldn’t put her in child if he tried? said Tadhg. I’ll look the case up when I go back, but you may take it from me before I get down the tome which all the theology is in, that for a man to take pleasure in his wife’s nakedness when he has no thought of begetting a child is a venial sin at the most. That’s what I’ve been anxious about, my lord Abbot. But you couldn’t give me a hint about what stretch of purgatory a venial sin will land me in for?

  Not long at all, Tadhg; not a year itself. And Biddy won’t refuse to drop her smock if you tell her that a sight of her figure will help you to tell a great story to the pilgrims. So far I think I can answer for her and for yourself. Now you’re not to say a word of this to her till you are married, and married more than a day! At the end of the month will be time enough. And here comes Biddy, who will take me back to Ballintober. Biddy, said Tadhg, you will take my lord Abbot back. And right glad I am to be able to do so! she answered. And once more Tadhg watched the boat pulling through the still lake till it reached the opposite shore. Biddy was first out of it, and she gave her hand to the Abbot to save him from the shock of too big a jump, and they stood talking together in view of Tadhg, who wondered what they might be saying.

  A great good thing it is to have the clergy, for life isn’t all eating and drinking, and lifting the neighbour’s cattle, and digging a spear into the neighbour’s ribs if he started to defend his wife against a spoiler. Without the clergy we wouldn’t be more than the brutes of the field. I suppose the Abbot over yonder is instructing Biddy what our lives are to be when we are married, and sure it was a good, clean thought he had telling me not to ask her to get into her pelt before me the very night of our marriage, nor for a while after. But to prepare her for it I’d better let her know that I am in trouble about the story to be told when the pilgrims come over in the big boat to do honour to Marban’s tomb, the tomb of a poet, a hermit and a holy man, for he was all three, and brother to a king as well — and to hear my stories about Sir Ulick and the Frenchwomen. I’m thinking he was sweetest on the Countess d’Artois, saying always that she was shaped in the mould of old Greece. But what do I know of the mould of old Greece, or old anywhere? and Biddy not a bit wiser than I am, less indeed; for the Abbot himself could not make her understand that a man has to see the story if he’s to be telling it. When it comes to the night that the Countess goes down to the fountain to bathe herself, I am no better than a blind man trying to tell how the sun lights up the crests of the hills. There she was in her pelt, I’d say, and there I’d stick, like an eel in the mud. A poet must see, as well as the painter and the sculptor, and I thank my stars that I’m going to see one whole woman the way God made her before I leave this earth. What man is there, barring the clergy themselves, that wouldn’t want to? And there are no clothes in heaven; the saints and the angels, every saint and every angel of them, are mother-naked so far as we know, and to see Biddy stripped will be just the same as the peep you might have of the world to come and you in a dream. But I’ll have to make a great bother about this story. And he fell to cudgelling his brains as to how he might fool Biddy about the troubles he was in with the story, asking her questions about the look of her body, whether she was like this or that or the other; and when she told him that her skin and her bones were very like his own except for certain parts, he would have to put on a booby face and say that it was a great mis fortune to a story-teller never to have seen the same parts. So day after day he made up talks that he meant to have with her, and after about three weeks of that he was fairly worn out.

  Biddy darling, said he, there’s no getting on with this story at all. What’s wrong with it, honey? she asked. Sure, ’tis all about a naked woman, and I never saw one, said he. What is to be done at all, at all? And they looked at each other inquiringly. Would it be asking too much of you, now that we’re properly married — Now that we’re properly married you’d be asking me to strip myself so that you may be telling what a woman is like to the pilgrims who come here? Well, if you like to spoil the story, Biddy — What have your stories about rampy women got to do with me? she said, and on that she turned into the house, leaving Tadhg a bit scared, saying to himself: I ought to have told her what my lord Abbot said, that every husband had a right to look on his wife any way he likes; she’d hardly put herself above the lord Abbot. Peter himself even — but nobody knows what that bitter little priesteen would say. While he was thinking about Peter he heard a step and his face flushed, for a thought goes as quick as lightning, and the thought that came to him was that maybe Biddy had gone into the house to strip. But her clothes were all on her, and she had only come back, as he soon learnt, for the sake of the argument, saying: Is it you, learned and all in the history of the heroes and the Gods and Goddesses of Ireland (and let me tell you that not an Irish God, let alone a Go
ddess, was ever seen out of their clothes), is it you that is asking me — If what you are telling me is true, Biddy, the Abbot of Ballintober doesn’t know what he is talking about. He is a good priest, said she, and it is his business to know the story of Fial, daughter of Mil, who, when she saw Lugaid looking down at her from the top of a high rock, got a cramp and sank to the bottom of the lake; and though he dived in after her and brought her up, she struggled away from him, saying: Let me die! Let me die! for I’m not the one to live after seeing a naked man. That’s one story, but one story isn’t enough, and I can match every story you tell with another. And I’d hear the story you’d match against Lugaid and Fial, she said. I’m thinking of Adam and Eve in the garden, said Tadhg. And weren’t they driven from the garden by an angel? But not for being naked, Biddy; nakedness is not sin, and now I’d be listening to another story from you. Gile wouldn’t marry Omra because he said to her that he’d never know a minute’s happiness till he saw her naked, and for these words she turned on him. You are no better than a Pagan, she said, for none but the Pagans see each other naked. And Omra went away hungry, chewing his desire, like Connla eating into his apple, it never growing less. You know that story? Yes, I know the story, Biddy; get you on with the one you’re telling me. Gile lived in a great fear of Omra, but great as her fear of him was she had to strip when she wanted a bath. Now there was a well near by that she thought nobody knew about, and nobody did know about this well except Omra himself. He followed her to the well, and when she looked up and saw Omra looking at her, she found her death in the well. But that’s no new story, Biddy, but the story you told me before. Fial drowned herself in a lake and Gile in a well, and I bar this last one, so will you be trying again. Everything in Ireland goes by threes, but you’ll be hard put to it to find three stories of women that died rather than be seen naked by their husbands. You’ll hardly let on to me that you never heard of Sabia, the daughter of Ailill Find? One day she was washing herself in the spray by the clear sand-Strewn spring, and she saw out beyond her on the plain tall Cahir coming towards her, and he lusty and rude as an oak. He is coming to enjoy the sight of me in my skin, she cried, but he’ll never see me naked and alive! the last words that came out of her mouth, for she held her head under the water till she had no strength to lift it up. You’ve heard enough now about the modesty of the women of Ireland and about the courage of the women of Ireland not to ask your own wife to strip herself before you, for you to concoct her into a story for the long ears, and they dirty, of the pilgrims. What is a pilgrim after all, Tadhg honey, more than anyone else that you’d show them your wife? Forget about the story, said Tadhg, and remember an old, old man that has never seen a woman naked in his life; and if his own wife won’t give him as much as a look, or the half of a look itself, he’ll find himself in heaven one day, where the angels and archangels and the seraphs and the cherubs are as naked as the sole of your foot, and that poor old man will be the same silly innocent in heaven that he was on earth. What in the world do you expect to see? said Biddy. Do you think that my legs, or my anything else, will be different from any other woman’s? There’s none that would look so near to Mother Eve as yourself. I can see you in my thoughts, Biddy, long and lank — Long I am, and lank too, said Biddy. Let you do now what I am asking you to do, Biddy honey, for when I’m gone from you you’ll be sorry that you refused me. It is better to please your husband than to be telling him old stories that have not as much sense in them as a whistle of wind. Well then, said Biddy, I wouldn’t be refusing my husband anything lest I might be regretting it afterwards. Is there a finer place for a woman to walk about in naked than this island, nobody looking on except the birds, and every one of them thinking that Paradise is back again, blackbirds and thrushes, willow wrens and warblers of all kinds, just as it was in the days when Marban spoke of the birds as the little musicians of the world to his brother, King Guare, who came to see him. Well now, if you won’t be looking at me stripping, I’ll give you a sight of me. And when she comes out of the thicket she’s gone behind, he said, it will be like one of the days in Paradise long ago!