Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  And, without any transition in place or time, she finds herself listening to the sound of rippling water. There is an iron drinking- cup close to her hand. She seems to recognise the spot. It is Shoreham. There are the streets she knows so well, the masts of the vessels, the downs. But something darkens the sunlight, the tawny body of the snake oscillates, the people cry to her to escape. She flies along the streets, like the wind she seems to pass. She calls for help. Sometimes the crowds are stationary, as if frozen into stone, sometimes they follow the snake and attack it with sticks and knives. One man with colossal shoulders wields a great sabre; it flashes about him like lightning. Will he kill it? He turns, chases a dog, and disappears. The people too have disappeared. She is now flying along a wild plain covered with coarse grass and wild poppies. The snake is near her, and there is no one to whom she can call for help. But the sea is in front of her. She will escape down the rocks — there is still a chance! The descent is sheer, but somehow she retains foothold. Then the snake drops — she feels its weight upon her, and with a shriek she awakes.

  The moon hung over the sea, the sea flowed with silver, the world was as chill as an icicle.

  ‘The roses, the snake, the cliff’s edge, was it then only a dream?’ the girl thought. ‘It was only a dream, a terrible dream, but after all only a dream!’ Then a voice within her said, ‘But all was not a dream — there was something that was worse than the dream.’

  She uttered a low cry — she moaned. She drew herself up on her bed, and lay with her face buried in the pillow. Again she fought against sleep, but sleep came again, and in overpowering dream she lay as if dead. And she sees herself dead. All her friends are about her crowning her with flowers, beautiful garlands of white roses. They dress her in a long white robe, white as the snowiest cloud in heaven, and it lies in long, straight plaits about her limbs, like the robes of those who lie in marble in cathedral aisles. It falls over her feet, her hands are crossed over her breast, and all praise in low but ardent words the excessive whiteness of the garment. For none but she sees that there is a black spot upon the robe which they believe to be immaculate. She would warn them of their error, but she cannot; and when they avert their faces to wipe away their tears, the stain might be easily seen, but as they continue their last offices, folds or flowers fall over the stain and hide it from view.

  It is great pain to her to find herself unable to tell them of their error; for she well knows that when she is placed in the tomb, and the angels come, that they will not fail to perceive the stain, and seeing it, they will not fail to be shocked and sorrowful — and seeing it they will turn away weeping, saying, ‘She is not for us, alas! she is not for us!’ And Kitty, who is conscious of this fatal oversight, the results of which she so clearly foresees, is grievously afflicted, and she makes every effort to warn her friends of their error. But there is one amid the mourners who knows that she is endeavouring to tell of the black stain. And this one, whose face she cannot readily distinguish, maliciously, and with diabolical ingenuity, withdraws the attention of the others, so that they do not see it.

  And so it befell her to be buried in the stained robe. And she is taken away amid flowers and white cloths to a white tomb, where incense is burning, and where the walls are hung with votive wreaths, and things commemorative of virginal life. But upon all these, upon the flowers and images alike, there is some small stain which none sees but she and the one in shadow, the one whose face she cannot recognise. And although she is nailed fast in her coffin, she sees these stains vividly, and the one whose face she cannot recognise sees them too. And this is certain, for the shadow of the face is stirred by laughter.

  The mourners go; the evening darkens; the wild sunset floats for a while through the western heavens; the cemetery becomes a deep green, and in the wind that blows out of heaven the cypresses rock like things sad and mute. Then the blue night comes with stars in her tresses, and out of those stars angels float softly; their white feet hanging out of blown folds, their wings pointing to the stars. And from out of the earth, out of the mist — but whence and how it is impossible to say — there come other angels, dark of hue and foul smelling. But the white angels carry swords, and they wave these swords, and the scene is reflected in them as in a mirror; the dark angels cower in a corner of the cemetery, but they do not utterly retire.

  The tomb mysteriously opens, and the white angels enter the tomb. And the coffin is opened and the girl trembles lest the angels should discover the stain she knew of. But lo! to her great joy they do not see it, and they bear her away through the blue night, through the stars of heaven. And it is not until one whose face she cannot recognise, and whose presence among the angels of heaven she cannot comprehend, steals away one of the garlands with which she is entwined, that the fatal stain becomes visible. Then relinquishing their burden, the angels break into song, and the song they sing is one of grief; it travels through the spaces of heaven; she listens to its wailing echoes as she falls — as she falls towards the sea where the dark angels are waiting for her; and as she falls she leans with reverted neck and strives to see their faces, and as she nears them she distinguishes one.

  ‘Save me, save me!’ she cried; and, bewildered and dazed with the dream, she stared on the room, now chill with summer dawn. Again she murmured, ‘It was only a dream, it was only a dream;’ again a sort of presentiment of happiness spread like light through her mind, and again the voice within her said, ‘But all was not a dream — there was something that was worse than the dream.’ And with despair in her heart she sat watching the cold sky turn to blue, the delicate, bright blue of morning, and the garden grow into yellow and purple and red.

  She did not weep, nor did she moan. She sat thinking. She dwelt on the remembrance of the hills and the tramp with strange persistency, and yet no more now than before did she attempt to come to conclusions with her thought; it was vague, she would not define it; she brooded over it sullenly and obtusely. Sometimes her thoughts slipped away from it, but with each returning a fresh stage was marked in the progress of her nervous despair.

  And so the hours went by. At eight o’clock the maid knocked at the door. Kitty opened it mechanically, and she fell into the woman’s arms, weeping, sobbing. The sight of the female face brought relief; it interrupted the jarred and strained sense of the horrible; the secret affinities of sex quickened within her. The woman’s presence filled Kitty with the feelings that the harmlessness of a lamb or a soft bird inspires.

  XII.

  ‘But what is it, Miss, what is it? Are you ill? Why, Miss, you haven’t taken your things off; you haven’t been to bed!’

  ‘No; I lay down…. I have had frightful dreams — that is all.’

  ‘But you must be ill, Miss; you look dreadful, Miss. Shall I tell Mr. Hare? Perhaps the doctor had better be sent for.’

  ‘No, no; pray say nothing about me. Tell my father that I did not sleep, that I am going to lie down for a little while, that he is not to expect me for breakfast.’

  ‘I really think, Miss, that it would be as well for you to see the doctor.’

  ‘No, no, no. I am going to lie down, and I am not to be disturbed.’

  ‘Shall I fill the bath, Miss? Shall I leave the hot water here, Miss?’

  ‘Bath … hot water …’ Kitty repeated the words over as if she were striving to grasp a meaning, but which eluded her.

  Soon after the maid returned with a tray. The trivial jingle of the cups and plates was another suffering added to the ever-increasing stress of mind. Her dress was torn, it was muddy, there were bits of furze sticking to it. She picked these off; and as she did so, accurate remembrance and simple recollection of facts returned to her, and the succession was so complete that the effect was equivalent to a re-enduring of the crime, and with a foreknowledge of it, as if to sharpen its horror and increase the sense of the pollution. The vague hills, the vague sea, the sweet glow of evening — she saw it all again. And as if afraid that her brain, now strained like
a body on the rack, would suddenly snap, she threw up her arms, and began to take off her dress, as if she would hush thought in abrupt movements. In a moment she was in stays and petticoat. The delicate and almost girlish arms were disfigured by great bruises. Great black and blue stains were spreading through the skin.

  Kitty lifted up her arm; she looked at it in surprise; then in horror she rushed to the door where her dressing-gown was hanging, and wrapped herself in it tightly, hid herself in it so that no bit of her flesh could be seen.

  XIII.

  The day grew into afternoon. She awoke from a dreamless sleep of about an hour, and, still under its soothing influence, she pinned up her hair, settled the ribbons of her dressing-gown, and went downstairs. She found her father and John in the drawing-room.

  ‘Oh, here is Kitty!’ they exclaimed.

  ‘But what is the matter, dear? Why are you not dressed?’ said Mr. Hare.

  ‘But what is the matter? … Are you ill?’ said John, and he extended his hand.

  ‘No, no, ’tis nothing,’ she replied, and avoiding the outstretched hand with a shudder, she took the seat furthest away from her father and lover. They looked at her in amazement, and she at them in fear and trembling. She was conscious of two very distinct sensations — one the result of reason, the other of madness. She was not ignorant of the causes of each, although she was powerless to repress one in favour of the other. She knew she was looking at and talking to her dear, kind father, and that the young man sitting next him was John Norton, the son of her dear friend, Mrs. Norton; she knew he was the young man who loved her, and whom she was going to marry. At the same time she seemed to see that her father’s kind, benign countenance was not a real face, but a mask which he wore over another face, and which, should the mask slip — and she prayed that it might not — would prove as horrible and revolting as —

  But the mask that John wore was as nothing — it was the veriest make- believe. And she could not but doubt now but that the face she had known him so long by was a fictitious face, and as the hallucination strengthened, she saw his large mild eyes grow small, and that vague, dreamy look turn to the dull, liquorish look, the chin came forward, the brows contracted… the large sinewy hands were, oh, so like! Then reason asserted itself; the vision vanished, and she saw John Norton as she had always seen him.

  But was she sure that she did? Yes, yes — but her head seemed to be growing lighter, and she did not appear to be able to judge things exactly as she should; a sort of new world seemed to be slipping like a painted veil between her and the old.

  John and Mr. Hare looked at her.

  John at length rose, and he said, ‘My dear Kitty, I am afraid you are not well….’

  She strove to allow him to take her hand, but she could not overcome the instinctive feeling which caused her to shrink from him.

  ‘Don’t come near me — I cannot bear it!’ she cried; ‘don’t come near me, I beg of you.’

  More than this she could not do, and giving way utterly, she shrieked and rushed from the room. She rushed upstairs. She stood in the middle of the floor listening to the silence, her thoughts falling about her like shaken leaves. It was as if a thunderbolt had destroyed the world, and left her alone in a desert. The furniture of the room, the bed, the chairs, the books she loved, seemed to have become as grains of sand, and she forgot all connection between them and herself. She pressed her hands to her forehead, and strove to separate the horror that crowded upon her. But all was now one horror — the lonely hills were in the room, the grey sky, the green furze, the tramp; she was again fighting furiously with him; and her lover and her father and all sense of the world’s life grew dark in the storm of madness.

  A step was heard on the stairs; her quick ears caught the sound, and she rushed to the door to lock it. But she was too late. John held it fast.

  ‘Kitty, Kitty,’ he cried, ‘for God’s sake, tell me what is the matter?’

  ‘Save me! save me!’ she cried, and she forced the door against him with her whole strength. He was, however, determined on questioning her, on seeing her, and he passed his head and shoulders into the room.

  ‘Save me, save me! help, help!’ she cried, retreating from him.

  ‘Kitty, Kitty, what do you mean? Say, say—’

  ‘Save me; oh mercy, mercy! Let me go, and I will never say I saw you, I will not tell anything. Let me go!’ she cried, retreating towards the window.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Kitty, take care — the window, the window!’

  But Kitty heard nothing, knew nothing, was conscious of nothing but a mad desire to escape. The window was lifted high — high above her head, and her face distorted with fear, she stood amid the soft greenery of the Virginia creeper.

  ‘Save me!’ she cried.

  The white dress passed through the green leaves, and John heard a dull thud.

  XIV.

  Mr. Hare stood looking at his dead daughter; John Norton sat by the window. His brain was empty, everything was far away. He saw things moving, moving, but they were all far away. He could not re-knit himself with the weft of life; the thread that had made him part of it had been snapped. He knew that Kitty had thrown herself out of the window and was dead. The word shocked him, but there was no sense of realisation to meet it. She had walked with him on the hills, she had accompanied him as far as the burgh; she had waved her hand to him before they walked quite out of each other’s sight. Now she was dead.

  Had he loved her? Why was there neither burning grief nor tears? He envied the hard-sobbing father’s grief, the father who held his dead daughter’s hand, and showed a face on which was printed so deeply the terror of the soul’s emotion, that John felt a supernatural awe creep upon him; felt that his presence was a sort of sacrilege. He crept downstairs. He went into the drawing-room, and looked about for the place he had last seen her in.

  She usually sat on that sofa; how often had he seen her sitting there! And now he should not see her any more. Only three days ago she had been sitting in that basket-chair. How well he remembered her words, her laughter! Shadow-like is human life! one moment it is here, the next it is gone. Her work-basket; the very ball of wool which he had held for her to wind; the novel which she had lent to him, and which he had forgotten to take away. He would never read it now; or perhaps he should read it in memory of her, of her whom yesterday he had parted with on the hills — her little Puritan look, her external girlishness, her golden brown hair, and the sudden laugh so characteristic of her…. She had lent him this book — she who was now but clay.

  He took up his hat and set forth to walk home across the downs, all the while thinking, thinking over what had happened. He had asked her to be his wife. She had consented, and, alarmed at the prospect of the new duties he had contracted, he had returned home. These newly- contracted duties had stirred his being to its very depth; the chance appearance of a gipsy girl (without the aid of that circumstance he felt he would never have spoken) had set his life about with endless eventuality; he could not see to the end; the future he had indefinitely plighted, and his own intimate and personal life had been abandoned for ever. He had exchanged it for the life of the hearth, of the family; that private life — private, and yet so entirely impersonal-which he had hitherto loathed. He had often said he had no pity for those who accepted burdens and then complained that they had not sufficient strength to carry them. Such had been his theory; he must now make his theory and practice coincide.

  He had walked up and down his study, his mind aflame; he had sat in his arm-chair, facing the moonlight, considering a question, to him so important, so far-reaching, that his mind at moments seemed as if like to snap, to break, but which was accepted by nine-tenths of humanity without a second thought, as lightly as the most superficial detail of daily life. But how others acted was not his concern; he must consider his own competence to bear the burden — the perilous burden he had asked, and which had been promised to him.

  He must not adventure int
o a life he was not fitted for; he must not wreck another’s life; in considering himself he was considering her; their interests were mutual, they were identical; there was no question of egotism. But this marriage question had been debated a thousand times in the last six months; it had haunted his thought, it had become his daily companion, his familiar spirit. Under what new aspect could he consider this question? It faced him always with the same unmovable, mysterious eyes in which he read nothing, which told him nothing of what he longed to know. He only knew that he had desired this girl as a wife. A desire had come he knew not whence; and he asked himself if it were a passing weakness of the flesh, or if this passion abided in him, if it had come at last to claim satisfaction? On this point he was uncertain, this was nature’s secret.

  In the midst of his stress of mind his eyes had wandered over his books; they had been caught by the colour of a small thin volume, and, obeying an instinct, he had taken the volume down. He knew it well; a few hundred small pages containing the wisdom of a great Greek philosopher, Epictetus, and John had often before turned to this sage discourse for relief in his mental depressions and despair of life.

  ‘The subject for the good and wise man is his master faculty, as the body is for the physician and the trainer, and the soil is the subject for the husbandman. And the work of the good and wise man is to use appearances according to Nature. For it is the nature of every soul to consent to what is good and reject what is evil, and to hold back about what is uncertain; and thus to be moved to pursue the good and avoid the evil, and neither way for what is neither good nor evil.’

  In the light of these words John’s mind grew serene as a landscape on which the moon is shining; and he asked himself why he had hesitated if marriage were the state which he was destined to fulfil?