by George Moore
“For five years you have been devoted to Ireland, and now you and Ireland are separated like two ships.”
“Yes, like two ships. Ireland is still going Rome-ward, and Rome is not my way.”
“You are the ship, Ned, and you came to harbour in Ireland. But you and I are like two ships that have lain side by side in the harbour, and now—”
“And now what, Ellen? Go on!”
“It seemed to me that we were like two ships.”
“That is the very thing I was thinking on the hills. The comparison of two ships rose up in my mind on the hill, and then I remembered a passage.” And when he had repeated it she said: —
“So there is no hope for us on earth. We are but segments of a starry curve, and must be content with our stellar friendship. But, Ned, we shall never be enemies on earth. I am not your enemy, and never shall be. So we have nothing to think of now but our past friendship. The memory of our past — is all that remains? And it was for that you left America after the Cuban war? There is our child. You love the little boy, don’t you, Ned?”
“Yes,” he said, “I love the little boy.... But you’ll bring him up a Catholic. You’ll bring him up to love the things that I hate.”
“Let there be no bitterness between us to-night, Ned dear. Let there be only love. If not love, affection at least. This is our last night.”
“How is that?”
“Because, Ned, when one is so bent upon going as you are it is better he should go at once. I give you your freedom. You can go in the morning or when you please. But remember, Ned, that you can come back when you please, that I shall be always glad to see you.”
They went up-stairs and looked for some time on the child, who was sleeping. Ellen took him out of his bed, and she looked very pretty, Ned thought, holding the half-awakened child, and she kept the little quilt about him so that he might not catch cold.
He put his hands into his eyes and looked at his father, and then hid his face in his mother’s neck, for the light blinded him and he wished to go to sleep.
“Let me put him back in his bed,” Ned said, and he took his son and put him back, and he kissed him. As he did so he wondered how it was that he could feel so much affection for his son and at the same time desire to leave his home.
“Now, Ned, you must kiss me, and do not think I am angry with you for going. I know you are dull here, that you have got nothing further to do in Ireland, but it will be different when you come back.”
“And is it possible that you aren’t angry with me, Ellen, for going?”
“I am sorry you are going, Ned — in a way, but I should be more sorry to see you stay here and learn to hate me.”
“You are very wise, Ellen. But why did you read that manuscript?”
“I suppose because God wished me to.”
One thing Ireland had done for him, and for that he would be always grateful to Ireland — Ireland had revealed a noble woman to him; and distance would bring a closer and more intimate appreciation of her.
He left early next morning before she was awake in order to save her the pain of farewells, and all that day in Dublin he walked about, possessed by the great joyful yearning of the wild goose when it rises one bright morning from the warm marshes, scenting the harsh north through leagues of air, and goes away on steady wing-beats. But he did not feel he was a free soul until the outlines of Howth began to melt into the grey drift of evening. There was a little mist on the water, and he stood watching the waves tossing in the mist thinking that it were well that he had left home — if he had stayed he would have come to accept all the base moral coinage in circulation; and he stood watching the green waves tossing in the mist, at one moment ashamed of what he had done, at the next overjoyed that he had done it.
THE WAY BACK
IT WAS A pleasure to meet, even when they had nothing to say, and the two men had stopped to talk.
“Still in London, Rodney.”
“Yes, till the end of the week; and then I go to Italy. And you? You’re going to meet Sir Owen Asher at Marseilles.”
“I am going to Ireland,” and, catching sight of a look of astonishment and disapproval on Rodney’s face, Harding began to explain why he must return to Ireland.
“The rest of your life is quite clear,” said Rodney. “You knew from the beginning that Paris was the source of all art, that everyone here who is more distinguished than the others has been to Paris. We go to Paris with baskets on our backs, and sticks in our hands, and bring back what we can pick up. And having lived immersed in art till you’re forty, you return to the Catholic Celt! Your biographer will be puzzled to explain this last episode, and, however he may explain it, it will seem a discrepancy.”
“I suppose one should think of one’s biographer.”
“It will be more like yourself to get Asher to land you at one of the Italian ports. We will go to Perugia and see Raphael’s first frescoes, done when he was sixteen, and the town itself climbing down into ravines. The streets are lonely at midday, but towards evening a breeze blows up from both seas — Italy is very narrow there — and the people begin to come out; and from the battlements one sees the lights of Assisi glimmering through the dusk.”
“I may never see Italy. Go on talking. I like to hear you talk about Italy.”
“There are more beautiful things in Italy than in the rest of the world put together, and there is nothing so beautiful as Italy. Just fancy a man like you never having seen the Campagna. I remember opening my shutters one morning in August at Frascati. The poisonous mists lay like clouds, but the sun came out and shone through them, and the wind drove them before it, and every moment a hill appeared, and the great aqueducts, and the tombs, and the wild grasses at the edge of the tombs waving feverishly; and here and there a pine, or group of pines with tufted heads, like Turner used to draw.... The plain itself is so shapely. Rome lies like a little dot in the middle of it, and it is littered with ruins. The great tomb of Cecilia Metella is there, built out of blocks of stone as big as an ordinary room. He must have loved her very much to raise such a tomb to her memory, and she must have been a wonderful woman.” Rodney paused a moment and then he said: “The walls of the tombs are let in with sculpture, and there are seats for wayfarers, and they will last as long as the world, — they are ever-lasting.”
“Of one thing I’m sure,” said Harding. “I must get out of London. I can’t bear its ugliness any longer.”
The two men crossed Piccadilly, and Harding told Rodney Asher’s reason for leaving London.
“He says he is subject to nightmares, and lately he has been waking up in the middle of the night thinking that London and Liverpool had joined. Asher is right. No town ought to be more than fifty miles long. I like your description of Perugia. Every town should be walled round, now we trail into endless suburbs.”
“But the Green Park is beautiful, and these evening distances!”
“Never mind the Green Park; come and have a cup of tea. Asher has bought a new picture. I’d like to show it to you. But,” said Harding, “I forgot to tell you that I met your model.”
“Lucy Delaney? Where?”
“Here, I met her here,” said Harding, and he took Rodney’s arm so that he might be able to talk to him more easily. “One evening, a week ago, I was loitering, just as I was loitering to-day, and it was at the very door of St. James’s Hotel that she spoke to me.”
“How did she get to London? and I didn’t know that you knew her.”
“A girl came up suddenly and asked me the way to the Gaiety Theatre, and I told her, adding, however, that the Gaiety Theatre was closed. ‘What shall I do?’ I heard her say, and she walked on; I hesitated and then walked after her. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, ‘the Gaiety Theatre is closed, but there are other theatres equally good. Shall I direct you?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know what I shall do. I have run away from home.... I have set fire to my school and have come over to London thinking that I might go on the stage.’ She had
set fire to her school! I never saw more winning eyes. But she’s a girl men would look after, and not liking to stand talking to her in Piccadilly, I asked her to come down Berkeley Street. I was very curious to know who was this girl who had set fire to her school and had come over to London to go on the stage; and we walked on, she telling me that she had set fire to her school so that she might be able to get away in the confusion. I hoped I should not meet anyone I knew, and let her prattle on until we got to the Square. The Square shone like a ball-room with a great plume of green branches in the middle and every corner a niche of gaudy window boxes. Past us came the season’s stream of carriages, the women resting against the cushions looking like finely cultivated flowers. The beauty of the Square that afternoon astonished me. I wondered how it struck Lucy. Very likely she was only thinking of her Gaiety Theatre!”
“But how did you know her name?”
“You remember it was at the corner of Berkeley Square that Evelyn Innes stood when she went to see Owen Asher for the first time, she used to tell me how she stood at the curb watching London passing by her, thinking that one day London would be going to hear her sing. As soon as there was a break in the stream of carriages I took Lucy across. We could talk unobserved in the Square, and she continued her story. ‘I’m nearly seventeen,’ she said, ‘and I was sent back to school because I sat for a sculpture.’”
“What did you sit for?”
“For a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and a priest told on me.”
“Then you’re Lucy Delaney, and the sculptor you sat for is John Rodney, one of my intimate friends.”
“What an extraordinary coincidence,” said Rodney. “I never thought that Lucy would stay in Ireland. Go on with your story.”
“When I found out who she was there seemed no great harm in asking her in to have some tea. Asher will forgive you anything if there’s a woman in it; you may keep him waiting half an hour if you assure him your appointment was with a married woman. Well, Lucy had arrived that morning in London with threepence in her pocket, so I told the footman to boil a couple of eggs. I should have liked to have offered her a substantial meal, but that would have set the servants talking. Never did a girl eat with a better appetite, and when she had finished a second plateful of buttered toast she began to notice the pictures. I could see that she had been in a studio and had talked about art. It is extraordinary how quick a girl is to acquire the ideas of a man she likes. She admired Manet’s picture of Evelyn, and I told her Evelyn’s story — knowing it would interest her. ‘That such a happy fate should be a woman’s and that she should reject it,’ her eyes seemed to say. ‘She is now,’ I said, ‘singing Ave Marias at Wimbledon for the pecuniary benefit of the nuns and the possible salvation of her own soul.’ Her walk tells the length of the limbs and the balance of the body, and my eyes followed her as she moved about the room, and when I told her I had seen the statue and had admired the legs, she turned and said, with a pretty pleased look, that you always said that she had pretty legs. When I asked her if you had made love to her, she said you had not, that you were always too busy with your sculpture.”
“One can’t think of two things at the same time. If I had met her in Paris it would have been different.”
“Unfortunately I was dining out that evening. It was hard to know what to do. At last I thought of a lodging-house kept by a praiseworthy person, and took her round there and, cursing my dinner-party, I left her in charge of the landlady.”
“Like a pot of jam left carefully under cover... That will be all right till to-morrow,” said Rodney.
“Very likely. It is humiliating to admit it, but it is so; the substance of our lives is woman; all other things are irrelevancies, hypocrisies, subterfuges. We sit talking of sport and politics, and all the while our hearts are filled with memories of women and plans for the capture of women. Consciously or unconsciously we regard every young woman from the one point of view, ‘Will she do?’ You know the little look that passes between men and women as their hansoms cross? Do not the eyes say: ‘Yes, yes, if we were to meet we might come to an understanding?’ We’re ashamed that it should be so, but it is the law that is over us. And that night at my dinner-party, while talking to wise mammas and their more or less guileless daughters, I thought of the disgrace if it were found out that I had picked up a girl in the street and put her in charge of the landlady.”
“But one couldn’t leave her to the mercy of the street.”
“Quite so; but I’m speaking now of what was in the back of my mind.”
“The pot of jam carefully covered up,” said Rodney, laughing.
“Yes, the pot of jam; and while talking about the responsibilities of Empire, I was thinking that I might send out for a canvas in the morning and sketch something out on it; and when I got home I looked out a photograph of some women bathing. I expected her about twelve, and she found me hard at work.
“Oh, I didn’t know that you were a painter,” she said.
“No more I am, I used to be; and thinking of Rodney’s statue and what I can see of you through that dress I thought I’d try and do something like you.”
“I’m thinner than that.”
“You’re not thin.”
“We argued the point, and I tried to persuade her to give me a sitting. She broke away, saying that it wasn’t the same thing, and that she had sat for you because there were no models in Dublin. ‘You’ve been very good to me,’ she said, ‘I should have had to sleep in the Park last night if it had not been for you. Do continue to be good to me and get me on the stage, for if you don’t I shall have to go back to Dublin or to America.’ ‘America,’ I said. ‘Do you want to go to America?’ She didn’t answer, and when she was pressed for an answer, she said: ‘Well, all the Irish go to America, I didn’t mean anything more; I am too worried to know what I am saying,’ and then, seeing me turn round to look at my picture, she said, ‘I will sit to you one of these days, but I am too unhappy and frightened now. I don’t like saying no; it is always disagreeable to say no.’ And seeing it would give her no pleasure to sit, I did not ask her again.”
“I’m sorry you missed seeing something very beautiful.”
“I daresay she’d have sat if I’d have pressed her, but she was under my protection, and it seemed cowardly to press her, for she could not refuse. Suddenly we seemed to have nothing more to say to each other, and I asked her if she’d like to see a manager, and as it seemed a pity she should waste herself on the Gaiety Theatre I took her to see Sir Edward Higgins. The mummer was going out to lunch with a lord and could only think of the people he was going to meet. So we went to Dorking’s Theatre, and we found Dorking with his acting manager. The acting manager had been listening for a long while and wasn’t sorry for the interruption. But we had not been talking for more than two or three minutes when the call-boy brought in a bundle of newspaper cuttings, and the mummer had not the patience to wait until he was alone — one reads one’s cuttings alone — he stuck his knees together and opened the bundle, columns of print flowed over his knees, and after telling us what the critics were saying about him, mention was made of Ibsen, and we wondered if there was any chance of getting the public to come to see a good play. You know the conversation drifts.”
“You couldn’t get her an engagement,” said Rodney, “I should have thought she was suited to the stage.”
“If there had been time I could have done something for her; she’s a pretty girl, but you see all these things take a long time, and Lucy wanted an engagement at once. When we left the theatre I began to realise the absurdity of the adventure, and the danger to which I was exposing myself. I, a man of over forty, seeking the seduction of a girl of seventeen — for that is the plain English of it. We walked on side by side, and I asked myself, ‘What am I to her, what is she to me? But one may argue with one’s self forever.”
“One may indeed,” said Rodney, laughing, “one may argue, but the law that is over us.”
“Wel
l, the law that is over us compelled me to take her to lunch, and she enjoyed the lunch and the great restaurant. ‘What a number of butlers,’ she said. After lunch the same problem confronted me: Was I or was I not going to pursue the adventure? I only knew for certain that I could not walk about the streets with Lucy. She is a pretty girl, but she looked odd enough in her country clothes. Suddenly it struck me that I might take her into the country, to Wimbledon.”
“And you took her there and heard Evelyn Innes sing. And what did Lucy think? A very pretty experiment in experimental psychology.”
“The voice is getting thinner. She sang Stradella’s Chanson D’Eglise, and Lucy could hardly speak when we came out of church. ‘Oh, what a wonderful voice,’ she said, ‘do you think she regrets?’ ‘Whatever we do we regret,’ I answered, not because I thought the observation original, but because it seemed suitable to the occasion; ‘and we regret still more what we don’t do.’ And I asked myself if I should write to Lucy’s people as we walked about the Common. But Lucy wanted to hear about Owen Asher and Evelyn, and the operas she had sung, and I told the story of Tannhauser and Tristan. She had never heard such stories before, and, as we got up from the warm grass, she said that she could imagine Evelyn standing in the nuns’ garden with her eyes fixed on the calm skies, getting courage from them to persevere. Wasn’t it clever of her? We dined together in a small restaurant and I spent the evening with her in the lodging-house; the landlady let us her sitting-room. Lucy is charming, and her happiness is volatile and her melancholy too; she’s persuasive and insinuating as a perfume; and when I left the house, it was as if I had come out of a moonlight garden. ‘Thy green eyes look upon me... I love the moonlight of thine eyes.’”
“Go on,” said Rodney, “what happened after that?”
“The most disagreeable thing that ever happened to me in my life. You don’t know what it is to be really afraid. I didn’t until a fellow came up to me at the club and asked me if I had seen the detectives. Fear is a terrible thing, Rodney; there is nothing so demoralising as fear. You know my staid old club of black mahogany and low ceilings, where half a dozen men sit dining and talking about hunting and two-year-olds. There is a man in that club who has asked me for the last ten years what I am going to do with my two-year-olds. He cannot remember that I never had a two-year-old. But that night he wasn’t tipsy, and his sobriety impressed me; he sat down at my table, and after a while he leaned across and asked me if I knew that two detectives had been asking after me. ‘You had better look to this. These things turn out devilish unpleasantly. Of course there is nothing wrong, but you don’t want to appear in the police court,’ he said.”
