by George Moore
Seven or eight steps took them into a beautiful porch, and from thence into the Hall, a magnificent hall of more than a hundred feet by some thirty or forty, and lighted by the rose window that had claimed their attention from the very first moment they looked down the valley, in the south-eastern wall. With a centre and upright quatrefoil, Hugh said, turning over the leaves of the guide-book, and four strong mullions radiating from the cardinal point, and between these three lesser ones, the inner circle not quite concentric with that enclosing the tracery but dropping a little to create an optical illusion. And closing the book, he cried: On the shore of the western sea all this beauty was created by a people who, though barbarians in our eyes, had not outlived the age of beauty. How fond you are, said Percy, of the phrase: An age that has not outlived the age of beauty. There’s always beauty if you have eyes to find it. But not the old beauty, said Hugh.
The kitchen chimney, which the builder told them had fallen only a few years before, was lying on the floor, an immense mass of masonry three or four feet in thickness that testified to the strength of the vaulting, which, though it had fallen in other places, had resisted the weight of the flue. We have just come in time, said Percy, to see these ruins at their best, for in another hundred years they will be carting the rubble away to build cottages for the population of the district, which will have trebled by that time. A shadow floated over Hugh’s face, and Percy wondered why his words had troubled him, for everybody knew that all things pass away, and he suspected a secret cause. But he forgot his suspicion a moment after, for Hugh was talking gaily of this ancient method of architecture that laid an immense building like the present one over a series of crypts. In which, he said, the cooks and scullions, the grooms and pages, lived; a vast servitude, he averred, was indeed needed to keep so large a building in repair. They must have crawled like animals, Percy said, out of their burrows when the dirt on their bodies was too thick to be bearable any longer, a remark that Hugh did not like, saying that we had no intimate knowledge of how the men and women of old time lived. But where did they sleep? Percy asked, for there are but two bedrooms in all this building; and as sleep is urgent at times, they must have taken their fill of it where they fell on the rushes that strewed the floor of the Banqueting Hall. Whereupon they walked, thinking of the great serviture in the vaults, dark places into which they scarcely dared to look: But which were more habitable, Hugh said, once than they seem at present, for the ground is higher than it was; the earth grows. All these vaults were once on a level with the quadrangle, so it seems to me.
From thence they found a path which they followed gingerly by a great breach in the vaults to a doorway leading to the Bishop’s Dining Room, about half the size of the Banqueting Hall. A modest place, just large enough to have a snack in! said Percy, who was beginning to weary of Hugh’s investigations, his mind being on the drawing of the building from the quadrangle of the eastern front. But he could not begin his sketch yet awhile, for Hugh had just discovered that the Hall was lit by two windows to the north-west and four to the south-east, and that probably the recess that cut into the window at the south angle may have contained the refectory pulpit, and that behind it were traces of a passage and stair, leading, no doubt, to the minstrel gallery. Do come this way, Percy, for this doorway leads, I am sure, to the Bishop’s study. There are fireplaces and chimneys, and a way leading to a small apartment as necessary in ancient life as in modern. The great Bishop hopping round in a hurry, said Percy, and all the minor Bishops and their wives waiting! But they couldn’t have all been waiting at the same time unless their food disagreed with them! At which pleasantry the young men laughed heartily. I think I can see them in my thoughts gathered round this fireplace in the evening, Hugh said, and he began to speak of the forests that once covered the hills and the felling of them, several trees being needed each day to keep the Bishop warm. There seems to have been a way through here once, he continued. But we must leave the building, for the sun is shining, bringing out the shadows, and our visit to the Bishop’s private Chapel can be postponed. Percy said his sketch could wait, and he began to ask himself what Hugh expected to discover in these ruins, now ripe for drawing. Come, Hugh, sit and begin your drawing and forget the stables. But I cannot forget the pilgrims that tethered their horses, Hugh answered. But you can’t draw the pilgrims, and the stables are rubble heaps, Percy retorted, and Hugh took a seat beside him. But he began no drawing, saying that he could not concentrate on the ruin, for his thoughts were on the building before the Bishop had robbed it to add to his daughters’ dowries. If he had not, said Percy, he would have had his daughters on his hands, for one can barely imagine a Bishop begetting beautiful girls.
And whilst Percy drew, Hugh’s thoughts returned to the great mediaeval life to which this ruin testified, and so immersed was he in the past that Percy’s sketch had little or no interest for him. At every moment it seemed to him that the life herebefore was coming nearer to him; so near did it come that it was hard for him to restrain a cry. When the vision dwindled and reality returned, and he found himself among the ruins of a Palace of old time, he knew that that was why he had become so intensely conscious of the life he had always believed to be his own, a life that accident had estranged him from, casting him into one in which he would never be happy, for it was not himself. The earth, he said to himself, remembers all things, and this courtyard is pregnant with remembrances which have passed into me, and I have seen, as in an enchanted glass, that life that was lived before the world had forgotten beauty. Tears came to his eyelids; at any moment they might drop over the lids and fall down his cheeks, and if Percy were to ask him to give a reason for his tears he would not be able to give any, none that anybody would understand, not even Percy. So does happiness, he said to himself, turn to grief. Not to grief, he added, for grief is sorrow for what we have lost, but to melancholy, for melancholy is sorrow for that which we shall never possess. And to escape from himself he broke into speech, telling Percy that they must one day visit the British Museum together. The first thing he would show him would be a missal in which a group of exquisite women in long, pale robes walked among ecclesiastics, the happy, childlike faith of the twelfth century over every face. This missal, and many others, he said, were a record of the happy life that had been lived in England in the twelfth or thirteenth century, for only a happiness, brooding far and near, could have inspired this lisping art, so April like. In answer to a question from Percy, Hugh said: An art rarely outlasts a century, and so we may say that the life of an art is hardly longer than a man’s life — a few years, about which we need not quarrel.
Percy continued his drawing for some time in silence, till breaking the pause suddenly he said: I see a bland, sunny morning with the monks in their cloisters drawing tall nuns in pale robes walking among ecclesiastics, and knights riding from castle to castle accompanied by their gleemen in the slender months. But, Hugh, the innocency of the art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries contrasted with the lewdness to which the world was given over — My dear Percy, that view of the Middle Ages has been challenged and repudiated by all modern scholarship, above all by Walter Pater, who has shown that the genius of the cloister did not consist in the renunciation but in the transference of love from earth to heaven, getting thereby an exaltation greater than the senses could procure. He even dared to contend that there was no real difference between the practice of love in the cloister and in the castle, for the influence of the cloister had passed into the castle and set up an absent object of adoration for a present one. Dante saw Beatrice only once and when she was a child, and this glimpse of her sufficed to fill his life. Petrarch wrote sonnets to Laura — we are not sure that she ever lived in the flesh — and Rudel, the troubadour, sang the praises of the Princess of Tripoli for many years, his love waxing yearly till he died of it on his voyage out to her. Then he did set out to visit her? interposed Percy, but without noticing the interruption Hugh mentioned another troubador, Ramboult d�
�Orange, who sang the praises of the Comtesse d’Urgel and loved her all his life, though he had never seen her or she him. But if the loves of all men were in the head, said Percy, the world would come to an end. It would not matter much if it did, Hugh replied, since every man’s chance of reaching heaven is small, a heresy that Percy did not attempt to controvert, preferring to listen to Hugh telling that many of the troubadours repented their sins in monasteries, and that among these repentant sinners was Bernard de Ventadorn. You don’t believe that this is so, Percy? Plato was much read in the Middle Ages, and I prefer to think that the platonic loves you describe were due to his influence. But at the present moment I am more interested to hear how you came to be drawn to the Middle Ages, and how it was that the Knights of the Grail captured your imagination so completely that the life of that time seems to you, more real than the life you see about you? Hugh answered that he could not remember having been drawn to the Middle Ages. I seem, he said, to have known them always, and I never can altogether surrender the belief that I am but the shadow of a knight who lived eight hundred years ago. But you are not adrift, Percy, in a world that does not belong to you. You do not seek to escape from the present; you are never homesick, for you create out of your imagination a heightened world, a dwelling for your soul. But I cannot.
I can only love the beautiful, but you make the beautiful. Look at my drawing! Percy looked at Hugh’s drawing, till embarrassed by its clumsiness he returned it to Hugh with the remark that it was just in a nice state to begin over again. Hardly fair that would be, he added, if the model were a living one, but a ruin won’t mind; and he continued to draw, Hugh watching every stroke with admiration, conscious that he would never acquire a skill comparable to Percy’s.
What I find difficult to understand, said Percy, is your admiration for the Greeks and for the Middle Ages, two things so opposite, to which Hugh answered that whatever is loved and admired to-day was loved and admired from the beginning — For it is hard to think of man as unmindful of the beauty of the skies or of shapely mountains — and that it would seem to him that whatever man has deeply loved and pondered returns like a ghost. And which ghost is the most real to you — the fourth century before or the thirteenth after? asked Percy. The mediaeval world, Hugh replied, is nearer to me; it is my present, the Greek world is my past; in the world around me I am an exile. And you were always like that? So far as a man can know himself I was always like that, more so once than to-day, for I sometimes think the world has had its way with me, come between me and my real self, a self that nobody will ever know, not even you, Percy, who are so sensitive and sympathetic. Percy stopped drawing, saying: Tell me about yourself. I couldn’t if I wished tell the nights in the garret at Wotton Hall when I threw myself on my knees and implored God — Hugh paused, and after waiting some time for him to speak again, Percy asked him for what he had prayed. I could not tell those nights even if I wished, Hugh repeated. It may be that I prayed God might put the world back and that I might live again as a knight, riding in the lists, and of all, practising chastity. Chastity has always been the centre of my thoughts; sometimes among the stress of modern things the idea seems to fade a little, but it brightens again, and I feel that if I were to lose it, by some mischance, I should not be able to bear with my life. On those nights I was Sir Galahad and Sir Galahad was I, and a something more than an earthly chastity was our quest together. The great loneliness of those days and nights was — but it cannot go into words; if I were the greatest writer in the world, I should fail to express it. Loneliness perhaps tells the story of my life better than any other word, how it passes from day to day, two human beings, my mother and I, divided as no two are. Any other son would have suited her better than I. Any other mother would have suited me better than she. Small wonder it is that I love the thirteenth century, for there is not even a mother for me to love in the nineteenth. I was unhappy at Stanislaus College, and unhappier still when I returned home, outwardly one of the most fortunate men in the world, inwardly the least. You see, you were free, Percy, from the beginning; your father never imposed his ideas upon you. You were brought up a Catholic, but you were allowed to accept the Catholicism that suited your temperament. I was not; it was the harshest side of Catholicism that I was asked to consider always — not heaven but hell, and that to escape hell was but the good fortune of a few.
It was so clear that Hugh was telling himself, his uttermost truth, that Percy stopped drawing. You heard a great deal of that, he said, at Stanislaus College, too much, as I have heard my father say. He was not President in your time. Your father was a beautiful influence in Stanislaus College, the only one, and if he had been President in my time much would have been different within me and therefore without me. It was on Hugh’s lips to tell that his mother was afraid that he would follow his father’s foot-steps, but he checked the words, and Percy said: But you are free now; you can do what you like, think as you please, go where you please, buy what you please. You are mistaken, Percy.
I was not free in the past and I shall not be free in the future. Have you forgotten why we came here? To escape from all the women that my mother asked to Wotton Hall. But your mother’s friends have nothing to do with you. You can leave the table after luncheon. Hugh did not answer. Percy continued to draw, and it was some time before either spoke again. When I was a little boy, Hugh said, my mother tried to mould me, to make me according to her idea, and her idea was that. I should be a good and fervid Catholic, marry, and give her grandchildren. My mother cannot change herself, and to live with a strong, resolute woman, thinking one thing and one thing only and determined to get her away, makes life unendurable. Percy, my life is sometimes almost a nightmare. I do all I can to please my mother, for I know how much I owe to her. I play draughts with her in the evening and I read to her, and last year we went abroad together. Where we stayed was hateful to me, but she liked it, for there was plenty of society.
I do all I can, but what I do is as nothing, for I have disappointed her in the essential. But you are only two-and-twenty, Hugh. Nobody marries at two-and-twenty. Ah, but she suspects that I will never marry, and she is right. I don’t think I ever shall. And why do you think that? Percy asked, returning to his drawing. Because I am different, Percy, from other men. Different from other men! None of us is very different from the other. In what are you different? Percy asked. I don’t know, I cannot tell myself. But I know, I feel all the time, that I am different from other men. And that is the reason you think you will never marry? Well, one of the reasons. But one day you’ll meet some woman who is different from the others. I dare say that none of the women your mother asks to Wotton Hall for you to choose from is — well, a very delectable specimen of feminine humanity. Your mother presents a certain fare before you, and she says if you can’t eat it, it must be because you have no appetite. When this holiday is over, Percy, I shall have to return to the struggle, and sometimes I think that I shall never be able to go back to Wotton Hall. I wonder what you would think of my sister Beatrice, said Percy. I think you would like her. Why do you think I should like her? I don’t know; it just came into my head that you might like her.
VI
The day that the lads had sat sketching amid the ruins of the Bishop’s Palace it had come up in Hugh’s talk that all man has striven for or pondered on is deathless, again a remembrance of Pater, and as if to defend or reaffirm his metaphysics he added that man’s dreams, thoughts, and aspirations belong to humanity as much as the mallow to the bank under which it flourishes and dies generation after generation. We dream the dreams of our forefathers, Hugh had said, we think their thoughts, we pray their prayers; and at the end of a pause he continued: The prayer in The Merry Fiddlers was but the reflowering of prayers that have been uttered how often before, and our faring from inn to inn was but a return to man’s primitive nature, to the roaming animal that he is, resting in a place for a while, but longing to investigate every horizon and drawn from the hospitable shore by the b
arrenest island.
And what barrener spot, they often asked themselves, than Ramsey Island (they could see it from their bedroom windows), standing high out of the sea? and exalted in their imagination by stories of caverns known only to the seals and by the legends of its murdered hermit, they were inspired to sail a boat thither by themselves, an adventure from which they were not dissuaded by the dangers of the Sound, but rather by repeated assurances that no boatman would entrust his boat to them, and of all, at the present moment, when the spring tides were rising. But there were boatmen who would take them for the day to Ramsey Island: Mr. Williams was highly recommended to them, and after enquiry they found the street in which he lived, and further enquiries brought Mr. Williams himself downstairs. The tide is out now, he said, but it will be coming in at two o’clock, and it is no more than half a mile to the sea. I will call for you gentlemen at your inn about that time. We will just have time, Percy said to Hugh, to finish our drawings in the Bishop’s Palace; and they went thither uplifted by the prospect of the adventure that awaited them, returning in an hour to have some luncheon and await Mr. Williams, who appeared a little after two and took them across some rough fields over many walls, and at one of these Mr. Williams met his comrade, who was to accompany them. For the air is still, he said; there isn’t a wind about anywhere and we may have to put out the oars.
From thence the four picked their way over the rough coast of scrub and tussock grass till they came to a great inlet, a hundred or two hundred feet deep, and narrow almost as a railway line. Hugh and Percy were astonished by the cliffs, which brought the word beetling into their minds, but the boatmen told them that these cliffs were nothing to those they would see on Ramsey Island. It would be some time, however, before the tide came up, and Mr. Williams pointed to his boat, high and dry up in the inlet, where it seemed no water would ever reach her. She’ll be afloat in an hour’s time, less than that, said Mr. Williams, and to help the time away he began to tell stories of all the local characters, imitating their voices, among them being a great braggart called Owen, who assigned to himself an heroic part in all the tales of shipwrecks in the Sound. It was he who directed the swimmers who undertook to carry a line through the surf to the doomed vessel. Each story ended with: Enough! The men owed their lives to me! It was the word: Enough, that seemed to be the chief relish in the stories, and both young men laughed consumedly, Percy more than Hugh, who having never lived by the sea could hardly believe that the tide would reach the boat, so far up in the inlet. But Mr. Williams said: You see you bank, sir? As soon as the tide gets over it we shall be afloat soon after. And whilst the incoming waves swilled up the shingle, they had a pleasant talk with a poor fisherman whom they found brooding over his nets. A month’s mending they will take said he in answer to enquiries, and I doubt if they’ll ever be worth the time spent on them. But how did they get torn like this? asked Percy. The seal has been through them, he answered. During the war them fellows had it all their own way, and now there are so many that the fishing don’t pay the fishermen. But before the war? queried Percy. We had a gentleman here who spent his time shooting them. Shooting seals! said Hugh. Well, you see, sir, what my nets are like. We fish for the seals, and that’s about all. They moved away, and whilst Mr. Williams told that the old fellow had come to the trade late in life and was not to be trusted in the Sound, the tide continued to rise over the shingle bank. A long waiting it was, but withal not a weary waiting, for the boatmen were cheery fellows, brimming over, both of them, with local stories. All the same, Hugh and Percy were glad when the time came for them to scramble down the rocks to the boat, into which it was nearly time they should jump, for the water was now around her. Ten minutes afterwards she was afloat, with the boatmen pulling her out towards the open sea, to Hugh’s surprise; so heavily was the boat built that it looked as if four oars would be needed to get My Fancy over to Ramsey Island.
