by George Moore
You see, Alec, this is how it was. Polly, that was Hubert’s wife, died six months before Albert; and Hubert had been thinking ever since of going into partnership with Albert. In fact Hubert had been thinking about a shop, like Albert, saying to herself almost every day after the death of her wife: Albert and I might set up together. But it was not until she lay in bed that she fell to thinking the matter out, saying to herself: One of us would have had to give up our job to attend to it. The shop was Albert’s idea more than mine, so perhaps she’d have given up waiting, which would not have suited me, for I’m tired of going up these ladders. My head isn’t altogether as steady as it used to be; swinging about on a derrick isn’t suited to women. So perhaps it’s as well that things have fallen out as they have. Hubert turned herself over, but sleep was far from her, and she lay a long time thinking of everything and of nothing in particular, as we all do in our beds, with this thought often uppermost: I wonder what is going to be the end of my life. What new chance do the years hold for me?
And of what would Hubert be thinking, being a married woman? Of what else should she be thinking but of her husband, who might now be a different man from the one she left behind? Fifteen years, she said, makes a great difference in all of us, and perhaps it was the words, fifteen years, that put the children she had left behind her back into her thought. I wouldn’t be saying that she hadn’t been thinking of them, off and on, in the years gone by, but the thought of them was never such a piercing thought as it was that night. She’d have liked to have jumped out of her bed and run away to them; and perhaps she would have done if she only knew where they were. But she didn’t, so she had to keep to her bed; and she lay for an hour or more thinking of them as little children, and wondering what they were like now. Lily was five when she left home. She’s a young woman now. Agnes was only two. She is now seventeen, still a girl, Hubert said to herself; but Lily’s looking round, thinking of young men, and the other won’t be delaying much longer, for young women are much more wide-awake than they used to be in the old days. The rest of my life belongs to them. Their father could have looked after them till now; but now they are thinking of young men he won’t be able to cope with them, and maybe he’s wanting me too. Bill is forty, and at forty we begin to think of them as we knew them long ago. He must have often thought of me, perhaps oftener than I thought of him; and she was surprised to find that she had forgotten all Bill’s ill-usage, and remembered only the good time she had had with him. The rest of my life belongs to him, she said, and to the girls. But how am I to get back to him? how, indeed?... Bill may be dead; the children too. But that isn’t likely. I must get news of them somehow. The house is there; and lying in the darkness she recalled the pictures on the wall, the chairs that she had sat in, the coverlets on the beds, everything. Bill isn’t a wanderer, she said; I’ll find him in the same house if he isn’t dead. And the children? Did they know anything about her? Had Bill spoken ill of her to them? She didn’t think he would do that. But did they want to see her? Well, she could never find that out except by going to see. But how was she going to return home? Pack up her things and go dressed as a man to the house and, meeting Bill on the threshold, say: Don’t you know me, Bill? and are you glad to see your mother back, children? No; that wouldn’t do. She must return home as a woman, and none of them must know the life she had been living. But what story would she tell him? It would be difficult to tell the story of fifteen years, for fifteen years is a long time, and sooner or later they’d find out she was lying, for they would keep asking her questions.
But sure, said Alec, ’tis an easy story to tell. Well, Alec, what story should she tell them? In these parts, Alec said, a woman who left her husband and returned to him after fifteen years would say she was taken away by the fairies whilst wandering in a wood. Do you think she’d be believed? Why shouldn’t she, your honour? A woman that marries another woman, and lives happily with her, isn’t a natural woman; there must be something of the fairy in her. But I could see it all happening as you told it, the maidservants and the serving-men going their own roads, and the only fault I’ve to find with the story is that you left out some of the best parts. I’d have liked to know what the husband said when she went back to him, and they separated all the years. If he liked her better than he did before, or less. And there is a fine story in the way the mother would be vexed by the two daughters and the husband, and they at her all the time with questions, and she hard set to find answers for them. But mayhap the best bit of all is when Albert began to think that it wouldn’t do to have Joe Mackins hanging round, making their home his own, eating and drinking of the best, and when there was a quarrel he’d have a fine threat over them, as good as the Murrigan herself when she makes off of a night to the fair, whirling herself over the people’s heads, stirring them up agin each other, making cakes of their skulls. I’m bet, fairly bet, crowed down by the Ballinrobe cock. And now, your honour, you heard the Angelus ringing, and my dinner is on the hob, and I’ll be telling you what I think of the story when I come back; but I’m thinking already ’tis the finest that ever came out of Ballinrobe, I am so.
HENRIETTA MARR
I
IT HAPPENED THAT Etta’s carriage stopped within a few yards of where her brother was standing, and she went to him, saying: I thought the train journey would never end. The train is not late, he answered. If you had been in it, Harold, you would have thought it was; and now it seems that we shall never get away. A bad crossing? Harold interjected. My head is still full of it. We were packed like sardines, and a great tinful we should have been for the fishes if we had gone down. But shall we ever get away? Look at the luggage and see how it accumulates!
A barrier was formed, and trunks of all shapes and kinds began to appear, round leather trunks, bound with straps, testifying to trousers, coats, greatcoats, boots, perchance a dressing gown on top; great basket trunks went by, bespeaking dinner dresses, bodices, skirts, blouses, underlinen, shoes, everything except hats. A porter passed staggering under the weight of a long, shallow trunk, built to withstand the racket of travel to India and back, and he was followed by another porter carrying a suitcase and a Gladstone bag; leather hat-boxes were rare, men preferring to take them into the carriages with them, fearing the crush in the vans. Oh, the multitudinous hills of luggage! cried Etta. The boxes and the bags! It will take hours to examine them all. We shall miss the connection and not get to Sutton until midnight. What is the matter, Etta? Harold asked. Only nerves, she replied, but I’m making every effort to control myself. I will tell you about the boat train presently. Do you think we shall catch a train to Sutton this evening? You’ve been overworking, Etta, I’m certain of that. The train that comes up from Dover is one of our best trains. Now here is the Customs House officer. But will he let my trunks through, or shall I have to open them? If you talk like that in his hearing, he’ll ask you to open them all. Answer his questions calmly, indifferently, and he may let your trunks through without an examination.
Harold was right, for the Customs House officer, after overlooking Etta carefully, and judging her not to be a smuggler, marked her trunks with a piece of chalk. A porter put them on a barrow, and half an hour later they were in a slow train for Sutton. You’ve been overworking, Harold said, looking into his sister’s face with a view to descrying any change that may have befallen her during the months she had passed in Paris, and she answered that she had spent a great many hours every day in the studio and had come home on account of the heat. Harold asked her why she had not come home before, and she repeated that the heat was unbearable, the sun pouring through the skylight like a flame in July, driving the students out of Paris into the country to paint landscapes. A week before she left there was a great exodus, Renouf going away to Honfleur, his native town, to paint fishermen, Doucet leaving for his honeymoon (he was marrying an American girl who had been courting him flagrantly all through the session), and Jamain was on his way to Rome, having won the prize. Only a few unwo
rthy ones, she said, remained to continue their grimy drawings. I really couldn’t watch them blackening paper any longer, and feeling worn out I came back. I wonder you didn’t come back before, Harold said, and inwardly he congratulated himself that Etta had not brought back with her Renouf, Doucet or Jamain. He was always a little nervous as to the class of man Fate would give him for a brother-in-law.
Cissy Clive and Elsie Lawrence have gone to Fontainebleau with their young men to paint birches and oaks, Etta said, and at the words: gone with their young men, Harold’s face deepened a little, for he remembered these girls as very middle-class; and despite Etta’s admiration for Ralph Hoskin’s talent, he still bore a grudge against the painter for the advice he had given Etta. If one wants to learn painting, he had said to her, one must go where painting is being done, and it’s being done in Paris. And Harold’s old aversions against Etta’s National Gallery acquaintances returned to him on the journey to Sutton. Gone to Fontainebleau with their young men to paint birches and oaks, did not harmonise with his view of the acquaintances that Etta should choose for herself. But since she had decided to go to Paris, it was better that she went with Cissy Clive and Elsie Lawrence than alone. If he had been able to procure a chaperon for her, she would have flaunted his choice, so to some extent he was indebted to both of these girls, and would have to ask them to the Manor House when they returned to England. Gone to Fontainebleau with their young men, might only be Etta’s way of talking, and as it seemed to him useless to express any disapproval of her friends, he began to ask her questions about her life in Paris, the hotel she and her friends lived in, and the eating-house they frequented. She had mentioned Duval in one of her letters, and he confused Duval with Durand, to Etta’s great amusement. Durand, she said, is a great restaurant in Paris; the Duvals are eating-houses. But is it reasonable to expect me to know the names of the restaurants and the eating-houses in a city that I have never visited? And now that she had explained to him what the Duval really was, he began to wonder why his sister had chosen to live in such discomfort; for his sister, as far as he knew her, was more averse from squalor than another. He had always thought her one who preferred to look up rather than down, and it was on his lips to put some inquiries to her; but seeing that she was weary and tired, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he thought it would be safer to ask her about her journey.
Whereupon she broke forth into a pleasant garrulousness, telling him that she had enjoyed watching the French country as it passed through a long stretch of fens, pools, meres, linking one into the other so closely that she never was sure that the train was not following the course of a marshy, sluggish river; on one of these pools was an abandoned boat. But why do you think the boat was abandoned, Etta? It is probably used daily. I hope it isn’t, she answered; it would be out of keeping with the landscape if it were. He asked if she had made a sketch of the boat, and learnt from her that lunch had helped the time away till the train passed into a landscape from which the sea never seemed to be far distant, sand-hills and pines; and travelling on and on they caught sight of the sea at intervals, losing it again and again, till at last it appeared before them, calm as a lake, speckled with ships. We embarked, Harold, and voyaged under a pale mauve sky till the white cliffs came into view. You have no idea how fine they are, despite the fact that they have been called the parapets of an island of blowing woodland. Although Etta knew that the slightest memory of his business would wipe from his mind the most beautiful description of sea and sky ever penned, she returned to the sunset to plague him, and when she had exhausted her vocabulary in description of the trains she described how she had, during the whole of the crossing, walked to and fro, getting into her lungs as much sea breeze as she could, which they wanted sadly.
He will understand that, she said to herself, and was rewarded by some commendatory remarks from Harold as to her wisdom in remaining on deck, and of all, in returning home, remarks that provoked her out of her facetiousness, and becoming terribly serious she asked him if she was looking a fright. He answered that she was looking tired, and she replied that she was all right till she reached Dover. I’ve never been in a train that crawled into Chatham up a long incline like a beldam, she said. At Chatham we saw the sea again, which was a great discouragement, for I thought we had left the sea a hundred miles behind us. You know how in a dream we try to escape from something and can’t? It was like that, and about an hour ago I seemed to lose control of myself. Yes, you seemed very nervous when you jumped out of the train at Charing Cross. I don’t know how it was, but the Dover train got upon my nerves, she answered. The ten miles between London and Sutton are passing pleasantly enough now. And the Manor House, if I remember rightly, is near the station. How far is it, Harold? Now, Etta, I’m not going to tell you how far the Manor House is from the station. As if you had forgotten!
Harold’s density, or rather his lack of humour, his slow, methodical mind, had always been an amusement to his mother and sister, who looked upon him as a very pure Marr in mind and in body; and recalling her mother’s words: Never did a mind and body come together so harmoniously, Etta applied them to Harold, thinking with amusement, but not unkindly, that his mind was inevitable in a thin, well-proportioned man, who walked with his shoulders set well back, and caressed a long, golden moustache with a short, crabbed hand. She acknowledged his nose to be better shapen than her own; but what she lost on the nose she gained on the eyes — his wore the same brown stare always, and she fell in with her mother’s judgment that whosoever saw Harold would recognise him to be the type of the South-Saxon, commonplace and steadfast. And then her thoughts passing from Harold to her mother, she remembered the pain that his mother’s failings used to cause Harold during the last years of her life; for there was no denying that her mother often drank more wine than was good for her, and when that happened her tongue was unrestrained — she talked with her butler during dinner about the cedars of Lebanon; and though Harold admired his mother’s contributions to the Saturday Review, he could not bring himself to accept them as sufficient atonement for her social transgressions. Indeed, he would have preferred that she ceased to contribute to the Saturday Review and other papers, and in unguarded moments he was wont to produce his opinion that the people of the Manor House should refrain from playing the piano in public, and from suburban acquaintances.
Etta threw back to her mother in many little ways, for a true Marr would not have picked up acquaintances in the National Gallery — an Orme (Mrs. Marr was an Orme) might. Etta, too, recognised her kin in the Orme rather than in the Marr. The readiness with which she reproduced her musical memories on the piano came to her from her mother; likewise her taste for art. Mrs. Marr had brought back copies of Andrea del Sarto and Luini from Italy, and visitors were expected to accept them as originals and Etta’s water-colours as prodigies, which they were able to do without suffering in their consciences; artists didn’t come in those days to the Manor House. And Etta’s thought on returning home was of her mother, who, with all her faults, would have rendered homage to the drawings she was bringing, some comprehension, some interest at least. Harold would, of course, ask to see her drawings, and the thought of showing drawings to Harold, who was a real Marr, more Marr than ever, more like himself, awoke the spirit of comedy in Etta; and remembering that a man proclaims his inner entity in his choice of meats, she asked him what he had ordered for dinner.
Well, Etta, I’m afraid that at this moment I can’t recall the whole of the bill of fare, but I’m sure there’s some salmon. That’s English enough, she answered slyly, detecting a better opening for her wit when Harold happened to mention jugged hare. Isn’t that rather a sudden leap? she inquired. Leap where? Into England’s most characteristic dish, she replied, her amusement suddenly checked by his answer that if jugged hare was not to her liking, the cook would be able to find something that was in the larder. It isn’t a question of my liking it, Harold, she interrupted, fearing that she had offended him, a thing she did
not wish to do. A year of hard work has made me nervous, and I’m trying to forget myself in a joke, that is all, only you won’t let me. I am so tired and weary that whether there was jugged hare or boiled chicken or grilled salmon — Again you’re making fun of England, Etta.
Oh no, Harold, I’m not. I am too tired to eat, that’s all. He asked if she would come down to dinner. No, Harold; let me have a cup of weak tea and a biscuit. You’ll forgive me for not sitting through the jugged hare with you, for I’m very, very tired, and you’ll not expect me at breakfast and will go away as usual by the nine o’clock train? His anxiety to catch the nine o’clock train to London was a family joke, and Harold was about to say that he was weary of the joke and that it was time a new one were invented; but the train was running into Sutton, and he said instead: The carriage will be waiting for us, and don’t ask me how far we are from the station. She welcomed this tardy appreciation of her joke, and a few minutes afterwards they passed through the lodge gates, and a footman came forth to take down Etta’s luggage. You are sure, Etta, that you will not take even a little soup before going to bed? No, Harold; I couldn’t eat anything, not even soup. And he watched her ascending step by step wearily, indulging in the hope that there was nothing radically wrong with her, and that she would be well again after a good night’s rest.
It doesn’t seem to me as if I shall ever be able to think of eating again. I am too tired even to sleep, she sighed as she laid her head on the pillow; but the many restless hours she saw before her did not come to pass. I must have fallen asleep at once, she said, stretching herself voluptuously. The day is broad and bright, and how pleasant the room is. For how long have I slept? What time is it? Ten, eleven, or maybe twelve o’clock. Not so bad as that, she added, catching sight of the clock, only halfpast ten. So she turned over and lay in a happy, lucid idleness among the pillows for another hour, thinking of her bathroom and the comfort of it, remembering that in the hotel in the Quartier Latin there was no bathroom, and that she and Cissy and Elsie had had to go to some public baths, thing that she disliked to do. Bathing, she had said, where all the bodies in the town have been, a remark that provoked them to chide her. For fastidiousness, she said; and for coarseness on another occasion, when she had answered Elsie, who came into her room to borrow one of her dresses: With pleasure, Elsie, if you promise not to return it to me. I cannot abide anybody’s sweat but my own.
