by George Moore
Their garden was a small square facing the street in which they lived. It looked as if it should be the common property of those living in the street, but the landlord had found that if he allowed all the tenants to walk in the garden no one walked in it at all. For it to be enjoyed by someone it had to become the exclusive property of one house, and it had been given to the Misses O’Hara to keep in order. They had a pretty taste in gardening, and they kept it in beautiful order.
Along the street there were hawthorn-trees and along one wall many lilac-bushes and some apple-trees, and the lilacs grew in such abundance that their branches joined overhead, making a shady little avenue. The tool-house was at the end of this avenue, and Letitia could read there in safety; her sister could not come upon her unawares; the moment the garden gate opened Letitia could hide her novel behind the loose planks.
She could generally get about one hour a day by herself in the garden, and she read about Emma’s love of Rudolph, and the scene where she sees him for the last time in the garden impressed her very much, and while talking to her sister of things that did not interest her she remembered how the ripe peach had broken from its stalk and had fallen with a thud in the quiet midnight. She had read of the passionate yearning of this wife of the country doctor, the wife always looking to something beyond her life and the husband quite contented in his life. The sensation that the book exhaled of Emma’s empty days was extraordinarly intense. There was a description of how Emma looked out of the window in the morning, how she watched her husband ride away to visit his patients. Later, a clerk came to fill her empty days with desire again, and Letitia was extraordinarily impressed by a passage describing how the husband, lying by his wife’s side, thinks of the child in the cradle, what she will be like when she grows up, etc., while Emmas dreams of a romantic elopement in a coach drawn through mountain passes by four horses. Letitia read that Emma hardly heard her husband’s breathing, so intently did she listen to the tinkling of the postilion bells and the sound of distant water-falls.
Rudolph was a neighbour, and Emma had been able to see Rudolph in her own house or in his, but she had to go to Rouen to see the clerk, and to go to Rouen she required money, and Letitia read how Emma used to borrow from a usurer. When the usurer gave her the money all she saw in it, all it represented to her, was a number of visits to Rouen. Emma used to meet her lover in a hotel. The descriptions of their meetings frightened Letitia, and she sometimes thought she was not justified in reading any more, but her scruple died from her in an extraordinary sense of bewilderment and curiosity.
The garden gate closed with a snap, and she slipped the book behind the loose woodwork of the shed and, catching up a rake, went to meet her sister.
Ismena had come to ask her sister if she had seen the French dictionary. She had been writing to some of her friends in Aix and wanted to know how to spell a word. Letitia told her sister that she thought she would find the dictionary in the study, and she resolved to put it there when they went in to lunch.
They walked across the sward to the bare borders. The sunflowers had died and the dahlias had been put away for the winter, but the chrysanthemums were still flowering.
After lunch Ismena brought her sister out with her to pay some visits, and next day it rained. It rained all the week, and they read the Waverley novels under the great Victorian chandelier. Letitia often thought of putting on her waterproof and running down to the tool-house to fetch her book. The Waverley novels were books, and Mrs Henry Wood’s novels were books, but this book was life or very nearly. Letitia knew she never would get nearer life than this book, and she waited impatiently for another dry day. Whenever there was a dry hour Ismena was with her, and it looked as if the Waverley novels would be finished before she got into the garden again. She was now trying to read The Talisman, but she seemed to make no progress, and she had to move her marker on several pages in order to deceive Ismena. While skipping the last half of this book she had to deceive Ismena further. She held the book as if she were reading it, and fixed her thoughts on Emma and the usurer. There could be but one end - the convent, or her husband might die and she might marry the clerk. But then she would not be punished for her sins! Then Rudolph was her first love, and to marry him not only the husband but the clerk would have to die. But these endings were the endings that Scott or Mrs Henry Wood would have chosen, and Letitia wondered.
At last a fine day came, but that morning Letitia awoke with a bad throat, and her throat grew worse all day. Next day she could hardly speak, and Ismena had to send for their doctor; but he assured her there was no cause for alarm, that her sister was not suffering from diphtheria. An hour later the parlour maid said to a visitor -
‘Miss O’Hara is ill, she is in bed, but Miss Ismena would like to see you.’
Ismena explained that, although her sister could not speak, there was no cause for alarm; the doctor said so. The visitor thought she would send in a specialist, but Ismena never permitted any interference, and two days after Letitia was dead. She died the evening of the following day. About four o’clock she made signs that she wanted to write, and Ismena handed her a sheet of note-paper and a pencil, and she wrote, ‘There is a brown-paper parcel in the summer-house.’ She thought that if she got better, she could read the book in bed; if she got worse, she would ask the nurse to burn it.
But it took Ismena a very long time to find the book, so securely had it been hidden, and during that time Letitia’s throat had inflamed still further, and when Ismena returned Letitia was dead.
Had it not been for the garden Ismena would not have lived; it was the garden that helped her to forget her grief. She digged in the garden all the spring, and in June Ismena’s flower-beds were the admiration of the neighbourhood. But one day as she crossed the sward going to the tool-house she remembered that she had gone there to fetch a brown-paper parcel for her sister. She had taken a long time to find it, and when she brought it to her sister, her sister was dead. She left the garden and searched for it; she remembered that it looked like a book. At last she found it, and it was a book. She had read it in France long ago; she remembered who had given her the book, and wondering what had become of him she stood for a long time watching the trees waving in the garden.
‘But how did Letitia come upon this book? Who could have given it to her? Now I know why she sat in the garden so often. Now I know what became of the French dictionary. Oh,’ she said, ‘who ever would have thought this of Letitia!’
THE VOICE OF THE MOUNTAIN
MARY CRONIN WAS an only daughter and had plenty of money, and one day coming home from Mass she told her father that she would marry Dan Coogan. Her father said:
‘Well, Mary, I had hoped for a richer man, but Dan is a good boy, who will work the farm well and make you happy.’
‘I’ll tell him what you say,’ said Mary, and she called after Dan, and from that day the neighbours looked upon them as married. There was great dancing and singing in the farmhouse on Sunday evenings, the piper did not leave the kitchen until midnight, and many a Monday morning the neighbours walked down the village street in the dawn light.
Dan lived in a hill village two miles distant, where his father worked a little farm of about ten acres. This farm was to go to his brother, and before Dan’s courting of Mary Cronin the price of his passage to America had been spoken of as his fortune.
‘America is the place for the man who has pluck in him and who wants to work and to make money. Here you think of nothing but spending your wages in the public-house. You are always looking for your neighbours’ opinions because you’ve no principles of your own. That is not the way in America.’
It was thought that he might praise America without dispraising Ireland.
‘You’re a weak people, too lazy to make your own clothes. There is many a girl in the village who would go without a new dress if she had to make it herself.’
If another said half as much as Dan he would have been hunted out of the parish, bu
t no one minded him. It was just as if they knew he would not be like this always, and that they must have patience with him. His words seemed unlike him, for there was a dream in his blue eyes - they seemed to say, ‘I love you,’ and everyone sympathized with Mary.
And now, since his marriage was settled the neighbours had begun to ask if he was going to stay with them, and the answer was that old Cronin would not let him have his daughter if he did not mean to stay at home and work the farm. Old Cronin saw the makings of a good man in Dan, and old Cronin was never far wrong. Dan was proud of his father-in-law’s opinion. And he was proud of himself: in getting Mary he had ‘done out’ the whole country. Dan thought little of Irish courtship, ‘running to the priest to ask him to make their marriages for them’, he said to himself as he walked home after a dance at the Cronins’, and he remembered with satisfaction how he had looked the girl straight in the eyes and put his arm about her.
He had just bidden Mary and the neighbours who had come to the dance ‘good-night’, and it was not many more times he’d be walking this mountain road; in a fortnight he would be living with his father-in-law, who had a farm of eighty acres, and a fine house two storeys high, and he thought of the fine bedroom he would sleep in, and the gig he would drive to Dublin. If there was one thing Dan hated more than another it was a bare mountain side, and as he walked home he gloated in the thought that his lot would be for henceforth in the snug plain beneath the hills.
He walked, swinging his stick, thinking the world very pleasant, and his own life as the principal thing in it.
His way led through a dark wood where the trees hung thickly, and a little further on there was an old churchyard, where no one had been buried seemingly for centuries, so ruinous were the graves, and a little further on there was a fragment of a church, a carved doorway, and Dan had seen many people admiring this crumbling arch. He could distinguish the carving in the moonlight, and he stood wondering how people could be so foolish as to waste time dreaming over a crumbling stone. America was the country for him. But he had given up America for Mary’s sake.
There was a little wind in the ash trees and the trembling foliage made him tremble. ‘They seem very strange,’ he thought, and Dan supposed it was the night time that made them like living things. Behind them lay the bare mountain valley. He had just been thinking that he hated this landscape, and now was surprised and disappointed to find that he hated it no longer. There was a wistfulness in the distance, and it seemed to steal into his heart and to draw him out of himself, out of the self he had known always, and into another self, an unspotted self, a second self. And in the sway of his second self he began to walk timidly, and he looked about him as one might in some sacred place; and he did not dare to swing his stick lest he should break the furze blossoms, nor did he kick the stones from the path, for he did not despise them any longer.
A little further on there was a great Druid stone, or was it a stone that some deluge had carried down the hill and left upon four upright stones? He had heard this stone had been an altar and that the Druids came there to worship the sun, but he had not listened to these stories, they had gone in one ear and out through the other as wind goes through a crack in the door. But now these stories were like music in his ears, and the earth that he had cared for only to plant potatoes in and that he had thought good for nothing else had become possessed of an extreme sweetness, and after trying to resist the impulse, for it seemed a mad impulse, he yielded to it, and flinging himself on the ground kissed the earth. Remembering how different his thoughts were a moment ago, he felt a little dazed and he thought he must be going mad.
As he rose from his knees he saw cattle grazing, and they moved so mysteriously that they seemed like exhalations, and the ash trees and the grey stones around which they grazed seemed almost as alive as they. ‘We’re all living together in the earth.’ The words came into his mind suddenly - ‘all things are part of the earth, part of its life, and we’re all doing the earth’s bidding.’
Through a great clearness of mind he looked back into the time of the Druids, and after seeing them he saw the Danes, and he saw Brian in the forest, and a great king coming to meet him. For after years of war against the Danes Brian had been left with only fifteen followers, and standing in rags before the king he had told him that the stranger must be driven out. A century later a traitor had brought the English over, and the battle against the stranger had been continued through the centuries. After the siege of Limerick the ‘wild geese’ had fled to France and Austria to fight the stranger abroad when they could fight him at home no longer. Their desire to get rid of the stranger had never come to an end. He seemed to know things he had never learned; the earth seemed to whisper everything he needed to know; the blood that had been shed seemed his blood; the wrongs that had been done were his wrongs, and he learned all these things that night from the hill.
Half way down the hill, on a level with his eyes, there was a fir wood, and over the tops of the fir trees a long plain, and the moon shone so brightly that he could follow the lines of the field and the lines of the coast. One field fixed his attention; its lines were like the lines of a horseshoe, and about it were dim fields, and a little way out to sea Howth floated in the moonlight as shapely, as mysteriously, as an island in the legends of the Golden Age.
Dan wandered about till the moon faded, thinking of the limitless years behind him when he was part of the earth, and of the limitless years in front of him when he would be part of the earth again, and all the while he saw clouds rising up in the west, and they were blown southward. One cloud seemed to lead the others, and when the dawn began the outlines of the coast seemed to enclose his life, and the mountain seemed to whisper a message, and in their message were the names of Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Mitchell and Stephens.
‘Home,’ he cried; ‘why should I go home? What shall I find at home?’
And he went home scared by his own folly, and lay down on his bed.
Next morning he had forgotten a great part of his ravings, and went to his work as usual, and came to his dinner as usual. But at night a great craving came upon him, and, telling his father and mother he was going to see Mary Cronin, he walked amid the hills; every night he learned to love them and to understand them better. All this time his father and mother did not know where he went after nightfall and they wondered greatly until a goat-herd told them he had seen Dan at dawn on the brow of the hill, and then Dan had talked to him of foreign parts.
He seemed to lose interest in the ordinary things, and when they spoke of the farm, of the planting of potatoes, of the sowing of corn, of the price of pigs and cattle, he hardly seemed to hear what they were saying, and when they asked him of what he was thinking he started like one who had been awakened suddenly. When they asked him if he wished to leave them he said he did not know, and a moment afterwards he said he wished to go away; and when they asked him where, he said he saw a lonely country, and that people were marching through the hills.
‘Don’t ask me any more,’ he said, ‘my mind is wandering, and you only make it wander more when you question me.’
They thought it was to America he wanted to go, and when he said no they thought of Australia. The Coogans were afraid old Cronin would hear about Dan, and, of course, he heard of his talk of going away, and he spoke to Mary and wished her to break off the marriage. Wherever Dan might go she would go with him, she said. But her heart was very sore, and the tales she heard made her weep.
‘These hills have bewitched him,’ she said.
‘They tell me,’ said Mrs Coogan, ‘that he stands for hours looking across the sea as if he were waiting for a ship to come to take him away. You’ll find him under the ash trees sitting on a bit of wall.’
Mary sought him on the hillside. The landscape was reddening, the leaves hung listless, and high up in the soft autumn weather a flock of great birds with outstretched necks were flying southward.
Winter must have begun early in the north,’ sai
d Dan; ‘there must be snow and ice there or the wild geese would not be flying south. They come in from all sides, it is said, to their leader.’
‘It is curious,’ said Mary, ‘that they never miss their way.’
‘Nor will that bird miss its way,’ said Dan, pointing to a cuckoo perched on the wall. ‘To-day or to-morrow, when the instinct is ripe in him, he will go all by himself to a place where he has never been, thousands of miles away, and there will be no mistake.’
‘Why do you speak to me, Dan, about these birds? Is it because you feel like them?’
‘I suppose that is it, Mary; I feel as if I must go. But the birds know where they are going.’
He got off the wall and they walked home together. But he could give her no straight answer, and he looked at her in a way that made her fear that he cared for her no longer.
‘Dan, if you have ceased to care for me, tell me, but if you want me to go to America I will go. Do you not care for Ireland any longer?’
‘I never loved Ireland before; it is now that I am beginning to love her.’
‘And it is now,’ she said, ‘you want to leave Ireland.’ They entered the kitchen talking of New Zealand; but it was not to New Zealand nor to Canada that he wanted to go.
‘What have I done to make you angry with me, Dan, to make you care less for me than you did?’
‘You are just as young and as good and as comely as before.’
‘And yet you don’t want to marry me?’
‘Something is calling me. Are you not afraid to marry me? You have heard them say that I was going out of my mind.’
‘Oh, Dan, you want to frighten me so that I may say I don’t want to marry you. But you will never get me to say that. Dan, Dan, what have I done?’
‘Someone is calling me. Mary, I cannot help myself. It is as if someone was calling me from over the sea.’
