by George Moore
The long plain cultivated with tedious regularity that we had been passing through before we came to Lyons, flowed on field after field; it seemed as if we should never reach the end of it, and looking on those same fields, for they were the same, I said to myself: “If I were an economist that plain would interest me, but since I got Doris’s letter I am primitive man, and he abhors the brown and the waving field, and ‘the spirit in his feet’ leads him to some grassy glen where he follows his flocks, listening to the song of the wilding bee that sings as it labours amid the gorse. What a soulless race that plain must breed,” I thought; “what soulless days are lived there; peasants going forth at dusk to plough, and turning home at dusk to eat, procreate and sleep.” At last a river appeared flowing amid sparse and stunted trees and reeds, a great wide sluggish river with low banks, flowing so slowly that it hardly seemed to flow at all. Rooks flew past, but they are hardly wilding birds; a crow — yes, we saw one; and I thought of a heron rising slowly out of one of the reedy islands; maybe an otter or two survives the persecution of the peasant, and I liked to think of a poacher picking up a rabbit here and there; hares must have almost disappeared, even the flock and the shepherd. France is not as picturesque a country as England; only Normandy seems to have pasturage, there alone the shepherd survives along the banks of the Seine. Picardy, though a swamp, never conveys an idea of the wild; and the middle of France, which I looked at then for the first time, shocked me, for primitive man, as I have said, was uppermost in me, and I turned away from the long plain, “Dreary,” I said, “uneventful as a boarding-house.”
But it is a long plain that has no hill in it, and when I looked out again a whole range showed so picturesquely that I could not refrain, but turned to a travelling companion to ask its name. It was the Esterelles; and never shall I forget the picturesqueness of one moment — the jagged end of the Esterelles projecting over the valley, showing against what remained of the sunset, one or two bars of dusky red, disappearing rapidly amid heavy clouds massing themselves as if for a storm, and soon after night closed over the landscape.
“Henceforth,” I said, “I shall have to look to my own thoughts for amusement,” and in my circumstances there was nothing reasonable for me to think of but Doris. Some time before midnight I should catch sight of her on the platform. It seemed to me wonderful that it should be so, and I must have been dreaming, for the voice of the guard, crying out that dinner was served awoke me with a start.
It is said to be the habit of my countrymen never to get into conversation with strangers in the train, but I doubt if that be so. Everything depends on the tact of him who first breaks silence; if his manner inspires confidence in his fellow-traveller he will receive such answers as will carry the conversation on for a minute or two, and in that time both will have come to a conclusion whether the conversation should be continued or dropped. A pleasant little book might be written about train acquaintances. If I were writing such a book I would tell of the Americans I once met at Nuremberg, and with whom I travelled to Paris; it was such a pleasant journey. I should have liked to keep up their acquaintance, but it is not the etiquette of the road to do so. But I am writing no such book; I am writing the quest of a golden fleece, and may allow myself no further deflection in the narrative; I may tell, however, of the two very interesting people I met at dinner on board La Côte d’Azur, though some readers will doubt if it be any integral part of my story. The woman was a typical French woman, pleasant and agreeable, a woman of the upper middle classes, so she seemed to me, but as I knew all her ideas the moment I looked at her, conversation with her did not flourish; or would it be more true to say that her husband interested me more, being less familiar? His accent told me he was French; but when he took off his hat I could see that he had come from the tropics — Algeria I thought; not unlikely a soldier. His talk was less stilted than a soldier’s, and I began to notice that he did not look like a Frenchman, and when he told me that he lived in an oasis in the desert, and was on his way home, his Oriental appearance I explained by his long residence among the Arabs. He had lived in the desert since he was fourteen. “Almost a Saharian,” I said to him. And during dinner, and long after dinner we sat talking of the difference between the Oriental races and the European; of the various Arab patois. He spoke the Tunisean patois and wrote the language of the Koran, which is understood all over the Sahara and the Soudan, as well as in Mecca. What interested me, perhaps even more than the language question, was the wilding’s enterprise in attempting to cultivate the desert. He had already enlarged his estate by the discovery of two ancient Roman wells, and he had no doubt that all that part of the desert lying between the three oases could be brought into cultivation. In ancient times there were not three oases but one; the wells had been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of acres had been laid waste by the Numidians in order, I think he told me, to save themselves from the Saracens who were following them. He spent eight months of every year in his oasis, and begged of me, as soon as I had wearied of Cannes, to take the boat from Marseilles — I suppose it was from Marseilles — and spend some time with him in the wild.
“Visitors,” he said, “are rare. You’ll be very welcome. The railway will take you within a hundred miles; the last hundred miles will be accomplished on the back of a dromedary; I shall send you a fleet one and an escort.”
“Splendid,” I answered. “I see myself arriving sitting high up on the hump gathering dates — I suppose there are date palms where you are? Yes? — and wearing a turban and a bournous.”
“Would you like to see my bournous?” he said, and opening his valise he showed me a splendid one which filled me with admiration, and only shame forbade me to ask him to allow me to try it on. Ideas haunt one. When I was a little child I insisted on wearing a turban and going out for a ride on the pony, flourishing a Damascus blade which my father had brought home from the East. Nothing else would have satisfied me; my father led the pony, and I have always thought this fantasy exceedingly characteristic; it must be so, for it awoke in me twenty years afterwards; and fanciful and absurd as it may appear, I certainly should have liked to have worn my travelling companion’s bournous in the train if only for a few minutes. All this is twelve years ago, and I have not yet gone to visit him in his oasis, but how many times have I done so in my imagination, seeing myself arriving on the back of a dromedary crying out, “Allah! Allah! And Mohammed is his prophet!” But though one can go on thinking year after year about a bournous, one cannot talk for more than two or three hours about one; and though I looked forward to spending at least a fortnight with my friends, and making excursions in the desert, finding summer, as Fromentin says, chez lui, I was glad to say good-bye to my friends at Marseilles.
I was still quite far from the end of my journey, and so weary of talk that at first I was doubtful whether or not it would be worth while to engage again in conversation, but a pleasant gentleman had got into my carriage, and he required little encouragement to tell me his story. His beginnings were very humble, but he was now a rich merchant. It is always interesting to hear how the office boy gets his first chance; the first steps are the interesting ones, and I should be able to tell his story here if we had not been interrupted in the middle of it by his little girl. She had wearied of her mother, who was in the next carriage, and had come in to sit on her father’s knee. Her hair hung about her shoulders just as Doris’s had done five years ago, taking the date from the day that I journeyed in quest of the golden fleece. She was a winsome child, with a little fluttering smile about her lips and a curious intelligence in her eyes. She admitted that she was tired, but had not been ill, and her father told me that long train journeys produced the same effect on her as a sea journey. She spoke with a pretty abruptness, and went away suddenly, I thought for good, but she returned half an hour afterwards looking a little faint, I thought, green about the mouth, and smiling less frequently. One cannot remember everything, and I have forgotten at what station these people g
ot out; they bade me a kindly farewell, telling me that in about two hours and a half I should be at Plessy, and that I should have to change at the next station, and this lag end of my journey dragged itself out very wearily.
Plessy is difficult to get at; one has to change, and while waiting for the train I seemed to lose heart; nothing seemed to matter, not even Doris. But these are momentary capitulations of the intellect and the senses, and when I saw her pretty face on the platform I congratulated myself again on my wisdom in having sent her the telegram. How much pleasanter it was to walk with her to the hotel than to walk there alone! “She is,” I said to myself, “still the same pretty girl whom I so bitterly reproached for selfishness in Cumberland Place five years ago.” To compliment her on her looks, to tell her that she did not look a day older, a little thinner, a little paler, that was all, but the same enchanting Doris, was the facile inspiration of the returned lover. And we walked down the platform talking, my talk full of gentle reproof — why had she waited up? There was a reason.... My hopes, till now buoyant as corks, began to sink. “She is going to tell me that I cannot come to her hotel. Why did I send that telegram from Lyons?” Had it not been for that telegram I could have gone straight to her hotel. It was just the telegram that had brought her to the station, and she had come to tell me that it was impossible for me to stay at her hotel.
After thirty hours of travel it mattered little which hotel I stayed at, but to-morrow and the next day, the long week we were to spend together passed before my eyes, the tedium of the afternoons, the irritation and emptiness of Platonic evenings— “Heavens! what have I let myself in for,” I thought, and my mind went back over the long journey and the prospect of returning bredouille, as the sportsmen say. But to argue about details with a woman, to get angry, is a thing that no one versed in the arts of love ever does. We are in the hands of women always; it is they who decide, and our best plan is to accept the different hotel without betraying disappointment, or as little as possible. But we had not seen each other for so long that we could not part at once. Doris said that I must come to her hotel and eat some supper. No; I had dined on board the train, and all she could persuade me to have was a cup of chocolate. Over that cup of chocolate we talked for an hour, and then I had to bid her good-night. The moon looked down the street coldly; I crossed from shadow to light, feeling very weary in all my body, and there was a little melancholy in my heart, for after all I might not win Doris. There was sleep, however, and sleep is at times a good thing, and that night it must have come quickly, so great was the refreshment I experienced in the morning when my eyes opened and, looking through mosquito curtains (themselves symbols of the South), were delighted by the play of the sunlight flickering along the flower-papered wall. The impulse in me was to jump out of bed at once and to throw open les croisées. And what did I see? Tall palm trees in the garden, and above them a dim, alluring sky, and beyond them a blue sea in almost the same tone as the sky. And what did I feel? Soft perfumed airs moving everywhere. And what was the image that rose up in my mind? The sensuous gratification of a vision of a woman bathing at the edge of a summer wood, the intoxication of the odour of her breasts.... Why should I think of a woman bathing at the edge of a summer wood? Because the morning seemed the very one that Venus should choose to rise from the sea.
Forgive my sensuousness, dear reader; remember it was the first time I breathed the soft Southern air, the first time I saw orange trees; remember I am a poet, a modern Jason in search of a golden fleece. “Is this the garden of the Hesperides?” I asked myself, for nothing seemed more unreal than the golden fruit hanging like balls of yellow worsted among dark and sleek leaves; it reminded me of the fruit I used to see when I was a child under glass shades in lodging-houses, but I knew, nevertheless, that I was looking upon orange trees, and that the golden fruit growing amid the green leaves was the fruit I used to pick from the barrows when I was a boy; the fruit of which I ate so much in boyhood that I cannot eat it any longer; the fruit whose smell we associate with the pit of a theatre; the fruit that women never grow weary of, high and low. It seemed to me a wonderful thing that at last I should see oranges growing on trees; I so happy, so singularly happy, that I am nearly sure that happiness is, after all, no more than a faculty for being surprised. Since I was a boy I never felt so surprised as I did that morning. The valet de chambre brought in my bath, and while I bathed and dressed I reflected on the luck of him who in middle age can be astonished by a blue sky, and still find the sunlight a bewitchment. But who would not be bewitched by the pretty sunlight that finds its way into the gardens of Plessy? I knew I was going to walk with Doris by a sea blue as any drop-curtain, and for a moment Doris seemed to be but a figure on a drop-curtain. Am I very cynical? But are we not all figures on drop-curtains, and is not everything comic opera, and “La Belle Hélène” perhaps the only true reality? Amused by the idea of Jason or Paris or Menelaus in Plessy, I asked Doris what music was played by the local orchestra, and she told me it played “The March of Aïda” every evening. “Oh, the cornet,” I said, and I understood that the mission of Plessy was to redeem one from the coil of one’s daily existence, from Hebrew literature and its concomitants, bishops, vicars, and curates — all these, especially bishops, are regarded as being serious; whereas French novels and their concomitants, pretty girls, are supposed to represent the trivial side of life. A girl becomes serious only when she is engaged to be married; the hiring of the house in which the family is reared is regarded as serious; in fact all prejudices are serious; every deflection from the normal, from the herd, is looked upon as trivial; and I suppose that this is right: the world could not do without the herd nor could the herd do without us — the eccentrics who go to Plessy in quest of a golden fleece instead of putting stoves in the parish churches (stoves and organs are always regarded as too devilishly serious for words).
Once I had a long conversation with my archbishop concerning the Book of Daniel, and were I to write out his lordship’s erudition I might even be deemed sufficiently serious for a review in the Church Gazette. But looking back on this interview and judging it with all the impartiality of which my nature is capable, I cannot in truth say that I regard it as more serious than pretty Doris’s fluent conversation, or the melancholy aspect of his lordship’s cathedral as more serious than the pretty Southern sunlight glancing along the seashore, lighting up the painted houses, and causing Doris to open her parasol. What a splendid article I might write on the trivial side of seriousness, but discussion is always trivial; I shall be much more serious in trying to recall the graceful movement of the opening of her parasol, and how prettily it enframed her face. True that almost every face is pretty against the distended silk full of sunlight and shadow, but Doris’s, I swear to you, was as pretty as any medieval virgin despite its modernness. Memline himself never designed a more appealing little face. Think of the enchantment of such a face after a long journey, by the sea that the Romans and the Greeks used to cross in galleys, that I used to read about when I was a boy. There it was, and on the other side the shore on which Carthage used to stand; there it was, a blue bay with long red hills reaching out, reminding me of hills I had seen somewhere, I think in a battle piece by Salvator Rosa. It seemed to me that I had seen those hills before — no, not in a picture; had I dreamed them, or was there some remembrance of a previous existence struggling in my brain? There was a memory somewhere, a broken memory, and I sought for the lost thread as well as I could, for Doris rarely ceased talking.
“And there is the restaurant,” she said, flinging up her parasol, “built at the end of those rocks.”
We were the first swallows to arrive; the flocks would not be here for about three weeks. So we had the restaurant to ourselves, the waiter and doubtless the cook; and they gave us all their attention. Would we have breakfast in the glass pavilion? How shall I otherwise describe it, for it seemed to be all glass? The scent of the sea came through the window, and the air was like a cordial — it
intoxicated; and looking across the bay one seemed to be looking on the very thing that Whistler had sought for in his Nocturnes, and that Steer had nearly caught in that picture of children paddling, that dim, optimistic blue that allures and puts the world behind one, the dream of the opium-eater, the phrase of the syrens in “Tannhäuser,” the phrase which begins like a barcarolle; but the accompaniment tears underneath until we thrill with expectation.
As I looked across the bay, Doris seemed but a little thing, almost insignificant, and the thought came that I had not come for nothing even if I did not succeed in winning her.
“Doris, dear, forgive me if I am looking at this bay instead of you, but I’ve never seen anything like this before,” and feeling I was doing very poor justice to the emotions I was experiencing, I said: “Is it not strange that all this is at once to me new and old? I seem, as it were, to have come into my inheritance.”
