Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  One reads one’s past life like a book out of which some pages have been torn and many mutilated, and among many scattered and broken sentences I come upon a paragraph telling of a summer which I spent in Southwick, writing the Confessions of a Young Man, in a lodging overlooking the green. We all remember that wonderful Jubilee summer, when the corn was harvested at the end of July; and nearly every evening of summer-time I had followed the winding road under the downs until I came to a corner where the sunk fence could be climbed. As I walked across the park I could see the lights in the dining-room. Kind, homely, hospitable folk, always glad to see me, among whom the pleasantest years of my life were passed; so it is a pity that so much text should be missing or indecipherable. A continuous narrative is not discoverable until the evening when Colville brought back two Belgian hares, and asked his mother to look after them. I recall our first solicitudes, our eagerness to poke lettuces into their hutch; and when some young rabbits appeared there was no end to our enthusiasm.

  Colville’s project of a rabbit-farm was largely his mother’s, I think; be this as it may, by identifying herself with it she had persuaded herself at the end of two years that she alone could feed rabbits. It was plain to us she was working beyond her strength; there could be no doubt about that, and very often I would plead my right to reprove her and take a heavy barrowful of turnips out of her hands, and insist on wheeling it across the garden into the rabbit-yard. Everybody knows how quickly rabbits breed; before three years were out there were four hundred rabbits in the yard; one could hardly walk into it for fear of treading on the little ones; the outhouses were absorbed one by one, and in the fourth year there were rabbit-hutches in the stables, in the coal-and in the wood-sheds, and we used to say that in another six months they would be in the kitchen and coming up the stairs into the drawing-room, if the masons that were building Colville’s house on the downs and the maker of the iron hurdles at Wolverhampton did not hasten. And every time Colville returned from London he was asked if he had been able to extract a definite promise from his ironmonger. At last the poor man, plagued and frightened, went himself to Wolverhampton, and came back joyful, saying that the manager at the works had given him special assurances that we might look forward to the exportation of the rabbits to the downs at the end of the month. The end of the month seemed a long while off, but we understood that if the rabbits were turned out on the downs before the ground was enclosed, the stoats and the foxes would get a great number, and poachers the rest. A poaching raid would certainly be organised at Beading, and the labour of years would be wasted.

  The last delay was happily not a long one; a few weeks afterwards the house was declared ready to receive us, and the rabbits went away in several vans, Colville and I following on foot, talking, as we went by Thunders Barrow Barn, of the great fortune that always lay about waiting to be picked up by the adventurous.

  Again a great gap comes in my narrative. Memory chooses to retain certain scenes and to allow others to perish, and her choice often seems arbitrary and unreasonable. Why should I, for instance, remember Knight, the keeper at Freshcombe Lodge? A spare, silent man is before me as I write, and in my memory he still goes about his work just as he used to do twenty years ago. He strides along, a typical gamekeeper, stopping by the thorn tree to see if there is anything in his traps. A red and white animal is struggling in one of them, and is killed with a blow of his stick and hung up in the thorn-tree, Knight saying that the young stoats will come there looking round after her, and that he expects to get the whole litter by the end of the week.

  Every morning as I sat at my window writing I used to see Knight taking food to the great mastiff that was kept some twenty yards from the house: a poor silent animal, always on a chain, to whom the glory of strangling a poacher never came. Colville bought a bloodhound; it was thought she might be useful for tracking, but she was a useless, timid bitch, to whom we could never teach anything, but some of her puppies learned to follow a trail in Freshcombe Bottom. Close to the house there were ten couples of beagles — hard, wiry, blue-haired beagles; and all these are forgotten but Sailor Lad, who could find his way over any fence, and would put his nose down and trail a rabbit when he could run no faster than a hedgehog. We all loved him for his cleverness, and waited eagerly for the first shooting, feeling sure that would lead the pack; but Sailor Lad was gun-shy.

  The squire and I were very fair shots; we could be counted upon to shoot well forward, hitting the rabbit in the head, spoiling him as little as possible for the market; but, in spite of our careful shooting, Colville soon found that the profit that could be made on shot rabbits would not pay the interest of the large sum of money that had been spent on the house and hurdles. He determined to make an end of the shooting-parties, and told me one night how he thought the rabbits might be netted. The furze must be planted in strips with eighty yards of feeding-ground between each strip. The rabbits would leave the furze at dawn, and the nets could be lifted. It would not be difficult to invent some mechanism to lift them quickly, so that the rabbits would not have time to get back into the furze.

  But the replanting of the furze, I said, would keep the whole of the Sussex militia at work for —

  I was about to say for ten years, but Colville, interrupting me, said that he did not propose the work should be done all at once, and I answered that I hoped he did not propose to himself any such job. It is not wise to argue with a man who has just risen from an unsatisfactory examination of his accounts, and later, after some tactless advice of mine to leave such matters as the catching of the rabbits to his keeper, he lost his temper, and, rushing to the door threw it open and begged of me to retire to my own apartments.

  When he called me down to breakfast next morning I heard a tremor in his voice, and after some injudicious attempt at explanation we seemed to come to a tacit understanding that it would be better to let the matter drop. He was very wrathful, his temper had been sorely tried, and for a week at least I am sure that I must have seemed to him a cruel, unsympathetic fellow. It is not to be doubted that I was in fault. But Colville could not see that it was my overflowing sympathy that prevented me from observing that rule of conduct which must be observed if two men would live together; each must keep from asking the other questions, and from criticising the other’s projects. It would have been interesting to debate this point with him, but Colville was not much interested at any time in criticism of the human mind. He had an ear, however, for music, and whistled beautifully going up and down stairs; and a few days after, hearing that the nightingales were singing in the coombe, we went out to listen to them.

  In yon thorn you’ll find him, Knight said, and we moved on quietly till we came within sight of the insignificant brown bird that had just arrived, possibly from Algeria. Not a wind stirred in the tall grass, nor was there a cloud in the sky; a dim gold fading into grey and into blue, darkening overhead. A ghostly moon floated in the south, and the blue sailless sea was wound about the shoulders of the hills like a scarf. A fairer evening never breathed upon this world, nor did a lovelier prospect ever enchant human eyes, and Golville and I sat, a twain enchanted. It was one of those evenings when confidences rise to the lips, and Colville, as if to show me that he had forgotten our quarrel, confided new projects to me. In years to come he hoped to fill the coombes with apple trees; they would cost from half a crown to three and sixpence apiece to buy, and in some twenty years or more orchards would blossom every May from Thunders Barrow Barn all the way to the foot of the downs.

  My imagination was touched, and we returned through the blue dusk delighted with each other, fearful lest our lives should not continue to be lived at Freshcombe till the end; we may have even dreamed of our graves under the apple boughs, and when we reached the top of the hill we had reached also the top of our friendship.

  A few days afterwards the evenings began to seem a little tedious; all I had to say to Colville I had said, for the time being, at least, and his sisters and his mother an
d his father, whom I loved well, were always glad to see me, and the walk was pleasant along the hillsides, and it was pleasant to enter that Italian house under the ilex trees and to find them all glad of my company. The squire liked me to stay on after dinner to play billiards with him, and to keep to the sheep path without missing it on a dark night was difficult, so I was often persuaded to stay the night. These visits became more numerous, and I went to London more frequently. Life, although pleasant at the top and at the foot of the downs, was too restricted in view for the purpose of my literature. If one wants to write, one has to live where writing is being done, I said, and again I left my friends, this time for a still longer absence, and I might never have returned to them if the Boer War had not brought me down to Sussex to find out if there were anything in England, in the country, in the people with which I could still sympathise.

  The train that I was returning to my friends by did not pass through Brighton, but came through Preston Park by what is known as the loop-line, and as we approached Shoreham my thoughts were bent on that house far away among the hills. It was not likely that I should find Colville as Pro-Boer as myself; his long militia service would render an active Pro-Boer policy impossible, but he might regard the war as a mistake; and, feeling myself to be in a distinctly reasonable mood, I decided that if Colville would agree to regard the war as a mistake we might come to terms.

  About a quarter of a mile lay between their house and the station, and up that straight road I walked, wondering if a great deal of my admiration for the country might be attributed to my love of the people who lived at the foot of those hills, and catching sight of a somewhat shapeless line, nowise beautiful in itself, I said: It may be so; but the downs must not be judged by one hillside. The squire will lend me a horse, and over to Findan I will go tomorrow. Only after a long ride shall I know if I still love the downs. And as this resolution formed in my mind I heard the squire calling me.

  He was on the top of the stile, coming out of the corn-field, and it was pleasant to see him cross it so easily, and to see him still dressed in breeches and gaiters, hale as an old tree, and not unlike one — just as spare and as rugged. He gave me a hand covered with a hard reddish skin, like bark, and the shy smile that I knew so well trickled down his wide mouth.

  We walked on together in delightful sympathy, but had not gone very far when we caught sight of Colville coming down the drove-way, walking very fast, his shoulders set well back, his toes turned out militia fashion. As the drove-way led only to the downs, it could hardly have been otherwise than that he had been to Freshcombe, so I asked after the rabbits. He said that he was thinking of letting the place, and his voice and manner left me in no doubt that he did not wish to talk about business, a thing that never happens when business is going well with a man. It may, therefore, have been to escape from further questions that he begged me to excuse him if he walked on in front, saying he had some letters to write which he wished to go away by the night’s post. But he had not gone very far when the squire said, in that low, sad voice which is the best part of my recollection of him, that Colly had gone to work too expensively, and had left too many rabbits on the ground. All my sympathy was aroused on the instant, but the squire’s talk was always in sudden remarks, and as he required a long silence between each, we had passed through the gate leading to the lawn before he spoke again. Something was preparing in his mind, but before he could utter it we met Florence and Dulcie, whom I had hitherto thought of as blonde Saxon girls; they were now middle-aged women, Dulcie looking as old as Florence, though younger by a couple of years; silent women, a little abrupt in their speech, more like their father than their mother.

  Their mother’s portrait might be introduced into the present text if it had not been written years ago and published in a volume entitled Memoirs of My Dead Life. My portrait is too long for quotation; it cannot be curtailed by me, at least; and paraphrase is out of the question to a man who has written something that he felt deeply, and written, he thinks, truly. The pages entitled A Remembrance would have enhanced any charm that my narrative may have, but the omission cannot be avoided. My reader must read them in the Memoirs, and I doubt not that when he has read them he will ask himself the question which I am now asking myself: would her gay, kindly mind have saved me from the folly of talking of the Boer War during dinner? If he has learned to know me at all, he will probably think she would have failed. The fact that I had come down to Sussex to escape from opinions did not save me from talking of the value of small nationalities before the soup tureen was removed from the table, and to the dear squire, who thought without circumlocutions. It was enough for him to know that his country was at war. He answered: My dear Rory, the Boers invaded our territory, and he sat holding a piece of cake in both his hands, as if he were afraid that somebody would take it from him. As he munched it he kept his eyes fixed on the cake itself with an expression on his face that plainly read, I’ll have another piece presently. Golville and I had often noticed this little trick of his, and had laughed over it.

  The charm of domestic life is its intensity; each learns to know the other in his or her every peculiarity, physical and mental. We had often noticed the squire’s habit of waggling his foot from time to time when he lay back in his armchair in the billiard-room after dinner, purling at his pipe in silence. Colville had drawn my attention to it, and to the old slippers and the grey socks. Colville was a friendly fellow, with a good deal of the squire’s natural kindness in him and a disposition for a pleasant talk; but when I went to —— for this last time I found him immersed in his accounts and in himself, to the exclusion of the Boer War and the mistakes of the English Generals. So preoccupied was he with the business of his farm that as soon as he had finished his pipe he went to his brown-paper parcel, which he untied, and produced his diary, saying that his entries were in arrear; and begging of us to excuse him, he began his preparations for transcribing his life. They were always the same: first he sought for scribbling-paper, and taking his letters from his breast pocket he utilised the envelopes, cutting them open carefully. It took him some time to unclasp his penknife, and to sharpen the pencil with which he drafted out the events of the last three days. He then tramped out of the room, his toes well turned out, returning with pen and ink and blotting-paper. The diary was unlocked, and getting it well before him he copied his notes in a caligraphy that would have honoured a medieval scrivener.

  Rory, what has become of the chest of cigars?

  With this remark the squire broke the silence abruptly and laughed — timidly, for he was conscious of a change in the atmosphere. All the same, he laughed, for he liked to remember how on the occasion of my first visit he had offered me a cheroot, but I had gone upstairs saying, Perhaps you would like one of my cigars, and returned with an oaken chest containing about a thousand of all kinds. My visit was only for a few days, and in the squire’s recollection I had said: Well, you see, one can only carry half a dozen cigars in a case, and if one brings a box one never knows if any one will care for that brand, so I thought it safer to bring the chest. And when the squire spoke of this chest of cigars of thirty years ago, he never failed to speak of my adventure that very same evening at Shoreham Gardens, whither I had insisted on going, though Colville had refused to accompany me, and strove to dissuade me with the report that on Saturday nights it was frequented by London roughs come down for the day; I would get myself into trouble certainly. But I had gone to the Gardens and the family had sat up, anxious for my safety, and great indeed was the commotion when I returned about midnight with a long tale of adventure and an eye that would be black in the morning. My friends cherished these stories, which had lost all interest for me, and the squire’s next anecdote I had clean forgotten: how on the Monday I had peppered his keeper at eighty yards because he persisted in paunching rabbits while still alive, though I had told him I did not approve of such cruelty. Some hunting anecdotes, in which Colville had a share, were added, and a little later we
went to our several beds, myself depressed and hopeless, anxious to forget in sleep that I had been unable to keep the Boer War out of the conversation.

  Sleep closed over me, and next morning I awoke thinking that perhaps it might be as well to go back to London by the twelve o’clock from Brighton; but the ride to Findan had been mentioned overnight, and just as if nothing had happened, the squire told me after breakfast that he had ordered his horse to be saddled for me. Colville said he would not be able to meet me at Freshcombe, and in a voice that did not seem altogether friendly. He gave me his hand, however, saying that he would bid me goodbye, since I was going away by the five o’clock. His sisters went to their different occupations, expecting me back for lunch, Florence hoping I would not talk any more about that horrid war, Dulcie lingering to ask me why I wanted to go to Findan, and on such a day! I mentioned a horse, but did not know what answer to give back when she reminded me that the horse fair is in May, and reading suspicions of some woman in her eyes, I sprang into the saddle and rode away.

  A new nag, the squire had said; she goes easily on the roads, but pulls a bit on the downs. A rushing, querulous animal, lean as a rake, I soon discovered her to be. A hide hardly thicker than a glove saved her but little from the cold showers and the hard winds that rushed down upon us from the hills. A very different day, I said as I pulled at her, from the day that the squire and I rode over to Findan to the fair. One of my pleasantest recollections was that ride, and despite my exasperated humour it was impossible for me to resist the temptation, as I rode down the valley, to recall how the squire and myself had gone out on horseback one morning in May, looking, as we jogged along side by side by the edge of the valley through which the Adur flows, like figures out of an old ballad. Never did larks rise out of the grass and soar roystering as abundantly as they did that morning. We walked, we trotted, we cantered our horses till we came to Findan’s sunny hollow filled with its fair. Many horses were at tether, some were being trotted up and down by the gipsies. We reined in to see a boy ride a bay pony on a halter over a gate held up for the jump in the middle of the field, and while the squire talked with an acquaintance, I sat at gaze, lost in admiration of a group of comely larches; they seemed to me like women engaged with their own beauty, so gracefully did they loll themselves on the sweet wind, every one, I felt sure, aware of her own long shadow on the grass. Our returning, though less vividly remembered, was not less pleasing than our going forth, and my humour must have been harsh indeed that February day to have imperilled so delightful a recollection by riding to Findan alone under dark skies and through bitter winds along grey river lands. It was not in my intention, I suppose, to find Sussex beautiful, and the dun tumult of the downs showing against the rainy sky suggested the welcome thought that I had been befooled, and that this English country was the ugliest in the world, and its weather the worst.