Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  Grania

  Qu’est-ce qu’il dira à Finn?

  Diarmuid

  Je lui donne ces pommes d’or et Finna saura que ce n’est pas lui qui les a trouvées. Oui, je lui donnerai cette branche, et Finna saura que je tiens mon serment.

  Grania

  Entre ses mains les pommes seront flétries, elles n’arriveront pas à Finn si elles sont les pommes dont le berger nous a parlé, elles disparaîtront comme une poussière légère. (Diarmuid donne la branche à l’homme, et l’homme s’en va traînant le cadavre de son compagnon.) Tu aurais dû le tuer, il conduira Finn à cette caverne. Il faut que nous cherchions des landes plus désertes, plus inconnues.

  Diarmuid

  Peut-être au bout de ces landes où il faut que nous nous cachions des années, peut-être trouverons-nous une douce vallée paisible.

  Grania

  Et alors, Diarmuid, dans cette vallée que se passerait-il entre nous?

  Diarmuid

  Grania, j’ai prêtée serment à Finn.

  Grania

  Oui, mais le serment que tu as prêté à Finn ne te poursuit pas dans la forêt: les dieux à qui tu as fait appel ne règnent pas ici. Ici les divinités sont autres.

  Diarmuid

  Si cet homme nous trahit, il y a deux sorties à cette caverne et, comme tu dis, il ne faut pas attendre ici, il faut que nous nous en allions très loin.

  Grania

  Je ne puis te suivre. Je pense à toi, Diarmuid, nuit et jour, et mon désir me laisse sans force; je t’aime, Diarmuid, et les pommes que tu as trouvées dans cette vallée désolée ne sont-elles pas un signe que ma bouche est pour ta bouche?

  Diarmuid

  Je ne puis t’écouter ... nous trouverons un asile quelque part. Viens au jour. La caverne te fait peur et elle me fait peur aussi. Il y du sang ici et une odeur de sang.

  Grania

  Restons, Diarmuid: tu es un guerrier renommé, et tu as vaincu deux hommes devant mes yeux. Mais, Diarmuid, la pomme qui est tombée dans ma robe ... regarde-la: elle ose plus que toi. Nous avons des périls à traverser ensemble, les serments que tu as prêtés à Tara ne te regardent plus. Notre monde sera autre et nos divinités seront autres.

  Diarmuid

  Mais j’ai prêté serment à Finn. Finn c’est mon frère d’armes, mon capitaine. Combien de fois nous avons été contre l’ennemi ensemble! — non, Grania, je ne puis.

  (Il la prend dans ses bras. La scène s’obscurcit.)

  Grania

  Le jour est pour la bataille et pour les périls, pour la poursuite et pour la fuite; mais la nuit est le silence pour les amants qui n’ont plus rien qu’eux-mêmes. (Un changement de scène; maintenant on est dans une vallée pierreuse à l’entrée d’une caverne, à gauche un bois et le soleil commence à baisser.)

  The introduction of French dialogue into the pages of this book breaks the harmony of the English narrative, but there is no help for it; for only by printing my French of Stratford atte Bowe can I hope to convince the reader that two such literary lunatics as Yeats and myself existed, contemporaneously, and in Ireland, too, a country not distinguished for its love of letters. The scene in the ravine, which follows the scene in the cave, was written in the same casual memory of the French language, and its literature. We can think, but we cannot think profoundly, in a foreign language, and though a sudden sentiment may lift us for a while out of the common rut, we soon fall back and crawl along through the mud till the pen stops. Mine stopped suddenly towards the end of the act, and I wandered out of the reading-room into the verandah to ponder on my folly in having come to France to write Diarmuid and Grania, and to rail against myself for having accepted Yeats’s insulting proposal.

  When my fit of ill temper had passed away, I admitted that reason would be amenable to the writing of Diarmuid and Grania in Irish, but to do that one would have to know the Irish language, and to learn it, it would be necessary to live in Arran for some years. A vision of what my life would be there rose up: a large, bright cottage with chintz curtains, and homely oaken furniture, and some three or four Impressionist pictures, and the restless ocean my only companion until I knew enough Irish for daily speech. But ten years among the fisherfolk might blot out all desire of literature in me, and even if it didn’t, and if I succeeded in acquiring Irish (which was impossible), it would be no nearer to the language spoken by Diarmuid and Grania than modern English is to Beowulf.

  But what is all this nonsense that keeps on drumming in my head about the Irish language and Anglo-Irish? And I went out of the hotel into the street convinced that any further association with Yeats would be ruin to me. Lady Gregory feared that I should break up the mould of his mind. But it is he that is breaking up the mould of mine. I must step out of his way. And as for writing Diarmuid and Grania in French — not another line! My folly ends on the scene in my pocket, which I’ll keep to remind me what a damned fool a clever man like Yeats can be when he is in the mood to be a fool. A moment after, it seemed to me that it would be well to write and tell him that I would give the play up to him and Lady Gregory to finish; and I would have given them Diarmuid and Grania if it had not been my one Irish subject at the time, life without a subject not being easily conceived by me; so I decided to retain it, and next day returned to England and to Sickert.

  The pictures on the easels were forgotten, and the manuscripts in Victoria Street, so obsessed were we by the thought that, while we were talking, De Wet’s army might be caught in one of Kitchener’s wire entanglements, and the war be brought to an end, and I remember that very often as I stared at Sickert across the studio my thoughts would resolve into a prayer that the means might be put into my hands to humiliate this detestable England, this brutal people! A prayer not very likely to be answered, and I wondered at my folly while I prayed. Yet it was answered. Every week letters came to me from South Africa, as they came to every other Englishman, Irishman, and Scotchman, and it is not likely that any of these letters contained news that others did not read in their letters or in the newspapers; but soon after my prayer in Sickert’s studio, a letter was put into my hands containing news so terrific that for a long time I sat, unable to think, bewildered, holding myself in check, resisting the passion that nearly compelled me to run into the street and cry aloud the plan that an English General had devised. De Wet was in the angle formed by the junction of two rivers; the rivers were in flood; he could go neither back nor forwards; and troops were being marched along either bank, the superior officers of every regiment receiving orders, so my correspondent informed me, that firing was not to cease when De Wet was caught in the triangle and the white flag raised. My correspondent said, and said justly, that if notice had been given at the beginning of the war that quarter would not be asked for nor given, we might have said, This is too horrible, and covered our faces, but we should not have been able to charge our Generals with treachery. But no such notice had been given, and he reminded me that we were accepting quarter from the Boers at the rate of eight hundred a day. A murder plot, pure and simple, having nothing in common with any warfare waged by Europeans for many centuries. It must be stopped, and publication will stop it. But is there a newspaper in London that will publish it? One or two were tried, and in vain. And while you dally with me, I cried, De Wet and his army may be massacred. Only in Ireland is there any sense of right.

  And next day, in Dublin, I dictated the story to the editor of the Freeman’s Journal. The Times reprinted it, and the editor of a Cape paper copies it from the Times, upon which the military authorities in South Africa disowned and repudiated the plot. If they had not done so, the whole of Cape Colony, as I thought, would have risen against us; and once the plot was repudiated, the Boers were safe; it would be impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine on another occasion. The Boer nation was saved and England punished, and in her capacious pocket that she loves so well. The war, I reflected, was costing England two millions a week, and with the white flag respected, it will last some years longer; at the
very lowest estimate my publication will cost England two hundred millions. The calculation put an alertness into my step, and I walked forth, believing myself to be the instrument chosen by God whereby an unswerving, strenuous, Protestant people was saved from the designs of the lascivious and corrupt Jew, and the stupid machinations of a nail-maker in Birmingham. In a humbler and more forgiving mood I might have looked upon myself as having saved England from a crime that would have cried shame after her till the end of history. A great delirium of the intellect and the senses had overtaken Englishmen at that time, and how far they had wandered from their true selves can be guessed from the fact that that great and good man Kruger, who loved God and his fellow-countrymen, was scorned throughout the whole British Press — and why? Because he read his Bible. Even to the point of ridiculing the reading of the Bible did a Birmingham nail-maker beguile the English people from their true selves.

  There is great joy in believing oneself to be God’s instrument, and it seemed to me, as I walked, that my mission had ended in England with the exposure of the murder plan, and that I had earned my right to France, to my own instinctive friends, to the language that should have been mine; and it was while thinking that England was now behind me, and for ever, that a presence semed to gather, or rather, seemed to follow me as I went towards Chelsea. The first sensation was thin, but it deepened at every moment, and when I entered the Hospital Road I did not dare to look behind me, yet not for fear lest my eyes should see something they had never seen before, something not of this world; and walking in a devout collectedness, I heard a voice speaking within me: no whispering thought it was, but a resolute voice, saying, Go to Ireland! The words were so distinct and clear that I could not turn to look. Nobody was within many yards of me. I walked on, but had not taken many steps before I heard the voice again. Order your manuscripts and your pictures and your furniture to be packed at once, and go to Ireland. Of this I am sure — that the words Go to Ireland did not come from within, but from without. The minutes passed by, and I waited to hear the voice again, but I could hear nothing except my own thoughts telling me that no Messiah had been found by me at the dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel because the Messiah Ireland was waiting for was in me and not in another.

  So the summons has come, I said — the summons has come; and I walked, greatly shaken in my mind, feeling that it would be impossible for me to keep my appointment with the lady who had asked me to tea that evening. To chatter with her about indifferent things would be impossible, and I returned to Victoria Street unable to think of anything but the voice that had spoken to me; its tone, its timbre, lingered in my ear through that day and the next, and for many days my recollection did not seem to grow weaker. All the same I remained doubtful; at all events, unconvinced of the authenticity of the summons that I had received. It was hard to abandon my project of going to live in my own country, which was France, and I said to myself, If the summons be a real one and no delusion of the senses, it will be repeated. Next morning, as I lay between sleeping and waking, I heard the words, Go to Ireland! Go to Ireland! repeated by the same voice, and this time it was close by me, speaking into my ear. It seemed to speak within five or six inches, and it was so clear and distinct that I put out my hand to detain the speaker. The same voice, I said to myself; the same words, only this time the words were repeated twice. When I hear them again they will be repeated three times, and then I shall know.

  But our experience in life never enables us to divine what our destiny will be, nor the manner in which it may be revealed to us. The voice was not heard again, but a few weeks afterwards, in my drawing-room, the presence seemed to fill the room, overpowering me; and though I strove to resist it, in the end it forced me upon my knees, a prayer was put into my mouth, and I prayed, but to whom I prayed I do not know, only that I was conscious of a presence about me and that I prayed. Doubt was no longer possible. I had been summoned to Ireland! Tonks collected some friends to dinner; Steer and Sickert were among the company, and it was pointed out to me that no man could break up his life as I proposed to break up mine with impunity. It is no use. Nothing that you can say will change me.

  My manner must have impressed them; they must have felt that my departure was decreed by some unseen authority, and that, no doubt, the Boer War had made any further stay in England impossible to me.

  SALVE

  I

  AS I RETURNED home after the dinner at Tonks’s lightly weighing my friends’ talents, the thought suddenly struck me that in leaving London I was leaving them for ever, whether in a week or six weeks I did not know; only of this was I sure, that my departure could not be much longer delayed; and while passing through Grosvenor Gardens, I began to wonder by what means the Destiny I had just heard would pull me out of my flat in Victoria Street. Two years or eighteen months of my lease still remained; this lag end had been advertised, but no desirable tenant had presented himself, and it did not seem to me that I could go away to Dublin leaving the flat empty, taking with me all my pictures and furniture. A house in Dublin would be part of my equipment as a Gaelic League propagandist, and it would cost me a hundred pounds a year; houses in Dublin are rarely in good repair, some hundreds might have to be spent upon it; and, falling into an armchair, I asked myself where all this money was to come from. My will is always at ebb when the necessity arises of writing to my banker to ask him how many hundred pounds are between me and destitution. We are but a heredity. My father was a spendthrift and hated accounts, and to me accounts are as mysterious as Chinese, as repellent. We are the same man with a difference; the pain that his pecuniary embarrassment caused him seems to have fallen on me with such force that I am naturally economical. My agent said when he visited me in the Temple: Very few would be content to live in a cock-loft like you, George. His remark or a certain lady’s objection to the three flights of stairs had tempted me out of the Temple, and now hatred of the Boer War was forcing me into what seemed a pit of ruin. Two hundred and fifty a year I shall be paying for houses, I said, and yet I must go; even if I am to end my days in the workhouse I must go, even though to engage in Gaelic League propaganda may break up the mould of my mind. The mould of my mind doesn’t interest me any longer, it is an English mould; better break it up at once and have done with it. Whereupon my thoughts faded away into a vague meditation in which ideas did not shape themselves, and next morning I rose from my bed undecided whether I should go or stay, but knowing all the while that I was going. It was a queer feeling, day passing over day, and myself saying to myself: I am twelve hours nearer departure than I was yesterday, yet having no idea how I was going to be freed from my flat, but certain that something would come to free me. And the something that came was the Westminster Trust, a Company that had been formed for the purpose of acquiring property in Victoria Street.

  It had been creeping up from Westminster for some time past, absorbing house after house, turning the grey austere residential mansions built in 1830 into shops. It had reached within a few doors of me about the time of my landlord’s death, and, as soon as his property passed into the hands of the Trust, notice was served upon the tenants that their leases would not be renewed. One lease, that of a peaceable General Officer who lived over my head and never played the piano, expired about that time, and as arrangements could not be made for turning his flat at once into offices it was let, temporarily, to a foreign financier, who demanded more light. The extra windows that were put in to suit his pleasure and convenience seemed to the Company’s architect such an improvement that the Company offered to put extra windows into my rooms free of cost.

  But don’t you see that if two windows be put in, the present admirable relation of wall space to window will be destroyed?

  Light, after all —

  I engaged these rooms, I said, because I believed that they would afford me the quiet necessary for the composition of books, but for the last three weeks I haven’t heard the sweet voice of a silent hour. Have you an ear for music? Tell me if
a silent hour is not comparable to a melody by Mozart? You live in a quiet suburban neighbourhood, I’m sure, and can tell me. All the beautiful peace of Peckham is in your face.

  The manager regretted that the improvements over my head had caused me inconvenience, and he suggested putting me upon half-rent until these were completed; a surprisingly generous offer, so thought I at the time; but very soon I discovered that the reduction of my rent gave him all kinds of rights, including the building of a wall depriving my pantry of eight or nine inches of light, and the chipping away of my window-sills. The news that I was about to lose my window-sills brought me out of my bedroom in pyjamas, and, throwing up the window, I got out hurriedly and seated myself on the sill, thinking that by so doing I could defy the workmen. Bill, drop yer ‘ammer on his fingernails. Better wait and see ’ow long ‘e’ll stand this fine frosty morning in his pi-jamas. The wisdom of this workman inspired my servant to cry to me to come in. We both feared pneumonia, but if I did not dress myself very quickly, the workmen would have knocked away the window-sill. It was a race between us, and I think that half the sill was gone when I was partially dressed, so I seated myself on the last half.

  Let him bide, cried one workman to his mate who was threatening my fingers with the hammer; and they continued their improvements about my windows, filling my rooms with dust and noise. I know not how it started, but a tussle began between me and one of the stone-cutters. We’ll see what the magistrate will have to say about this bloody assault, said the man as he climbed down the ladder, and when I had finished my dressing I went to my solicitor, who seemed to look upon the struggle on the scaffolding as very serious. His application for redress was answered by a letter saying that if a summons were issued against the Company, a cross-summons would be issued against me for assault on one of the workmen. A civil action, the solicitor said, was my remedy; and I should have gone on with this if the Company had not expressed a good deal of regret when the tradesmen engaged in laying down a parquet floor for the financier brought down my dining-room ceiling with a crash. The director sent men at once to sweep up the litter, and he ordered his new tenant, the financier, to restore the ceiling; but my solicitor advised me to refuse the tradesmen admission, and by doing so I found that I had again put myself in the wrong; the ceiling was put up at my expense after a long interval during which I dined in the drawing-room. My solicitor’s correspondence with the Company did not procure me any special terms; the Company merely repeated an offer they had previously made, which was to buy up the end of my lease for £100, a very inadequate compensation, it seemed to me, for the annoyance I had endured; but as I felt that my solicitor could not cope with the Company, I came gradually to the conclusion that I had better accept the £100. It would pay for the removal of all my furniture and pictures to Dublin, leaving something over for the house which I would have to hire and at once, for the offer of the Company was subject to my giving up possession at the end of the month.