by George Moore
You haven’t heard that Moore is leaving us?
Leaving us! I hope his friend Sir Thornley Stoker hasn’t discovered anything very special in Liffey Street. He has been up and down there many times lately on the trail of a Sheraton sideboard, and Naylor has been asked to keep it till an appendicitis should turn up. The Chinese Chippendale mirror over the drawing-room chimney-piece originated in an unsuccessful operation for cancer; the Aubusson carpet in the back drawing-room represents a hernia; the Renaissance bronze on the landing a set of gall-stones; the Ming Cloisonnée a floating kidney; the Buhl cabinet his opinion on an enlarged liver; and Lady Stoker’s jewels a series of small operations performed over a term of years.
We broke into laughter; he is very amusing, AE whispered; and at the end of our laughter I explained that Sir Thornley was supreme in the suburbs of art; but as soon as he attempted to storm the citadel, to buy pictures, he was as helpless as an old housewife.
How many Sir Joshuas and Gainsboroughs have I saved him from!
If he ever sells his collection I suppose it will fetch a great deal of money.
It never will be sold in his lifetime, John, but at his death there will be a great auction. The terms of the will are explicit, arranging not only for his own departure but for the departure of the curiosities. Wound in an old Florentine brocade, he will be laid in a second-hand coffin, 1 BC, and driven to Mount Jerome; and on the same evening the curiosities will leave for England, Naylor, Sir Thornley’s chief agent, accompanying them to Kingstown; and standing at the end of the pier, two yards of crêpe floating from his hat like a gonfalon, and a Renaissance wand in his hand, his sighs will fill the sails of the parting ship, without, however, his tears sensibly increasing the volume of the rising tide, and when the last speck disappears over the horizon he will fall suddenly forward.
But for what feat of surgery did a grateful patient send him the second-hand coffin?
Conan continued to pile imagination upon imagination until the conversation drifted back to the point from which it had started. Had I really made up my mind to leave Dublin?
My dear Conan, if you’ll stop talking Moore will tell you why he conceives himself to be under an obligation to leave us.
I’m sure I beg pardon. I didn’t believe in the possibility of losing you till you’re carried to the woods in Kiltoon, the spot mentioned in the chapter of The Lake which you read to us last Saturday under this tree.
It’s only this, Conan, that John Eglinton heard in the National Library —
Well, of course, if it was heard in the National Library — and Conan went off into a peal of laughter, bringing a dark and perplexed look into John’s eyes.
Well, Conan, if you want to hear why I thought of leaving Ireland, not today or tomorrow, but eventually, I’ll tell you, but I must not be interrupted again. AE and John Eglinton, who have no Catholic relations, will have some difficulty in understanding me, but you will understand, and they will understand, too, when I remind them that at Tillyra years ago dear Edward insisted on my making my dinner off the egg instead of the chicken, and on going to Mass on Sunday. He is interested, and so exclusively, in his own soul that he regards mine, when I am visiting him, as essential to the upkeep of his. Now, I can’t help thinking that if I remain in Ireland and were to fall dangerously ill at Tillyra, the spiritual tyranny of years ago might be revived in a more serious form. His anxiety about his soul would force him to bring a Catholic priest to my bedside, and if this were to happen, and I failed to yell out in the holy man’s ear when he bent over me to hear my confession, To hell with the Pope, the rumour would go forth that I died fortified by the rites of the Holy Catholic Church.
But you are not leaving us because you think you’re going to die at Tillyra, and that Edward will bring a priest to your bedside?
No, that would be hardly a sufficient reason for leaving my friends; but I confess that I should like to die in a Protestant country among my co-religionists.
Moore is thinking of declaring himself a Protestant.
The Colonel has said that it would be a great grief to him if I were to do so; but you’ll excuse me, Conan, if I don’t stop to explain, for I notice that AE hasn’t touched his fish, and that Teresa has begun to despair of being able to attract his attention to the lobster sauce. AE, I shall be obliged to ask everybody present to cease talking, so that you may eat your fish. The spirit in you must have acquired a great command over the flesh for that turbot not to tempt you. It tastes to me as if it had only just come out of the sea. A capon follows the turbot, the whole of our dinner; but have no fear, the bird is one of the finest, weighing nearly five pounds.
What beneficent Providence led it into such excesses of fat? cried Conan. It neither delved, nor span, nor wasted its tissues in vain flirtation; a little operation released it from all feminine trouble, and allowed it to spend its days in attaining a glory to which Moore, with all his literature, will never attain — the glory of fat capon. At the end of our laughter, Conan cried: The unlabouring brood of the coop. You know Yeats’s line, The unlabouring brood of the skies? For a long time I thought that Yeats was referring to the priests, but he must have been thinking of capons; no, he knows nothing of capons. He must have been thinking of the stars.
Oh, songless bird, far sweeter than the rose!
And virgin as a parish priest, God knows!
Fearing that Conan’s jests might scandalise the gardener, and remembering that there was only white wine on the table, I sent him to the house to fetch the red. Teresa could remain, for she had told me she had not been to her duties for many a year, and I had come to look upon her as one of my sheaves.
A more fragrant bird was never carved, and I beg of you, AE, to eat the wing that the Gods have given you. He lived and died for us. And here is the gardener with the wine that comes to me from Bordeaux in barrels — a pleasant, sound dinner wine. I don’t press it upon you as a vintage wine, but I am told that it is by no means disgraceful. You see I am dependent upon others, only knowing vin ordinaire from Château Lafitte because of my preference for the former. I warrant that the innocent nuns up there, now all abed, wondering why the lights are burning in my garden, are better bibbers than anybody at this table, except perhaps Conan. All a-row in their cells they lie, wondering what impiety their neighbour is organising. I suppose you have all heard the report that I have re-established the worship of Venus in this garden, bringing flowers to her statue every morning?
Perhaps they think these lamps are an illumination in her honour, AE suggested.
Causing them to look into their mirrors oftener than the rule allows. There was a time when I liked to stand at my back window and watch them following winding walks under beautiful trees, while their neighbours, the washerwomen, blasphemed over their washtubs. The contrast between the slum and the convent garden, separated by a nine-inch wall, used to amuse me; but now I take no further interest in my nuns, not since they have put up that horrible red-brick building — an examination hall or music-room —
Spoiling excellent material for kitchen-maids, said Conan.
Be that as it may, the most doleful sounds of harp and violin come through the window, spoiling my meditations. In Dublin there is no escape from the religious. If I walk to Carlisle Bridge to take a car to the Moat House I meet seminarists all along the pavement, groups of threes and fours; and full-blown priests flaunt past me — rosy-cheeked, pompous men, danging gold watch-chains across their paunches, and tipping silk hats over their benign brows —
Their vulpine brows, Conan said.
A black queue stretching right across Dublin, from Drumcondra along the Merrion Road. The other day a particularly aggressive priest walked step for step with me as far as Sydney Parade, and it seemed to me that when I altered my pace he altered his. I was going on to see John Eglinton, and no sooner had I outstepped the priest than the great wall of the convent confronted me. I wonder where all the money comes from?
Out of Purgatory’s
bank, Conan answered cheerfully; and there is no fear of them overdrawing their account, for money is always dribbling in. Nothing thrives in Ireland like a convent, a public-house, and a race-meeting. Any small house will do for a beginning; a poor-box is put in the wall, a couple of blind girls are taken in, and so salubrious is our climate that the nuns find themselves in five years in a Georgian house situated in the middle of a beautiful park. The convent whose music distracts your meditations is occupied by Loreto nuns — a teaching order, where the daughters of Dublin shopkeepers are sure of acquiring a nice accent in French and English. St Vincent’s Hospital, at the corner, is run by nuns who employ trained nurses to tend the sick. The eyes of the modern nun may not look under the bedclothes; the medieval nun had no such scruples. Our neighbourhood is a little overdone in convents; the north side is still richer. But let’s count what we have around us: two in Leeson Street, one in Baggot Street and a training college, one in Ballsbridge, two in Donnybrook, one in Ranelagh; there is a convent at Sandymount, and then there is John Eglinton’s convent at Merrion; there is another in Booterstown. Stillorgan Road is still free from them; but I hear that a foreign order is watching the beautiful residences on the right and left, and as soon as one comes into the market — You have been out hawking, my dear Moore, and I appeal to you that the hen bird is much stronger, fiercer, swifter than the —
The tiercel.
The tiercel, of course, for while he was pursuing some quarry at Blackrock, the larger and the stronger birds, the Sister of Mercy and the Sister of the Sacred Heart, struck down Mount Annville, Milltown, and Linden. All the same, the little tiercel has managed to secure Stillorgan Castle on the adjacent hillside, a home for lunatic gentlemen, most of them Dublin publicans.
Like my neighbour Cunningham, who only just escaped incarceration.
His was a very tragic story, said John Eglinton. Did you never suspect him of being a bit queer?
It often seemed odd not to exchange a good morning from doorstep to doorstep. His old housekeeper was affable enough; she would bid me a kindly greeting when I returned home after a short absence in the West, and she must have gossiped with my servants, for some of the mystery with which he surrounded himself vanished. I certainly did hear from somebody that his rule was never to have a bite or sup outside his own house; it must have been my cook who told me, and now I come to think of it she added, somewhat contemptuously, that he dined in the middle of the day and went out for his walk at three o’clock.
As the clock struck he sallied forth, a most laughable and absurd little man, not more than two inches over five feet; a long, thick body was set on the shortest possible legs, and he was always dressed the same, in a yellow overcoat and wide grey trousers not unlike dear Edward’s. It would be an exaggeration to say that Cunningham was one of the sights of Dublin when he rolled down the pavement for his walk with a thick stick in his hand, a corpulent cigar between his teeth, a white flower in his button-hole. He was one of the minor sights of Dublin as he went away towards the Phoenix Park, a jolly little fellow to the casual observer, but to me, who saw him every day, his good humour seemed superficial and to overlie a deep-set melancholy.
The melancholy of the dwarf, Conan said under his breath.
His walk was always up the main road of the Phoenix Park, as far as Castleknock Gate and back again, and I think his old housekeeper told Miss Gough that he wouldn’t miss his walk for the King of England. You asked me if I knew him; I never saw anybody more determined not to make my acquaintance. When we passed each other in the street he always averted his eyes, and if I had been polite, I should have imitated him, but I could not keep myself from looking into his comical eyes turned up at the corners, and wondering at the great roll of flesh from ear to ear, and at the chins descending step by step into his bosom. It was from Sir Thornley Stoker that I learned how determined he was not to make my acquaintance. You can’t guess, he said one day, whom I have let out of the room? Your next-door neighbour, Cunningham. I begged him to stay to meet you, but it was impossible to persuade him. He said Oh, no, I won’t meet George: and on Sir Thornley pressing him to give a reason, he refused, urging as an excuse that I was an enemy of the Church. But I think myself that he was afraid I would put into print some of the stories that it was his wont to tell against the priests. He had stories about everybody, even about me. That very afternoon Sir Thornley could hardly speak for laughing. If you had only heard him just now telling — But tell me what it was. I can’t tell you. It’s the Dublin accent and the Dublin dialect. It was all about Evelyn Innes. You don’t know what you’ve missed, and he turned over in his chair to laugh again. No, there’s no use my trying to tell it; you should hear Cunningham. But I can’t hear Cunningham; he won’t know me. At last, apologising for spoiling the story, Sir Thornley told me that I must take for granted the racy description of two workmen who had come to Upper Ely Place to mend the drains in front of my house. After having dug a hole, they took a seat at either end, and sat spitting into it from time to time in solemn silence, until at last one said to the other, Do you know the fellow that lives in the house forninst us? You don’t? Well, I’ll tell you who he is: he’s the fellow that wrote Evelyn Innes. And who was she? She was a great opera-singer. And the story is all about the ould hat. She was lying on a crimson sofa with mother-of pearl legs when the baronet came into the room, his eyes jumping out of his head and he as hot as be damned. Without so much as a good morrow, he jumped down on his knees alongside of her, and the next chapter is in Italy.
The crimson sofa with the mother-of-pearl legs, and the baronet as hot as be damned, would be about as much of your story as a Dublin workman would be likely to gather from the book, John Eglinton said.
The touch that Evelyn Innes is all about the old hat is excellent, Conan added, and then became grave like a dog that licks his lips after a savoury morsel. And, continuing, I told them how, in the last three months before his death, we all noticed a great change in Cunningham; his face turned the colour of lead, and the old housekeeper often talked to Miss Gough about him, not saying much, expressing her alarm as old women do, with a shake of the head. One day she said the master had gone very queer lately, that he would sit for hours brooding, not saying a word to anybody; and it was about three weeks after that she rushed into our house distracted, wringing her hands, speaking incoherently, telling us that, not finding her master in his bedroom when she took him up his cup of tea, she had gone to seek him in the closet, and not finding him there, she had rushed up to the top landing. He was after hanging himself from the banisters, she wailed, and I sent for the police and for his solicitor and sat on the stairs till they came. No one will ever know what he suffered. Didn’t I tell Miss Gough that he would sit for hours, and he not saying a word to any one? He must have been thinking of it all that time, and little did I understand him when he said — many and many’s the time he said it as he went upstairs to bed: They’ll never get me as long as I’ve got this right hand on my body.
I don’t know if the tragedy transpires in my telling, but what I see is a retired publican overcome by scruples of conscience, his failing brain filled with memories of how he had beguiled customers with stories about the clergy into drinking more than was good for them. A man of that kind would very soon begin to believe that the allies of the clergy, the demons, were after him, and that he could only save himself by giving all his money for Masses for the repose of his soul. And that is what he did. It all went in Masses, or nearly all; the relations got a very small part, after threatening to contest the will. But what interests me is the agony of mind that he must have suffered week in, week out, repeating it, They’ll never get me as long as I’ve got this right hand on my body. The phrase must have run in the old housekeeper’s head, and somebody, seeing that his mind was giving way and fearing lest he might kill himself, may have said to him: You had better put yourself under restraint. His adviser may have suggested John of God’s, and this advice, though well meant, may, pe
rhaps, have destroyed what remained of his poor mind. They’ll never get me as long as I’ve got this right hand on my body. It was with that phrase he went up to bed one evening and hanged himself next morning from the banisters with a leather strap. Miss Gough met him coming home the evening before he killed himself, and she tells me that she’ll never forget the look in his face. Have you ever seen a maniac, and the cunning look out of the corner of the eyes which says: Now you think you’re going to get the best of me, but you aren’t. She remembers noticing that look in his face as he passed her, his two hands thrust into the pockets of his short overcoat. He was bringing home the strap, for the old woman said at the inquest that he had bought it that evening. I suppose he was hiding it under his overcoat. I wonder why he waited till early next morning before hanging himself. Poor little man! That strap was the great romance of his life.
The phrase jarred a little. No one answered, and then, his voice hardly breaking the silence, John Eglinton spoke of a tragedy that occurred almost under his own windows, the barred windows of an old coaching inn, at the end of a little avenue of elm-trees, down at Merrion, overlooking the great park in which the convent stands. A nun had been found drowned, whether by her companions or by the gardener was not related in the newspapers — merely the fact that she had been found in the pond one morning. It was stated at the inquest that the nun was a sleep-walker, and the verdict returned was one of accidental death. The verdict of suicide in a moment of temporary insanity would not have been agreeable to the nuns, but to me, a teller of tales, it is more interesting to think that she had gone down in the night to escape from some thought, some fear, some suffering that could be endured no longer. She was free to leave the convent; the bars that restrained her were no iron bars, but they were not less secure for that. She may have suffered, like Cunningham, from scruples of conscience, and gone down in despair to the pond.
And while you were dressing yourself to go to the National Library, she was floating among water-weeds and flowers.
