Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  Something dreadful must have happened! she kept repeating to herself, and her talk was full of allusions to a letter she had received from my father. At last she confided to me that he had written to her saying if she did not get a wire from him on a certain day she was to come at once. We got the morning papers coming off the boat, and there was nothing about him in them, but the absence of news was not enough to reassure her, and I felt there was something on her mind of which she did not dare to speak. She does not appear again in my memory till we arrived at Balla. Her brother was waiting outside the gate, and I saw him take her aside and heard him say: Mary, prepare for the worst; George is dead.

  We climbed on the car — Joe and my mother on one side, the driver sat on the dicky, and I remember his back showing all the way against a grey sky and my mother wrapped in a brown shawl. Joe Blake is not so distinct to me, only his yellow mackintosh. Every now and again I heard the wail of my mother’s voice, and I sobbed too, thinking of my father whom I should never speak to again. At the same time I was conscious, and this was a source of great grief to me, that my life had taken a new and unexpected turn. In the midst of my grief I could not help remembering that my father’s death had redeemed me from the Army, from Jurles, and that I should now be able to live as I pleased. That I should think of myself at such a moment shocked me, and I remember how frightened I was at my own selfish wickedness, and a voice that I could not restrain, for it was the voice of the soul, asked me all the way to Moore Hall if I could get my father back would I bring him back and give up painting and return to Jurles? I tried hard to assure myself that I was capable of this sacrifice, but without much success, and I tried to grieve like my mother. But I could not.

  We never grieve for anybody, parent or friend, as we should like to grieve, and are always shocked by our absent-mindedness; at one moment weeping for the dead, at another talking of indifferent things or asking casual questions as to how the dead man died. And we only remember certain moments. At will I can see myself and Joseph Applely in my father’s bedroom standing together by the great bureau at which he wrote, and in which he kept his letters, and I remember how my eyes wandered from Joseph to the empty bed. He had been removed to the next room, or perhaps he had died in the marriage bed; however this may be, Joseph Applely told me that when he came to call the master, he was lying on his back breathing heavily, and thinking that it would be better not to disturb him he had gone away; closing the door quietly, and when he returned an hour later the master was lying just as he had left him, only he could catch no sound of breathing. So much do I remember precisely, and somewhat less precisely, that Joseph Applely told me he had sent for the doctor. A dim thought hangs about in my memory that the doctor was in the neighbourhood; be this as it may, the reason assigned for death was apoplexy. Two, three, or four days went by and I remember nothing till somebody came into the summer room to tell my mother that if she wished to see him again she must come at once, for they were about to put him into his coffin, and catching me by the hand, she said, We must say a prayer together.

  The dead man lay on the very bed in which I was born, his face covered with a handkerchief, and as my mother was about to lift it from his face the person who had brought us thither warned her from the other side of the white dimity curtains not to do so. He is changed, she said.

  I don’t care, my mother cried, and snatched away the handkerchief, revealing to me the face all changed. And it is this changed face that lives unchanged in my memory, and three moments of the next day: the moment when Lord John Browne bade me goodbye on the way from Carnacun (the body had been brought there for High Mass and was being carried back to Kiltoome, a cold March wind was blowing over the fields, and he feared the journey round the lake); the moment when Father Lavelle called upon the people to hoist him on to the tomb for him to speak his panegyric; and the moment when the mason’s mallets were heard closing the vault where the dead man would remain with his ancestors, one would like to say for centuries, but nothing endures in this world, not even our graves. I cannot remember who spoke after Lavelle, and afterwards the multitude began to disperse through the woods and along the shores of the lake, a great many lingering on the old stone bridge to admire the view. Of course I was very principal, and as I passed up the road I felt many eyes fixed upon me, and conjectured that they were all wondering how much of my father’s talent I had inherited, and if I would take up the running at the point where he had dropped out of the race. Among the hundreds of unknown there was here and there a known face; our carpenters, sawyers, gardeners, and stablemen — all our servants from Derrinanny and Ballyholly, the villages beyond the domain over the hill along the lake’s edge. And of course, I did not escape the inquisitive gaze of the men that used to row me about the islands when Lough Carra was my adventure, and they were probably thinking what I would do for them when I came to live in Moore Hall; and after these men were other faces known to me, but not so well known, the beaters whom I had seen rousing the woodcock out of the covers of Derrinrush, and it seems that when I turned from the Dark Road and walked up the lawn some of the old tenants spoke to me. I have some recollection of being spoken to at the sundial, and I think their questioning eyes reminded me that the house on the hill was mine, and they who spoke to me and those who did not dare to speak were mine to do with as I pleased. Until the ‘seventies Ireland was feudal, and we looked upon our tenants as animals that lived in hovels round the bogs, whence they came twice a year with their rents; and I can remember that once when my father was his own agent, a great concourse of strange fellows came to Moore Hall in tall hats and knee-breeches, jabbering to each other in Irish. An old man here and there could speak a little English, and I remember one of them saying: Sure, they’re only mountaineymen, yer honour, and have no English; but they have the goicks, he added with unction. And out of the tall hats came rolls of bank-notes, so dirty that my father grumbled, telling the tenant that he must bring cleaner notes; and afraid lest he should be sent off on a long trudge to the bank, the old fellow thrust the notes into my father’s hand and began jabbering again. He’s asking for his docket, yer honour, the interpreter explained. My father’s clerk wrote out a receipt, and the old fellow went away, leaving me laughing at him, and the interpreter repeating: Sure, he’s a mountaineyman, yer honour. And if they failed to pay their rents, the cabins they had built with their own hands were thrown down, for there was no pity for a man who failed to pay his rent. And if we thought that bullocks would pay us better we ridded our lands of them; cleaned our lands of tenants, is an expression I once heard, and I remember how they used to go away by train from Claremorris in great batches bawling like animals. There is no denying that we looked upon our tenants as animals, and they looked on us as kings; in all the old stories the landlord is a king. The men took off their hats to us and the women rushed out of their cabins dropping curtsies to us until the ‘seventies. Their cry, Long life to yer honour, rings still in my ears; and the seignioral rights flourished in Mayo and Galway in those days, and soon after my father’s funeral I saw the last of this custom: a middle-aged woman and her daughter and a small grey ass laden with two creels of young chickens were waiting at my door, the woman curtsying, the girl drawing her shawl about her face shyly. She was not an ugly girl, but I had been to Lodge Road and had seen Jim Browne’s pictures.

  Everything was beginning for me, and everything was declining for my mother. She would have liked to linger by her husband’s grave a little while, but I gave her no peace, urging the fact upon her that sooner or later we should have to go back to London. Why delay, mother? We cannot spend our lives here going to Kiltoome with flowers. An atrocious boy as I relate him, but an engaging manner transforms reality as a mist or a ray of light transforms a landscape, and my mother died believing me to have been the best of sons, though I never sacrificed my convenience to hers. It will be admitted that that is the end we should all strive for. But the means? Ah, the means! An ancient saw this of ends and means
which it will be well to leave to others to disentangle.

  Awaking from a long reverie, I asked myself where I had left off, like an absent-minded old woman telling a child a story. At the part where every day spent in Moore Hall after my father’s death was like a great lump of lead on my shoulders. My mother’s grief increased day by day; and if her health were to break down we might be kept at Moore Hall for months. It was important to get her back to London, and I think it must have been in the train that she heard the Army had never appealed to me; I had only consented to accept the Army because I had nothing else to propose to my father; it was painting that interested me, and a studio was sought as soon as I arrived in London. My aspiration did not reach as high as a private studio; the naked was my desire, and a drawing-class would provide me with that. No examination was required at Limerston Street. Barthe, a Frenchman, ran the little show, of which Whistler was the attraction, and as soon as the model rested I picked my way through the easels and stood at the edge of the crowd that had collected round the famous artist. His drawings on brown-paper slips seemed to me to be very empty and casual, altogether lacking in that attitude of mind which interested me so much in Rossetti. His jokes were disagreeable to me; he did not seem to take art seriously, but I must have disguised my feelings very well, for he asked me to come to see him; any Sunday morning, he said, I should find him at 96 Cheyne Walk. The very next Sunday I went there, but there were few pictures in the studio, and I was left to look upon the melancholy portrait of his mother which he had just completed, and gathering nothing from it I turned to another picture, a girl in a white dress dreaming by the chimney-piece, her almost Rossetti-like face reflected in the mirror. Swinburne had translated her languor into verses; these were printed round the frame; and while I read them Whistler discoursed to his friends on the beauty of Oriental art, and his praise sent me to the Japanese screen, but I could discover no correct drawing in it, and begged one of the visitors to tell me how faces represented by two or three lines and a couple of dots could be considered to be well drawn. He gave me a hurried explanation, and returned to Whistler, who laughed boisterously whilst rattling iced drinks from glass to glass; and I think that I despised and hated him when he capped my somewhat foolish enthusiasm for the pre-Raphaelite painters with a comic anecdote.

  I left his house irritated, and somewhat ostentatiously neglected him at the class, allying myself openly and defiantly to the next celebrity, for our class boasted of another, Oliver Madox Brown, son of the great Ford Madox Brown, a boy that came from Fitzroy Square, bringing with him such a reputation for genius that he paid no attention whatever to Whistler-a strange boy, stranger even than I: a long fat body buttoned in an old overcoat reaching to his knees, odd enough when upright, but odder still when crouching on the ground in front of his drawing-board, his right hand sketching rapidly, his left throwing black locks of hair from his face, of which little was seen but the great hooked nose. I could not keep him out of my thoughts, for he seemed to me even more unfortunate than myself, less likely to win a woman’s love. At last my passion to know him overcame me, and I dared to speak to him. He engaged immediately in conversation just as if he wished to become my friend, and agreed to walk back to South Kensington with me. I remember the care with which I picked my words during this walk, and my object being to win him it seemed to me to be perfectly safe to ask if he were in the life-room in the Academy. My surprise was great when he answered that he had no time to spare for the Academy, all his mornings being employed upon his six-foot canvas, the Deformed Transformed, and wondering how he managed to give visible shape to an idea so essentially literary, I asked if he could explain his composition to me. He said that he would prefer to show me his picture, and I promised to call at Fitzroy Square, but delayed going there from day to day lest too much desire to see him and his picture might wean him from the willingness he had shown for my acquaintance; and it was not till he asked me why I had not been to see him that I summoned sufficient courage to take the tram to Gower Street. Before me on the doorstep was a handsome middle-aged man, somewhat thick-set, with greying hair and beard, who said to me, You have come to see Oliver, haven’t you? divining one of Oliver’s friends in me.

  We met at the class in the Fulham Road, and he asked me to come and see his picture. And you are Oliver’s father? I added, the great painter. For I recognised Oliver in the handsome and kindly eyes. Yes, yes, and he turned on the landing to ask me if I would care to come into his studio before going to see Oliver. Does he, then, think so much of Oliver that he puts him before his own pictures? I asked myself whilst he pulled the easels forward and showed me his pictures. If I may make a remark, I said aloud.

  Pray do, he said.

  Your hands always seem a little heavy, but perhaps that is your style, as long necks are Rossetti’s.

  He laughed in his beard, and we ascended that great sloping staircase. He paints in the morning, said the adoring father, and writes in the evening when he doesn’t go to the class. A volume of poems was mentioned, and I asked if the manuscript had gone to the publisher. Oliver hesitates about sending it. Swinburne and Rossetti are publishing poetry, and all the literature of the pre-Raphaelite movement has hitherto gone into verse. He drawled on, telling me that Oliver had finished a prose romance of about three hundred and fifty pages and was about to begin another, and a volume of short stories was mentioned. I ventured an inquiry, and the great painter quoted from his advice to his son: Oliver, don’t waste your time on short stories. You have your six-foot canvas in the morning and your novels and poems in the evening.

  I was too overwhelmed to give any answer, and Oliver paid no heed to his fond parent’s admonishment. He seemed to take it for granted that he was not like other men, and I understood that having heard himself so often spoken of as a genius he had accepted the fact of his genius as he had come to accept the fact that he could speak and hear and walk. But I, who had been brought up in the belief that I was very stupid, was astonished at my extraordinary good fortune in having met Oliver and won his good opinion. After all, come what may, this wonderful father and still more wonderful son had thought me worth speaking to for a while, and then, remembering that Oliver was writing a novel, I begged him to read me some of it if he weren’t too busy. He hesitated and might have been tempted if his father had not reminded him that luncheon would be ready in a few minutes. Father and son were condescending enough to ask me to stay to lunch, but I did not dare to say yes, and descended the stairs regretting my shyness. On the doorstep, while trying to summon up courage to say, On second thoughts I’ll come back to lunch, I besought Oliver to bring his manuscript down to the class and read it to us during the rests. He promised to do so, and the following day when Mary Lewis left the pose and wrapped herself in a shawl (a shapely little girl she was, Whistler’s model; she used to go over and talk to him during the rests), Oliver began to read, and Mary sat like one entranced, her shawl slipping from her, and I remember her listening at last quite naked. And when the quarter of an hour had gone by we begged Oliver to go on reading, forgetful of Whistler, who sat in a corner looking as cross as an armful of cats. At last, M. Barthe was obliged to intervene, and Mary resumed the pose.

  Après tout, je ne veux pas que mon atelier devienne un cours de littérature, he muttered.

  But we were thinking of the story, and begged Oliver to take up the reading again at the end of the sitting, and Whistler went away in high dudgeon, for Mary stopped behind to hear how the story ended. And a few months later we crowded together, forgetful of the model, telling how typhoid had robbed England of a great genius; and after Oliver’s death my interest in the class declined.

  III

  OUR ADVANCEMENTS ARE broken or delayed by unexpected returnings to our beginnings, and my story is that a young man whom I had known at Jurles’s asked me to visit him for the hunting season, and that I met a man at his house who had a horse running at Croydon but was without a jockey. So it was natural to me to propos
e myself, and rely on Joseph Applely’s promptitude to send me my father’s racing breeches and boots, which he did; and the farce was gone through of taking them down to Croydon, though the owner had written saying that he intended, or half intended, to scratch the horse, his warning serving no purpose, for we are all mummers, and life being but a mumming, it was pleasant to think of myself taking all the jumps, the water-jump especially, in front of the stand. But to do this it was necessary to go down prepared, the breeches and boots in a brown-paper parcel under my arm, the parcel helping me to realise myself as a steeplechase jockey. No doubt that with some luck I should have got the horse round the course as well as another, but the owner having scratched the horse, and the day being wet and the Ring a couple of inches deep in mud, the result of that Croydon meeting was for me a severe cold that prevented me from taking my driving-lesson from Ward, one of the great coachmen of that time, a lesson that I sorely needed, for I had engaged to drive a coach down to Epsom.

  All the same, on four lessons this feat was accomplished, the horses meeting with no serious accident, and, encouraged by my luck, a few weeks afterwards the same party was invited by me to a great gala dinner at Richmond, and while the coach was being led over several hillocks through the furze bushes on to the dusty road, for in the darkness we had wandered into Wandsworth Common, one of my guests said to me: You mustn’t think of giving up driving; your luck will never desert you. But four horses galloping on Wandsworth Common in the middle of the night! Margaret Gilray whispered to her cousin, Sally Giles. I wish we were safely at home.

  These excursions passed the summer away, and in August Sally and Margaret were bidden goodbye. Belfort’s brother, who was going to be married and wished to make a splash before doing so, had hired a lodge in Ross-shire. He had invited his brother, and his brother had been allowed to invite me; a great event this was, and hours were spent at the tailors’ considering different patterns; at the hosiers’ turning over scarves, neckties, and shirts of many descriptions, frilled and plain; and when my mother said that I could not have both a dressing-case costing fifty pounds and a pair of guns, I decided to have the dressing-case and to send to Moore Hall for my father’s muzzle-loaders, and though forty years have gone by, I can still smile at the astonishment that the guns inspired in the Ross-shire shooting-lodge. And when it was noticed that the locks were noiseless, Captain H —— , who had been told off as my companion on the morrow, was soon interested in them, and spent most of the evening with a toothbrush trying to clean them, succeeding at last in producing a faint clicking, but not enough to convince him that he would be safe while shooting with me. It were better, he thought, to lend me one of his guns, and the breech-loader, the first that I held in my hands, was held fairly straight, and my bag was numerous for a boy of my appearance and conversation. Captain H —— had begun to feel that if by chance my bag were the bigger, he would be wickedly chaffed, and this misfortune might have happened to him if the boots that had won my fancy in the Sloane Street shop-window had not begun to break up, the pretty clasps and buckles being unable to resist the tough Ross-shire heather.