by George Moore
It is better that we should understand each other. The plain truth is that I must cease to be your lover unless my life is to be sacrificed.
Cease to be my lover!
That is impossible, but a change comes into every love story.
The explanation stuttered on. I remember her saying: I don’t wish you to sacrifice your life. I have forgotten the end of her sentence. She drew her hand suddenly across her eyes. I will conquer this obsession.
A man would have whined and cried and besought and worried his mistress out of her wits. Women behave better than we; only once did her feelings overcome her. She spoke to me of the deception that life is. Again we were standing by the gate at the end of the chestnut avenue, and I remembered her telling me how a few years ago life had seemed to hold out its hands to her; her painting and her youth created her enjoyment.
But now life seems to have shrivelled up, she said; only a little dust is left.
Nothing is changed, so far as you and I are concerned. We see each other just the same.
I am no more to you than any other woman.
She went away again to Italy to paint and returned to Ireland, and one day she came to see me, and remained talking for an hour. I have no memory of what we said to each other, but a very clear memory of our walk through Dublin over Carlisle Bridge and along the quays. I had accompanied her as far as the Phoenix Park gates, and at the corner of the Conyngham Road, just as I was bidding her goodbye, she said:
I want to ask your advice on a matter of importance to me.
And to me, for what is important to you is equally important to me.
I am thinking, she said, of being married.
At the news it seems to me that I was unduly elated and tried to assume the interest that a friend should.
XII
IT WAS THREE years after that the Colonel asked me to go to see some friends who lived in the Clondalkin district, and we followed the quays talking of the woman we were going to see and her sisters in Galway, but when we reached the long road leading to the Moat House, a group of trees (one of Stella’s motives) recalled her, and so vividly, that I could not keep myself from speaking of her.
I have no peace since her death. Not every day, I said, nor every night, else I should be dead by now, or mad; consciousness is spasmodic, and no warning is given. Any sight or sound is enough. She painted those trees; they hang in my room, feathery against a blue sky that has changed to grey, to everlasting grey. A touch of rhetoric had come into my speech.... Yet I was speaking truthfully, and the Colonel tried to soothe me.
Blame! Of course no blame attaches to me, and yet ... I may have wronged Florence. But I never felt any remorse on her account, only on Stella’s. The question isn’t whether I gave her the best advice that might have been given in the circumstances; I gave her the only advice that was possible for me to give. I knew nothing but good of the man; and the advice I gave was the only advice she would have taken. No, I cannot reproach myself with anything, and yet, and yet — Why did I speak in his favour? And that is what I am afraid no one will ever be able to tell me. Was it because I wished to free myself from all responsibility? There was none. She took her chance with me and I took mine with her — an equal chance in these days when women desert their lovers as frequently as men desert their mistresses. We were bound by no contract; it was no passing fancy, no infidelity that parted us. Again and again I have given thanks to my stars, to my destiny, to the Providence that watches over me that it is impossible to trace any connection between my confession to her and her announcement to me of her marriage. More than a year intervened.
I can’t see that any blame attaches to you for the advice that you gave.
Nor can I, yet her death overshadows my life, and for no reason. You see I told her, but not till she had admitted that she was going to be married, or was thinking of being married, that I had gotten a letter from Elizabeth, inviting me to come to see her. She had neglected me for years, ever since her marriage, but she is the only woman of whom I did not weary. A sister-mistress, I said. The Colonel, who does not understand these subtleties, kept silence. I had expected him to ask why I had told Stella of the letter, but the Colonel never asks personal questions, and I doubt if he was very much interested in my story. It may have been to drive her into this marriage that I told her that this other woman had written to me. What do you think?
I don’t think it at all likely. She was determined on her marriage before she spoke to you about it. You have no reason to suppose that her marriage was not a happy one?
On the contrary, there are many reasons to think that it was a very happy one.
I don’t see there is any cause for blame.
Nor do I, but her death is the one thing that I wish had not happened to me.
I waited for the Colonel to continue the inquiry, but he showed no inclination to do so, and his indifference exasperated me without shocking me as Edward had done when I had gone to him for sympathy, throwing all the blame upon myself, and he had answered: Why didn’t she mind herself? — the pure peasant speaking through him; and to escape from the atmosphere of the cabin I looked toward the Colonel. Any mention, I thought, of Sarsfield and the Siege of Limerick would rouse him; but having no desire for a historical disquisition at that moment, I began to think out the whole story again, finding some consolation in remembering that it was not for any mere woman I had crossed two seas, but for her whom I had sought for twenty years, turning from many fallacious forms and vain appearances, till at length I discovered the divine reciprocation of all my instincts and aspirations, the prophetic echo of my eternity, one summer’s day among a luncheon-party in the Savoy Hotel. Certain moments cannot pass from us, and I do not think I shall ever outlive the moment when I rose from my chair to meet my fate in the Savoy Hotel. My readers do not need telling that the moving tints of a shot-silk gown did not cover a dusky body from Italy or Spain; they have guessed already that my fate came to me out of Flanders in all the fair bloom of her twentieth summer; the full, flower-like eyes, the round brow, the golden hair, a dryad by Rubens in appearance and withal a dryad’s nature. If Ruben’s dryad were to come upon a traveller’s fire in a forest, she would sit by it warming her shins as long as it lasted, and then depart for lack of thought to rouse the ashes into flame, and I have often thought that Elizabeth treats the arts as the dryad the traveller’s fire; she warms her shins and departs, and overtaking satyrs and fauns in mossy dells abandons herself again to her instincts. I can pick up a thread, I have heard her say, but continuity I cannot abide; and feeling that it would have been stupid to answer: You look upon me as a thread that can be picked up and dropped with every change of fancy, I fell to thinking how after a long day’s journey I had come upon Elizabeth in a hilly country fronting great prospects of pasture in which kine wandered in long herds, and how she led me day after day through the woods, through sunny interspaces that I remember for many a pleasant frolic in the warm fragrant grass. I remember the tasselled branches of the larches, the blackbird in the underwood, the thrush on the high branch, and the mocking laughter of the yaffle when he crossed from wood to wood; but Elizabeth remembers nothing; the dryad is without our human memories.
All the whiles of this summer pleasance somebody was dying near us; we were parted for many months, and when we came together again our love story was no longer told in the woods. Yet she seemed contended with me for a lover, and so docile was she in this Michaelmas summer of our love that I said: There will be no change. I wonder, I asked her in my folly, if we shall love each other always, if in ten years’ time — She laughed, and three weeks after she took me aside to confide a strange project to me.
You don’t mind, darling, if I don’t see you tonight? I prefer to tell you —— has asked me if he might come. I can’t well refuse. You don’t mind?
It would be vain for me to try to oppose your wishes, and you would hate me if I did.
How well you know me! How clever you are!
The pedant that was in Goethe muddied this utterance. We do not choose our desires; he should have said, If we desire in youth ardently, our desires will be fulfilled in age. But what is truth? the sage has often asked, and the aesthetician in me regretted Doris’s taste for elderly men, and, stopping before the armoire à glace at Orelay, I had felt intensely that this love story was no frolic of nymph and satyr, but a disgraceful exhibition of Beauty and the Beast.
Theories, however, avail us nothing, and it was not till several months after parting with Doris that I began to reconsider the important question — important, for no man lives who can say he is not interested in the question when a man should begin to try — how shall I put it? Well, to avoid unplatonic love encounters. But is an encounter ever platonic? A question for grammarians, for me it is to tell that a few months after my return to Dublin a lady called to see my pictures, and that the encounter of our lips sent the blood rushing to my head, and so violently that for ten minutes I lay where I had fallen on the sofa, holding my splitting temples. My time for love encounters is over, I said, reaching out my hand to her sadly.... She was too frightened to answer, and after proposing a glass of water was glad to get away out of the house. A sigh escaped me; my head was quieter, and, struggling to my feet, I stood by the window watching the hawthorns blowing. At last words came to me: Love’s period is over for me. Life is for ever changing, and very little remains after fifty for a man and still less for a woman. We are for ever dying. Woolly bear is succeeded by the cricket bat, the bat is followed by the rod, the gun, the horse, the girl, and between fifty and sixty we discover that our love-life is over and done. Our interest in sex, however, remains the same, but it is an intellectual interest, changed, transformed, lifted out of the flesh. Our eyes follow the movement of the body under the silken gown, a well-turned neck and shapely bosom please us, and we like to look into the feminine eyes and read the feminine soul; but we do not kiss the point of white shoulders when thoughtless ladies lead us away after dinner into a corner of a shadowy drawing-room and cry in our ears, No, all is not over yet.
I wandered out into the garden, finding consolation in the thought that one does not grieve for a lost appetite, for a lost power, for a lost force. Horrible, I said, and my eyes wandered over my garden, for the month was October. The dahlias were blackening and the Michaelmas daisies were growing slattern; soon there would be no flowers left but the flower that never fails to remind me of the mops with which coachmen wash their carriage wheels. The swallows must be by now half-way across the Mediterranean. Soon they will be nesting among the stones of Cheops’ Pyramid, and, my thoughts returning to myself, I said, My mother used to say that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Celibacy is set above all the other virtues in Ireland, and the Irish people will listen to my exhortations now that I have become the equal of the priest, the nun, and the ox. Chastity is the prerogative of the prophet, why no man can tell, and dear Edward, to whom the virtue of chastity is especially dear, believes that it was the stories of what the newspapers would call my unbridled passions that had caused the Irish people to turn a deaf ear to my exhortations that they should speak Irish and write Irish, and to my prophesying that a new literature would arise out of the new language, or the old language revived.
My thoughts unfolded, and I remembered how strangely I had been moved the night in the Temple when Edward said he would like to write his plays in Irish. The Tale of a Town had brought me to Tillyra, and I had caught sight of Cathleen ni Houlihan in the dusk over against the Burran mountains as I returned through the beech-woods and the dank bracken. The rewriting of The Tale of a Town had awakened the Irishman, that was dormant in me, and the Boer War had turned my love of England to hatred of England, and a voice heard on three different occasions had bidden me pack my portmanteau and return to Ireland. The voice was one that had to be obeyed, but Ireland had not listened to me and until now it seemed that I had misread the signs. But Nature is not a humorist. She intended to redeem Ireland from Catholicism and has chosen me as her instrument, and has cast chastity upon me so that I may be able to do her work, I said. As soon as my change of life becomes known the women of Ireland will come to me crying, Master, speak to us, for, at the bidding of our magicians, we have borne children long enough. May we escape from the burden of child-bearing without sin? they will ask me, and I will answer them: Ireland has lain too long under the spell of the magicians, without will, without intellect, useless and shameful, the despised of nations. I have come into the most impersonal country in the world to preach personality — personal love and personal religion, personal art, personality for all except for God; and I walked across the greensward afraid to leave the garden, and to heighten my inspiration I looked toward the old apple-tree, remembering that many had striven to draw forth
the sword that Wotan had struck into the tree about which Hunding had built his hut. Parnell, like Sigmund, had drawn it forth, but Wotan had allowed Hunding to strike him with his spear. And the allegory becoming clearer I asked myself if I were Siegfried, son of Sigmund slain by Hunding, and if it were my fate to reforge the sword that lay broken in halves in Mimi’s cave.
It seemed to me that the garden filled with tremendous music, out of which came a phrase glittering like a sword suddenly drawn from its sheath and raised defiantly to the sun.
XIII
SINCE THE DAY I walked into my garden saying: Highly favoured am I among authors, my belief had never faltered that I was an instrument in the hands of the Gods. But the chosen of the Gods are always given the needful means for the accomplishment of the Gods’ mighty purposes, and for many months I had stood perplexed, but never doubting. I had striven to fashion a story, and then a play, but the artist in me could not be suborned. Davitt came with a project for a newspaper, but he died; and I had begun to lose patience, to lose spirit, and to mutter, I am without hands to smite, and suchlike, until one day on coming in from the garden, the form which the book should take was revealed to me. But an autobiography, I said, is an unusual form for a sacred book. But is it? My doubts quenched a moment after in a memory of Paul, and the next day the dictation of the rough outline from the Temple to Moore Hall was begun, and from that outline, decided upon in a week of inspiration, I have never strayed. I had not been to Moore Hall for many years, and loath to go there had often said to Miss Gough: Why should I go to Moore Hall? for it is all mirrored in memory; all the beautiful curves of the bay are before me, along Kiltoome and Connor Island.
