Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  But if the lake hasn’t changed, the country has, and you’ll bring back many new impressions and moods.

  You may be right. The gentry have gone and the big houses are in ruins, or empty or sold to nuns and monks, who are the only people who can afford to live in fine houses. Ballinafad is now a monastery. You’ll see Ballinafad. I know it as well as Moore Hall. But you haven’t seen it as a monastery?

  You may be right. I’ll go. Nature is full of surprises. Prolific mother of detail, I’ll go to thee.

  Ballinafad lies away to the left between Balla and Manulla, and on stepping out of the train I said: To take in Ballinafad would mean a round of four or five miles. I will instead drive over from Moore Hall. But where is the Colonel’s gig? and overtaking the porter I laid hand on his shoulder and he told me that if the Colonel’s gig did not arrive soon, my best chance of getting a car would be in the village. He promised that as soon as his work was finished he would go down and inquire, but he was afraid Johnnie MacCormac had gone to Westport, and if Johnnie wasn’t at home the only thing to do would be to telegraph for a car to Balla. And Balla being seven miles away, I should have to wait an hour and a half at Manulla Junction, watching grey sky and bridge, listening to the plaint of telegraph wires. The porter said he thought he heard a yoke coming up the road. He’ll cross the bridge over beyant; and the bridge became at once the object of interest to me. It’s his yoke right enough. You’ll be off now in no time; and these words were spoken in a tone that convinced me the man was conscious of his melancholy lot. But I couldn’t stop at Manulla to keep him company; as soon as I left he would be as lonely as before; and the Colonel’s groom being anxious to excuse himself for being late told me [he] had gone to Derrinanny to sleep with his wife overnight.

  I wonder where the station-master and the porters live?

  Are you after leaving anything behind you, sir?

  No, I was merely wondering what they do when not at work at the station. There are only two trains in the day. The boy thought there were three, but he would be able to find out at the grocer’s. So there is a shop in Manulla?

  We’ll be passing it in a minute, sir; we’re just going into the village now.

  Nobody was about; we saw neither cat, nor dog, nor pig in the muddy street; the groom mentioned, however, that the Colonel knew the priest, and as soon as we passed his chapel the fields began again, uneventful little fields, for there was neither tree nor brook to be seen, nor any one at work in them. Great stones had rolled down from the walls into the boreens leading from the main road up a landscape that it would be flattering to call hilly; it was merely a little tumbled. Over the hillside a cabin showed sometimes, and at last a dog bounded out of one, and I said:

  Where there’s a dog there’s a man, and where there’s a man a woman isn’t far off — isn’t that so?

  The boy did not answer, and, as seemingly he could not be persuaded into talk of any interest, I continued my survey of the country, noticing, for lack of something else to do, that it had flattened out without becoming a plain, and that the clouds were gathering on the horizon in a mass foretelling a downpour. But to mention that we were in for a wetting would only provoke a monosyllable from the boy. On the whole, the better chance of conversation seemed to be in a comparison between the Manulla and the Balla Road.

  The Colonel thinks this is the easier road.

  It doesn’t seem to be quite so hilly, but it is treeless, whereas on the Balla road there are trees nearly all the way to Moore Hall. Ballinafad — by the way, Mr Llewellyn Blake has settled the monks at Ballinafad, hasn’t he?

  So I’ve heard tell, sir.

  And how do the country people like that, and they going to get the estate divided between them?

  The boy called to the pony, and I had to repeat the question.

  The monks is giving fine wages at Ballinafad.

  But how much they were paying he could not tell, and I tried to forget his presence, remembering that on the road out of Balla we leave Athy Valley on the right, and I took pleasure in recalling Sir Robert Blosse and Lady Harriet; their children I never knew. A little farther on was Browne Hall; Edith and Alice were beautiful girls. The Browne Hall and the Ballinafad estates were contiguous, and Joe Blake going off to Castlebar races with his arms round his serving-maid’s waist rose up in my mind as if it had been yesterday. And two miles farther up the road is Ballyglass, our post town; the mail coach used to change horses there, and I remembered my mother reining in her ponies so that we might have a good view of the coach as it came swinging round the bend. The men that clipped horses lived in Ballyglass, in a cottage with a pretty flower garden in front — a rare thing in Mayo; and from the gate of Tower Hill to Carnacun the road is wooded, between Carnacun and Moore Hall the hills are naked, and the Annys River dribbles through the low-lying fields under Annys Bridge to Lough Carra.

  We shall turn into the Castlebar road presently, shan’t we?

  Yes, sir, round by Clogher.

  Clogher! the name carried my thoughts over the years to the time when we went thither to gather cherries and were suffered to tear down branches unreproved. There were four girls at Clogher — Helena, Lizzie, Livy, and May. Lizzie was the merriest, and her inventiveness won my father’s admiration, for, needing a hearthrug for her doll’s house, she set a trap and caught a mouse. My father delighted in this association of images — a mouse-skin rug for a doll’s house; and as we drove toward Moore Hall it seemed to me that I could see Clogher and its dead girls quite plainly. No more than a little mist had come between us. In another instant I shall be pondering on life and its meaning, I said, and looked round for something in the landscape to which I might direct the lad’s attention. May we not hope for a fine day after all? I asked him, and the question seemed legitimate enough, for at that moment a ray lit the worn field in which a yoe bleated after her lamb to come at once to relieve her udder. He did not answer, so I pressed him with:

  The lamb is the first sign of spring. The lamb comes before the daffodil. Do you know the flower?

  Do you mean the daffydowndilly, sir?

  That’s what old Betty MacDonald used to call them.

  We’re just turning into the Clogher road, sir.

  Yes, and yonder is the police-station, and beyond is the cross-road — to the right Castlebar, to the left Carnacun.

  You’ve a fine memory, God bless it, yer honour.

  The whitewash of the Clogher police barracks struck through the trees the same as forty years before, and I began to wonder what answer the boy would make if I were to tell him that the trees had not grown a foot within forty years. I suppose the police are always after the girls now as they were in my time? and the boy answered me: Them fellows do be too busy oiling their quiffs to put the comether on the girls.

  As soon as we pass the barracks, I said, we shall turn to the left and there will be hazel-bushes and rocks on both sides of the road, and about two hundred yards farther on we shall get a blink of Carnacun Lake where the hill drops. But the groom was not listening, and I fell to thinking of the pretty brooks one sees in England, purling and curling between low green banks, and shadowed by willow-trees. The willow follows the brook, and the Irish landscape lacks brooks and willows. Lakes are not in my temperament, I said; and set myself to remembering the many different lakes that we catch sight of from our roads; and then my thoughts were whisked away to Domnick Browne, who went to New Zealand, taking with him a bundle of hazel rods for walking-sticks, forty years ago, and did not write to me till he discovered that he could trace me no further back than Charles V, but himself went back to Charlemagne. A wonderful thing life is, I said, and began to notice the endless stone walls between Moore Hall and Manulla, loose walls dividing little fields with a hawthorn growing in one corner and two magpies flying — whither? The people and the country are still savage, I mused, and Ireland is without pleasant objects to look upon, though why there have never been windmills in Ireland it would be difficult to say, f
or there is plenty of wind. In my childhood there were a few water-mills, and it was pleasing to recall the day when the governess and the Colonel and myself had tripped over to Tower Hill to watch the mill-wheel. But long ago that mill stopped working. Yonder is Carnacun Lake, behind a scrubby hillside with the pines foment it, as the groom would say if he could be persuaded into speech. The lake seemed smaller than I remembered it, but he could not tell me if it were drying up. I looked forward to the crossroads, and it was pleasant to see that the smith’s forge was still there, and Grayon’s house, one of my tenants, the tenant of Ballintubber, a wealthy man, even forty years ago, for he could afford to lend me two hundred pounds ... money spent during my minority. The chapel stood up over the village on a knoll, and the fringe of trees about it was as ragged as when our carriage used to turn in the gateway. The smith’s house and three or four cabins with sagging roofs were still the village of Carnacun; nothing had been added or taken away, and I looked out for the house licensed to sell beer and tobacco. It was there, as dark and as dismal as of yore, a threshold that any moralist would approve, and above it was the great wall of the ball alley denounced by Father James Browne in his sermons: You think I don’t be hearing your brogues about the doorways, and after I have gone up the steps to the altar, he used to say. And now the rival of his Mass had fallen into ruins, some of the cut stone had tumbled out of the high wall, weeds had sprung up in the alley, and Father James’s house, to which I liked to ride my pony for a Latin lesson, was a ruin too. The present priest lives higher up the hill, in a two-storeyed house with plate-glass windows; but does he read Virgil for his pleasure and drink as good port as Father James? Be this as it may, it will always seem to me that a great deal of the character of the village of Carnacun has gone with the old cottage under the ilex-trees, the ball alley, and Father James Browne. His image has nearly faded from my mind, but I can still recall a high-shouldered man with a large hooked nose and a complexion like a Crofton apple, whose wont it was to walk about the parish in a torn cassock seeing that everybody was about his business. He would hop over the wall down into the road and out of the road again, on to the path across the triangular field to the school-house over yonder on the hillside. Why, Misther School-masther, do you mind being called the school-masther? You are the school-masther just as I am the parish priesht. I don’t mind being called the parish priesht. I like being called the parish priesht, so why should you not like being called the school-masther? So class distinctions were beginning to jar even then, I said. And to this school we owe the disappearance of the Irish language from this part of the country. I remembered the children returning from this school along a road that winds through damp fields on one side, melting almost into bog about the Annys River; on the other side the land rises, and all the cabins appeared just as I had left them; a little improvement was noticeable in the last one; a sty it used to be in old time, amid cesspools, unfit truly for an animal to live in. My hope often was that no human being would come out of its doorway until we had passed it by, and I recalled the satisfaction with which I learnt one day that this cabin was not on our but on the Tower Hill property. I anticipated the elder-bushes a few yards farther on, and could still see my mother and my governess in my thoughts gathering elder flowers for they were supposed to be good for sunburn, and myself cutting elder stems to make pop-guns. A path leads over the hill to the right, and down to the left a boreen runs along one of our woods, to Runnineal, a Tower Hill village by the Annys River, and the house under the pines where the main road strikes through is a wood-ranger’s lodge, the dwelling of a man called Murphy, whose welcome I used to dread; for, like a great big dog, he would run out of his house or saw-pit when he heard the wheels of the car, and his bark of welcome followed us until we reached the little bridge that spans the bog drain. In those days a path was a wonderful thing, much more wonderful than a road, and there was an enticing little path by the bridge-head. My governess forbade it; but one day I succeeded in persuading her to wander down it, and we had followed it through some young fir-trees; and yet undaunted I had implored that we should follow the path through a wood, and it had led us at last to a field golden with buttercups and a drain in which wild irises grew. A little farther on we spied another path leading up the hillside, a dark and suspicious path, but a girl who dropped a curtsy told us that it would lead us right on to the stables of the Big House. We had dared to follow it too; and had come upon dells, open spaces, and copses, and trees of every kind; silver firs in whose vasty heights I was certain there were wood-pigeons’ nests; and as we descended the hill on the other side a rowan delayed us; the berries were just beginning to redden, and immediately after we were in the bog road which was well known to us, and at the end of our adventure. Red Rowan berries and blue irises are not of the same month; two memories seem to have got mingled. No matter, this wooded hillside was once full of adventure and mystery, and there was a dark place under the turret at the end of the garden into which I did not dare to go, bramble-covered hollows into which I used to peep and then run away, afraid to look back. But the day came when I pushed my way through the dark coverts, and lo! there was nothing. Suddenly the pony stopped, and whilst the driver opened the gates I admired the fine ironwork and the cut-stone pillars topped with round balls that the Colonel had brought from Newbrook, and it looked handsomer even than I had expected, though the Colonel’s praise had led me to expect a good deal. It had opened upon one of the Newbrook avenues a hundred years ago; cut stone was not so costly then as it is today; even so, money must have been more plentiful in those days, for the gateway obviously represented a great deal of labour. In those times everything came off the land: mutton, beer, butter, bread, jam; the stewards, gardeners, butlers, and huntsmen came from the village, the housemaids too, for feudalism had lasted in Ireland down to 1870. But the peasants have come into possession of the lands from which they were evicted, and are now felling the trees of the beautifully timbered parks — trees two hundred years old are being sold at eighteen-pence apiece at Newbrook. And the trees that I am now looking at — the Moore Hall trees — will soon after my death be felled, the gateway will be offered for sale again, and the cut stone will find its way into cottage walls.

  The pony stopped in front of the high pitch in the road, jerking me forward in my seat, and began the laborious ascent whilst I looked out for the tall laburnum up whose slippery stem I had never succeeded in swarming. It was among the gone; some hawthorn-bushes I missed too, and very little was left of the great lilac-bush that marked another path to the stables. We had looked forward to seeing it when we walked out with our governess, and I remembered how one day in midsummer, after chasing through the woods, playing at Red Indians, yelling as we imagined Red Indians yell on the war-path, I had thrown myself into a haycock just by this lilac-bush, and planned the morrow: we would bring out whips with louder lashes and extend our adventure into mysterious places whither we had never dared to venture. But the next day the woods had lost some of their mystery. When summer returned the ghouls and fairies had died out of my imagination, and finding that I no longer experienced any desire to crack my whip, or to hide in the lilac-bush, or to roll in the hay, I went to old Joseph to ask him how this was. He answered I had grown older.... The drive turned round a hawthorn, passed through a glade, and I looked out for the next lilac-bush, for it was within its perfume that I had had my first religious conversation with the Colonel. It, too, was among the gone, but on the left, on the brow of the lawn, were two holly-trees into which I had shot many an arrow from the steps. But the laburnums that had once decorated the head of the drive, had they died too, died of old age or for lack of human companionship, the laburnum being a familiar tree?

  The last ascent is steep, and the pony walked every step of it, not consenting to trot till he reached the gravel sweep in front of the square Georgian house with the great flight of steps and big pillars supporting a balcony. On these steps a couple of red setters were always waiting — a spec
ial breed for which the house was famous. Nell rose up before me in her colour, in her shape, in all her winsome ways. A better dog never drew the scent of a covey of partridges or pack of grouse, and she would retrieve a duck far out in the reeds. My father often beat her for coursing hares, but despite these beatings she could not bear to be separated from him, and one evening he pulled her out of the lake into the boat saying that she had been swimming after us for more than an hour, and that if the large trout had not delayed us outside the reeds, she would have gone on swimming till she sank. Her son, Saddler, the biggest setter ever known — like a Newfoundland he was, and not a single white hair in his coat — used to lie in the hall on the mat. One day my father mentioned that the dog always snapped if he was stirred out of his sleep, and looked round with a bewildered air, and then suddenly seemed to recover himself. Saddler was suffering all this while from rabies, and as soon as the veterinary surgeon saw him he ordered him to be shot. Blush and Ruby were the last setters that adorned the steps, and the steps were the only part of the architecture that I ever liked, Moore Hall not being in my early taste, which was for brick, and perhaps it is still, for houses that have been added to by different generations rather than for grey square blocks with pillared balconies. Moore Hall had always seemed to me a Mansion House inferior to Clogher and Tower Hill. But it is superior to either, for it was built in 1780, and it was with a sense of relief that I had heard from the Colonel in Dublin that the roof had been raised by my father after winning some big races. The old roof was fifteen feet lower, and the slates that covered it were the small green Irish slates like tiles mortared together. I learnt from him that it had never been completely water-tight, and constant leakage having rotted the beams, the roof had to be raised. So my antipathy to this eighteenth-century house was to some extent justified. It was no longer eighteenth century; its eighteenth-century proportions had been spoilt by the new roof and by the plate-glass that my father had put into the windows of the hall and dining-room and drawing-room, and I felt sure that if I were ever to come to live in Moore Hall, the whole countryside would have to be searched for the old hand-made glass with rings in each pane like blobs of grease in soup. But I had always liked the imposing flight of steps, the iron railings, the pillared balcony, and the hall with its Adam ceiling, and should have liked the rooms on either side better if they had not been decorated in accordance with Victorian taste. It would seem that my father’s journey to the East had to expend itself somehow, and being a clever man of many aptitudes he had designed a Greek room in an interval between racing and politics. His room had filled my childhood with admiration. But the straw colour and the blue-grey chosen for the walls had faded in the course of forty years, and the decorators that had come from Dublin when the Colonel went into his residence at Moore Hall had failed to divine the original tints in the faded; the Colonel had warned me that they had failed, but I was not prepared for so complete a failure, and the somewhat coarse, very nearly vulgar appearance that had been given to the room set me thinking that perhaps it would be well to replace all this plaster of Paris with a pretty French paper. But who could restore the Adam ceiling? I asked myself, as I crossed a hall of fine proportions, and untouched, I muttered, as I went into the dining-room. My father’s pilasters and parquets in variegated woods displeased me, and I felt certain that if Moore Hall were to be the end of my life the drawing-room and dining-room would have to be brought into harmony with the hall and the roof lowered some ten or fifteen feet; my father was too near the Georgian period to appreciate it, I added, and, raising my eyes from the carved merman and mermaid on either side of the fireplace to my ancestor in the red coat, I began to wonder if the painting were Spanish.... Be that as it may, my grandfather is a Wilkie for sure; and just as I had arrived at this conclusion the Colonel bounced in, fresh and rosy from the farmyard, all breeches and gaiters, and anxious to show me round the house, and I followed him into the hall. It opens on to a wide passage with a staircase at either end, and off this passage there were four rooms — our old schoolroom, the water-closet, and two more rooms opening one into the other, and known as the doctor’s and the priest’s room. All these rooms the Colonel had thrown into one, and he had brought down grandfather’s book-cases and set them along the walls, achieving in this way a fine room, no doubt; but a long narrow room is un-Georgian, and character in a house is as important as in a man. No one sits in a long, narrow room. The fireplace is necessarily at one end, so while our left side is freezing our right is being roasted. Rooms should be square, there can be no doubt about it; and the present library is at another disadvantage — it overlooks a backyard, a desert place surrounded by high walls, the top of the walls spiked like a jail. This desert place was once set round with outhouses; a scullery opened on to this yard, and the hen-house was next to it. There was the wood-house, and on the other side of the gate was a turf-house, and in the right-hand corner I remembered the great chimney of the brew-house where William Mullowney’s father brewed the household beer. But that was before my time. Our beer came from Ballinrobe in the ‘sixties: our beer now comes from Dublin.