Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  In old times the backyard was the centre of activity. The water for the house was brought from the lake in a water-barrel, the cart stood in the yard with the mule-boy beside it, and when the maids had filled their cans he put the mule into the shafts and went away to the lake again, leaving them to exchange words with the garden-boy, their gossip interrupted by the voice of the cook or the arrival of the ass from the bog with creels of turf, which the turf-boy would carry up the back staircase, emptying his load into the great barrels that stood on the different landings, filling with special care the barrel in Joseph Applely’s pantry, and I think it was Joseph who told me that these vats had come from Spain filled with port and sherry. And my thoughts passing into dialogue, I said: You have read all the family papers and can tell when these importations of wine ceased. After our great-grandfather’s death probably. The Colonel could not tell me if this were so, and so inveterate a dreamer is he that he led me to the pantry window to ask me if it would be better to rebuild the outhouses or cover in the yard.

  Cover in the yard! I said.

  Why not? A series of arches and a terrace on the top.

  And a flight of steps would serve from the higher to the lower terrace.

  And on either hand vases —

  Or rare pieces of sculpture, I said. The Colonel looked distressed. But how would the yard underneath be lighted?

  By side windows.

  And the drip? The rain would have to go somewhere. On our way to the bathroom he explained how the drip might be mitigated. Here, he said, is the bathroom, and I answered: ’Tis well; but the great eighteenth century knew not bathrooms, and we talked of the footpans and the bidets that once formed part of the furniture of every bedroom, and the disrepute into which bathing had fallen since Roman times, all through the Middle Ages, until Anglo-Indians reintroduced the habit of the thorough washing of the body into Europe. From the bathroom window we caught sight of the ruined privy under the beech-trees to which our ancestors were wont to adjourn in the morning, their pipes in their mouths, to talk the news, and the news was always of a race-horse, or a duel, or a hunt. We have improved upon those times, yet our neighbours still allow their dogs to deposit ordure upon our doorsteps in London. And whilst I meditated on humanity’s slow advancement, the Colonel told me that he had chosen my father’s dressing-room for the bathroom. I never should have had the courage to make the change, so real is my memory of the room as it stood in my father’s lifetime, himself seated at the great bureau full of countless drawers at which he wrote his letters, or standing before the toilet-table between the windows covered with cut-glass phials of macassar oil, pots of bear’s grease, many kinds of ivory brushes, tortoiseshell combs of all sorts and sizes, some destined for the hair of the head, some for the whiskers, relics of the days of his dandyhood, for he must have been a great dandy when Anonymous turned a shoe at Liverpool and Corunna won the Chester Cup.

  He liked me to come into his dressing-room to talk to him while he lathered his face, and I remembered the lie I told him when he asked me if I had used the top of his silver shaving-pot to knock in a nail, and his alarm when I stumbled over the long s’s in grandfather’s edition of Burke’s speeches. I have forgotten his reproofs to me, but can still see him in my thoughts opening the green-baize door, and can almost hear him communicating the direful tidings to my mother. As she showed little or no alarm the governess was sent for and it was put to them: Had they ever known or heard of a child of seven who could not read Burke’s speeches without faltering in an edition printed with the long s’s? Before Miss Westby had time to answer, my mother said that she didn’t believe that any child of seven could read the long s’s without faltering, and I can recall his long mouth speaking through the latter, telling that when he was three he used to read the Times aloud to his mother at breakfast. My mother’s incredulity exasperated him; he ordered my governess and me to the schoolroom, and for days we sat reading a very indifferent history of England by one Lingard. We listened with apprehension while Joseph Applely brushed the master’s silk hats and arranged his gloves for him in the hall, and we breathed more freely when we heard the hall door clang, for we knew then he had gone to the stables to run his fingers down the horses’ forelegs, and our hope was that his interest in the morning gallops would help him to forget my lessons. We passed the door of the room to which my mother had taken me to pray by the death-bed. It had not been in use since mother’s death. The Colonel was with her; he had probably seen her die, and I supposed that that was why he had chosen for himself the two rooms at the end of the passage — rooms that I recollected as grandmother’s rooms; and after visiting them he threw open the door of the summer room, a pretty room opening on to the balcony that the four great pillars support, and in an instant the room returned to what it had been forty years before, my father sitting at the rosewood table in the evening, drinking a large cup of tea, telling me stories of Egypt and the Dead Sea, Baghdad, the Euphrates and the Ganges, stories of monkeys and alligators and hippopotami, stories that a boy loves. We left the room to go to the rooms that were once grandfather’s library. The Colonel had turned them into bedrooms. Grandfather’s spirit seems still to animate these rooms, I said. The Colonel did not answer, and then I seemed to apprehend something that had hitherto escaped me: Moore Hall had always seemed alien and remote to me because it was pervaded by the minds of those that preceded me. My grandfathers and grandmothers were underground, but along the landings and in the large rooms opening on the passages I seemed to be aware of mentalities different from my own. Nor is it strange that this should be so, Moore Hall not having been subjected to any new influences after 1870; and going down to luncheon with my brother I felt I should never be able to live in this house; I should always feel my grandfather sitting by me wondering how it was that his grandson should practise so familiar a style, one so unlike Gibbon.

  I should always be engaged in imaginary dialogues, I said, telling him he did not always write like Gibbon but like me in his preface to the French Revolution, and that the preface is the best part of it. If you were to say that, said the Colonel, he would answer, But you haven’t read my history of the French Revolution. I asked myself if the Colonel intended a reproach. After luncheon, he proposed to show me the garden, but I could barely see it, so clear was my memory of the old eighteenth-century garden with its rows of espalier apple-trees and four great walnut-trees, one in each plot. The two great ilex-trees whose branches leaned in front of the turret were gone; the turret was in ruins, and the Colonel had felled a good many beeches along the twenty-foot wall to get light and air for his fruit-trees. I was sorry for these.

  But nothing grows under them, he explained, and led me round his peach and pear and apple and cherry-trees, and while he explained the different varieties, I dreamed of the sweet-briar hedge that divided my mother’s flower-garden from the plots in which we had once grown potatoes, cabbages, onions, spinach, chives, parsnips, cauliflowers, beans, asparagus. The asparagus-bed was never a great success, because of the walnut-trees which my father would not allow to be felled, his mother having planted them. Even more distinct in my memory than these trees was a great apple-tree — a very venerable tree, moss-grown and carious. It stood up a little beyond the flower-walk, and near it, tucked away in a corner, was a dense growth of raspberry-bushes enclosed by a thick hedge, a dangerous place in my imagination, one in which witches and other evil spirits were to be met, but the fruit tempted me, and my governess once boxed my ears for having hidden myself among the raspberries. And then we came upon the ruins of the greenhouse from which we used to steal the grapes, even when the door was kept locked, and my father once beat me with a horse-whip for breaking the panes, and now, elderly men both of us, the Colonel and I stood looking at a large cut-stone chimney that the Colonel had saved in case I should care to rebuild the greenhouse again. Cut stone is very expensive, he said, but in our grandfathers’ days labour was cheaper; and we passed into the stables, none of which had
fallen. There was the box in which Croagh Patrick neighed when the boy brought his sieveful of corn. How he plunged his muzzle into it! for he was a greedy feeder and ready to kick any one that came near him till the last grain was licked up. In the next box I had seen Master George, one of the best horses of his year, only a few pounds behind Croagh Patrick at a mile and a half, and his superior at two miles, a terrible buck-jumper that would have dislodged any cowboy. The little ponies that these horsemen ride have not sufficient strength to throw them out of the high Mexican saddles, but Master George was sixteen hands and a half, and when his head disappeared between his legs it was no easy thing to keep on a six-pound saddle, and the tightest might have been flung out of it as I was three times one morning before breakfast, these falls irritating my father scarcely less than the long s’s had done eight years before, compelling him to declare that no horse could unseat him. Joseph Applely smiled and went out of the room, and next morning my father was thrown in front of the house by the holly-trees, breaking his collar-bone, and the doctor had to be sent for. The Colonel started to enumerate: Wolf Dog, Anonymous, and Corunna have dragged hay out of those very racks, he said; and the coach-house recalled the coach hung on leather straps, and the great phaeton, likewise on leather straps, which hardly ever went out — a museum piece it was — and the tiny phaeton in which our mother used to drive Primrose and Ivory, a beautiful pair of ponies. The great fir at the back of the stable, in front of the hayrick, reminded me of the day that Joseph Applely took me out for a walk and taught me a little bird-lore. The nest he showed me at the end of the bough was a goldfinch’s, and we explored the woods together, and far clearer than today is that fragrant morning by the hawthorn-tree all in flower, Joseph lifting me up to see into the blackbird’s nest. And I remember his voice: You mustn’t touch the eggs, Master George, or the bird will forsake her nest. But how will the bird know? Let’s try. We must go back, Master George, and if we return at one we shall get home in time for dinner. Let’s go a little farther, Joseph, and find some more nests, I cried, for it did not seem to me that I should ever want dinner again.

  But of what was the Colonel thinking? He is like his father, discreet; therefore not a man of letters, and we talked about the foreign firs which our father had planted in the ‘sixties, and they seemed to me to be out of keeping with the landscape. Deodars may be suited to India, I said, and the Wellingtonia may be well enough in California, but here they are detestable; and far worse than the deodar and the Wellingtonia is that cypress los — something, a tree of vile habit, sending down branches to take root, creating a little jungle. The Colonel admitted the habit, which he could not well deny, but he could not be persuaded to send round for a couple of hatchets, urging that felling trees is not the light work that I imagined it to be, the real reason being that he is as averse as I am from felling a tree, an aversion inherent in every sensitive nature, one might almost say in every nature except the woodcutter’s; habit has blunted his; he has forgotten the original instinct of tree-worship, and perceives no longer the mystery of the vasty height sprung out of a single seed.

  It was while I was thinking these things that the great walls of the farmyard rose up through the beech-trees, eighteen or twenty feet high, enclosing buildings of all kinds; stables for many cart-horses, granaries, barns, haggards, byres, smithies. A great deal of cut stone had been used in these buildings, and the Colonel had saved many pieces from the ruins of the smithy, and these he said would come in useful when the time came to rebuild the farmyard. I liked to hear him dreaming his dreams while I meditated the question whether it were crueller to fell an ox or a tree. Behind that wall I had seen death for the first time, and with that kind of morbid pleasure which one feels in wounding oneself, I recalled how the shepherd had come one day into the yard driving half a dozen sheep before him, and how, stopping in my play, I asked him why he had brought them from the fields. He answered me that Friday was always killing day, and putting out his crook he caught a sheep by the leg and felt for the fat; but not being satisfied with the animal, he allowed it to escape from him. Again he put out his crook and caught another, and again he was not satisfied; three or four sheep were tried; it may have been over the fourth that he muttered, This one will do, and led it into a corner. He and his boy stretched it on a slightly raised platform, and I asked why a bucket was placed under its head. To catch the blood, Master George, the shepherd answered as he sharpened his knife; and all this ritual was so enticing that I waited impatiently, and marvelled how it was that the sheep accepted death without a bleat, looking at us all the time with round, peaceful eyes, in which one could read neither love of life, nor fear of death, nor reproach. At last the eyes began to glaze, and I said to the shepherd, He has begun to die, and the shepherd pressed the sheep all over with his great strong fingers, urging the blood out of the wound in the neck. A few days later we were stopped in our walk by strange squealings, and scenting death, we appealed to a peasant; and he told us the butcher was killing pigs. We ran from our governess to see the pigs killed; we hid from her in a stable, and did not venture out till she had given up the search. I’m afraid you’re late; he’s a goner by this time, the peasant called after us, and when we arrived at the farmyard the carcass was being cut up and salted, and it would be some time before the butcher would be ready for another. The Colonel was a little diffident, uncertain whether he should stay to see a pig killed, but perhaps ashamed to go lest I might laugh at him. I took on authoritative airs, and bade the men hurry, returning now and again to the dung-heap to watch the pigs; there were eleven or twelve rooting and rolling, happy, for the warm May sunlight caressed their sides, and apparently the screams of their fellow, now passed away into salt pork, had not disturbed them. Standing by them I picked out the biggest to be taken next, a pigheaded animal that contested every yard of the way, two rustics dragging him, and myself applying an ash-stick as a goad to his rump, and so cruelly that one of the rustics begged me to desist. He was bleeding under the tail when he was hoisted to the platform, and I felt ashamed of my cruelty; but he was a vicious brute that would have bitten the butcher had it not been for the rope about his snout. The butcher worked his knife slowly through the neck; and I plied him with questions: Why was it that pigs squealed when they were being killed and sheep died without uttering a bleat? Was it because it hurt pigs more to die than it did sheep? The butcher answered that pigs were noisy devils; somebody else added that they liked music, the bagpipes especially — answers that perplexed me; and I stood watching the blood, noting that with its flowing the squeals grew fainter and fainter. Dead he seemed such a stupid thing that I began to wish him alive again. My governess came into the cowyard saying she had been looking for us everywhere; our dinner was ready and we must come at once. But we haven’t got the bladder yet. The butcher put his hand into the pig, tore it out, and handed it to us all stinking, our governess begging us to relinquish it, but we explained to her that we were going to blow it out and tie it to the end of a stick. We shall want two more bladders to beat each other with, I explained, and hurried the Colonel through his dinner. I would have brought my sister to the farmyard, where still some more pigs wallowed in the dung-heap outside Fright’s stable, waiting the great experience of their lives — the butcher’s knife.