Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  Fright was a very handsome thoroughbred horse. He had won some big races — the Cesarewitch, I think — and had gone to the stud with a deformed foreleg. My father was sure Fright would get winners if he were given the right mares, and the horse stood at Moore Hall for many years at ten pounds for thoroughbred mares, five for half-breds; the groom’s fee was, I think, the same in every case, five shillings, and it was a very well-earned five shillings, for Fright needed a great deal of coaxing and encouragement before he showed any interest in the mare waiting for him in the yard outside his box, and he would certainly have gone to the knacker’s if he had not neighed at the sight of some cart-mares as Pat Kelly was bringing him home from exercise. And seeing that the mares were in the horse’s mind, Pat began to tell me how he had spoken in the horse’s ear. I was all ear, but Pat became reticent suddenly, and I was left pondering on the mystery of the continuous existence of life in this world.

  I had been told, as every child is told, that babies were found under gooseberry-bushes, and had accepted the explanation for some years, but between the ages of ten and twelve this explanation seemed hardly worthy of a boy’s serious credence, and I had accepted the only other possible solution — that the female produced children unaided, and had begun to regret my sex when Pat Kelly’s words made life seem again worth living. And not to find myself lacking when my day came, I used to hide in the carpenter’s shop (the carpenter’s shop being next to Fright’s stable) so that I might hear Pat encouraging the horse with all kinds of coaxings: That’s the old boy, that’s the old man, and sometimes with so little effect that Pat’s mouth would grow dry and he would curse the horse, and after cursing him he would start another set of coaxings, at the end of which, perhaps, the horse would be led out of the stable. It was then time for me to run out of the carpenter’s shop and climb into one of the beech-trees overlooking the yard. One day I succeeded in persuading the Colonel to come with me, and that was the very day that Pat pointed us out to our father, who called to us to come down and caned the Colonel severely.

  With all these memories flocking through my mind, it was sad to see the carpenter’s shop in ruins, for in it I had spent many days with Micky Murphy trying to learn to use the chisel, the plane, and the saw; but to no purpose did I labour, for I was without handicraft, less gifted than the carpenter’s son. The Colonel had never collected hatchets and hammers, saws and chisels, planes and gouges, files and augers and gimlets, and perhaps that is why he had bought an old saw-mill in Ballinrobe and established it in a corner of the haggard where, once upon a time, there used to be great sport ferreting rats in the wheat stacks built upon short stone pillars about three feet from the ground, with a slab on the top to keep out the rats. But a mischievous boy, preferring a rick full of rats to his father’s grain, will leave a plank for them to climb; and when threshing-day comes, the rats will scurry before a ferret with the dogs in full tilt after them; and if perchance a curious dog should try to appreciate the smells of rat and ferret and get his nose bitten, he will cry, You’ll know better next time, Towser.

  Outside the barn was a curious old threshing-machine; two horses yoked to a great beam were the motive power; and these set going within a little stone circle all kinds of wheels and cogwheels, and in response the winnowing-machine inside the barn clattered; and when I came to see how the work was progressing, the women smiled upon me as they fed it with sheaves, asking me not to come too near lest I should have my fingers chopped. When the threshing-machine went out of gear, the flail was flung, and dodging the thresher’s weary flingin’ tree, I would snatch a handful of grain and throw it to the finches waiting in the fir-trees on the hillside; not out of kindness of heart, but to entice them to their death; for when they assembled in sufficient numbers and were pecking unmindful of danger, two barrels of a fowling-piece were loosed upon them, and the ground was quickly covered with blood and feathers. A boy must learn to shoot, and whilst learning he fires at blackbirds and thrushes on the lawn, at the jackdaws as they hover about the chimneys, at the magpies as they fly from thorn to thorn, and the gulls flapping about the lake’s shore are shot at again and again; gulls will dive after a wounded gull, and so the sportsman has a chance of shooting gulls till his heart sickens. And then wandering from the shore into the woods he will shoot a squirrel, a badger, a raven; hawks and owls he considers it his duty to loose upon, and wood-pigeons, too, for they are greedy birds and the farmer does not reap where he has sown. A boy lusts to kill; he will set dogs after a cat, and one day a very beautiful white cat was hunted out of the laundry into the lofts and then out of the lofts; and when the cat escaped by a broken window the dogs were set after her, and when puss crossed the road, the dogs in hot pursuit, she was forced to take to one of the trees growing out of the shelving hillside. The laundry-maids came running down the road pleading for their cat, but a barbarous boy climbed the tree and shook her out of the branches, and in imitation of a huntsman pulled out a knife and cut off the cat’s head and distributed the flesh, treating the cat as if she were a wild animal — a hare or a rabbit — whose function it is to provide us with sport as well as food.

  You would like to see the Stone Park, the Colonel said. The name of the field awakened a memory pleasanter than the infamous hunting of the cat, a gathering of nuts one summer evening long ago with two laundry-maids and a stable-boy. Perhaps there is nothing that takes a deeper hold on memory than the drawing down of boughs laden with fruit in the dusk of a dead day. We had gathered till strange shadows began to move about the fairy ring spared by my father when he set to work to redeem the Stone Park from the hazel, more acres being needed for the growing of oats, so numerous were the racehorses at Moore Hall at this time. The corn prospered in the virgin soil and a great crop was expected; but our horses got none of it, for our peafowl had encamped in the middle of the field, leaving only a fringe, and the villagers muttered when the birds took to their heels or their wings: The master would have done well not to have meddled with the good people!

  The good people seem to have recovered their holding, I said to myself whilst seeking the road that our father had built. But all trace of it was lost in a jungle of blackthorn and hazel. Our mearing was the wall of the great park that had once extended round Castle Carra, and whilst the Colonel narrated his plans for the second ridding of the Stone Park by means of dynamite, I heard him break off in the middle of a sentence: The goats again! and away he went with thirty or forty goats trotting in front of him. It is just as I suspected, said he a little later. They feed on green boughs during the summer, but just at this time of the year they come over the deer-park wall in search of grass.

  He told me that he had thought of shooting them, but was afraid to raise up hatred against himself in the country, for the goats were not altogether wild; for certain, somebody had a claim upon them. And he continued talking, but for a long time my thoughts were among the days when we clambered the deer-park wall and wandered to Castle Carra, a great stronghold in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, abandoned so it was said, in the seventeenth, or later, the descendants of the great chieftains having gone to live in the modern house, now a ruin like the castle. In the ‘sixties a herdsman lived in a corner of it; we bought goat’s milk from him, and how good it was in the noggins, foaming over the brims! The circumstances of the abandonment of the castle must have been wonderful. Or was it abandoned by degrees? At one time all the headland was fortified, but of this vast castle little remains except the central tower or fort, now grown about with thorn and hazel. My mother’s wont was to repeat verses from Marmion as we passed under the gateway, and our tablecloth was laid on the grassy space which we believed to be the ancient banqueting-hall. Above us were glimpses of staircases built between the walls, and one day I climbed up the wall and mounted the stairs. But the chieftains had left neither treasure nor pistols nor swords behind them.

  We might do a little clearing every year, the Colonel broke in, and all the trees that we get out of the St
one Park can be cut up by the saw-mill, creating a provision of fuel for the house, and in ten or twelve years we shall find we have added many acres of arable land to the estate. Aren’t you listening?

  Yes, I’m listening, and I think you’re right; in about ten or twelve years Moore Hall will have returned to the Moore Hall of before-times. But have you been to Castle Carra lately?

  He had visited Castle Carra some three or four months ago, and the castle was crumbling; last Christmas there had been a great downfall; the old gateway had wellnigh disappeared, and he did not think the castle itself would last more than fifty years. The great modern or quasi-modern house, to which the chieftains repaired when private wars were no longer recognised as lawful, is passing away, he said, even more rapidly than the castle. I found pieces of the great stone fox that stood in the middle of the courtyard and the two hounds one on either side among the brushwood. Another thing. Castle Island needs repair. Michael Malia was on the island last summer, and he tells me that the base of the old castle is insecure, but that a few pounds would make it safe.

  My dear Maurice, it is sad to see ancient Ireland passing away before our eyes. But we cannot rebuild ancient Ireland, and it is clear to me that as soon as I am gone Moore Hall will be pulled down to build cottages in Derrinany and Ballyholly, or the house will become a monkery or a nunnery. Which would you prefer?

  The Colonel sought refuge in silence, and I read in the melancholy that overspread his face that the abandonment of family property to the prelacy was distasteful to him. And now that Llewellyn has given Ballinafad to the monks, he may, I said to myself, be more willing than he was some years ago to allow me to bring up one of his children a Protestant, on condition, of course, that I leave him Moore Hall. I had written to him once on this very subject, and his answer had reached me in Paris. A very angry letter it was, characterising my proposal as infamous and outrageous. Why should my proposal be looked upon as infamous and disgraceful? I had asked myself, and I began to ask myself again the same question. He may, I said, think differently now; circumstances have changed. Moreover, the proposal might be put to him again in conversation; words pass rapidly; there is no time for anger if they be dealt out skilfully; and I thought how after dinner, when his wife had gone to bed and we were sitting in two armchairs before the turf fire, I might begin by complaining that now that Stella and Walter Osborne and Hughes were gone, Dublin had become a little too small for me. He would ask me whether I was going to London or to Paris. Paris would introduce Dujardin’s name, and I would tell him that Dujardin’s ambitions were to found a new religion in which there was no dogma, only rite. The Colonel would shrug his shoulders and ask how rite could exist independently of dogma, and I would answer that there was no dogma in ancient religions. The Colonel would answer, Judaism, and I would explain incidentally that the Jews had never indulged in heresy hunting. It was not permitted to insult Jehovah, and anybody who did so was condemned to death, as Socrates was condemned for insulting the Gods. Dogma and its concomitant, heresy hunting, arose when? What Pope founded the Holy Order? The Reformation would be mentioned, and it would be an easy transition from the Reformation to my proposal.

  We make these plans, but very rarely do we adhere to them; and after dinner, when we two were sitting in the drawing-room, without prelude or introductory matter of any kind, I said:

  My dear Maurice, I have a proposal to make to you. I am quite willing to pay for the education of your eldest son, and to leave him any property and pictures that may remain after my death, but I should like to bring him up a Protestant. Our family is a Protestant family; there are one or two apostates, it is true, but —

  I should never consent to what you are proposing. You needn’t go on.

  I’m sorry for that, for of course it is impossible for you to deny that Catholicism makes for illiteracy. As I have pointed out again and again, Catholicism has hardly produced a book worth reading since the Reformation.

  But I deny that completely.

  It doesn’t suit you to admit it. But this you will admit, that if Catholicism degrades, corrodes, paralyses, and stupefies the intelligence, its day is over.

  I admit that, if your premises be correct, but I deny your premises.

  To deny is easy; but if what I say be not true, if Catholics have written as well as Agnostics and Protestants, the books are known. Name them.

  At the end of a long waste of argument, I said:

  Well, if you are convinced that the Catholic is equal to the Protestant, why not bring the matter to the test? Do you bring up one of your sons a Catholic, I will bring up the other a Protestant, and back him to be the superior of the Catholic boy, to the extent of five hundred pounds. I’ll be generous. If I win, I will give the five hundred to the Catholic as a sort of consolation prize.

  The proposal you are making to me is utterly inacceptable and horrible. I can’t think of anything more detestable than that I should give you one of my children to be brought up in a religion of which I disapprove, and that I should be tempted to do this by a promise that you will leave him money! If, later on, my children were to tell me that they preferred Protestantism to Catholicism, I don’t say that I shouldn’t be sorry, but I should do nothing to prevent them following the religion which they wished to follow, but if they were to change their religion in order to inherit property, or to get money, I should hate the very sight of them.

  But, my dear Maurice, nobody except Cardinal Newman ever changed his religion for theological reasons. All changes of religion are brought about by pecuniary or sexual reasons.

  The Colonel did not answer. He lay back in his armchair white with passion, the first time I had ever seen him lose his temper since he was a little boy. It would have been easier to let the matter drop, but I had determined to make a last attempt to save the boy, and could not stop half-way.

  You told me I libelled my great-grandfather when I hinted that he became a Catholic because it was impossible to carry on business in Spain as a Protestant.

  And I say so still; but we’re not talking now of our great-grandfather, but of my children.

  But you knew that our great-grandfather never became a Catholic, and knowing the truth why did you conceal it? Because you are a Catholic?

  We are talking now of the religion my children are being brought up in, and I say that your proposal is not an honourable one, and if possible it would be less honourable of me to accept it.

  Everybody has his own ideas of honour; there is no fixed standard; but it is a very common thing, as you must know, that when parents are divided in religious beliefs some of the children are brought up in one religion and some in another, and it would be difficult to impugn the fairness of such an arrangement. I am prejudiced in favour of Protestantism for intellectual reasons, and because my life is moulded on facts rather than upon sentimentalities. And the answer I got from the Colonel was that I looked at the world through a narrow tube and could only see one spot at a time, and that my opinions were always as narrow as the tube; and then, getting angrier and angrier, his face bleaching with a passion which I could not help admiring, for at all events he was himself in this scene, he reminded me that I had said I would leave Moore Hall to his children, but no sooner had I said that than I began to impose conditions. In the beginning they were to learn Irish, that was the condition; now a new condition was to be imposed, they were to be brought up Protestants.

  Not both, only one, I protested; and if I pay for his education you can’t expect me to bring up a boy in a religion which I think paralyses the intelligence. Your concern is with the possibility of a future life, the soul’s arrival in Purgatory and its subsequent release by means of Masses paid for the Pope’s indulgences, and —

  XIV

  AND WHEN ON a subsequent occasion my brother told me, in answer to a question, that I had been paying fifty pounds a year to the Jesuits, and afterwards one hundred and thirty a year to the Benedictines for the education of my nephew, I uttered the cry or
moan of a man taken with a sudden sickness. The sensation the news brought me was, strangely enough, physical, a sort of fainting in the very bowels, or else I cannot describe it. I wrote to you from Paris offering to pay for my nephew’s education, I said, if he were brought up a Protestant, and the answer I got was that my proposal was a dishonourable one. How, then, could you think that I was willing to pay for a Catholic education? and it has been going on year after year and I was never told. His answer was that he would repay me; and with the transference of some hundreds of pounds from Cox’s to the National Bank, the question of money would be settled between us. But there is no question of money, I bewailed. I don’t care a fig for the money. But the deception ... I could not answer him further; the shock of the discovery deprived me of any power of reasoning, and I ascended the stairs, thinking as well as I could that any calamity had been preferable to the one that had befallen me, and that I should have been paying for the education of a Catholic while meditating Hail and Farewell rankled like salt in a wound. While writing Ave and Salve, I muttered, and a deeper sense of unhappiness than I had ever known before began to steal over me as I dragged my feet along the landing to the room in which I was to sleep.