by George Moore
I shall get no sleep tonight, I said, raising the blind in the hope that the moon shining on the lake would calm me; and my eyes roved over the dim outlines of the lake into the pearly distances neither blue nor grey. A moment later the words: He is a born Catholic, fell from my lips, and the phrase seemed to me to represent a truth hitherto unexpected or insufficiently appreciated. We do not acquire our religion, we bring it into the world. We are born Catholics or Protestants. Catholicism and Protestantism are attitudes of mind. And I pondered the question for what seemed a long while, awakened suddenly by the thought that if my nephews had a worth they would discover themselves to be Protestants. From eighteen to twenty-one is the time when we stick for ever or find a way out. Every man of worth chooses a religion for himself, and so my money has been only wasted; but it has not gone to the moulding of a soul. All the same, I would not have had this happen, no, not for all the money in the world. And I fell to thinking how I had laughed and jeered at dear Edward because he dreaded lest his money might be applied to the production of heretical plays; yet here was I suffering from the same dread. The perfect circle of the moon detained my thoughts a little while, and the lonely castle beneath it set me thinking of savage hordes of Welsh and Irish disputing for possession of the island. But however far our thoughts may wander we are awakened by the old pain. My senses sickened again. A judgment upon me, I cried, for having jeered at dear Edward! And at the words: dear Edward, my thoughts sped away to Bayreuth and returned to my brother and to our childhood. My mind, I said, is like an ever-veering wind, and sleep will be sought in vain; all the same, I must seek sleep. And all night long the same thoughts revisited me, marching round my brain like prisoners in a yard, high walls, and no strip of sky above the multitudinous bricks. Round and round they go, I cried, and then away went my thoughts again, and of what I was thinking when I feel asleep I cannot tell.
Your bath-water is ready, sir.
Yes, yes, I answered, and turned over. If I could only cease to think! But the moment I see him I shall begin to think again of Jesuits and Benedictines. Of what shall we speak? I asked, and going to the bath, and in the bath, and coming from the bath, I tried to discover subjects of conversation, lingering over my dressing, and so advantageously that Evelyn was dispensing tea and coffee and when I entered the dining-room, and after breakfast I thanked her kindly when she said:
Now, Maurice, won’t you take George out and show him the new gateway, which he says he has not seen sufficiently?
The Colonel murmured some answer, and whilst hustling himself into his old yellow overcoat, he told me that the part of the ironwork missing from the gates brought from Newbrook had been supplied by the smith at Carnacun, and that he was curious to hear if I should be able to distinguish the old from the new. The stonework was complete, all except two knobs; these Michael Malia would be able to replace, and the cost would not be more than five or ten pounds a knob. His optimism was somewhat dismal, for I never imagined anybody living in Moore Hall again, and after viewing the gateway which had only cost me forty pounds, we turned down the road to the gate lodge, now empty, the Colonel having succeeded in expelling its late tenants, his gardener. A gate lodge, I said, is generally beside the gate, but this one is fifty yards away. The Colonel declared it to be an excellent house, and I meditated, for this gate lodge was associated in my mind with many memories. It had a loft which was reached by a ladder, and I had often thought that I would like to sleep in a loft among the hay; and there was a deep drain beyond the garden at the edge of the wood, and down this drain I had often floated on a raft made out of a plank and the shutters from the windows, into deep water under the bridge. It was a thrilling experience to find oneself on a raft under an arch, but the novelty wore away quickly, and one day I had undertaken a longer voyage, punting the raft down the drain into the lake. But in the lake the punt pole (a branch torn from a tree) had proved insufficient, and the freshening wind had carried me and the raft out into the open lake, and looking at the Colonel I remembered him crying among the rushes while I debated my chances, whether it would be better to remain on the raft trusting it to carry me to some island, or to throw myself from it into the lake in the hope that the water was not deep enough to drown me. The waves leaped higher and higher, threatening to wash the shutters from the plank, till at last it became clear that the chance that the water was not deep enough to drown me would have to be accepted. It rose to my chin, lifting me off my feet, and I continued wading, hoping not to stumble into a hole. Yes, I said to the Colonel, I had a near escape that day from drowning, and now I can still see you running along the strand crying for some one to come and save your brother. If the accident had happened a few years before, he said, you would have been drowned; the lake was deeper, and he told me how in the ‘sixties a young engineer had come down from the Board of Works with a project for draining Lough Carra into Lough Mask, but our father had offered such opposition to the scheme that it had to be abandoned. Up to the ‘seventies, I answered, we were feudal lords, and he was listened to in the House of Commons when he said that he could not allow a small Sahara to be created before his front door. We controlled our landscapes in those days, or it may have been that the shores of Lough Mask were implicated in this drainage scheme. As likely as not it was discovered that the draining of Lough Carra would inundate the shores of Lough Mask. A weir was therefore constructed in the River Robe, said the Colonel, and his words revived the day I had brought a boat from Lough Carra to Lough Mask and had put back frightened by the great waves of that gloomy lake.
Our father saved Lough Carra, but it is for certain many feet lower than it used to be; and I reminded the Colonel of the great pleasure-boat about whose rotting planks we often played in childhood. It had been allowed to rot under a group of pines, standing some fifty or sixty yards from the lake’s edge, by the side of a walled trench, once its harbour. For to what other purpose could the walled trench have been put? we often asked our governess, our subsequent questions drifting into dim speculation as to how many pounds it would cost to mend the boat; and if Micky Murphy could mend it if he were paid ten pounds. This rotting boat appealed to our imaginations, for its seats would hold a dozen or more ladies and gentlemen, and there were rowlocks for eight oars, and the Colonel and I were wont to imagine the great picnic-parties that had sat under the sail, for there was a hole in one of the seats for a mast. Was Castle Hag or Castle Island the destination of these picnic-parties? we asked each other; and was there a turkey stuffed with chestnuts in the hamper? We were certain that there were cakes and fruits and jams, and that the footman spread a snowy cloth in the glade under the castle wall. Our governess read while we dreamed. We! Did the Colonel dream? If he did, he never told me his dreams. He is reticent about his dreams, but garrulous about externals, and as we walked round the shores of Lough Carra for the last time, he regretted that he had not brought with him the key of the new boat-house, for he would like to show me his brother-in-law’s boats, rowing-boats, skiffs, wherries, a steam launch, and a yacht. A shrunken lake for certain, else the reeds would not have thriven. —— had had to cut a passage through them for his boats, and the Colonel unfolded a project to me whereby the lake might be cleared of reeds, and before he had reached the end of his project we were at the bridge that stretches over the turlough (a turlough in Mayo is a low-lying field, that is flooded in winter), and he pointed out the pump that drew the water from a well out in the middle of the lake — a well that old Betty MacDonald told us was once up in Kiltoome, but it had suddenly descended and had sprung up in the lake, with a ring of grass around it, for it was a holy, or maybe a fairy well. She was note quite sure which. The pump had cost me two hundred pounds, but I had to admit that if people were to live at Moore Hall, a pump was necessary. The walls require mending, I remarked, coming upon a cottage that my father had built but had never put a roof on; and I added, A ruin that will supply excellent material for the building of necessary walls.
But the C
olonel said there was plenty of stone, and no need either to pull down the cottage or to roof it. The walls were probably too rotten to bear a roof, and, speaking of the Congested Districts Board, he said, They even ask for the paddock, the field behind the cottage. The fields beyond the gate were Corrour, the New Gardens, Lough Navadogue, Rochetown, and our father’s racecourse, on which he had trained Corunna, Wolf Dog, Anonymous, Crough Patrick, and Master George, to number a few of his famous horses, and all these fields the Congested District Board required.
So that the holdings of three tenants might be extended, the Colonel said; and if you yield, Moore Hall will be no more than a villa in the midst of a wild country; cottagers within the woods right up against Kiltoome, and who can say that pigsties will not be built? The present cottagers would probably prevent the pigs from rotting in the graveyard, but the cottagers fifty years hence will have no scruples. The Board insist on acquiring all the land right up to Kiltoome, and at their own price, and if you refuse to sell, the Board may refuse to buy your other estates, Ballintubber, and those in Galway and Roscommon. A very serious matter for you if the Board refused to buy.
How is that?
The next move of the Board will be to stir up all the tenants to combine in a campaign against rent — like putting a stick into a wasp’s nest, the Colonel added, with a deep note of anger in his voice. So far as I understand, the proposal is to leave you Derrinrush.
We returned to Moore Hall, and so gloomy were our thoughts that we turned aside instinctively from the Dark Road and ascended the steep lawn together.
My dear Maurice, Moore Hall was built in feudal times. Read the tablet over the balcony, 1790, and feudalism continued down to 1870; a big square house on a hill, to which the peasants came every morning to work. You remember the bell that hung over the laundry? It rang at seven, and before it ceased clanging our labourers assembled and were bidden to their day’s work; and a shilling a day was fine wages in those good times. And you remember the women coming from the village with their husbands’ and brothers’ dinners? Half a dozen boiled potatoes in a cloth, and a great dinner it was if they got a noggin of buttermilk from the cook. They ate their potatoes and drank their buttermilk under the hawthorn hedge in the backyard, if the day were fine, and, if it were wet, in byre or stable. The young men wore corduroy trousers and frieze coats, the old men were still in knee breeches and tall hats; a red petticoat hung to the women’s knees and they wore a printed handkerchief round their heads. We were kings in those days; little kings, but kings for all that, with power of life and death as has been said and truly, for we often sundered wife and husband, sister from brother; and often drove away a whole village to America if it pleased us to grow beef and mutton for the English market. And in those days the peasants were afraid to thatch their cottages lest their rent should be raised, nor was there one peasant in our villages or in the Tower Hill villages worth a ten-pound note. The Colonel asked me if I remembered a cabin in the middle of Annys bog, a dwelling hardly suited for an animal, yet a man and woman lived there and children were born in it, and I answered him: We used to pass it on our walks, you and I and our governess. Yes, I remember it, and I remember one day up in the mountains while grouse-shooting stabling my horse in a man’s cabin. But we shall never be able to do it again. The landlords have had their day. We are a disappearing class, our lands are being confiscated, and our houses are decaying or being pulled down to build cottages for the folk. All that was has gone or is going. Moore Hall represents feudalism.
I think that anybody who would like to live in a comfortable house —
Square rooms and lofty passages conformed to the ideas of our ascendants, and jerry-built villas, all gables, red tiles, and mock beams, stand for modern taste and modern comfort; hot water on every landing and electric light. Nobody wants a real house unless an American millionaire, and it is not because of its reality that he wants it but for its unreality. It is unreal to him, and having a great deal of money, he indulges in eccentricity. In this way the old world is carried on by Americans; even in England there are very few houses that are the capitals of the estate they stand in as Moore Hall was up to fifty years ago. Moore Hall is out of date, and it astonishes me that you don’t feel it. I wish in a way that I could summon sufficient courage to pull it down and sell it; it would make excellent rubble to build labourers’ cottages, and if I could I would cut down every tree and lay the hillside bare. Why not, since I know it will be laid bare a few years after my death? The fate that overtook Ashbrook hangs over Muckloon. It will be given over to peasants, like Ashbrook. You remember the piece of tapestry that was woven in Ashbrook by our great-grand-aunt or grandmother and is now on exhibition in South Kensington Museum? I wonder how long it will be before another piece of tapestry like that is woven in Mayo. In the dining-room hangs a portrait of a lady with a dog, painted by a young girl in Galway. Is there one in Galway now who would paint as well? No. With all our so-called culture, sculpture, painting, architecture, and the art of the use of words are disappearing. By the way, Maurice, I don’t know whether you have heard my theory that the age of art is over as much as the Stone Age.
People have always been saying, he answered, that the age of art is over. I could cite you many passages from Elizabethan writers in which they deplore the decline of art and the English language. They were wrong, I replied, that is all. But it cannot be denied that there was neither art nor literature in Europe in the Middle Ages, from the sixth, shall we say, to the twelfth century? The Colonel answered me that art cannot flourish in the midst of invasions; and he began: Rome was sacked by Alaric in the fifth century, and in the same century Europe was overrun by the Huns, headed by Attila, and a century later the Saracens invaded Europe and were defeated by the French at the Battle of Tours; and as we walked toward the house he explained that if this defeat had not taken place we might all be Mohammedans now.
But do you think that the sleep of Mohammedanism is a deeper sleep than the sleep of Catholicism? I beg your pardon for introducing the religious question. You are appreciative of the trend of the past, but seem blind to that of the present. I cannot help being sorry for my poor country that has never been able to show a brave face to the world. Some extraordinary curse seems to have been laid upon this land in the tenth century or about that time. Ireland was something then; she had a religion of her own — and she was inventing an art of her own. Up to the tenth century it looked as if God intended to do something for Ireland, and in the tenth or the eleventh century he changed his mind, and ever since the curse seems to have been deepening. In another fifty years Ireland will have lost all the civilisation of the eighteenth century and will be a swamp of peasants with a priest here and there, the exaltation of sacraments and whisky her lot, and a hundred legislators united only in protecting monkeries and nunneries from secular inquisition. The Colonel did not agree with me that the gentry were dying out in Mayo. The Brownes of Breaghwy and the Lynches of Partry had been building lately. My dear Maurice, you will not see things as they are. Or is it that you don’t remember Mayo in the days of the gentry as well as I do? Athy Valley is empty, and you told me that you and an old peasant had searched for traces of Browne Hall, but could find none. Ballinafad is a monastery. The Blakes are still in Tower Hill, and a last Lynch lives his lonely life in Clogher. Cornfield is empty, and will be pulled down very soon. The Knoxs have left Creagher. Newbrook is sold, and the masonry distributed — part of it is at the end of the drive. Brownestown House was burnt before our time, but not much before it. How many more? The Lamberts are gone. What was the name of their place? Brook something.
Every class has its ups and downs, and there is no doubt that ours is going through a crisis.
No crisis whatsoever. We have outlived our day, that is all; and in thirty years we shall be, as I have said, as extinct as the dodo, unless religion comes to our aid. You seem not to have heard of the New French party — the Catholic Atheists? Religion is to be taught again in the
hope that man may be persuaded to forgo the joy of a woman’s bosom for the sake of Abraham’s. The Colonel laughed, but he was not pleased, and to break the irritating silence he told me that Castle Carra had been sold to the Congested Districts Board, and out of the arch, built during the famine, a row of concrete cottages had been run up according to specifications. The old deer park will supply some material, I said. The jungle will be grubbed up; you will get rid of the goats. And we talked on in this fashion, and after dinner resumed the same talk, saying the same things over and over again; and when we ascended the stairs to our beds, about eleven o’clock, the Colonel promised to drive me over to Llewellyn’s monastery next day.
Llewellyn Blake is my uncle, my mother’s youngest brother, and he came into the property of Ballinafad on the death of Joe Blake, famous in the county Mayo for many racehorses and a love story. Joe seems to have been the only one in the family whose soul did not trouble him. His brother Mark, from whom he inherited the property of Ballinafad, was a fine old country rake, leaving samples of his voice and demeanour and appearance in every village, and then going to Dublin to repent his sins, attaining in the last years of his life the spectacular appearance of Father Christmas, causing much annoyance in the chapels that he frequented from his incurable habit of interrupting the services with Oh, Lord; oh, Lord; my unfortunate soul! Llewellyn is as tall as his brother Mark, two or three inches over six feet, large in proportion, with sloping shoulders, snapping his words out and then relapsing into silence. He used to be much admired at dances in the drawing-rooms of Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares, and in the old Royalty Theatre he patronised the Muse Terpsichore. But those days are over and done with, and, like his brother Mark, he has become uneasy about his soul. He was warned of its disease by me years ago, but he paid no heed to my warnings, and convinced of its continuous existence, and that priests can help him to save it, he has founded a monastery. I should do the same if I were a Roman Catholic, but the Colonel, who is one, would have me try to prevent the founding of this monastery by action at law, and I am still trying to understand the Colonel who believes in the efficacy of masses for the dead, but seems to think that Llewellyn’s relations should come before his soul — a most impossible Colonelesque argument; and the spirit fumed within me to express my point of view; but I put chains upon my spirit, and Carnacun went by for the last time. We were on the heights of Ballyglass when the struggling spirit sundered its last fetters, and I said:
