Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  IV.

  On the morning of the meet of the hounds he was called an hour earlier. He drank a cup of tea and ate a piece of dry toast in a back room. The dining-room was full of servants, who laid out a long table rich with comestibles and glittering with glass. Mrs. Norton and Kitty were upstairs dressing.

  He wandered into the drawing-room and viewed the dead, cumbrous furniture; the two cabinets bright with brass and veneer. He stood at the window staring. It was raining. The yellow of the falling leaves was hidden in grey mist. ‘This weather will keep many away; so much the better; there will be too many as it is. I wonder who this can be.’ A melancholy brougham passed up the drive. There were three old maids, all looking sweetly alike; one was a cripple who walked with crutches, and her smile was the best and the gayest imaginable smile.

  ‘How little material welfare has to do with our happiness,’ thought John. ‘There is one whose path is the narrowest, and she is happier and better than I.’ And then the three sweet old maids talked with their cousin of the weather; and they all wondered — a sweet feminine wonderment — if he would see a girl that day whom he would marry.

  Presently the house was full of people. The passage was full of girls; a few men sat at breakfast at the end of the long table. Some red- coats passed. The huntsman stopped in front of the house, the dogs sniffed here and there, the whips trotted their horses and drove them back. ‘Get together, get together; get back there! Woodland Beauty, come up here.’ The hounds rolled on the grass and leaned their fore- paws on the railings, willing to be caressed.

  ‘Now, John, try and make yourself agreeable; go over and talk to some of the young ladies. Why do you dress yourself in that way? Have you no other coat? You look like a young priest. Look at that young man over there; how nicely dressed he is! I wish you would let your moustache grow; it would improve you immensely.’ With these and similar remarks whispered to him, Mrs. Norton continued to exasperate her son until the servants announced that lunch was ready. ‘Take in Mrs. So-and-so,’ she said to John, who would fain have escaped from the melting glances of the lady in the long seal-skin. He offered her his arm with an air of resignation, and set to work valiantly to carve a large turkey.

  As soon as the servants had cleared away after one set another came, and although the meet was a small one, John took six ladies in to lunch. About half-past three the men adjourned to the billiard-room to smoke. The numerous girls followed, and with their arms round each other’s waists and interlacing fingers, they grouped themselves about the room. At five the huntsmen returned, and much to his annoyance, John had to furnish them with a change of clothes. There was tea in the drawing-room, and soon after the visitors began to take their leave.

  The wind blew very coldly, the roosting rooks rose out of the branches, and the carriages rolled into the night; but still a remnant of visitors stood on the steps talking to John. He felt very ill, and now a long sharp pain had grown through his left side, and momentarily it became more and more difficult to exchange polite words and smiles. The footmen stood waiting by the open door, the horses champed their bits, the green of the park was dark, and a group of girls moved about the loggia, wheels grated on the gravel… all were gone! The butler shut the door, and John went to the library fire. There his mother found him. She saw that something was seriously the matter. He was helped up to bed, and the doctor sent for.

  For more than a week he suffered. He lay bent over, unable to straighten himself, as if a nerve had been wound up too tightly in the left side. He was fed on gruel and beef-tea, the room was kept very warm; it was not until the twelfth day that he was taken out of bed.

  ‘You have had a narrow escape,’ the doctor said to John, who, well wrapped up, lay back, looking very pale and weak, before a blazing fire. ‘It was lucky I was sent for. Twenty-four hours later I would not have answered for your life.’

  ‘I was delirious, was I not?’

  ‘Yes; you cursed and swore fearfully at us when we rolled you up in the mustard plaster. It was very hot, and must have burnt you.’

  ‘It has scarcely left a bit of skin on me. But did I use very bad language? I suppose I could not help it…. I was delirious, was I not?’

  ‘Yes, slightly.’

  ‘I remember, and if I remember right, I used very bad language. But people when they are delirious do not know what they say. Is not that so, doctor?’

  ‘If they are really delirious they do not remember, but you were only slightly delirious… you were maddened by the pain occasioned by the pungency of the plaster.’

  ‘Yes; but do you think I knew what I was saying?’

  ‘You must have known what you were saying because you remember what you said.’

  ‘But could I be held accountable for what I said?’

  ‘Accountable? … Well, I hardly know what you mean. You were certainly not in the full possession of your senses. Your mother (Mrs. Norton) was very much shocked, but I told her that you were not accountable for what you said.’

  ‘Then I could not be held accountable, I did not know what I was saying.’

  ‘I don’t think you did exactly; people in a passion don’t know what they say!’

  ‘Ah! yes, but we are answerable for sins committed in the heat of passion; we should restrain our passion; we were wrong in the first instance in giving way to passion…. But I was ill, it was not exactly passion. And I was very near death; I had a narrow escape, doctor?’

  ‘Yes, I think I can call it a narrow escape.’ The voices ceased. The curtains were rosy with lamp-light, and conscience awoke in the languors of convalescent hours. ‘I stood on the verge of death!’ The whisper died away. John was still very weak, and he had not strength to think with much insistence, but now and then remembrance surprised him suddenly like pain; it came unexpectedly, he knew not whence or how, but he could not choose but listen. Was he responsible for those words? He could remember them all now; each like a burning arrow lacerated his bosom, and he pulled them to and fro.

  He could now distinguish the instantaneous sensation of wrong that had flashed on his excited mind in the moment of his sinning…. Then he could think no more, and in the twilight of contrition he dreamed vaguely of God’s great goodness, of penance, of ideal atonements. And as strength returned, remembrance of his blasphemies grew stronger and fiercer, and often as he lay on his pillow, his thoughts passing in long procession, his soul would leap into intense suffering. ‘I stood on the verge of death with blasphemies on my tongue. I might have been called to confront my Maker with horrible blasphemies in my heart and on my tongue; but He, in His Divine goodness, spared me; He gave me time to repent. Am I answerable, O my God, for those dreadful words that I uttered against Thee, because I suffered a little pain, against Thee who once died on the cross to save me! O God, Lord, in Thine infinite mercy look down on me, on me! Vouchsafe me Thy mercy, O my God, for I was weak! My sin is loathsome; I prostrate myself before Thee, I cry aloud for mercy!’

  Then seeing Christ amid His white million of youths, beautiful singing saints, gold curls and gold aureoles, lifted throats, and form of harp and dulcimer, he fell prone in great bitterness on the misery of earthly life. His happiness and ambitions appeared to him less than the scattering of a little sand on the sea-shore. Joy is passion, passion is suffering; we cannot desire what we possess; therefore desire is rebellion prolonged indefinitely against the realities of existence; when we attain the object of our desire, we must perforce neglect it in favour of something still unknown, and so we progress from illusion to illusion. The winds of folly and desolation howl about us; the sorrows of happiness are the worst to bear, and the wise soon learn that there is nothing to dream of but the end of desire. God is the one ideal, the Church the one shelter, from the incurable misery of life. The life of the cloister is far from the meanness of life. And oh! the voices of chanting boys, the cloud of incense, and the Latin hymn afloat on the tumult of the organ.

  In such religious aestheticisms the soul
of John Norton had long slumbered, but now it awoke in remorse and pain, and, repulsing its habitual exaltations as if they were sins, he turned to the primal idea of the vileness of this life, and its sole utility in enabling man to gain heaven. A pessimist he admitted himself to be so far as this world was concerned. But the manifestations of modern pessimism were checked by constitutional mysticity. Schopenhauer, when he overstepped the line ruled by the Church, was repulsed. From him John Norton’s faith had suffered nothing; the severest and most violent shocks had come from another side — a side which none would guess, so complex and contradictory are the involutions of the human brain. Hellenism, Greek culture and ideal; academic groves; young disciples, Plato and Socrates, the august nakedness of the Gods were equal, or almost equal, in his mind with the lacerated bodies of meagre saints; and his heart wavered between the temple of simple lines and the cathedral of a thousand arches. Once there had been a sharp struggle, but Christ, not Apollo, had been the victor, and the great cross in the bedroom of Stanton College overshadowed the beautiful slim body in which Divinity seemed to circulate like blood; and this photograph was all that now remained of much youthful anguish and much temptation.

  A fact to note is that his sense of reality had always remained in a rudimentary state; it was, as it were, diffused over the world and mankind. For instance, his belief in the misery and degradation of earthly life, and the natural bestiality of man, was incurable; but of this or that individual he had no opinion; he was to John Norton a blank sheet of paper, to which he could not affix even a title. His childhood had been one of tumult and sorrow; the different and dissident ideals growing up in his heart and striving for the mastery, had torn and tortured him, and he had long lain as upon a mental rack. Ignorance of the material laws of existence had extended even into his sixteenth year, and when, bit by bit, the veil fell, and he understood, he was filled with loathing of life and mad desire to wash himself free of its stain; and it was this very hatred of natural flesh that had precipitated a perilous worship of deified flesh. But the Gothic cathedral had intervened; he had been taken by the beauty of its architecture and the beauty of its Gregorian chant. But now he realised — if not in all its truth, at least in part — that his love of God had only taken the form of a gratification of the senses, a sensuality higher but as intense as those which he so much reproved. His life had been but a sin, an abomination. And as a woman rising from a bed of small-pox shrinks from destroying the fair remembrance of her face by pursuing the traces of the disease through every feature, he hid his face in his hands and called for forgiveness — for escape from the endless record of his conscience. He saw the Hell which awaits him who blasphemes. To the verge of that Hell he had drifted…. He pictured himself lost in eternal torment. The Christ he saw had grown pitiless. He saw Christ standing in judgment amid a white million of youths….

  Too weak to think clearly, he sat dreaming. The blazing fire decorated the darkness, and the twilight shed upon curtains purfled with birds and petals. He sat, his head resting on his large, strong fingers, pining for sharp-edged mediaeval tables and antique lamps. The soft, diffused light of the paper-shaded lamp jarred his intimate sense of things. However dim the light of his antique lamps, their beautiful shapes were always an admonition, and took his thoughts back to the age he loved — an age of temples and disciples. Recollection of Plato floated upon his weak brain, and he remembered that the great philosopher had said that there were men who were half women, and that these men must perforce delight in the society of women. That there were men too who were wholly men, and that these perforce could find neither pleasure nor interest away from their own sex. He had always felt himself to be wholly male, and this was why the present age, so essentially the age of women, was repellent to him.

  His thoughts floated from Greece to Palestine, and looking into the blaze he saw himself bearing the banner of the Cross into the land of the infidel, fighting with lance and sword for the Sepulchre. He saw the Saracen, and trembling with aspiration, he heard the great theme of salvation to the Saviour sung by the basses, by the tenors, by the altos; it was held by a divine boy’s voice for four bars high up in the cupola, and the belief theme in harp arpeggios rained down like manna on the bent heads of the knights.

  Awaking a little, his thoughts returned to the consideration of his present condition. He had been ill, death had been by his bedside, and in that awful moment he had blasphemed. He could conceive nothing more terrible, and he thanked God for his great mercy. If worldly life was a peril he must fly from that peril, the salvation of his soul must be his first consideration. His thoughts lapsed into dreams — dreams of aisle and cloister, arches and legended panes. Palms rose in great curls like the sky, and beautiful harmonies of voices were gathered together, grouped and single voices, now the white of the treble, now the purple of the bass, and these, the souls of the carven stone, like birds hovering, like birds in swift flight, like birds poising, floated from the arches. Then the organ intoned the massive Gregorian, and the chant of the mass moved amid the opulence of gold vestments; the Latin responses filled the ear; and at the end of long abstinences the holy oil came like a bliss that never dies. In the ecstasy of ordination it seemed to him that the very savour and spirit of God had descended upon him.

  V.

  Mrs. Norton flung her black shawl over her shoulders, rattled her keys, and scolded the servants at the end of the long passage. Kitty, as she watered the flowers in the greenhouse, often wondered why John had chosen to become a priest and grieve his mother. One morning, as she stood watching the springtide, she saw him walking up the drive: the sky was bright with summer hours, and the beds were catching flower beneath the evergreen oaks. She ran to Mrs. Norton, who was attending to the canaries in the bow-window.

  ‘Look, look, Mrs. Norton, John is coming up the drive; it is he — look!’ ‘John!’ said Mrs. Norton, seeking for her glasses nervously; ‘yes, so it is; let’s run and meet him. But no; let’s take him rather coolly. I believe half his eccentricity is only put on because he wishes to astonish us. We won’t ask him any questions — we’ll just wait and let him tell his own story—’

  ‘How do you do, mother?’ said the young man, kissing Mrs. Norton with less reluctance than usual. ‘You must forgive me for not having answered your letters. It really was not my fault…. And how do you do, Kitty? Have you been keeping my mother company ever since? It is very good of you; I am afraid you must think me a very undutiful son. But what is the news?’

  ‘One of the rooks is gone.’

  ‘Is that all? … What about the ball at Steyning? I hear it was a great success.’

  ‘Oh, it was delightful.’

  ‘You must tell me about it after dinner. Now I must go round to the stables and tell Walls to fetch my things from the station.’

  ‘Are you going to be here for some time?’ said Mrs. Norton with an indifferent air.

  ‘Yes, I think so; that is to say, for a couple of months — six weeks. I have some arrangements to make; but I will speak to you about all that after dinner.’

  With these words John left the room, and he left his mother agitated and frightened.

  ‘What can he mean by having arrangements to make?’ she asked. Kitty could of course suggest no explanation, and the women waited the pleasure of the young man to speak his mind. He seemed, however, in no hurry to do so; and the manner in which he avoided the subject aggravated his mother’s uneasiness. At last she said, unable to bear the suspense any longer —

  ‘Have you had a quarrel with the Jesuits?’

  ‘Not exactly a quarrel, but the order is so entirely opposed to the monastic spirit. What I mean is — well, their worldliness is repugnant to me — fashionable friends, confidences, meddling in family affairs, dining out, letters from ladies who need consolation…. I don’t mean anything wrong; pray don’t misunderstand me. I merely mean to say that I hate their meddling in family affairs. Their confessional is a kind of marriage bureau; they have alw
ays got some plan on for marrying this person to that, and I must say I hate all that sort of thing…. If I were a priest I would disdain to… but perhaps I am wrong to speak like that. Yes, it is very wrong of me, and before… Kitty, you must not think I am speaking against the principles of religion; I am only speaking of matters of—’

  ‘And have you given up your rooms in Stanton College?’

  ‘Not yet — that is to say, nothing is settled definitely; but I do not think I shall go back there, at least not to live.’

  ‘And do you still think of becoming a priest?’

  ‘On that point I am not certain. I am not yet quite sure that I have a vocation for the priesthood. I would wish the world to be my monastery. Be that as it may, I intend altering the house a little here and there; you know how repugnant this mock Italian architecture is to my feelings. For the present I am determined only on a few alterations. I have them all in my head. The billiard-room, that addition of yours, can be turned into a chapel. And the casements of the dreadful bow-window might be removed; and instead of the present flat roof a sloping tiled roof might be carried up against the wall of the house. The cloisters would come at the back of the chapel.’

  His mother bit her thin lips, and her face tightened in an expression of settled grief. Kitty was sorry for Mrs. Norton, but Kitty was too young to understand, and her sorrow evaporated in laughter. She listened to John’s explanations of the architectural changes as to a fairy tale. Her innocent gaiety attracted her to him; and as they walked about the grounds after breakfast he spoke to her about pictures and statues, of a trip he intended to take to Italy and Spain, and he did not seem to care to be reminded that this jarred with his project for immediate realisation of Thornby Priory.

  Leaning their backs against the iron railing which divided the greensward from the park, John and Kitty looked at the house.