by George Moore
I can’t think how you ever came by such boots. Where did you get them? They are as wonderful as your guns! How do you contrive to hit off the extraordinary?
And I told him that it was not until the last moment, between six and seven in the evening, that I remembered I had forgotten to order any shooting boots. My feet, you see, being as small as a woman’s, the ready-made shooting boots in the Brompton Road were too large for me; all the shops were shutting, I was getting frantic when I saw a line of boots in a shop-window in Sloane Street marked Ladies’ Boots for the Highlands! They’ll fit me, I said to myself. You see they do, only —
I shall have to take you round tomorrow to the local cobbler.
The noiseless locks, the ladies’ boots, and the admission that I was always in love supplied the Ross-shire shooting-lodge with matter for humorous conversation, and as I sat before my fire in Ely Place I heard my nickname, Mr Perpetual. To be ridiculous has always been ma petite luxe, but can any one be said to be ridiculous if he knows that he is ridiculous? Not very well. It is the pompous that are truly ridiculous. A random thought carried me out of Ely Place across the years to Lodge Road, and I can see myself and the company and the room: a round table on which are beef and salad, Cheshire cheese and beer, the supper provided by the fair cousins. Canaries are shrilling in their cages, and the bow-window is hung with rep curtains, and the sofa, too, is rep. There is wax fruit on the sideboard, and Sally and Margaret wear the tight bum-revealing dresses that succeeded the pious crinoline. Side-whiskers have not disappeared altogether; Belfort and myself, Humphries and Norton — two cavalry officers — are shaved only to mid-cheek. Incident after incident rises up and floats away like cigarette smoke, one incident retaining my attention a little longer than the others — the evening that Belfort refused to smoke one of my cigars, saying that he preferred to smoke one of his own manillas. He lighted one, and it was just beginning to draw when, impertinently, I tore it out of his teeth and flung it into the fire. A joke it had seemed to me, but he rushed for the poker and would have brained me with it if I had not slipped round the table and seized Colville’s sword and, unsheathing it in a moment, warded off the blow aimed at my head, and seeing another coming, it occurred to me that the best way to save myself would be to run Belfort through, and he would have received a thrust that might have done for him if one of the cavalry officers had not armed himself with a chair. The sword sank in the upholstery, and by that time Belfort had recovered his temper, and a few minutes after he was smoking one of my cigars in token of reconciliation. One of the cavalry officers asleep on the sofa is another memory that Time has not rubbed away, and Margaret coming to sit on my knees, perhaps because she had been warned not to inflame Mr Perpetual. Her dressmaker had brought home a beautiful blue tea-gown that evening; she was wearing it for the first time, and its folds of corded silk floated over my knees. The very weight and shape of her are remembered, and our inquietude whether the officer was shamming sleep or was asleep. The tea-gown had seemed to me the very painting robe that I needed, for art was never altogether out of my mind, and I had been thinking for some time of Saturn sitting in the shady sadness of a vale as a subject for a picture that my poor dead Oliver would have liked to paint. It would have been of no avail to offer it to Jim Browne, for he could not draw from Nature. A few months later I discovered another which he would have carried out if he had lived: the Witch of Atlas calls to Hermaphroditus, and I could see his wings catching the fainting airs bearing the boat up the shadowy stream to the austral waters beyond the fabulous Thamondacona, without, however, being able to arrange the figures so that they filled the canvas — the sinuous back of the witch, her arm upon the helm, looking up at Hermaphroditus; and one day Jim Browne was implored to say what was wrong with the composition.
Give me your palette and go upstairs and dress yourself. Take off that ridiculous garment, he added, thereby humiliating me, for Margaret Gilray’s tea-gown had seemed an excellent painting robe, an advance on the smock which Jim wore in his own studio. But it would be henceforth discarded, for Jim was now my mentor, my hero, my boon companion. It was my pride to be seen in Piccadilly with this fine Victorian gentleman whom I recall best on a wintry day; he never wore an overcoat, but buttoned his braided coat tightly about him and swung a big stick. Long flaxen locks fell thick over the collar, and his pegtops blew about in the wind; he was known to everybody as Piccadilly Jim or Piccadilly Browne, I have forgotten which. We met everybody between Hyde Park Corner and St James’s Street, and Jim saluted his acquaintances with a How are you? never a How do you do? He very rarely stopped to speak to any, but strode on quickly, mentioning the name of the passer-by, and I could but try to fix in my memory the appearance of the notable, regretting that Jim did not stop, that I had not been introduced. He liked to quiz me, and sometimes there was plenty of reason for mockery, and sometimes there was none, but in either case he quizzed me, turning some simple phrase into ridicule, as when I mentioned, regretfully — perhaps it was the note of regret in my voice that caused him to laugh at me — that my hair was yellower than his. How he used to drag out the word yellow, making me feel dreadfully ashamed of myself, until at last summoning up courage, I asked him if there was anything foolish in what I had said, and to my surprise he answered no. Then why had he been laughing at me all this while? and I listened to Jim again, for he was now asking, out of politeness — he always decided these questions — whether it would be more amusing to dine at the St James’s or at Kettners’ or at the Café de la Régence. It did not matter which. In whichever he might choose I could learn his taste in food, and my hope was that with practice I might acquire it; his taste in everything seemed essential, especially in women, and to make myself more perfectly acquainted with it, I drew his attention to the ladies dining at the distant tables, never daring, however, to hazard an opinion unless one seemed to realise all the ideals of beauty set forth in his pictures, and if he deigned to approve of any woman’s face and figure at Cremorne Gardens or in the Argyle Rooms, I used to mark her down for future study. My mistakes were numerous, and I was ashamed if he caught me talking to a woman whom he did not admire, and very proud if my choice met his approval, as it happened to do one day in the Park. I had stopped to speak to Kitty Carew, letting his walk on in front, and on overtaking him half-way down the pathway, he said: Yes, indeed, a very pretty woman. You were in luck, George, when you picked her up.
Jim’s satellite I was, but given to wandering out of my orbit. There were other companions whom Jim looked upon contemptuously — the Maitlands — and Jim’s contempt was shared by my gaunt Irish servant, William Mullowney, who used to enrage me when he came into the drawing-room with his Sor, Mr Dhurty Maitland has called to see you. It was quite true that Sydenham presented a somewhat neglected appearance, but however just William’s criticism might be, he could not be allowed to speak to me of my friends with contempt. This Derrinanny savage must be sent back to Moore Hall, I said. But a moment’s indignation does not add much to my story; I must tell how I made Sydenham’s acquaintance.
When we arrived from Mayo we had gone to live in Thurloe Square, in the house of a very genteel lady who did not let lodgings but who might be persuaded, so the house agent had said, to let us have her drawing-room floor and some bedrooms for five or six guineas a week. She often asked me into her parlour and talked to me about her connections and the neighbourhood, and, seeing I was at a loose end without companions, inspired by some connection of ideas, she said one day she would introduce me to the Maitland boys, the sons of a retired stipendiary magistrate from Athlone. The mother was a wonderful pianist, the boys were all clever, the three younger sons had a room to themselves at the bottom of the house where they painted scenery, wrote verses, and composed music. William and Dick, the two elder brothers, had taken the Lyceum Theatre, and were going to produce Chilperic, a comic opera by Hervé. She tapped at the window and Sydenham came in, and his news was that a letter had arrived that morning from Her
vé. He was coming over to play the title-rôle himself. Everything is relative, and at that moment of my life it was very wonderful for me to go to the Maitlands’ house and to hear the scores of Chilperic played by Sydenham and his mother. We received boxes and stalls from the Maitlands, and after a run of nearly six months, Chilperic was taken off to make way for the composer’s later opera, Le Petit Faust. But it did not please as much as its predecessor, and the theatre had to be closed. Dick had, however, managed to escape bankruptcy; half a success guarantees that another door shall be opened to the retiring manager, and in the ‘seventies, a few months after my father’s death, he brought over the entire company from Les Folies Dramatiques to play in French, Chilperic, L’Oeil Crevé, Le Canard à Trois Becs, and possibly Le Petit Faust. He sent me seats whenever I asked him, and I used to sit in the stalls learning all the little choruses and couplets night after night, admiring Paola Mariée, a pretty and plump brunette, who sang enchantingly as she tripped across the stage, and Blanche d’Antigny, a tall fair woman who played the part of a young shepherd. She wore a white sheepskin about her loins, and looked as if she had walked out of Jim’s pictures. I learnt from Dick that she was a great light-o’-love, sharing the Kingdom of Desire with Hortense Schneider and Léonie Leblanc.
It was well to sit in the stalls as Dick’s guest, and it would have been wonderful to accompany him through the stage door on to the stage, and be introduced to the French actresses to whom he spoke in French every night. But I could not speak French, and I vowed to learn the language of these women, who disappeared suddenly like the swallows, leaving me meditating what lives they lived in Paris, until Dick’s new theatrical venture, a translation of Offenbach’s Brigands, put them out of my head. For he had collected in the Globe Theatre the most beautiful women in London to form the corps of the gendarmerie that always arrived an hour too late to arrest the brigands; and one of the attractions of the piece was Mademoiselle d’Anka, a beautiful Hungarian, who sang Offenbach’s little ditties bewitchingly, and a song that Arthur Sullivan had written for her, Looking Back. Madame Debreux, a pretty brunette whom Dick had brought over, for he loved her, was in the cast, and Nelly Bromley, who was loved by the Duke of Beaufort, was in it too. A lovelier garland was never wreathed, and there was no lovelier flower in it than Marie de Grey, who never kissed any one except for her pleasure, and yet managed to live at the rate of three or four thousand a year. There was a woman who wore a green dress in the second act; her nose was too large, but her thighs were beautiful; and there was a pretty, tall, fair woman, whom I ran across in Covent Garden on her way to the theatre, and whom I took to lunch. She would have loved me if my heart had not been engaged elsewhere, but, as usual, I abandoned the prey for the shadow. And the shadow was the stately Annie Temple, who dared not listen to my courtship for dread of the rage of her fierce cavalry officer, a stupid fellow who snarled at me once so threateningly at the stage door that Annie must fain refuse me her photograph. Dot Robins’s mother sold me one for a sovereign, and from it I painted many portraits. Jim painted one from memory, mentioning again and again while he painted it that Annie was as tall as Mademoiselle d’Anka, whose acquaintance he had made on her arrival in London, before the theatre opened. It was he who introduced me to her, and he was glad now that I was able to get free seats at the Globe, and disappointed that Dick would not allow me to bring him behind the scenes. I should have liked to chaperon him, but it was a feather in my cap to leave him sitting in his box and skip away to the dressing-rooms, and when I returned we would lay our heads together trying to discover which was the handsomer woman, Annie Temple or Marie de Grey. Annie, in his opinion, was the finer woman, being as big, in fact, as Alice Harford, and he confided to me then and there that he used to meet Alice in a most romantic nook at the end of a little paved alley off the Fulham Road. He believed her to be in keeping and unfaithful only with him; all the same, she proposed one night at Cremorne to meet me at the nook; and delighted with my success, I could not refrain from telling Jim all about it, just to take him down a peg. But the result of this indiscretion was that Alice did not come to the nook at the time appointed, and I walked down the paved alley meditating that once again I had missed the prey for the shadow. And, as if my punishment were not enough, Jim continued to talk of her beauty, telling that her legs were shapelier than Mademoiselle d’Anka’s; they did not go in at the knee, and this great beauty, or this great fault, formed the theme of many conversations in the studio in Prince’s Gardens; Boucher’s women did not go in at the knee, but Rubens’s did, and laying his palette aside, Jim would throw himself on the sofa and tell me for the hundredth time that the only women worth loving were tall women with abundant bosom and flaxen hair, the only women that men with a sense of the beautiful could admire.
But long before this my guardian, Lord Sligo, wrote Jim a letter which brought him round to Alfred Place, and sitting on the edge of the table he read it to my mother, saying that if she agreed with Sligo’s strictures, there would be nothing for him to do but to refuse to see George any more, and if she didn’t agree with Sligo, the best thing would be to write to him saying that she thought Sligo was mistaken. Foreseeing that Lord Sligo would read any such letter from her as Please mind your own business, my mother hesitated, but I insisted, feeling that Jim’s friendship was necessary to me. All the same, Lord Sligo’s letter was not without avail. It stimulated Jim to moralise, and when I called in the afternoon to ask him if he would come up to Piccadilly to dine somewhere, and go on to the Argyle Rooms, he would read me a long lecture on the dangers of women.
The strong and healthy man refrains from women, and when I asked him if he always refrained from them himself he said he refrained as long as he could, and advocated a strong and energetic life to me. He said he would like to see me shoulder a gun and go away; not to Scotland to shoot grouse, but to Africa. Every young man should go forth and lead a natural life. Abyssinia was often mentioned, and to discover the source of the Nile was held up to me as an ambition suitable to my health and my fortunes. I should come back a far finer man than I went out. Alice Harford and Annie Temple were probably given to us so that we might resist their seductions, which were very trivial to a man who had got anything in him. And if Abbyssinia and the source of the Nile appeared too slight an adventure, there remained the Sahara and the Mountains of the Moon and Timbuctoo, where no European had been, but which a determined man might reach, and in his imagination Jim would roam through the great equatorial forests, filled, he said, with cities, relics of a civilisation that had passed away, now inhabitated only by lions, and to encourage me to accept an African adventure he would pull out a picture of a troop of elephants plunging through some reeds into a river while a gorilla disported himself on the branches of a dead tree. This led us to consider the exploits of Du Chaillu, who had shot the first gorilla. The animal had approached thumping his breasts with his fists, and the sound that he produced was that of a big drum. Du Chaillu had, however, knelt unmoved, saying to himself, Not yet. The gorilla approached another ten steps, and Du Chaillu said, Not yet; and again the gorilla approached, and Du Chaillu said, Fire! and the gorilla rolled over dead at Du Chaillu’s feet after twisting the rifle as if it were a bit of wire. Jim admired such nerve as this, and it recalled to him an excellent shot he had made years ago when he was staying at Moore Hall. He had said he would like to shoot a marten, and had taken a rifle with him; martens were rare even at that time, but he had caught sight of one at the end of a branch, and had shot it, and the incident had inspired him to think that he would like to wait for a lion in the moonlight at the foot of a tree. A moment like that is worth living for! And exalted by the thought he would seize his palette and paint Cain amid the rocks by the sea under a darkening sky, his arm thrown about his sleeping sister, a spear within his right arm; and as if the terrific lion stealing down upon him were not sufficient terror, Jim would sketch a lioness and her whelps in the background. As all the beasts in the picture were ro
aring, Jim roared in accompaniment, while whirling a mass of vermilion and white upon his palette; and then, uttering a deep growl, he would rush forward and a red tongue would appear; and when he had mixed emerald green with white he would advance some paces, cat-like, and then, snarling, would leap forward, and a moment after a great green eye started out of the darkness.