Memoirs of My Dead Life

by George Moore

But to the journey. How shall I tell it? The third part must have been the most painful, so clearly do I remember it: the curious agony of mind caused by a sudden recognition of objects long forgotten--a tree or a bit of bog-land. The familiar country, evocative of a great part of my childhood, carried my thoughts hither and thither. My thoughts ranged like the swallows; the birds had no doubt just arrived, and in swift elliptical flights they hunted for gnats along the banks of the old weedy canal. That weedy canal along which the train travelled took my thoughts back to the very beginning of my life, when I stood at the carriage window and plagued my father and mother with questions regarding the life of the barges passing up and down. And it was the sudden awakenings from these memories that were so terrible--the sudden thrust of the thought that I was going westward to see my mother die, and that nothing could save her from death or me from seeing her die. Perhaps to find one's self suddenly deprived of all will is the greatest suffering of all. How many times did I say to myself, "Nothing can save me unless I get out at the next station," and I imagined myself taking a car and driving away through the country! But if I did such a thing I should be looked upon as a madman. "One is bound on a wheel," I muttered, and I began to think how men under sentence of death must often wonder why they were selected especially for such a fate, and the mystery, the riddle of it all, must be perhaps the greatest part of their pain.

The morning was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and I used to catch myself thinking out a picturesque expression to describe it. It seemed to me that the earth might be compared to an egg, it looked so warm under the white sky, and the sky was as soft as the breast feathers of a dove. This sudden bow-wowing of the literary skeleton made me feel that I wanted to kick myself. Nature has forgotten to provide us with a third leg whereby we may revenge ourselves on instincts that we cannot control. A moment afterward I found myself plunged in reflections regarding the impossibility of keeping one's thoughts fixed on any one subject for any considerable length of time. At the end of these reflections I fell back, wondering, again asking if I were really destined to watch by my mother's death-bed. That day I seemed to become a sheer mentality, a sort of buzz of thought, and I could think of myself only as of a fly climbing a glass dome. It seemed to me that I was like a fly climbing and falling back, buzzing, and climbing again. "Never," I said to myself, "have I been more than a fly buzzing in a glass dome. And, good Lord, who made the glass dome?" How often did I ask myself that question, and why it was made, and if it were going to endure for ever!

In such sore perplexity of mind questions from anybody would be intolerable, and I shrank back into the corner of the carriage whenever a passer-by reminded me, however vaguely, of anybody I had ever known; the mental strain increased mile after mile, for the names of the stations grew more familiar. I began to try to remember how many there were before we arrived at Claremorris, the station at which I was going to get out. Half an hour afterward the train slackened, the porter cried out "Ballyhaunis." The next would be Claremorris, and I watched every field, foreseeing the long road, myself on one side of the car, the driver on the other; a two hours' drive in silence or in talk--in talk, for I should have to tell him my errand.... He might be able to tell me about my mother, if the news of her illness had got as far as Claremorris. At the public-house where I went to get a car I made inquiries, but nothing was known. My mother must have fallen ill suddenly--of what? I had not heard she was ailing; I did not remember her ever to have been ill. At that moment some trees reminded me that we were close to Ballyglass, and my thoughts wandered away to the long road on the other side of the hill, and I saw there (for do we not often see things in memory as plainly as if they were before us?) the two cream-coloured ponies, Ivory and Primrose, she used to drive, and the phaeton, and myself in it, a little child in frocks, anxious, above all things, to see the mail-coach go by. A great sight it was to see it go by with mail-bags and luggage, the guard blowing a horn, the horses trotting splendidly, the lengthy reins swinging, and the driver, his head leaned a little on one side to save his hat from being blown away--he used to wear a grey beaver hat. The great event of that time was the day that we went to Ballyglass, not to see the coach go by, but to get into it, for in those days the railway stopped at Athenry. And that was the day I saw the canal, and heard with astonishment that there was a time long ago, no doubt in my father's youth, when people used to go to Dublin in a barge. Those memories were like a stupor, and awaking suddenly I saw that more than two and a half miles lay between me and my mother. In half an hour more I should know whether she were alive or dead, and I watched the horse trotting, interested in his shambling gait, or not at all interested in it--I do not know which. On occasions of great nervous tension one observes everything.... Everything I remembered best appeared with mechanical regularity; now it was a wood, a while afterward somebody's farmyard, later on a line of cottages, another wood, one of my own gate lodges. An old sawyer lived in it now--looking after it for me; and I hoped that the wheels of the car would not bring him out, for it would distress me to see him. The firs in the low-lying land had grown a little within the last thirty years, but not much. We came to the bridge; we left it behind us; the gate lodge and the drive from it; the plantation that I knew so well, the lilac bushes, the laburnums--good Heavens! How terrible was all this resurrection! Mists hide the mountains from us, the present hides the past; but there are times when the present does not exist at all, when every mist is cleared away, and the past confronts us in naked outline, and that perhaps is why it is so painful to me to return home. The little hill at the beginning of the drive is but a little hill, but to me it is much more, so intimately is it associated with all the pains and troubles of childhood. All this park was once a fairyland to me; now it is but a thin reality, a book which I have read, and the very thought of which bores me, so well do I know it. There is the lilac bush! I used to go there with my mother thirty years ago at this time of year, and we used to come home with our hands full of bloom. Two more turnings and we should be within sight of the house! This is how men feel when condemned to death. I am sure of it. At the last hill the driver allowed his horse to fall into a walk, but I begged of him to drive on the horse, for I saw some peasants about the steps of the hall door; they were waiting, no doubt, for news, or perhaps they had news. "We have bad news for you," they cried in the wailing tones of the West.

"Not altogether bad news," I said to myself; "my mother is dead, but I have been saved the useless pain, the torture of spirit, I should have endured if I had arrived in time." China roses used to grow over the railings; very few blooms were left. I noticed just a few as I ran up the high steps, asking myself why I could not put the past behind me. If ever there was a time to live in the present this was one; but never was the present further from me and the past clearer than when I opened the hall door and stood in the hall paved with grey stones and painted grey and blue. Three generations had played there; in that corner I had learned to spin my first top, and I had kept on trying, showing a perseverance that amazed my father. He said, "If he will show as much perseverance in other things as he does in the spinning of a top, he will not fail." He used to catch me trying and trying to spin that top when he came downstairs on his way to the stables to see his beloved racehorses; that is the very chair on which he used to put his hat and gloves. In those days tall hats were worn in the country, and it was the business of his valet to keep them well brushed. How the little old man used to watch me, objecting in a way to my spinning my top in the hall, fearful lest I should overturn the chair on which the hat stood: sometimes that did happen, and then, oh dear!

In search of some one I opened the drawing-room door. My sister was there, and I found her on a sofa weeping for our mother, who had died that morning. We are so constituted that we demand outward signs of our emotions, especially of grief; we are doubtful of its genuineness unless it is accompanied by sighs and tears; and that, I suppose, is why my sister's tears were welcomed by me, for, truth to tell, I was a little shocked at my own insensibility. This was stupid of me, for I knew through experience that we do not begin to suffer immediately after the accident; everything takes time, grief as well as pain. But in a moment so awful as the one I am describing one does not reflect; one falls back on the convention that grief and tears are inseparable as fire and smoke. If I could not weep it were well that my sister could, and I accepted her tears as a tribute paid to our mother's goodness--a goodness which never failed, for it was instinctive. It even seemed to me a pity that Nina had to dry her eyes so that she might tell me the sad facts--when mother died, of her illness, and the specialist that had not arrived in time. I learned that some one had blundered--not that that mattered much, for mother would not have submitted to an operation.

While listening to her, I unwittingly remembered how we used to talk of the dear woman whose funeral I described in the pages entitled "A Remembrance." We used to talk, her daughters and her son and her husband and I, of her who was dying upstairs. We were greatly moved--I at least appreciated my love of her--yet our talk would drift from her suddenly, and we would speak of indifferent things, or maybe the butler would arrive to tell us lunch was ready. How these incidents jar our finer feelings! They seem to degrade life, and to such a point that we are ashamed of living, and are tempted to regard life itself as a disgrace.

I foresaw that the same interruptions, the same devagations, would happen among ourselves in the square Georgian house standing on a hill-top overlooking a long winding lake, as had happened among my friends in the Italian house under the downs amid bunches of evergreen oaks. Nor had I to wait long for one of these unhappy devagations. My sister had to tell me who was staying in the house: an aunt was there, my mother's sister, and an uncle, my mother's brother, was coming over next day. It is easy to guess how the very mention of these names beguiled us from what should be the subject of our thought. And the room itself supplied plenty of distractions: all the old furniture, the colour of the walls, the very atmosphere of the room took my thought back to my childhood. The sofa on which my sister was sitting had been broken years ago, and I unwittingly remembered how it had been broken. It had been taken away to a lumber-room; somebody had had it mended. I began to wonder who had done this--mother, most likely; she looked after every thing. I have said that I had just arrived after a long journey. I had eaten nothing since the night before. My sister spoke of lunch and we went into the dining-room, and in the middle of the meal my brother came in looking so very solemn that I began to wonder if he had assumed the expression he thought appropriate to the occasion--I mean if he had involuntarily exaggerated the expression of grief he would naturally wear. We are so constituted that the true and the false overlap each other, and so subtly that no analysis can determine where one ends and the other begins. I remembered how the relatives and the friends on the day of the funeral in Sussex arrived, each one with a very grave face, perchance interrupting us in the middle of some trivial conversation; if so, we instantly became grave and talked of the dead woman sympathetically for a few minutes; then on the first opportunity, and with a feeling of relief, we began to talk of indifferent things; and with every fresh arrival the comedy was re-acted. Returning from the past to the present, I listened to my brother, who was speaking of the blunder that had been made: how a wrong doctor had come down owing to--the fault was laid upon somebody, no matter upon whom; the subject was a painful one and might well have been dropped, but he did not dare to talk of anything but our mother, and we all strove to carry on the conversation as long as possible. But my brother and I had not seen each other for years; he had come back from India after a long absence. Nor, I think, had I seen my sister since she was married, and that was a long while ago; she had had children; I had not seen her before in middle age. We were anxious to ask each other questions, to hear each other's news, and we were anxious to see the landscape that we had not seen, at least not together, for many years; and I remember how we were tempted out of the house by the soft sunlight floating on the lawn. The same gentle day full of mist and sunlight that I had watched since early morning had been prolonged, and the evening differed hardly from the morning; the exaltation in the air was a little more intense. My mother died certainly on the most beautiful day I had ever seen, the most winsome, the most white, the most wanton, as full of love as a girl in a lane who stops to gather a spray of hawthorn. How many times, like many another, did I wonder why death should have come to any one on such a bridal-like day. That we should expect Nature to prepare a decoration in accordance with our moods is part of the old savagery. Through reason we know that Nature cares for us not at all, that our sufferings concern her not in the least, but our instincts conform to the time when the sun stood still and angels were about. It was impossible for us not to wonder why the black shadow of death should have fallen across the white radiant day. I say "us," for my brother no doubt pondered the coincidence, though he did not speak his thoughts to me. No one dares to speak such thoughts; they are the foolish substance of ourselves which we try to conceal from others, forgetting that we are all alike. The day moved slowly from afternoon to evening, like a bride hidden within a white veil, her hands and her veil filled with white blossom; but a black bird, tiny like a humming-bird, had perched upon a bunch of blossom, and I seemed to lose sight of the day in the sinister black speck that had intruded itself upon it. No doubt I could think of something better were I to set my mind upon doing so, but that is how I thought the day I walked on the lawn with my brother, ashamed and yet compelled to talk of what our lives had been during the years that separated us. How could one be overpowered with grief amid so many distracting circumstances? Everything I saw was at once new and old. I had come among my brother and sister suddenly, not having seen them, as I have said, for many years; this was our first meeting since childhood, and we were assembled in the house where we had all been born. The ivy grown all over one side of the house, the disappearance of the laburnum, the gap in the woods--these things were new; but the lake that I had not seen since a little child I did not need to look at, so well did I know how every shore was bent, and the place of every island. My first adventures began on that long yellow strand; I did not need to turn my head to see it, for I knew that trees intervened and I knew the twisting path through the wood. That yellow strand speckled with tufts of rushes was my first playground. But when my brother proposed that we should walk there, I found some excuse; why go? The reality would destroy the dream. What reality could equal my memory of the firs where the rabbits burrowed, of the drain where we fished for minnows, of the long strand with the lake far away in summertime? How well I remember that yellow sand, hard and level in some places as the floor of a ball-room. The water there is so shallow that our governess used to allow us to wander at will, to run on ahead in pursuit of a sandpiper. The bird used to fly round with little cries; and we often used to think it was wounded; perhaps it pretended to be wounded in order to lead us away from its nest. We did not think it possible to see the lake in any new aspect, yet there it lay as we had never seen it before, so still, so soft, so grey, like a white muslin scarf flowing out, winding past island and headland. The silence was so intense that one thought of the fairy-books of long ago, of sleeping woods and haunted castles; there were the castles on islands lying in misted water, faint as dreams. Now and then a bird uttered a piercing little chatter from the branches of the tall larches, and ducks talked in the reeds, but their talk was only a soft murmur, hardly louder than the rustle of the reeds now in full leaf. Everything was spellbound that day; the shadows of reed and island seemed fixed for ever as in a magic mirror--a mirror that somebody had breathed upon, and, listening to the little gurgle of the water about the limestone shingle, one seemed to hear eternity murmuring its sad monotony.

The lake curves inland, forming a pleasant bay among the woods; there is a sandy spit where some pines have found roothold, and they live on somehow despite the harsh sallies of the wind in winter. Along the shore dead reeds lie in rows three feet deep among the rushes; had they been placed there by hand they could not have been placed with more regularity; and there is an old cart-track, with hawthorns growing out of a tumbled wall. The hillside is planted--beautiful beeches and hollies at one end, and at the other some lawny interspaces with tall larches swaying tasselled branches shedding faint shadows. These were the wonder of my childhood. A path leads through the wood, and under the rugged pine somebody has placed a seat, a roughly hewn stone supported by two upright stones. For some reason unknown to me this seat always suggested, even when I was a child, a pilgrim's seat. I suppose the suggestion came from the knowledge that my grandmother used to go every day to the tomb at the end of the wood where her husband and sons lay, and whither she was taken herself long ago when I was in frocks; and twenty years after my father was taken there.

What a ceaseless recurrence of the same things! A hearse will appear again in a few days, perhaps the same hearse, the horses covered up with black made to look ridiculous with voluminous weed, the coachman no better than a zany, the ominous superior mute directing the others with a wand; there will be a procession of relatives and friends, all wearing crepe and black gloves, and most of them thinking how soon they can get back to their business: that masquerade which we call a funeral!

Fearing premature burial (a very common fear), my mother had asked that her burial should be postponed until a natural change in the elements of her body should leave no doubt that life no longer lingered there. And the interval between her death and her burial I spent along the lake's shore. The same weather continued day after day, and it is almost impossible to find words to express the beauty of the grey reflection of the islands and the reeds, and the faint evanescent shores floating away, disappearing in the sun-haze, and the silence about the shores, a kind of enchanted silence, interrupted, as I have said, only by the low gurgle of the water about the limestone shingle. Now and then the song of a bird would break out, and all was silence again.... "A silence that seems to come out of the very heart of things!" I said, and I stopped to listen, like one at the world's end; I walked on, wondering, through the rushes and tussocked grass and juniper bushes which grew along the wilding shore, along the edge of the wood. Coming from the town, I could not but admire the emptiness of the country; hardly ever did I hear the sound of a human voice or a footstep; only once did I meet some wood-gatherers, poor women carrying bundles of faggots, bent under their loads. And thinking that perchance I knew them--they were evidently from the village; if so, I must have known them when I was a boy--I was suddenly seized by an unaccountable dread or a shyness, occasioned no doubt by the sense of the immense difference that time had effected in us: they were the same, but I was different. The books I had pondered and the pictures I had seen had estranged me from them, simple souls that they were; and the consciousness of the injustice of the human lot made it a pain to me to look into their eyes. So I was glad to be able to pass behind some bushes, and to escape into the wood without their perceiving me.