Memoirs of My Dead Life

by George Moore

And coming upon pleasant interspaces, pleasanter even than those that lingered in my memory, I lay down, for, though the days were the first days of May, the grass was long and warm and ready for the scythe, the tasselled branches of the tall larches swung faintly in a delicious breeze, and the words of the old Irish poet came into my mind, "The wood was like a harp in the hands of a harper." To see the boughs, to listen to them, seemed a sufficient delight, and I began to admire the low sky full of cotton-like clouds, and the white flower that was beginning to light up the little leaves of the hedgerow, and I suppose it was the May-flower that drew down upon me a sudden thought of the beloved girl lost to me for ever. My mother's death had closed that wound a little, but in a moment all my grief reappeared, the wound gaped again, and it was impossible to stanch the bleeding.

A man cannot lament two women at the same time, and only a month ago the most beautiful thing that had ever appeared in my life, an idea which I knew from the first I was destined to follow, had appeared to me, had stayed with me for a while, and had passed from me. All the partial loves of my youth seemed to find expression at last in a passion that would know no change. Who shall explain the mystery of love that time cannot change? Fate is the only word that conveys any idea of it, for of what use to say that her hair was blond and thick, that her eyes were grey and blue? I had known many women before her, and many had hair and eyes as fine and as deep as hers. But never one but she had had the indispensable quality of making me feel I was more intensely alive when she was by me than I was when she was away. It is that tingle of life that we are always seeking, and that perhaps we must lose in order to retain. On such a day, under the swaying branches of the larches, the whiteness of the lake curving so beautifully amid low shores could not fail to remind me of her body, and its mystery reminded me of her mystery; but the melancholy line of mountains rippling down the southern sky was not like her at all. One forgets what is unlike, caring only to dwell upon what is like.... Thinking of her my senses grow dizzy, a sort of madness creeps up behind the eyes. What an exquisite despair is this--that one shall never possess that beautiful personality again, sweet-scented as the May-time, that I shall never hold that dainty oval face in my hands again, shall look into those beautiful eyes no more, that all the intimacy of her person is now but a memory never to be renewed by actual presence--in these moments of passionate memory one experiences real grief, a pang that never has found expression perchance except in Niobe; even that concentration of features is more an expression of despair than grief. And it was the grief that this girl inspired that prevented me from mourning my mother as I should like to have mourned her, as she was worthy of being mourned, for she was a good woman, her virtues shone with more admirable light year after year; and had I lived with her, had I been with her during the last years of her life, her death would have come upon me with a sense of personal loss; I should have mourned her the day she died as I mourn her now, intimately; when I am alone in the evening, when the fire is sinking, the sweetness of her presence steals by me, and I realise what I lost in losing her.

We do not grieve for the dead because they have been deprived of the pleasures of this life (if this life be a pleasure), but because of our own loss. But who would impugn such selfishness? It is the best thing we have, it is our very selves. Think of a mistress's shame if her lover were to tell her that he loved her because she wished to be beloved, because he thought it would give her pleasure to be loved--she would hate him for such altruism, and deem him unworthy of her. She would certainly think like this, and turn her face from him for a while until some desire of possession would send her back to him. We are always thinking of ourselves directly or indirectly. I was thinking of myself when shame prevented me from going to meet the poor wood-gatherers; they would not have thought at all of the injustice of having been left to the labour of the fields while I had gone forth to enjoy the world; they would have been interested to see me again, and a few kind words would have made their load seem easier on their backs. Called back by a sudden association of ideas, I began to consider that shameful injustice is undoubtedly a part of our human lot, for we may only grieve passionately for the casual, or what seems the merely casual; perhaps because the ultimate law is hidden from us; I am thinking now of her who comes suddenly into our lives tempting us with colour, fugitive as that of a flower, luring us with light as rapid as the light shed from the wings of a dove. Why, I asked myself, as I lay under the larches, are we to mourn transitory delight so intensely, why should it possess us more entirely than the sorrow that we experience for her who endured the labour of child-bearing, who nourished us perchance at her breast, whose devotion to us was unceasing, and who grew kindlier and more divorced from every thought of self as the years went by? From injustice there can be no escape, not a particle. At best we can, indeed we must, acquiesce in the fact that the only sorrow to be found in our hearts for aged persons is a sort of gentle sorrow, such as the year itself administers to our senses in autumn, when we come home with our hands full of the beautiful single dahlias that the Dutchmen loved and painted, bound up with sprays of reddening creepers; we come home along the sunny roads over which the yellow beeches lean so pathetically, and we are sad for the year, but we do not grieve passionately; our hearts do not break.

Then again we cannot grieve as the conventions would have us grieve--in strange dress; the very fact of wearing crepe and black gloves alienates us from our real selves; we are no longer ourselves, we are mummers engaged in the performance of a masque. I could have mourned my mother better without crêpe. "There never has been invented anything so horrible as the modern funeral," I cried out. A picture of the hearse and the mutes rose up in my mind, and it was at that very moment that the song of the bird broke out again, and just above my head in the larches an ugly, shrilling song of about a dozen notes with an accent on the two last, a stupid, tiresome stave that never varied. "What bird can it be," I cried out, "that comes to interrupt my meditations?" and getting up I tried to discover it amid the branches of the tree under which I had been lying. It broke out again in another tree a little farther away, and again in another. I followed it, and it led me round the wood towards the hilltop to the foot of the steps, two short flights; the second flight, or part of it at least, has to be removed when the vault is opened. It consists, no doubt, of a single chamber with shelves along either side; curiosity leads few into vaults not more than a hundred years old; above the vault is the monument, a very simple one, a sort of table built in, and when my father was buried, a priest scrambled up or was lifted up by the crowd, and he delivered a funeral oration from the top of it.

That day the box edgings were trampled under foot, and all the flowers in the beds. My mother, perhaps, cared little for flowers, or she did not live here sufficiently long to see that this garden was carefully tended; for years there were no children to come here for a walk, and it was thought sufficient to keep in repair the boundary wall so that cattle should not get in. No trees were cut here when the Woods were thinned, and the pines and the yews have grown so thickly that the place is overshadowed; and the sepulchral dark is never lifted even at midday. At the back of the tomb, in the wood behind it, the headstones of old graves show above the ground, though the earth has nearly claimed them; only a few inches show above the dead leaves; all this hillside must have been a graveyard once, hundreds of years ago, and this ancient graveyard has never been forgotten by me, principally on account of something that happened long ago when I was a little child. The mystery of the wood used to appeal to my curiosity, but I never dared to scramble over the low wall until one day, leaving my governess, who was praying by the tomb, I discovered a gap through which I could climb. My wanderings were suddenly brought to an end by the appearance, or the fancied appearance, of somebody in a brown dress--a woman I thought it must be; she seemed to float along the ground, and I hurried back, falling and hurting myself severely in my hurry to escape through the gap. So great was my fear that I spoke not of my hurt to my governess, but of the being I had seen, beseeching of her to come back; but she would not come back, and this fact impressed me greatly. I said to myself, "If she didn't believe somebody was there she'd come back." The fear endured for long afterwards; and I used to beg of her not to cross the open space between the last shift of the wood and the tomb itself. We can re-live in imagination an emotion already experienced. Everything I had felt when I was a child about the mysterious hollows in the beech wood behind the tomb and the old stone there, and the being I had seen clothed in a brown cloak, I could re-live again, but the wood enkindled no new emotion in me. Everything seemed very trivial. The steps leading to the tomb, the tomb itself, the boundary wall, and the enchanted wood was now no more than a mere ordinary plantation. There were a few old stones showing through the leaves, that is all. Marvels never cease; in youth one finds the exterior world marvellous, later on one finds one's inner life extraordinary, and what seemed marvellous to me now was that I should have changed so much. The seeing of the ghost might be put down to my fancy, but how explain the change in the wood--was its mystery also a dream, an imagination? Which is the truth--that experience robs the earth of its mystery, or that we have changed so that the evanescent emanations which we used suddenly to grow aware of, and which sometimes used to take shape, are still there, only our eyes are no longer capable of perceiving them? May not this be so?--for as one sense develops, another declines. The mystic who lives on the hillside in the edge of a cave, pondering eternal rather than ephemeral things, obtains glimpses, just as the child does, of a life outside this life of ours. Or do we think these things because man will not consent to die like a plant? Wondering if a glimpse of another life had once been vouchsafed to me when my senses were more finely wrought, I descended the hillside; the bird, probably a chaffinch, repeated its cry without any variation. I went down the hillside and lay in the shadow of the tasselled larches, trying to convince myself that I had not hoped to see the brown lady, if it were a lady I had seen, bending over the stones of the old burial-ground.

One day the silence of the woods was broken by the sound of a mason's hammer, and on making inquiry from a passing workman--his hodman probably--I learned that on opening the vault it had been discovered that there was not room for another coffin. But no enlargement of the vault was necessary; a couple of more shelves was all that would be wanted for many a year to come. His meaning was not to be mistaken--when two more shelves had been added there would be room for my brothers, myself, and my sister, but the next generation would have to order that a further excavation be made in the hill or look out for a new burial-ground. He stood looking at me, and I watched for a moment a fine young man whose eyes were pale as the landscape, and I wondered if he expected me to say that I was glad that things had turned out very well.... The sound of the mason's hammer got upon my nerves, and feeling the wood to be no longer a place for meditation, I wandered round the shore as far as the old boat-house, wondering how it was that the words of a simple peasant could have succeeded in producing such a strange revulsion of feeling in me. No doubt it was the intensity with which I realised the fact that we are never far from death, none of us, that made it seem as if I were thinking on this subject for the first time. As soon as we reach the age of reflection the thought of death is never long out of our minds. It is a subject on which we are always thinking. We go to bed thinking that another day has gone, that we are another day nearer our graves. Any incident suffices to remind us of death. That very morning I had seen two old blue-bottles huddled together in the corner of a pane, and at once remembered that a term of life is set out for all things--a few months for the blue-bottle, a few years for me. One forgets how one thought twenty years ago, but I am prone to think that even the young meditate very often upon death; it must be so, for all their books contain verses on the mutability of things, and as we advance in years it would seem that we think more and more on this one subject, for what is all modern literature but a reek of regret that we are but bubbles on a stream? I thought that nothing that could be said on this old subject could move me, but that boy from Derryanny had brought home to me the thought that follows us from youth to age better than literature could have done; he had exceeded all the poets, not by any single phrase--it was more his attitude of mind towards death (towards my death) that had startled me--and as I walked along the shore I tried to remember his words. They were simple enough, no doubt, so simple that I could not remember them, only that he had reminded me that Michael Malia, that was the mason's name, had known me since I was a little boy; I do not know how he got it out; I should not have been able to express the idea myself, but without choosing his words, without being aware of them, speaking unconsciously, just as he breathed, he had told me that if my heart were set on any particular place I had only to tell Michael Malia and he would keep it for me; there would be a convenient place for me just above my grandfather when they had got the new shelf up; he had heard we were both writers.

That country boy took it out of me as perhaps no poet had ever done! I shall never forget him as I saw him going away stolidly through the green wood, his bag of lime on his back.

And sitting down in front of the tranquil lake I said, "In twenty or thirty years I shall certainly join the others in that horrible vault; nothing can save me," and again the present slipped away from me and my mind became again clear as glass; the present is only subconscious; were it not so we could not live. I have said all this before; again I seemed to myself like a fly crawling up a pane of glass, falling back, buzzing, and crawling again. Every expedient that I explored proved illusory, every one led to the same conclusion that the dead are powerless. "The living do with us what they like," I muttered, and I thought of all my Catholic relations, every one of whom believes in the intervention of priests and holy water, the Immaculate Conception, the Pope's Indulgences, and a host of other things which I could not remember, so great was my anguish of mind at the thought that my poor pagan body should be delivered helpless into their pious hands. I remembered their faces, I could hear their voices--that of my dear brother, whom I shall always think of as a strayed cardinal rather than as a colonel; I could see his pale eyes moist with faith in the intercession of the Virgin--one can always tell a Catholic at sight, just as one can tell a consumptive. The curving lake, the pale mountains, the low shores, the sunlight, and the haze contributed not a little to frighten me; the country looked intensely Catholic at that moment. My thoughts swerved, and I began to wonder if the face of a country takes its character from the ideas of those living in it. "How shall I escape from that vault?" I cried out suddenly. Michael Malia's hodman had said that they might place me just above my grandfather, and my grandfather was a man of letters, a historian whose histories I had not read; and in the midst of the horror my probable burial inspired in me, I found some amusement in the admission that I should like the old gentleman whose portrait hung in the dining-room to have read my novels. This being so, it was not improbable that he would like me to read his histories, and I began to speculate on what the author of a history of the French Revolution [[1]] would think of "Esther Waters." The colour of the chocolate coat he wears in his picture fixed itself in my mind's eye, and I began to compare it with the colour of the brown garment worn by the ghost I had seen in the wood. Good Heavens, if it were his ghost I had seen!

[1.] Still unpublished.

And listening to the lapping of the lake water I imagined a horrible colloquy in that vault. It all came into my mind, his dialogue and my dialogue. "Great God," I cried out, "something must be done to escape!" and my eyes were strained out on the lake, upon the island on which a Welshman had built a castle. I saw all the woods reaching down to the water's edge, and the woods I did not see I remembered; all the larch trees that grew on the hillsides came into my mind suddenly, and I thought what a splendid pyre might be built out of them. No trees had been cut for the last thirty years; I might live for another thirty. What splendid timber there would then be to build a pyre for me!--a pyre fifty feet high, saturated with scented oils, and me lying on the top of it with all my books (they would make a nice pillow for my head). The ancient heroes used to be laid with their arms beside them; their horses were slaughtered so that their spirits might be free to serve them in the aerial kingdoms they had gone to inhabit. My pyre should be built on the island facing me; its flames would be seen for miles and miles; the lake would be lighted up by it, and my body would become a sort of beacon-fire--the beacon of the pagan future awaiting old Ireland! Nor would the price of such a funeral be anything too excessive--a few hundred pounds perhaps, the price of a thousand larches and a few barrels of scented oil and the great feast: for while I was roasting, my mourners should eat roast meat and drink wine and wear gay dresses--the men as well as the women; and the gayest music would be played. The "Marriage of Figaro" and some Offenbach would be pleasing to my spirit, the ride of the Valkyrie would be an appropriate piece; but I am improvising a selection, and that is a thing that requires careful consideration. It would be a fine thing indeed if such a funeral--I hate the word--such a burning as this could be undertaken, and there is no reason why it should not be, unless the law interdicts public burnings of human bodies. And then my face clouded, and my soul too; I grew melancholy as the lake, as the southern mountains that rippled down the sky plaintive as an Irish melody, for the burning I had dreamed of so splendidly might never take place. I might have to fall back on the Public Crematorium in England--in Ireland there is no Crematorium; Ireland lingers in the belief in the resurrection of the body. "Before I decide," I said to myself, "what my own funeral shall be, I must find out what funeral liberties the modern law and Christian morality permit the citizen," and this I should not be able to discover until I returned to Dublin.