Mike Fletcher: A Novel

by George Moore

In the dreary drawing-room, amid the tattered copies of the Graphic and Illustrated London News, he encountered the inevitable idle woman. They engaged in conversation; and he repeated the phrases that belong inevitably to such occasions.

"How horrible all this is," he said to himself; "this is worse than peeping and botanizing on a mother's grave."

He desired supreme grief, and grief fled from his lure; and rhymes and images thronged his brain; and the poem that oftenest rose in his mind, seemingly complete in cadence and idea, was so cruel, that Lily, looking out of heaven, seemed to beg him to refrain. But though he erased the lines on the paper, he could not erase them on his brain, and baffled, he pondered over the phenomena of the antagonism of desired aspirations and intellectual instincts. He desired a poem full of the divine grace of grief; a poem beautiful, tender and pure, fresh and wild as a dove crossing in the dawn from wood to wood. He desired the picturesqueness of a young man's grief for a dead girl, an Adonais going forth into the glittering morning, and weeping for his love that has passed out of the sun into the shadow. This is what he wrote:

A UNE POETRENAIRE.

We are alone! listen, a little while,
And hear the reason why your weary smile
And lute-toned speaking is so very sweet
To me, and how my love is more complete
Than any love of any lover. They
Have only been attracted by the gray
Delicious softness of your eyes, your slim
And delicate form, or some such whimpering whim,
The simple pretexts of all lovers;—I
For other reasons. Listen whilst I try
And say. I joy to see the sunset slope
Beyond the weak hours' hopeless horoscope,
Leaving the heavens a melancholy calm,
Of quiet colour chaunted like a psalm,
In mildly modulated phrases; thus
Your life shall fade like a voluptuous
Vision beyond the sight, and you shall die
Like some soft evening's sad serenity …
I would possess your dying hours; indeed
My love is worthy of the gift, I plead
For them.

Although I never loved as yet,
Methinks that I might love you; I would get
From out the knowledge that the time was brief,
That tenderness whose pity grows to grief,
My dream of love, and yea, it would have charms
Beyond all other passions, for the arms
Of death are stretchéd you-ward, and he claims
You as his bride. Maybe my soul misnames
Its passion; love perhaps it is not, yet
To see you fading like a violet,
Or some sweet thought away, would be a strange
And costly pleasure, far beyond the range
Of common man's emotion. Listen, I
Will choose a country spot where fields of rye
And wheat extend in waving yellow plains,
Broken with wooded hills and leafy lanes,
To pass our honeymoon; a cottage where
The porch and windows are festooned with fair
Green wreaths of eglantine, and look upon
A shady garden where we'll walk alone
In the autumn sunny evenings; each will see
Our walks grow shorter, till at length to thee
The garden's length is far, and thou wilt rest
From time to time, leaning upon my breast
Thy languid lily face. Then later still,
Unto the sofa by the window-sill
Thy wasted body I shall carry, so
That thou mays't drink the last left lingering glow
Of even, when the air is filled with scent
Of blossoms; and my spirits shall be rent
The while with many griefs. Like some blue day
That grows more lovely as it fades away,
Gaining that calm serenity and height
Of colour wanted, as the solemn night
Steals forward thou shalt sweetly fall asleep
For ever and for ever; I shall weep
A day and night large tears upon thy face,
Laying thee then beneath a rose-red place
Where I may muse and dedicate and dream
Volumes of poesy of thee; and deem
It happiness to know that thou art far
From any base desires as that fair star
Set in the evening magnitude of heaven.
Death takes but little, yea, thy death has given
Me that deep peace and immaculate possession
Which man may never find in earthly passion.

The composition of the poem induced a period of literary passion, during which he composed much various matter, even part of his great poem, which he would have completed had he not been struck by an idea for a novel, and so imperiously, that he wrote the book straight from end to end. It was sent to a London publisher, and it raised some tumult of criticism, none of which reached the author. When it appeared he was far away, living in Arab tents, seeking pleasure at other sources. For suddenly, when the strain of the composition of his book was relaxed, civilization had grown hateful to him; a picture by Fromantin, and that painter's book, Un été dans le Sahara, quickened the desire of primitive life; he sped away, and for nearly two years lived on the last verge of civilization, sometimes passing beyond it with the Bedouins into the interior, on slave-trading or rapacious expeditions. The frequentation of these simple people calmed the fever of ennui, which had been consuming him. Nature leads us to the remedy that the development of reason inflicts on the animal—man. And for more than a year Mike thought he had solved the problem of life; now he lived in peace—passion had ebbed almost out of hearing, and in the plain satisfaction of his instincts he found happiness.

With the wild chieftains, their lances at rest, watching from behind a sandhill, he sometimes thought that the joy he experienced was akin to that which he had known in Sussex, when his days were spent in hunting and shooting; now, as then, he found relief by surrendering himself to the hygienics of the air and earth. But his second return to animal nature had been more violent and radical; and it pleased him to think that he could desire nothing but the Arabs with whom he lived, and whose friendship he had won. But qui a bu boira, and below consciousness dead appetites were awakening, and would soon be astir.

The tribe had wandered to an encampment in the vicinity of Morocco; and one day a missionary and his wife came with a harmonium and tracts. The scene was so evocative of the civilization from which Mike had fled, that he at once was drawn by a power he could not explain towards them. He told the woman that he had adopted Arab life; explaining that the barbaric soul of some ancestor lived in him, and that he was happy with these primitive people. He too was a missionary, and had come to warn and to save them from Christianity and all its corollaries—silk hats, piano playing, newspapers, and patent medicines. The English woman argued with him plaintively; the husband pressed a bundle of tracts upon him; and this very English couple hoped he would come and see them when he returned to town. Mike thanked them, insisting, however, that he would never leave his beloved desert, or desert his friends. Next day, however, he forgot to fall on his knees at noon, and outside the encampment stood looking in the direction whither the missionaries had gone. A strange sadness seemed to have fallen upon him; he cared no more for plans for slave-trading in the interior, or plunder in the desert. The scent of the white woman's skin and hair was in his nostrils; the nostalgia of the pavement had found him, and he knew he must leave the desert. One morning he was missed in the Sahara, and a fortnight after he was seen in the Strand, rushing towards Lubini's.

"My dear fellow," he said, catching hold of a friend's arm, "I've been living with the Arabs for the last two years. Fancy, not to have seen a 'tart' or drunk a bottle of champagne for two years! Come and dine with me. We'll go on afterwards to the Troc'."