The sinking of the old dug-out will rob Edward of an evening's occupation, and the question comes, to what great national or civic end he will devote his Thursdays. On Monday evening he presides at the Piper's Club, on Tuesday he goes to the theatre, on Wednesday he attends a meeting of Sinn Fein, on Thursday he dozes through the proceedings of the Coisde Gnotha, on Friday there is choir practice in the cathedral, on Saturday he speaks severely to his disobedient choristers, tries new voices in his rooms in Lincoln Place, and plans new programmes with Vincent O'Brien, his choirmaster, chosen by him because he believes in O'Brien's talent and in his desire to give the music in accordance with tradition and Edward's own taste. On Sunday he is ever watchful in the cathedral, sitting with his hand to his ear, noting the time and the efficiency of the singers.

I had to give way on one point, he said to me, but I think I told you already that the Archbishop stipulated that if a great composer of Church music should arise, the cathedral should not be debarred from giving his music. I don't think it will happen very often, so there was no use in opposing His Grace on this particular point. We have now eight hundred a year—

Eight hundred a year out of ten thousand!

You see, he said, the Archbishop has added ten thousand to mine, and that invested at four per cent will bring in eight hundred.

So you succeeded in persuading the Archbishop to give you ten thousand as well as to grant you the Headship! My admiration for Edward as a business man swelled.

It was a hard fight, he said, and very often the negotiations were nearly broken off; but I stuck to my guns, for of course it wasn't likely that I was going to give ten thousand without getting what I was bargaining for.

The sum of money seemed to strike a chord in my memory, and I was moved to ask him what had led him to fix on this sum, but refrained lest I should appear too inquisitive. Something must have happened, I said, to fix this sum in his mind. It has never been less, it has never been more, and in the beginning he didn't know how much money was necessary to found the choir. Would he have given the twenty thousand if—

It suddenly dropped upon me that he had told me in Bayreuth, in the great yawning street between the little bridge and the railway-station, that he had come out of a great conscientious crisis, and had had to go to Bishop Healy and lay the whole matter before him. What sin can he have committed? I said to myself, and, quelling my curiosity as best I could, I tried to induce him to confide in me, and after some persuasion he confessed that his mother, fearing the Land Acts, had prevailed upon him to redistribute his grass-farms. He had told the tenants that he would reinstate them; whereas he had given them other farms equally good, but they had found fault with the lands he had put them into, and his bailiff had been fired at on the highroad to Gort. He had received coffins and crossbones; it was not, however, fear of his life or his money that had brought about the great mental breakdown, but his conscience. If he had acted wrongly, he must make reparation before his sin would be forgiven him.... And while I pictured him as a prey to remorse, of pallid and rueful countenance, he told me that the one thing that stood to him was his appetite. For after a night of agony he often descended his Gothic stairs forgetful of everything but the sirloin on the side-table. He is always original, I said, and has discovered an unexpected connection between conscience and appetite. But notwithstanding his appetite, he had had to leave Tillyra for Cork. He had always liked the sea and its influences, and in six weeks had returned much improved in health, but still unable to smoke his churchwarden, only an occasional cigar, and that a mild one.

It may have been from too much smoking, I said; but I can't think why you wanted to send for Bishop Healy. I could have advised you better.

Nothing would have satisfied me but a bishop, he answered, with a terrified look in his eyes.

To tell you that you must keep your promise?

All these business matters are very intricate, and it is difficult to say who is right and who is wrong. One doesn't know oneself, and when one's interests are concerned one doesn't see straight.

My heart went out to him, for it is seldom that one meets anybody altogether honourable about money matters, and rarer still is he who accepts the advice that he asks for: Edward had reinstated his tenants, and I began to wonder if the ten thousand that he had spent upon his choir was connected in some remote way with his management of the property, or with his mother's management, or with his father's. A conscience like Edward's might lead him back one hundred years, to his grandfather.

But if he had had any suspicion about this money, I should have heard it. He has been confessing himself to me for the last thirty years.... Now I come to think of it, he never told me how he first came to hear of Palestrina. It was when we lived in the Temple together that he began to speak to me about the Mass of Pope Marcellus; and one Christmas Eve he persuaded me to go over to Paris with him to hear it. And shall I ever forget how he sidled up to me when we came out of the church?

Now what do you think of Palestrina?

About the beauty of the music there can be no question, and as far advanced in his art as—shall we say—Botticelli?

And what about the plain-chant? You will never say again that you don't like plain-chant.

But there was no plain-chant. None was sung today.

Yes, the hymn. And the boy's voice—how much purer than a woman's!

He sang very beautifully, Edward.... You don't mean the Adeste Fideles?

Of course I do.

But Edward—And we began to argue, myself convinced, in spite of the fact that he showed me the Adeste Fideles in his Prayer-Book among plain-chant tunes, that it could not be else than modern music. A Raphael doesn't become a Rubens because it happens to have been hung among Rubenses.

We argued about plain-chant endings till I was on the point of reminding him of the thirteenth-century windows in Aix-la-Chapelle, but restrained myself for once, and admitting he had eaten too much steak, drunken too much wine, he asked me to come with him. He was taking me to the other end of Paris to buy the masses and motets of the great Italian contrapuntalists; we walked and we walked, arriving at last at the shop. His negotiations with the music-seller began to astonish me. I had fancied he was going to buy music to the value of a pound or thirty shillings—two pounds, perhaps—but I heard: And if I add three motets by Clemens non Papa and two masses by Orlando di Lasso, that will come to how much? Five hundred francs. And if I take six more motets and six more masses by Vittoria? That will bring up the total to twelve hundred francs. I may be wrong in my figures, but he certainly bought that morning from thirty to forty pounds' worth of music; and while the bundle was being tied, Borde, the conductor, came in, and I told him that my friend Edward Martyn was about to give ten thousand pounds to found a choir in Dublin, and was buying music. Borde was, of course, very much interested in the Dublin choir, and he led me into conversation graciously, in the course of which I said:

I congratulate you, M. Borde, on your wonderful boy treble.

A cloud came into his face, and after some pressing he admitted that there was no boy in his choir.

No boy! and Mr Martyn thinks a boy's voice much more beautiful than a woman's. It wasn't a boy, then, who sang the Adeste Fideles?

No ... a woman. He added that she was fifty. I thanked him inwardly, and, feeling sorry for Edward, persuaded Borde to admit that he had taught her to sing like a boy. But if Edward had mistaken a woman's voice for a boy's he may be mistaken about plain-chant.

Mr Martyn tells me that the Adeste is a plain-chant tune. Surely not.

No, he answered; it is a Portuguese tune, and it was written about one hundred years ago.

But, Edward spluttered, it is in my Prayer-Book among the plain-chant. How did it get there?

Borde could not enlighten him on that point, and I suggested that he should make application to the publisher of his Prayer-Book and get his money back. There is nobody. I said, like him. He is more wonderful than anything in literature. I prefer him to Sancho who was untroubled with a conscience and never thought of running to the Bishop of Toledo. All the same he is not without the shrewdness of his ancestors, and got the better of Archbishop Walsh, and for the last five years Vincent O'Brien has been beating time, and will beat it till the end of his life; and he will be succeeded by others, for Edward has, by deed, saved the Italian contrapuntalists till time everlasting from competition with modern composers. He certainly has gotten the better of Walsh. And I thought of a picture-gallery in Dublin with nothing in it but Botticelli and his school, and myself declaring that all painting that had been done since had no interest for me.... A smile began to spread over my face, for the story that was coming into my mind seemed oh! so humorous, so like Ireland, so like Edward, that I began to tell myself again the delightful story of the unrefined ears that, weary of erudite music, had left the cathedral and sought instinctively modern tunes and women's voices, and as these were to be found in Westland Row the church was soon overflowing with a happy congregation. But in a little while the collections grew scantier. This time it couldn't be Palestrina, and all kinds of reasons were adduced. At last the truth could no longer be denied—the professional Catholics of Merrion Square had been driven out of Westland Row by the searching smells of dirty clothes, and had gone away to the University Church in Stephen's Green. So if it weren't Palestrina directly it was Palestrina indirectly, and the brows of the priests began to knit when Edward Martyn's name was mentioned. Them fal-de-dals is well enough on the Continent, in Paris, where there is no faith, was the opinion of an important ecclesiastic. But we don't want them here, murmured a second ecclesiastic. All this counterpoint may make a very pretty background for Mr Martyn's prayers, but what about the poor people's? Good composer or bad composer, there is no congregation in him, said a third. There's too much congregation, put in the first, but not the kind we want! The second ecclesiastic took snuff, and the group were of opinion that steps should be taken to persuade dear Edward to make good their losses. The priests in Marlborough Street sympathised with the priests of Westland Row, and told them that they were so heavily out of pocket that Mr Martyn had agreed to do something for them. It seemed to the Westland Row priests that if Mr Martyn were making good the losses of the priests of the pro-Cathedral, he should make good their losses. It was natural that they should think so, and to acquit himself of all responsibility Edward no doubt consulted the best theologians on the subject, and I think that they assured him that he is not responsible for indirect losses. If he were, his whole fortune would not suffice. He was, of course, very sorry if a sudden influx of poor people had caused a falling-off in the collections of Westland Row, for he knew that the priests needed the money very much to pay for the new decorations, and to help them he wrote an article in the Independent praising the new blue ceiling, which seemed, so he wrote, a worthy canopy for the soaring strains of Palestrina.





There's that against it, he answered. If you could suggest anything better—What do you think of a library in which there is nothing but unacted plays? The characters could say, when there was nothing for them to do on the stage, that they were going to the library to read, and the library would have the advantage of reminding everybody of the garret in the Wild Duck. A very cruel answer, my friend, Dujardin will say, and I will tell him that I can't help seeing in Edward something beyond Shakespeare or Balzac. Now, tell me, which of these anecdotes I have told you is the most humorous? He will not answer my question, but a certain thoughtfulness will begin to settle in his face, and he will say: Everything with him is accidental, and when his memory fails him he falls into another mistake, and he amuses you because it is impossible for you to anticipate his next mistake. You know there is going to be one; there must be one, for he sees things separately rather than relatively. I am beginning to understand your friend.

You are, you are; you are doing splendidly. But you haven't told me, Dujardin, which anecdote you prefer. Stay, there is another one. Perhaps this one will help you to a still better understanding. When he brought The Heather Field and Yeats's play The Countess Cathleen to Dublin for performance, a great trouble of conscience awakened suddenly in him, and a few days before the performance he went to a theologian to ask him if The Countess Cathleen were a heretical work, and, if it were would Almighty God hold him responsible for the performance? But he couldn't withdraw Yeats's play without withdrawing his own, and it appears that he breathed a sigh of relief when a common friend referred the whole matter to two other theologians, and as these gave their consent Edward allowed the plays to go on; but Cardinal Logue intervened, and wrote a letter to the papers to say that the play seemed to him unfit for Catholic ears, and Edward would have withdrawn the plays if the Cardinal hadn't admitted in his letter that he had judged the play by certain extracts only.

He wishes to act rightly, but has little faith in himself; and what makes him so amusing is that he needs advice in aesthetics as well as in morals. We are, I said, Dujardin, at the roots of conscience. And I began to ponder the question what would happen to Edward if we lived in a world in which aesthetics ruled: I should be where Bishop Healy is, and he would be a thin, small voice crying in the wilderness—an amusing subject of meditation, from which I awoke suddenly.

I wonder how Dujardin is getting on with his Biblical studies? Last year he was calling into question the authorship of the Romans—a most eccentric view; and, remembering how weakly I had answered him, I took the Bible from the table and began to read the Epistle with a view to furnishing myself with arguments wherewith to confute him. My Bible opened at the ninth chapter, and I said: Why, here is the authority for the Countess Cathleen's sacrifice which Edward's theologian deemed untheological. It will be great fun to poke Edward up with St Paul, and on my way to Lincoln Place I thought how I might lead the conversation to The Countess Cathleen.



A few minutes afterwards a light appeared on the staircase and the door slowly opened.

Come in, Siegfried, though you were off the key.

Well, my dear friend, it is a difficult matter to whistle above two trams passing simultaneously and six people jabbering round a public-house, to say nothing of a jarvey or two, and you perhaps dozing in your armchair, as your habit often is. You won't open to anything else except a motive from The Ring; and I stumbled up the stairs in front of Edward, who followed with a candle.

Wait a moment; let me go first and I'll turn up the gas.

You aren't sitting in the dark, are you?

No, but I read better by candle-light, and he blew out the candles in the tin candelabrum that he had made for himself. He is original even in his candelabrum; no one before him had ever thought of a caridelabrum in tin, and I fell to admiring his appearance more carefully than perhaps I had ever done before, so monumental did he seem lying on the little sofa sheltered from daughts by a screen, a shawl about his shoulders. His churchwarden was drawing famously, and I noticed his great square hands with strong fingers and square nails pared closely away, and as heretofore I admired the curve of the great belly, the thickness of the thighs, the length and breadth and the width of his foot hanging over the edge of the sofa, the apoplectic neck falling into great rolls of flesh, the humid eyes, the skull covered with short stubbly hair. I looked round the rooms and they seemed part of himself: the old green wallpaper on which he pins reproductions of the Italian masters. And I longed to peep once more into the bare bedroom into which he goes to fetch bottles of Apollinaris. Always original! Is there another man in this world whose income is two thousand a year, and who sleeps in a bare bedroom, without dressing-room, or bathroom, or servant in the house to brush his clothes, and who has to go to the baker's for his breakfast?

We had been talking for some time of the Gaelic League, and from Hyde it was easy to pass to Yeats and his plays.

His best play is The Countess Cathleen.

The Countess Cathleen is only a sketch.

But what I never could understand, Edward, was why you and the Cardinal could have had any doubts as to the orthodoxy of The Countess Cathleen.

What, a woman that sells her own soul in order to save the souls of others!

I suppose your theologian objected—

Of course he objected.

He cannot have read St Paul.

What do you mean?

He can't have read St Paul, or else he is prepared to throw over St Paul.

Mon ami Moore, mon ami Moore.

The supernatural idealism of a man who would sell his soul to save the souls of others fills me with awe.

But it wasn't a man; it was the Countess Cathleen, and women are never idealists.

Not the saints?

His face grew solemn at once.

If you give me the Epistles I will read the passage to you. And it was great fun to go to the bookshelves and read: I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.

Edward's face grew more and more solemn, and I wondered of what he was thinking.

Paul is a very difficult and a very obscure writer, and I think the Church is quite right not to encourage the reading of the Epistles, especially without comments.

Then you do think there is something in the passage I have read?

After looking down his dignified nose for a long time, he said:

Of course, the Church has an explanation. All the same, it's very odd that St Paul should have said such a thing—very odd.

There is no doubt that I owe a great deal of my happiness to Edward; all my life long he has been exquisite entertainment. And I fell to thinking that Nature was very cruel to have led me, like Moses, within sight of the Promised Land. A story would be necessary to bring Edward into literature, and it would be impossible to devise an action of which he should be a part. The sex of a woman is odious to him, and a man with two thousand a year does not rob nor steal, and he is so uninterested in his fellow-men that he has never an ill word to say about anybody. John Eglinton is a little thing; AE is a soul that few will understand; but Edward is universal—more universal than Yeats, than myself, than any of us, but for lack of a story I shall not be able to give him the immortality in literature which he seeks in sacraments. Shakespeare always took his stories from some other people. Turgenev's portrait of him would be thin, poor, and evasive, and Balzac would give us the portrait of a mere fool. And Edward is not a fool. As I understand him he is a temperament without a rudder; all he has to rely upon is his memory, which isn't a very good one, and so he tumbles from one mistake into another. My God! it is a terrible thing to happen to one, to understand a man better than he understands himself, and to be powerless to help him. If I had been able to undo his faith I should have raised him to the level of Sir Horace Plunkett, but he resisted me; and perhaps he did well, for he came into the world seeing things separately rather than relatively, and had to be a Catholic. He is a born Catholic, and I remembered one of his confessions—a partial confession, but a confession: If you had been brought up as strictly as I have been—I don't think he ever finished the sentence; he often leaves sentences unfinished, as if he fears to think things out. The end of the sentence should run: You would not dare to think independently. He thinks that his severe bringing-up has robbed him of something. But the prisoner ends by liking his prison-house, and on another occasion he said: If it hadn't been for the Church, I don't know what would have happened to me.

My thoughts stopped, and when I awoke I was thinking of Hughes. Perhaps the link between Hughes and Edward was Loughrea Cathedral. He had shown me a photograph of some saints modelled by Hughes. Hughes is away in Paris, I said, modelling saints for Loughrea Cathedral. The last time I saw him was at Walter Osborne's funeral, and Walter's death set me thinking of the woman I had lost, and little by little all she had told me about herself floated up in my mind like something that I had read. I had never seen her father nor the Putney villa in which she had been brought up, but she had made me familiar with both through her pleasant mode of conversation, which was never to describe anything, but just to talk about things, dropping phrases here and there, and the phrases she dropped were so well chosen that the comfort of the villa, its pompous meals and numerous servants, its gardens and greenhouses, with stables and coach-house just behind, are as well known to me as the house that I am living in, better known in a way, for I see it through the eyes of the imagination ... clearer eyes than the physical eyes.

It does not seem to me that any one was ever more conscious of whence she had come and of what she had been; she seemed to be able to see herself as a child again, and to describe her childhood with her brother (they were nearly the same age) in the villa and in the villa's garden. I seemed to see them always as two rather staid children who were being constantly dressed by diligent nurses and taken out for long drives in the family carriage. They did not like these drives and used to hide in the garden; but their governess was sent to fetch them, and they were brought back. Her father did not like to have the horses kept waiting, and one day as Stella stood with him in the passage, she saw her mother come out of her bedroom beautifully dressed. Her father whispered something in his wife's ear, and he followed her into her bedroom. Stella remembered how the door closed behind them. In my telling, the incident seems to lose some of its point, but in Stella's relation it seemed to put her father and his wife before me and so clearly that I could not help asking her what answer her father would make were she to tell him that she had a lover. A smile hovered in her grave face. He would look embarrassed, she said, and wonder why I should have told him such a thing, and then I think he would go to the greenhouse, and when he returned he would talk to me about something quite different. I don't think that Stella ever told me about the people that came to their house, but people must have come to it, and as an example of how a few words can convey an environment I will quote her: I always wanted to talk about Rossetti, she said, and these seven words seem to me to tell better than any description the life of a girl living with a formal father in a Putney villa, longing for something, not knowing exactly what, and anxious to get away from home.... I think she told me she was eighteen or nineteen and had started painting before she met Florence at the house of one of her father's friends; a somewhat sore point this meeting was, for Florence was looked upon by Stella's father as something of a Bohemian. She was a painter, and knew all the Art classes and the fees that had to be paid, and led Stella into the world of studios and models and girl friends. She knew how to find studios and could plan out a journey abroad. Stella's imagination was captured, and even if her father had tried to offer opposition to her leaving home he could not have prevented her, for she was an heiress (her mother was dead and had left her a considerable income); but he did not try, and the two girls set up house together in Chelsea; they travelled in Italy and Spain; they had a cottage in the country; they painted pictures and exhibited their pictures in the same exhibitions; they gave dances in their studios and were attracted by this young man and the other; but Stella did not give herself to any one, because, as she admitted to me, she was afraid that a lover would interrupt the devotion which she intended to give to Art. But life is forever casting itself into new shapes and forms, and no sooner had she begun to express herself in Art than she met me. I was about to go to Ireland to preach a new gospel, and must have seemed a very impulsive and fantastic person to her, but were not impulsiveness and fantasy just the qualities that would appeal to her? And were not gravity and good sense the qualities that would appeal to me, determined as I was then to indulge myself in a little madness?

I could not have chosen a saner companion than Stella; my instinct had led me to her; but because one man's instinct is a little more clear than another's, it does not follow that he has called reason to his aid. It must be remembered always that the art of painting is as inveterate in me as the art of writing, and that I am never altogether myself when far away from the smell of oil paint. Stella could talk to one about painting, and all through that wonderful summer described in Salve our talk flowed on as delightfully as a breeze in Maytime, and as irresponsible, flashing thoughts going by and avowals perfumed with memories. Only in her garden did conversation fail us, for in her garden Stella could think only of her flowers, and it seemed an indiscretion to follow her as she went through the twilight gathering dead blooms or freeing plants from noxious insects. But she would have had me follow her, and I think was always a little grieved that I wasn't as interested in her garden as I was in her painting; and my absent-mindedness when I followed her often vexed her and my mistakes distressed her.

You are interested, she said, only in what I say about flowers and not in the flowers themselves. You like to hear me tell about Miss —— whose business in life is to grow carnations, because you already see her, dimly, perhaps, but still you see her in a story. Forget her and look at this Miss Shifner!

Yes, it is beautiful, but we can only admire the flowers that we notice when we are children, I answered. Dahlias, china roses, red and yellow tulips, tawny wallflowers, purple pansies, are never long out of my thoughts, and all the wonderful varieties of the iris, the beautiful blue satin and the cream, some shining like porcelain, even the common iris that grows about the moat.

But there were carnations in your mother's garden?

Yes, and I remember seeing them being tied with bass. But what did you say yesterday about carnations? That they were the—

She laughed and would not tell me, and when the twilight stooped over the high trees and the bats flitted and the garden was silent except when a fish leaped, I begged her to come away to the wild growths that I loved better than the flowers.

But the mallow and willow-weed are the only two that you recognise. How many times have I told you the difference between self-heal and tufted vetch?

I like cow parsley and wild hyacinths and—

You have forgotten the name. As well speak of a woman that you loved but whose name you had forgotten.

Well, if I have, I love trees better than you do, Stella. You pass under a fir unstirred by the mystery of its branches, and I wonder at you, for I am a tree worshipper, even as my ancestors, and am moved as they were by the dizzy height of a great silver fir. You like to paint trees, and I should like to paint flowers if I could paint; there we are set forth, you and I.

I have told in Salve that in Rathfarnham she found many motives for painting; the shape of the land and the spire above the straggling village appealed to me, but she was not altogether herself in these pictures. She would have liked the village away, for man and his dwellings did not form part of her conception of a landscape; large trees and a flight of clouds above the trees were her selection, and the almost unconscious life of kine wandering or sheep seeking the shelter of a tree.

Stella was a good walker, and we followed the long road leading from Rathfarnham up the hills, stopping to admire the long plain which we could see through the comely trees shooting out of the shelving hillside.

If I have beguiled you into a country where there are no artists and few men of letters, you can't say that I have not shown you comely trees. And now if you can walk two miles farther up this steep road I will show you a lovely prospect.

And I enjoyed her grave admiration of the old Queen Anne dwelling-house, its rough masonry, the yew hedges, the path along the hillside leading to the Druid altar and the coast-line sweeping in beautiful curves, but she did not like to hear me say that the drawing of the shore reminded her of Corot.

It is a sad affectation, she said, to speak of Nature reminding one of pictures.

Well, the outlines of Howth are beautiful, I answered, and the haze is incomparable. I should like to have spoken about a piece of sculpture, but for your sake, Stella, I refrain.

She was interested in things rather than ideas, and I remember her saying to me that things interest us only because we know that they are always slipping from us. A strange thing for a woman to say to her lover. She noticed all the changes of the seasons and loved them, and taught me to love them. She brought a lamb back from Rathfarnham, a poor forlorn thing that had run bleating so pitifully across the windy field that she had asked the shepherd where the ewe was, and he had answered that she had been killed overnight by a golf-ball. The lamb will be dead before morning, he added. And it was that March that the donkey produced a foal, a poor ragged thing that did not look as if it ever could be larger than a goat, but the donkey loved her foal.

Do you know the names of those two birds flying up and down the river?

They look to me like two large wrens with white waistcoats.

They are water-ouzels, she said.

The birds flew with rapid strokes of the wings, like kingfishers, alighting constantly on the river, on large mossy stones, and though we saw them plunge into the water, it was not to swim, but to run along the bottom in search of worms.

But do worms live under water?

The rooks were building, and a little while after a great scuffling was heard in one of the chimneys and a young jackdaw came down and soon became tamer than any bird I had ever seen, tamer than a parrot, and at the end of May the corncrake called from the meadow that summer had come again, and the kine wandered in deeper and deeper and deeper herbage. The days seemed never to end, and looking through the branches of the chestnut in which the fruit had not begun to show, we caught sight of a strange spectacle. Stella said, A lunar rainbow, and I wondered, never having heard of or seen such a thing before.

I shall never forget that rainbow, Stella, and am glad that we saw it together.

In every love story lovers reprove each other for lack of affection, and Stella had often sent me angry letters which caused me many heart-burnings and brought me out to her; in the garden there were reconciliations, we picked up the thread again, and the summer had passed before the reason of these quarrels became clear to me. One September evening Stella said she would accompany me to the gate, and we had not gone very far before I began to notice that she was quarrelling with me. She spoke of the loneliness of the Moat House, and I had answered that she had not been alone two evenings that week. She admitted my devotion. And if you admit that there has been no neglect—

She would not tell me, but there was something she was not satisfied with, and before we reached the end of the avenue she said, I don't think I can tell you. But on being pressed she said:

Well, you don't make love to me often enough.

And full of apologies I answered, Let me go back.

No, I can't have you back now, not after having spoken like that.

But she yielded to my invitation, and we returned to the house, and next morning I went back to Dublin a little dazed, a little shaken.

A few days after she went away to Italy to spend the winter and wrote me long letters, interesting me in herself, in the villagers, in the walks and the things that she saw in her walks, setting me sighing that she was away from me, or that I was not with her. And going to the window I would stand for a long time watching the hawthorns in their bleak wintry discontent, thinking how the sunlight fell into the Italian gardens, and caught the corner of the ruin she was sketching; and I let my fancy stray for a time unchecked. It would be wonderful to be in Italy with her, but—

I turned from the window suspicious, for there was a feeling at the back of my mind that with her return an anxiety would come into my life that I would willingly be without. She had told me she had refrained from a lover because she wished to keep all herself for her painting, and now she had taken to herself a lover. She was twenty years younger than I was, and at forty-six or thereabouts one begins to feel that one's time for love is over; one is consultant rather than practitioner. But it was impossible to dismiss the subject with a jest, and I found myself face to face with the question—If these twenty years were removed, would things be different? It seemed to me that the difficulty that had arisen would have been the same earlier in my life as it was now, and returning to the window I watched the hawthorns blowing under the cold grey Dublin sky.

The problem is set, I said, for the married, and every couple has to solve it in one way or another, but they have to solve it; they have to come to terms with love, especially the man, for whom it is a question of life and death. But how do they come to terms? And I thought of the different married people I knew. Which would be most likely to advise me—the man or the woman? It would be no use to seek advice; every case is different, I said. If anybody were to advise me it would be the man, for the problem is not so difficult for a woman. She can escape from love more easily than her lover or her husband; she can plead, and her many pleadings were considered, one by one, and how in married life the solution that seems to lovers so difficult is solved by marriage itself, by propinquity. But not always, not always. The question is one of extraordinary interest and importance; more marriages come to shipwreck, I am convinced, on this very question than upon any other. In the divorce cases published we read of incompatibility of temper and lack of mutual tastes, mere euphemisms that deceive nobody. The image of a shipwreck rose up in me naturally. She will return, and like a ship our love for each other will be beaten on these rocks and broken. We shall not be able to get out to sea. She will return, and when she returns her temperament will have to be adjusted to mine, else she will lose me altogether, for men have died of love, though Shakespeare says they haven't. Manet and Daudet—both died of love; and the somewhat absurd spectacle of a lover waiting for his mistress to return, and yet dreading her returning, was constantly before me.

It often seemed to me that it was my own weakness that created our embarrassment. A stronger man would have been able to find a way out, but I am not one that can shape and mould another according to my desire; and when she returned from Italy I found myself more helpless than ever, and I remember, and with shame, how, to avoid being alone with her, I would run down the entire length of a train, avoiding the empty carriages, crying Not here, not here! at last opening the door of one occupied by three or four people, who all looked as if they were bound for a long journey. I remember, too, how about this time I came with friends to see Stella, whether by accident or design, frankly I know not; I only know that I brought many friends to see her, thinking they would interest her.

If you don't care to come to see me without a chaperon, I would rather you didn't come at all, she said, humiliating me very deeply.

It seemed to me, I answered, blushing, that you would like to see ——, and I mentioned the name of the man who had accompanied me.

If I am cross sometimes it is because I don't see enough of you.

It seems to me that it was then that the resolve hardened in my heart to become her friend ... if she would allow me to become her friend. But in what words should I frame my request and my apology? All the time our life was becoming less amiable, until one evening I nipped the quarrel that was beginning, stopping suddenly at the end of the avenue.

It is better that we should understand each other. The plain truth is that I must cease to be your lover unless my life is to be sacrificed.

Cease to be my lover!



The explanation stuttered on. I remember her saying: I don't wish you to sacrifice your life. I have forgotten the end of her sentence. She drew her hand suddenly across her eyes. I will conquer this obsession.

A man would have whined and cried and besought and worried his mistress out of her wits. Women behave better than we; only once did her feelings overcome her. She spoke to me of the deception that life is. Again we were standing by the gate at the end of the chestnut avenue, and I remembered her telling me how a few years ago life had seemed to hold out its hands to her; her painting and her youth created her enjoyment.

But now life seems to have shrivelled up, she said; only a little dust is left.

Nothing is changed, so far as you and I are concerned. We see each other just the same.

I am no more to you than any other woman.

She went away again to Italy to paint and returned to Ireland, and one day she came to see me, and remained talking for an hour. I have no memory of what we said to each other, but a very clear memory of our walk through Dublin over Carlisle Bridge and along the quays. I had accompanied her as far as the Phoenix Park gates, and at the corner of the Conyngham Road, just as I was bidding her goodbye, she said:

I want to ask your advice on a matter of importance to me.

And to me, for what is important to you is equally important to me.

I am thinking, she said, of being married.

At the news it seems to me that I was unduly elated and tried to assume the interest that a friend should.