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The Untilled Field

G >> George Moore >> The Untilled Field



This etext was produced by Charles Franks, Robert Rowe, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





THE UNTILLED FIELD

by George Moore





CONTENTS




I. IN THE CLAY
II. SOME PARISHIONERS
III. THE EXILE
IV. HOME SICKNESS
V. A LETTER TO ROME
VI. JULIA CAHILL'S CURSE
VII. A PLAYHOUSE IN THE WASTE
VIII. THE WEDDING-GOWN
IX. THE CLERK'S QUEST
X. "ALMS-GIVING"
XI. SO ON HE FARES
XII. THE WILD GOOSE
XIII. THE WAY BACK





CHAPTER I
IN THE CLAY




It was a beautiful summer morning, and Rodney was out of his bed
at six o'clock. He usually went for a walk before going to his
studio, and this morning his walk had been a very pleasant one,
for yesterday's work had gone well with him. But as he turned into
the mews in which his studio was situated he saw the woman whom he
employed to light his fire standing in the middle of the roadway.
He had never seen her standing in the middle of the roadway before
and his doors wide open, and he instantly divined a misfortune,
and thought of the Virgin and Child he had just finished. There
was nothing else in his studio that he, cared much about. A few
busts, done long ago, and a few sketches; no work of importance,
nothing that he cared about or that could not be replaced if it
were broken.

He hastened his steps and he would have run if he had not been
ashamed to betray his fears to the char-woman.

"I'm afraid someone has been into the studio last night. The hasp
was off the door when I came this morning. Some of the things are
broken."

Rodney heard no more. He stood on the threshold looking round the
wrecked studio. Three or four casts had been smashed, the floor
was covered with broken plaster, and the lay figure was
overthrown, Rodney saw none of these things, he only saw that his
Virgin and Child was not on the modelling stool, and not seeing it
there, he hoped that the group had been stolen, anything were
better than that it should have been destroyed. But this is what
had happened: the group, now a mere lump of clay, lay on the
floor, and the modelling stand lay beside it.

"I cannot think," said the charwoman, "who has done this. It was a
wicked thing to do. Oh, sir, they have broken this beautiful
statue that you had in the Exhibition last year," and she picked
up the broken fragments of a sleeping girl.

"That doesn't matter," said Rodney. "My group is gone."

"But that, sir, was only in the clay. May I be helping you to pick
it up, sir? It is not broken altogether perhaps."

Rodney waved her aside. He was pale and he could not speak, and
was trembling. He had not the courage to untie the cloths, for he
knew there was nothing underneath but clay, and his manner was so
strange that the charwoman was frightened. He stood like one dazed
by a dream. He could not believe in reality, it was too mad, too
discordant, too much like a nightmare. He had only finished the
group yesterday!

He still called it his Virgin and Child, but it had never been a
Virgin and Child in the sense suggested by the capital letters,
for he had not yet put on the drapery that would convert a naked
girl and her baby into the Virgin and Child. He had of course
modelled his group in the nude first, and Harding, who had been
with him the night before last, had liked it much better than
anything he had done, Harding had said that he must not cover it
with draperies, that he must keep it for himself, a naked girl
playing with a baby, a piece of paganism. The girl's head was not
modelled when Harding had seen it. It was the conventional
Virgin's head, but Harding had said that he must send for his
model and put his model's head upon it. He had taken Harding's
advice and had sent for Lucy, and had put her pretty, quaint
little head upon it. He had done a portrait of Lucy. If this
terrible accident had not happened last night, the caster would
have come to cast it to-morrow, and then, following Harding's
advice always, he would have taken a "squeeze," and when he got it
back to the clay again he was going to put on a conventional head,
and add the conventional draperies, and make the group into the
conventional Virgin and Child, suitable to Father McCabe's
cathedral.

This was the last statue he would do in Ireland. He was leaving
Ireland. On this point his mind was made up, and the money he was
going to receive for this statue was the money that was going to
take him away. He had had enough of a country where there had
never been any sculpture or any painting, nor any architecture to
signify. They were talking about reviving the Gothic, but Rodney
did not believe in their resurrections or in their renaissance or
in their anything. "The Gael has had his day. The Gael is
passing." Only the night before he and Harding had had a long talk
about the Gael, and he had told Harding that he had given up the
School of Art, that he was leaving Ireland, and Harding had
thought that this was an extreme step, but Rodney had said that he
did not want to die, that no one wanted to die less than he did,
but he thought he would sooner die than go on teaching. He had
made some reputation and had orders that would carry him on for
some years, and he was going where he could execute them, to where
there were models, to where there was art, to where there was the
joy of life, out of a damp religious atmosphere in which nothing
flourished but the religious vocation.

"Good Heavens! How happy I was yesterday, full of hope and
happiness, my statue finished, and I had arranged to meet Harding
in Rome. The blow had fallen in the night. Who had done this? Who
had destroyed it?"

He fell into a chair, and sat helpless like his own lay figure. He
sat there like one on whom some stupor had fallen, and he was as
white as one of the casts; the charwoman had never seen anyone
give way like that before, and she withdrew very quietly.

In a little while he got up and mechanically kicked the broken
pieces of plaster aside. The charwoman was right, they had broken
his sleeping girl: that did not matter much, but the beautiful
slenderness, the grace he had caught from Lucy's figure--those
slendernesses, those flowing rhythms, all these were gone; the
lovely knees were ugly clay. Yes, there was the ruin, the ignoble
ruin, and he could not believe in it; he still hoped he would wake
and find he had been dreaming, so difficult is it to believe that
the living have turned to clay.

In front of him there was the cheval glass, and overcome though he
was by misfortune he noticed that he was a small, pale, wiry, and
very dark little man, with a large bony forehead. He had seen,
strangely enough, such a bumpy forehead, and such narrow eyes in a
Florentine bust, and it was some satisfaction to him to see that
he was the typical Italian.

"If I had lived three hundred years ago," he said, "I should have
been one of Cellini's apprentices."

And yet he was the son of a Dublin builder! His father had never
himself thought to draw, but he had always taken an interest in
sculpture and painting, and he had said before Rodney was born
that he would like to have a son a sculptor. And he waited for the
little boy to show some signs of artistic aptitude. He pondered
every scribble the boy made, and scribbles that any child at the
same age could have done filled him with admiration. But when
Rodney was fourteen he remodelled some leaves that had failed to
please an important customer; and his father was overcome with
joy, and felt that his hopes were about to be realised. For the
customer, who professed a certain artistic knowledge, praised the
leaves that Rodney had designed, and soon after Rodney gave a
still further proof of his desire for art by telling his mother he
did not care to go to Mass, that Mass depressed him and made him
feel unhappy, and he had begged to be allowed to stay at home and
do some modelling. His father excused his son's want of religious
feeling on the ground that no one can think of two things at once,
and John was now bent on doing sculpture. He had converted a
little loft into a studio, and was at work there from dusk to
dusk, and his father used to steal up the ladder from time to time
to watch his son's progress. He used to say there was no doubt
that he had been forewarned, and his wife had to admit that it did
seem as if he had had some pre-vision of his son's genius: how
else explain the fact that he had said he would like to have a son
a sculptor three months before the child was born?

Rodney said he would like to go to the School of Art, and his
father kept him there for two years, though he sorely wanted him
to help in the business. There was no sacrifice that the elder
Rodney would not have made for his son. But Rodney knew that he
could not always count upon his father's help, and one day he
realised quite clearly that the only way for him to become a
sculptor was by winning scholarships. There were two waiting to be
won by him, and he felt that he would have no difficulty in
winning them. That year there was a scholarship for twenty-five
pounds, and there was another scholarship that he might win in the
following year, and he thought of nothing else but these
scholarships until he had won them; then he started for Paris with
fifty pounds in his pocket, and a resolve in his heart that he
would live for a year and pay his fees out of this sum of money.
Those were hard days, but they were likewise great days. He had
been talking to Harding about those days in Paris the night before
last, and he had told him of the room at the top of the house for
which he paid thirty francs a month. There was a policeman on one
side and there was a footman on the other. It was a bare little
room, and he lived principally on bread. In those days his only
regret was that he had not the necessary threepence to go to the
cafe. "One can't go to the cafe without threepence to pay for the
harmless bock, and if one has threepence one can sit in the cafe
discussing Carpeaux, Rodin, and the mysteries, until two in the
morning, when one is at last ejected by an exhausted proprietor at
the head of numerous waiters."

Rodney's resolutions were not broken; he had managed to live for
nearly a year in Paris upon fifty pounds, and when he came to the
end of his money he went to London in search of work. He found
himself in London with two pounds, but he had got work from a
sculptor, a pupil of Dalous: "a clever man," Rodney said, "a good
sculptor; it is a pity he died." At this time Garvier was in
fairly good health and had plenty of orders, and besides Rodney he
employed three Italian carvers, and from these Italians Rodney
learned Italian, and he spent two years in London earning three
pounds a week. But the time came when the sculptor had no more
work for Rodney, and one day he told him that he would not require
him that week, there was no work for him, nor was there the next
week or the next, and Rodney kicked his heels and pondered Elgin
marbles for a month. Then he got a letter from the sculptor saying
he had some work for him to do; and it was a good job of work, and
Rodney remained with Garvier for two months, knowing very well
that his three pounds a week was precarious fortune. Some time
after, the sculptor's health began to fail him and he had to leave
London. Rodney received news of his death two years afterwards. He
was then teaching sculpture in the art schools of Northampton, and
he wondered whether, if Garvier had lived, he would have succeeded
in doing better work than he had done.

From Northampton he went to Edinburgh, he wandered even as far as
Inverness. From Inverness he had been called back to Dublin, and
for seven years he had taught in the School of Art, saving money
every year, putting by a small sum of money out of the two hundred
pounds that he received from the Government, and all the money he
got for commissions. He accepted any commission, he had executed
bas-reliefs from photographs. He was determined to purchase his
freedom, and a sculptor requires money more than any other artist.

Rodney had always looked upon Dublin as a place to escape from. He
had always desired a country where there was sunshine and
sculpture. The day his father took him to the School of Art he had
left his father talking to the head-master, and had wandered away
to look at a Florentine bust, and this first glimpse of Italy had
convinced him that he must go to Italy and study Michael Angelo
and Donatello. Only twice had he relaxed the severity of his rule
of life and spent his holidays in Italy. He had gone there with
forty pounds in his pocket, and had studied art where art had
grown up naturally, independent of Government grants and
mechanical instruction, in a mountain town like Perugia; and his
natural home had seemed to him those narrow, white streets
streaked with blue shadows. "Oh, how blue the shadows are there in
the morning," he had said the other night to Harding, "and the
magnificent sculpture and painting! In the afternoon the sun is
too hot, but at evening one stands at the walls of the town and
sees sunsets folding and unfolding over Italy. I am at home amid
those Southern people, and a splendid pagan life is always before
one's eyes, ready to one's hand. Beautiful girls and boys are
always knocking at one's doors. Beautiful nakedness abounds.
Sculpture is native to the orange zone--the embers of the
renaissance smoulder under orange-trees."

He had never believed in any Celtic renaissance, and all the talk
he had heard about stained glass and the revivals did not deceive
him. "Let the Gael disappear," he said. "He is doing it very
nicely. Do not interfere with his instinct. His instinct is to
disappear in America. Since Cormac's Chapel he has built nothing
but mud cabins. Since the Cross of Cong he has imported Virgins
from Germany. However, if they want sculpture in this last hour I
will do some for them."

And Rodney had designed several altars and had done some religious
sculpture, or, as he put it to himself, he had done some sculpture
on religious themes. There was no such thing as religious
sculpture, and could not be. The moment art, especially sculpture,
passes out of the domain of the folk tale it becomes pagan.

One of Rodney's principal patrons was a certain Father McCabe, who
had begun life by making an ancient abbey ridiculous by adding a
modern steeple. He had ruined two parishes by putting up churches
so large that his parishioners could not afford to keep them in
repair. All this was many years ago, and the current story was
that a great deal of difficulty had been experienced in settling
Father McCabe's debts, and that the Bishop had threatened to
suspend him if he built any more. However this may be, nothing was
heard of Father McCabe for fifteen years. He retired entirely into
private life, but at his Bishop's death he was heard of in the
newspapers as the propounder of a scheme for the revival of Irish
Romanesque. He had been to America, and had collected a large sum
of money, and had got permission from his Bishop to set an example
of what Ireland could do "in the line" of Cormac's Chapel.

Rodney had designed an altar for him, and he had also given Rodney
a commission for a statue of the Virgin. There were no models in
Dublin. There was no nakedness worth a sculptor's while. One of
the two fat unfortunate women that the artists of Dublin had been
living upon for the last seven years was in child, the other had
gone to England, and the memory of them filled Rodney with
loathing and contempt and an extraordinary eagerness for Italy. He
had been on the point of telling Father McCabe that he could not
undertake to do the Virgin and Child because there were no models.
He had just stopped in time. He had suddenly remembered that the
priest did not know that sculptors use models; that he did not
know, at all events, that a nude model would be required to model
a Virgin from, and he had replied ambiguously, making no promise
to do this group before he left Ireland. "If I can get a model
here I will do it," he had said to himself. "If not, the
ecclesiastic will have to wait until I get to Italy."

Rodney no more believed in finding a good model in Dublin than he
believed in Christianity. But the unexpected had happened. He had
discovered in Dublin the most delicious model that had ever
enchanted a sculptor's eyes, and this extraordinary good fortune
had happened in the simplest way. He had gone to a solicitor's
office to sign an agreement for one of Father McCabe's altars, and
as he came in he saw a girl rise from her typewriting machine.
There was a strange idle rhythm in her walk as she crossed the
office, and Rodney, as he stood watching her, divined long
tapering legs and a sinuous back. He did not know what her face
was like. Before she had time to turn round, Mr. Lawrence had
called him into his office, and he had been let out by a private
door. Rodney had been dreaming of a good model, of the true
proportions and delicate articulations that in Paris and Italy are
knocking at your door all day, and this was the very model he
wanted for his girl feeding chickens and for his Virgin, and he
thought of several other things he might do from her. But he might
as well wish for a star out of heaven, for if he were to ask that
girl to sit to him she would probably scream with horror; she
would run to her confessor, and the clergy would be up in arms.
Rodney had put the girl out of his head, and had gone on with his
design for an altar. But luck had followed him for this long
while, and a few days afterwards he had met the pretty clerk in a
tea-room. He had not seen her face before, and he did not know who
it was until she turned to go, and as she was paying for her tea
at the desk he asked her if Mr. Lawrence were in town. He could
see that she was pleased at being spoken to. Her eyes were alert,
and she told him that she knew he was doing altars for Father
McCabe, and Father McCabe was a cousin of hers, and her father had
a cheese-monger's shop, and their back windows overlooked the mews
in which Rodney had his studio.

"How late you work! Sometimes your light does not go out until
twelve o'clock at night."

Henceforth he met her at tea in the afternoons, and they went to
the museum together, and she promised to try to get leave from her
father and mother to sit to him for a bust. But she could only sit
to him for an hour or two before she went to Mr. Lawrence, and
Rodney said that she would be doing him an extraordinary favour if
she would get up some hours earlier and sit to him from eight till
ten. It was amusing to do the bust, but the bust was only a
pretext. What he wanted her to do was to sit for the nude, and he
could not help trying to persuade her, though he did not believe
for a moment that he would succeed. He took her to the museum and
he showed her the nude, and told her how great ladies sat for
painters in the old times. He prepared the way very carefully, and
when the bust was finished he told her suddenly that he must go to
a country where he could get models. He could see she was
disappointed at losing him, and he asked her if she would sit.

"You don't want a nude model for Our Blessed Lady. Do you?"

There was a look, half of hesitation, half of pleasure, and he
knew that she would sit to him, and he guessed she would have sat
to him long ago if he had asked her. No doubt his long delay in
asking her to sit had made her fear he did not think her figure a
good one. He had never had such a model before, not in France or
in Italy, and had done the best piece of work he had ever done in
his life. Harding had seen it, and had said that it was the best
piece that he had done. Harding had said that he would buy it from
him if he got rid of the conventional head, and when Harding had
left him he had lain awake all night thinking how he should model
Lucy's head, and he was up and ready for her at eight, and had
done the best head he had ever done in his life.

Good God! that head was now flattened out, and the child was
probably thrown back over the shoulders. Nothing remained of his
statue. He had not the strength to do or to think. He was like a
lay figure, without strength for anything, and if he were to hear
that an earthquake was shaking Dublin into ruins he would not
care. "Shake the whole town into the sea," he would have said.

The charwoman had closed the door, and he did not hear Lucy until
she was in the studio.

"I have come to tell you that I cannot sit again. But what has
happened?"

Rodney got up, and she could see that his misfortune was greater
than her's.

"Who has done this?" she said. "Your casts are all broken."

"Who, indeed, has done this?"

"Who broke them? What has happened? Tell me. They have broken the
bust you did of me. And the statue of the Virgin--has anything
happened to that?"

"The statue of the Virgin is a lump of clay. Oh, don't look at it.
I am out of my mind."

She took two or three steps forward.

"There it is," he said. "Don't speak about it, don't touch it."

"Something may be left."

"No, nothing is left. Don't look at me that way. I tell you
nothing is left. It is a lump of clay, and I cannot do it again. I
feel as if I never could do a piece of sculpture again, as if I
never wanted to. But what are you thinking of? You said just now
that you could not sit to me again. Tell me, Lucy, and tell me
quickly. I can see you know something about this. You suspect
someone."

"No, I suspect no one. It is very strange."

"You were going to tell me something when you came in. You said
you could not sit to me again. Why is that?"

"Because they have found out everything at home, that I sat for
you, for the Virgin."

"But they don't know that--"

"Yes, they do. They know everything. Father McCabe came in last
night, just after we had closed the shop. It was I who let him in,
and mother was sorry. She knew he had come to ask father for a
subscription to his church. But I had said that father and mother
were at home, and when I brought him upstairs and we got into the
light, he stood looking at me. He had not seen me for some years,
and I thought at first it was because he saw me grown up. He sat
down, and began to talk to father and mother about his church, and
the altars he had ordered for it, and the statues, and then he
said that you were doing a statue for him, and mother said that
she knew you very well, and that you sometimes came to spend an
evening with us, and that I sat to you. It was then that I saw him
give a start. Unfortunately, I was sitting under a lamp reading a
book, and the light was full upon my face, and he had a good view
of it. I could see that he recognised me at once. You must have
shown him the statue. It was yesterday you changed the head."

"You had not gone an hour when he called, and I had not covered up
the group. Now I am beginning to see light. He came here anxious
to discuss every sort of thing with me, the Irish Romanesque, the
Celtic renaissance, stained glass, the possibility of rebuilding
another Cormac's Chapel. He sat warming his shins before the
stove, and I thought he would have gone on for ever arguing about
the possibility of returning to origins of art. I had to stop him,
he was wasting all my day, and I brought over that table to show
him my design for the altar. He said it was not large enough, and
he took hours to explain how much room the priest would require
for his book and his chalice. I thought I should never have got
rid of him. He wanted to know about the statue of the Virgin, and
he was not satisfied when I told him it was not finished. He
prowled about the studio, looking into everything. I had sent him
a sketch for the Virgin and Child, and he recognised the pose as
the same, and he began to argue. I told him that sculptors always
used models, and that even a draped figure had to be done from the
nude first, and that the drapery went on afterwards. It was
foolish to tell him these things, but one is tempted to tread on
their ignorance, their bigotry; all they say and do is based on
hatred of life. Iconoclast and peasant! He sent some religion-
besotted slave to break my statue."

"I don't think Father McCabe would have done that; he has got me
into a great deal of trouble, but you are wronging him. He would
not get a ruffian to break into your studio."

Rodney and Lucy stood looking at each other, and she had spoken
with such conviction that he felt she might be right.

"But who else could do it except the priest? No one had any
interest in having it done except the priest. He as much as told
me that he would never get any pleasure from the statue now that
he knew it had been done from a naked woman. He went away thinking
it out. Ireland is emptying before them. By God, it must have been
he. Now it all comes back to me. He has as much as said that
something of the temptation of the naked woman would transpire
through the draperies. He said that. He said that it would be a
very awful thing if the temptations of the flesh were to transpire
through the draperies of the Virgin. From the beginning they have
looked upon women as unclean things. They have hated woman. Woman
have to cover up their heads before they go into the churches.
Everything is impure in their eyes, in their impure eyes, whereas
I saw nothing in you but loveliness. He was shocked by those round
tapering legs; and would have liked to curse them; and the dainty
design of the hips, the beautiful little hips, and the breasts
curved like shells, that I modelled so well. It is he who
blasphemes. They blaspheme against Life.... My God, what a vile
thing is the religious mind. And all the love and veneration that
went into that statue! There it is: only a lump of clay."

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