William Shakespeare - "King Richard the Second"

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Dillon Wallace - "The Lure of the Labrador Wild"

Clarence E. Edwords - "Bohemian San Francisco"

The Untilled Field

G >> George Moore >> The Untilled Field




"Yes. But, Ned--"

"No, no, I am not in the least angry," he said, "I shall always
get money to carry on politics. But what a game it is! And I
suppose, Ellen, you consult him on every detail of your life?"

Her admission that Father Brennan had taken down books and put on
his spectacles delighted him.

"Taking down tomes!" he said. "Splendid! Some of these gentlemen
would discuss theology with God. I can see Father Brennan getting
up: 'Sire, my reason for entering the said sin as a venal sin,
etc.'"

Very often during the evening the sewing dropped from her hands,
and she sat thinking. Sooner or later she would nave to tell Ned
she had read his manuscript. He would not mind her reading his
manuscript, and though he hated the idea that anyone should turn
to a priest and ask him for his interpretation regarding right and
wrong, he had not, on the whole, been as angry as she had
expected.

At last she got up. "I am going to bed, Ned."

"Isn't it very early?"

"There is no use my stopping here. You don't want to talk to me;
you'll go on playing till midnight."

"Now, why this petulancy, Ellen? I think it shows a good deal of
forgiveness for me to kiss you after the way you have behaved."

She held a long string of grease in her fingers, and was melting
it, and when she could no longer hold it in her fingers, she threw
the end into the flame.

"I've forgiven you, Ellen.... You never tell me anything of your
ideas now; we never talk to each other, and if this last relation
is broken there will be nothing ... will there?"

"I sought Father Brennan's advice under the seal of confession,
that was all. You don't think that--"

"There are plenty of indirect ways in which he will be able to
make use of the information he has got from you."

"You have not yet heard how it happened, and perhaps when you do
you will think worse of me. I went into your room to see what
books you were reading. There was no harm in looking at a book;
but you had put the books so far into the bookcase that I could
not see the name of the author. I took up the manuscript from the
table and glanced through it. I suppose I ought not to have done
that: a manuscript is not the same as a book. And now goodnight."

She had gone to her room and did not expect him. Well, the sensual
coil was broken, and if he did not follow her now she would
understand that it was broken. He had wanted freedom this long
while. They had come to the end of the second period, and there
are three--a year of mystery and passion, and then some years of
passion without mystery. The third period is one of resignation.
The lives of the parents pass into the children, and the mated
journey on, carrying their packs. Seldom, indeed, the man and the
woman weary of the life of passion at the same time and turn
instinctively into the way of resignation like animals. Sometimes
it is the man who turns first, sometimes it is the woman. In this
case it was the man. He had his work to do, and Ellen had her
child to think of, and each must think of his and her task from
henceforth. Their tasks were not the same. Each had a different
task; she had thrown, or tried to throw, his pack from his
shoulders. She had thwarted him, or, tried to thwart him. He grew
angry as he thought of what she had done. She had gone into his
study and read his papers, and she had then betrayed him to a
priest. He lay awake thinking how he had been deceived by Ellen;
thinking that he had been mistaken; that her character was not the
noble character he had imagined. But at the bottom of his heart he
was true to the noble soul that religion could not extinguish nor
even his neglect.

She said one day: "Is it because I read your manuscript and told
the priest, that you would not come to my room, or is it because
you are tired of me?"

"I cannot tell you; and, really, this conversation is very
painful. I am engaged upon my work, and I have no thoughts for
anything but it." Another time when he came from the piano and sat
opposite to her she raised her eyes from her sewing and sat
looking at him, and then getting up suddenly she put her hands to
her forehead and said to herself: "I will conquer this," and she
went out of the room.

And from that day she did not trouble him with love. She obtained
control over herself, and he remembered a mistress who had ceased
to love him, and he had persecuted her for a long while with
supplication. "She is at one with herself always," he said, and he
tried to understand her. "She is one of those whose course through
life is straight, and not zig-zag, as mine is." He liked to see
her turn and look at the baby, and he said, "That love is the
permanent and original element of things, it is the universal
substance;" and he could trace Ellen's love of her child in her
love of him; these loves were not two loves, but one love. And
when walking one evening through the shadows, as they spoke about
the destiny we can trace in our lives, about life and its
loneliness, the conversation verged on the personal, and she said,
with a little accent of regret, but not reproachfully:--

"But, Ned, you could not live with anyone, at least not always. I
think you would sooner not live with anyone."

He did not dare to contradict her; he knew that she had spoken the
truth; and Ned was sorry he was giving pain to Ellen, for there
was no one he would have liked to please better. He regretted that
he was what he was, that his course was zig-zag. For a moment he
regretted that such a fate should have befallen Ellen. "I am not
the husband that would have suited her," he said.... And then,
after a moment's reflection, "I was her instinct; another would
not have satisfied her instinct; constancy is not everything. It's
a pity I cannot love her always, for none is more worthy of being
loved."

They became friends; he knew there was no danger of her betraying
him again. Her responsibility ended with her money, and he told
her how the agitation was progressing.

"Oh, Ned, if I were only sure that your agitation was not directed
against religion I would follow you. But you will never believe in
me."

"Yes, I believe in you. Come to Dublin with me; come to the
meeting. I'd like you to hear my speech."

"I would like to hear you speak, Ned; but I don't think I can go
to the meeting."

They were on their way to the station, and they walked some time
without speaking. Then, speaking suddenly and gravely as if
prompted by some deep instinct, Ellen said:--

"But if you fail, Ned, you will be an outcast in Ireland, and if
that happens you will go away, and I shall never see you again."

He turned and stood looking at her. That he should fail and become
an outcast were not at all unlikely. Her words seemed to him like
a divination! But it is the unexpected that happens, she said to
herself, and the train came up to the station, and he bade her
good-bye, and settled himself down in a seat to consider his
speech for the last time.

"I shall say everything I dare, the moment is ripe; and the threat
to hold out is that Ireland is becoming a Protestant country. And
the argument to use is that the Catholics are leaving because
there is no joy in Ireland."

He went through the different sections of his speech introducing
the word joy: Is Ireland going to become joyous? She has dreamed
long enough among dead bones and ancient formulae. The little
stations went by and the train rolled into Harcourt Street. He
called a car. He was speaking at the Rotunda.

He was speaking on the depopulation question, and he said that
this question came before every other question. Ireland was now
confronted with the possibility that in five-and-twenty years the
last of Ireland would have disappeared in America. There were some
who attributed the Irish emigration to economic causes: that was a
simple and obvious explanation, one that could be understood by
everybody; but these simple and obvious explanations are not
often, if they are ever, the true ones. The first part of Ned's
speech was taken up with the examination of the economic causes,
and proving that these were not the origin of the evil. The
country was joyless; man's life is joyless in Ireland. In every
other country there were merry-makings. "You have only to go into
the National Gallery," he said, "to see how much time the Dutch
spent in merry-makings." All their pictures with the exception of
Rembrandt's treated of joyful subjects, of peasants dancing under
trees, peasants drinking and singing songs in taverns, and
caressing servant girls. Some of their merry-makings were not of a
very refined character, but the ordinary man is not refined, and
in the most refined men there is often admiration and desire for
common pleasure. In the country districts Irish life is one of
stagnant melancholy, the only aspiration that comes into their
lives is a religious one. "Of course it will be said that the
Irish are too poor to pay for pleasure, but they are not too poor
to spend fifteen millions a year upon religion." He was the last
man in the world who would say that religion was not necessary,
but if he were right in saying that numbers were leaving Ireland
because Ireland was joyless he was right in saying that it was the
duty of every Irishman to spend his money in making Ireland a
joyful country. He was speaking now in the interests of religion.
A country is antecedent to religion. To have religion you must
first have a country, and if Ireland was not made joyful Ireland
would become a Protestant country in about twenty-five years. In
support of this contention he produced figures showing the rate at
which the Catholics were emigrating. But not only were the
Catholics emigrating--those who remained were becoming nuns and
priests. As the lay population declined the clerics became more
numerous. "Now," he said, "there must be a laity. It is a very
commonplace thing to say, but this very commonplace truth is
forgotten or ignored, and I come here to plead to-day for the
harmless and the necessary laity." He knew that these words would
get a laugh, and that the laugh would get him at least two or
three minutes' grace, and these two or three minutes could not be
better employed than with statistics, and he produced some
astonishing figures. These figures were compiled, he said, by a
prelate bearing an Irish name, but whose object in Ireland was to
induce Irishmen and Irishwomen to leave Ireland. This would not be
denied, though the pretext on which he wished Irish men and women
to leave Ireland would be pleaded as justification. "But of this I
shall speak," Ned said, "presently. I want you first to give your
attention to the figures which this prelate produced, and with
approbation. According to him there were ten convents and one
hundred nuns in the beginning of the century, now there were
twelve hundred convents and twenty thousand nuns. The prelate
thinks that this is a matter for us to congratulate ourselves on.
In view of our declining population I cannot agree, and I regret
that prelates should make such thoughtless observations. Again I
have to remind you of a fact that cannot be denied, but which is
ignored, and it is that a celibate clergy cannot continue the
population, and that if the population be not continued the tail
of the race will disappear in America in about twenty-five
years.... Not only does this prelate think that we should
congratulate ourselves on the fact that while the lay population
is decreasing the clerical population is increasing, but he thinks
that Ireland should still furnish foreign missions. He came to
Ireland to get recruits, to beseech Irishmen and Irishwomen to
continue their noble work of the conversion of the world. No doubt
the conversion of the world is a noble work. My point now is that
Ireland has done her share in this noble work, and that Ireland
can no longer spare one single lay Irishman or cleric or any
Irishwoman. If the foreign mission is to be recruited it must be
recruited at the expense of some other country."

Ned suggested Belgium as the best recruiting ground. But it was
the prelate's own business to find recruits, it was only Ned's
business to say that Ireland had done enough for the conversion of
the world. And this prelate with the Irish name and cosmopolitan
heart, who thought it an admirable thing that the clerical
population should increase, while the lay population declined; who
thought that with the declining population Ireland should still
send out priests and nuns to convert the world--was no true
Irishman. He cared not a jot what became of his country, so long
as Ireland continued to furnish him with priests and nuns for the
foreign mission. This prelate was willing to bleed Ireland to
death to make a Roman holiday. Ireland did not matter to him,
Ireland was a speck--Ned would like to have said, a chicken that
the prelate would drop into the caldron which he was boiling for
the cosmopolitan restaurant; but this would be an attack upon
religion, it would be too direct to be easily understood by the
audience, and as the words came to his lips he changed the phrase
and said, "a pinch of snuff in the Roman snuff-box." After this,
Ned passed on to perhaps the most important part of his speech--to
the acquisition of wealth by the clergy. He said that if the lay
population had declined, and if the clerical population had
increased, there was one thing that had increased with the clergy,
and that was the wealth of the clergy. "I wish the cosmopolitan
prelate had spoken upon this subject. I wonder if he inquired how
much land has passed into the hands of the clergy in the last
twenty years, and how many mortgages the religious hold upon land.
I wonder if he inquired how many poultry-farms the nuns and the
friars are adding to their convents and their monasteries; and now
they are starting new manufactories for weaving--the weaving
industry is falling into their hands. And there are no lay
teachers in Ireland, now all the teaching is done by clerics. The
Church is very rich in Ireland. If Ireland is the poorest country
in the world, the Irish Church is richer than any other. All the
money in Ireland goes into religion. There is only one other trade
that can compete with it. Heaven may be for the laity, but this
world is certainly for the clergy."

More money was spent upon religion in Ireland than in any other
country. Too much money was spent for the moment in building
churches, and the great sums of money that were being spent on
religion were not fairly divided. And passing rapidly on, Ned very
adroitly touched upon the relative positions of the bishops and
the priests and the curates. He told harrowing stories of the
destitution of the curates, and he managed so well that his
audience had not time to stop him. Everything he thought that they
could not agree with he sandwiched between things that he knew
they would agree with.

Father Murphy stood a little distance on his right, a thick-set
man, and as the sentences fell from Ned's lips he could see that
Father Murphy was preparing his answer, and he guessed what Father
Murphy's answer would be like. He knew Father Murphy to be an
adroit speaker, and the priest began in a low key as Ned had
expected him to do. He began by deploring the evils of emigration,
and Mr. Carmady deserved their best thanks for attracting popular
attention to this evil. They were indebted to him for having done
this. Others had denounced the evil, but Mr. Carmady's eloquence
had enabled him to do so as well, perhaps even better than it had
been done before. He complimented Mr. Carmady on the picturesque
manner in which he described the emptying of the country, but he
could not agree with Mr. Carmady regarding the causes that had
brought about this lamentable desire to leave the fatherland. Mr.
Carmady's theory was that the emptying of Ireland was due to the
fact that the Irish priests had succeeded in inducing men to
refrain from the commission of sin. Mr. Carmady did not reproach
the priests with having failed; he reproached them with having
succeeded. A strange complaint. The cause of the emigration, which
we all agreed in deploring, was, according to Mr. Carmady, the
desire of a sinless people for sin. A strange accusation. The
people, according to Mr. Carmady, were leaving Ireland because
they wished to indulge in indecent living. Mr. Carmady did not use
these words; the words he used were "The joy of life," but the
meaning of the words was well known.

"No race," he said, "had perhaps ever been libelled as the Irish
race had been, but of all the libels that had ever been levelled
against it, no libel had ever equalled the libel which he had
heard uttered to-day, that the Irish were leaving Ireland in
search of sin.

"They had heard a great deal about the dancing-girl, and according
to Mr. Carmady it would seem that a nation could save itself by
jigging."

"He is speaking very well, from his point of view," said Ned to
himself.

Father Murphy was a stout, bald-headed man with small pig-like
eyes, and a piece seemed to have been taken from the top of his
bony forehead. He was elegantly dressed in broadcloth and he wore
a gold chain and he dangled his chain from time to time. He was
clearly the well-fed, well-housed cleric who was making, in this
world, an excellent living of his advocacy for the next, and Ned
wondered how it was that the people did not perceive a discrepancy
between Father Murphy's appearance and the theories he propounded.
"The idealism of the Irish people," said the priest, "was
inveterate," and he settled himself on his short legs and began
his peroration.

Ned had begun to feel that he had failed, he began to think of his
passage back to America. Father Murphy was followed by a young
curate, and the curate began by saying that Mr. Carmady would be
able to defend his theories, and that he had no concern with Mr.
Carmady's theories, though, indeed, he did not hear Mr. Carmady
say anything which was contrary to the doctrine of our "holy
religion." Father Murphy had understood Mr. Carmady's speech in
quite a different light, and it seemed to the curate that he,
Father Murphy, had put a wrong interpretation upon it; at all
events he had put one which the curate could not share. Mr.
Carmady had ventured, and, he thought, very properly, to call
attention to the number of churches that were being built and the
number of people who were daily entering the orders. He did not
wish to criticise men and women who gave up their lives to God,
but Mr. Carmady was quite right when he said that without a laity
there could be no country. In Ireland the clergy were apt to
forget this simple fact that celibates do not continue the race.
Mr. Carmady had quoted from a book written by a priest in which
the distinguished author had said he looked forward to the day
when Ireland would be one vast monastery, and the curate agreed
with Mr. Carmady that no more foolish wish had ever found its way
into a book. He agreed with Mr. Carmady that a real vocation is a
rare thing. No country had produced many painters or many
sculptors or many poets, and a true religious vocation was equally
rare. Mr. Carmady had pointed out that although the population had
diminished the nuns and priests had increased, and Father Murphy
must hold that Ireland must become one vast monastery, and the
laity ought to become extinct, or he must agree with Mr. Carmady
that there was a point when a too numerous clergy would
overbalance the laity.

Altogether an unexpected and plucky little speech, and long before
it closed Ned saw that Father Murphy's triumph was not complete.
Father Murphy's face told the same tale.

The curate's argument was taken up by other curates, and Ned began
to see he had the youth of the country on his side.

He was speaking at the end of the week at another great meeting,
and received even better support at this meeting than he had done
at the first, and he returned home wondering what his wife was
thinking of his success. But what matter? Ireland was waking from
her sleep.... The agitation was running from parish to parish,
it seemed as if the impossible were going to happen, and that the
Gael was going to be free.

The curates had grievances, and he applied himself to setting the
inferior clergy against their superiors, and as the agitation
developed he told the curates that they were no better than
ecclesiastical serfs, that although the parish priests dozed in
comfortable arm-chairs and drank champagne, the curates lived by
the wayside and ate and drank very little and did all the work.

But one day at Maynooth it was decided that curates had legitimate
grievances, and that the people had grievances that were likewise
legitimate. And at this great council it was decided that the
heavy marriage fees and the baptismal fees demanded by the priests
should be reduced. Concessions were accompanied by threats. Even
so it required all the power of the Church to put down the
agitation. Everyone stood agape, saying the bishops must win in
the end. An indiscretion on Ned's part gave them the victory. In a
moment of excitement he was unwise enough to quote John Mitchel's
words "that the Irish would be free long ago only for their damned
souls." A priest wrote to the newspapers pointing out that after
these words there could be no further doubt that it was the
doctrine of the French Revolution that Mr. Carmady was trying to
force upon a Christian people. A bishop wrote saying that the
words quoted were fit words for Anti-Christ. After that it was
difficult for a priest to appear on the same platform, and the
curates whose grievances had been redressed deserted, and the
fight became an impossible one.

Very soon Ned's meetings were interrupted, disagreeable scenes
began to happen, and his letters were not admitted to the
newspapers. A great solitude formed about him.

"Well," he said one morning, "I suppose you have read the account
in the paper of my ignominious escape. That is what they called
it."

"The wheel," Ellen said, "is always going round. You may be at the
bottom now, but the wheel is going round, only there is no use
opposing the people in their traditions, in their instinct... .
And whether the race is destined to disappear or to continue it is
certain that the last Gael will die a Catholic."

"And the Red Indian will die with the scalp at his girdle."

"We won't talk about religion, we'll talk about things we are
agreed upon. I have heard you say yourself that you would not go
back to America again, that you never enjoyed life until you came
here."

"That was because I met you, Ellen."

"I have heard you praise Ireland as being the most beautiful and
sympathetic country in the world."

"It is true that I love these people, and I wish I could become
one of them."

"You would become one of them, and yet you would tear them to
pieces because they are not what you want them to be."

Sometimes he thought he would like to write "A Western Thibet,"
but he was more a man of action than of letters. His writings had
been so long confined to newspaper articles that he could not see
his way from chapter to chapter. He might have overcome the
difficulty, but doubt began to poison his mind. "Every race," he
said, "has its own special genius. The Germans have or have had
music. The French and Italians have or have had painting and
sculpture. The English have or have had poetry. The Irish had, and
alas! they still have their special genius, religious vocation."

He used to go for long walks on the hills, and one day, lying in
the furze amid the rough grass, his eyes following the course of
the ships in the bay, he said: "Was it accident or my own
fantastic temperament that brought me back from Cuba?" It seemed
as if a net had been thrown over him and he had been drawn along
like a fish in a net. "For some purpose," he said. "But for what
purpose? I can perceive none, and yet I cannot believe that an
accident brought me to Ireland and involved me in the destiny of
Ireland for no purpose."

And he did not need to take the book from his pocket, he knew the
passage well, and he repeated it word for word while he watched
the ships in the bay.

"We were friends and we have become strangers, one to the other.
Ah, yes; but it is so, and we do not wish to hide our
strangerhood, or to dissemble as if we were ashamed of it. We are
two ships each with a goal and a way; and our ways may draw
together again and we may make holiday as before. And how
peacefully the good ships used to lie in the same harbour, under
the same sun; it seemed as if they had reached their goal, and it
seemed as if there was a goal. But soon the mighty sway of our
tasks laid on us as from of old sundered and drove us into
different seas and different zones; and it may be that we shall
never meet again and it may be that we shall meet and not know
each other, so deeply have the different seas and suns changed us.
The law that is over us decreed that we must become strangers one
to the other; and for this we must reverence each other the more,
and for this the memory of our past friendship becomes more
sacred. Perhaps there is a vast invisible curve and orbit and our
different goals and ways are parcel of it, infinitesimal segments.
Let us uplift ourselves to this thought! But our life is too short
and our sight too feeble for us to be friends except in the sense
of this sublime possibility. So, let us believe in our stellar
friendship though we must be enemies on earth."

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