“Euphorion in Texas” (1920)

“Euphorion in Texas” is a short story in the form of memoir, first published by George Moore in the English Review in 1914 and then inserted into a private 1920 edition of Memoirs of My Dead Life, which had first been published in 1906. In it, a beautiful and cultured woman from Texas named Honor—based on Honor Euphrasia Woulfe—comes to Dublin and asks Moore to father her child.

XIII.

‘Bring in the lamp, Agnes,’ I said, ‘and quickly.’ And to myself as soon as she had left the room I said, ‘Alas! She’ll linger in the pantry leaving me in this grey dusk which pervades the room like a phantom.’ And afraid to look round I sat in my chair, thinking; for the dusk had started me thinking that it were stupid to retain any longer, for the sake of their beauty, my old-time lamps. A key winds up the nourishing oil with a gurgle, but the men who understood the delicate mechanism of these lamps are dead; mine are never in perfect repair, and the process of lighting them seems to be beyond the scope of Agnes’s mind, for the fact, simple though it seems, has never been fully grasped by her, that after winding up the lamp she must wait till the oil overflows the burner before laying the match to the wick. ‘Ah, here she is!’ And I began to put questions to her, gradually eliciting the truth, cook had wound the lamp for her, so there would be no danger of finding myself in the dark.

It is unfortunate to happen upon so imperfect an intelligence as Agnes’s, but everybody has faults, we must always remember that; and with an easy mind I watched a yellow-haired, robust young woman with enormous hips and narrow shoulders, draw grey curtains across the tall, narrow windows. The long folds seemed to me to be in keeping with the urn-shaped lamps; and in a room now lighted by fire and lamp, I lay back in my arm-chair and tried to pick up the thread of my memories, catching up an adventure at Vincennes, whither I had gone with a pretty woman at the end of the ’seventies when white stockings were still modish. A garter and a lace handkerchief were treasured by me for many years, and the three letters that she wrote to me; but in those days no order was kept among my papers, so nothing remains of her but a name, a name which she may have changed. It seems strange that I should remember her address all through these years? 17 Cathedral Street, Baltimore. But if the street has been pulled down, nothing remains of her. Baltimore is too large a town to be cherished among one’s personal recollections. Besides, I have never been there. If I had gone to Baltimore I might have married her, and if I had married her my life would have been quite different. I might have gone into business. What is Baltimore celebrated for? And what has become of Marie Bruguère? Irrelevant questions of this kind elderly gentlemen are prone to ask themselves in the hour before dinner, when the parlourmaid has brought the lamp and drawn the curtains. And while considering which I should choose, were it given to me again to choose a life of love or of literature, my eyes roved over the pictures hanging upon the walls, the cabinets against the walls, and the tables and chairs spaced over the pale roses and florid architecture of Aubusson. It seemed to me that a chair hid a beautiful flower, and some finely designed sprays, but to remove the chair would interrupt my dream. ‘And chairs we must have.’ I said, ‘though they interrupt the perfect enjoyment of an Aubusson carpet.’

And having delivered myself of this little homily I set myself to thinking that perhaps she lay under an incised stone, and of the certain dispersal of all my beautiful furniture at Christie’s in a few years—in a very few years. My eye fell languid on the delicate proportions of a certain cabinet ‘in whose drawers,’ I said, ‘are stored many dozen letters, and, alas, not one from her who once lived in Cathedral Street!’ She wrote few and Gabrielle wrote many; her letters are all there—all but the first; long letters of four and six and eight pages, in which she tells everything, lifts every veil. I remember her writing: ‘You must make no apologies; that you are middle-aged is one of your recommendations. I really don’t like young men; and that you write books is your best quality since they are beautiful. We shall speak much of Evelyn Innes. The next day we shall meet in a museum, the next in a fiacre, and we shall take a lovely drive, and the last day you shall come to see me … You will like me very much, of course, because you could not dislike one of your own women. But I am very tall, and if you are not, it will irritate you.’

‘How evocative,’ I said, ‘are those words of small, witty eyes, blond hair, and some freckles. She writes like one whose voice is low. If I knew German I should detect her distinctly unprotestant, soft, South-German accent. Still more evocative is the letter in which she tells me that I must inscribe myself in the visitor’s book as Mr. Dayne from London, and write to her as soon as I am rested. “We will talk of Evelyn Innes,” she says in that letter, and, no doubt, if I had indulged the erethism of this exquisite Viennese, we should have talked of Evelyn Innes one of the most powerful literary aphrodisiacs ever written … though it be little else. ‘‘As soon as you are rested you will send me a little note in which you will tell me the number of your room, and à quelle heure you expect me. I then shall come at once. How nice it will be! I shall stay an hour and a half, and even if we are a little disappointed we shall laugh a great deal, because it is amusing when a lady comes to see a gentleman she has never seen before. Have you ever heard of such a funny thing?”’

A great lump of coal crumbled into ashes, and while throwing another on the fire, I reflected that the post bag had never carried a more delightful invitation; to which, alas, I had not responded! And ever since I have been asking myself why I did not go to her. Was it because she revealed herself too completely in her letter, body and soul? Be this as it may, I did not rush to the adventure, but began, instead, a comedy in which Lewis Davenant persuades Sebastian Dayne to go to Vienna and win Gabrielle’s love if he can. And it is now too late to go to her; I might as well ask her to wear one of her old hats as to love me now. Emily, too, was sacrificed to literature. In her case I feared to meet an elderly spinster who would extend a sisterly hand saying: ‘I understand you, you understand me; let us go under the willows and weep.’ But she was not a spinster. Like Gabrielle, she was moved to write to me after reading Evelyn Innes, and her story trickles through a long correspondence, carefully tied up in packets and tucked away in a drawer in that Sheraton book-case. A pathetic story hers seems to be in this hour of firelight and memory. Every man’s memory is a mirror of dead ladies. Emily came to Europe in her ’teens, and perforce we read the word ‘Fate’ when she writes that she came from Australia to learn singing at Leipzig and sat opposite her future husband the first day she took her place at table d’hôte. She thought she had never seen anybody that she liked less, and vowed between the soup and fish if she had known such a man was to sit opposite her she would have had her dinner in her room. But we cannot escape our Fate, and, despite her reluctance, the man opposite carried her away to Frankfort, where she has lived ever since, and where she has been moulded like a plant by her environment, never using her English except in her letters to me, yet keeping it in its purity, and telling me in a somewhat formal style that for years she was loved by a young German whom she met every summer in a small town in Bavaria. She was then a Roman Catholic with a sense of sin in her heart, and one day on her way to her lover her conscience troubled her so grievously that she stopped at a church, and seeing an old priest she entered his confessional and confessed much weakness of the flesh to him. ‘If I am on my way to my lover,’ she said, ‘it is to tell him that I’ll see him no more.’ ‘My daughter,’ he answered, ‘you had better not go to your lover.’

Every man’s memory is a mirror of dead ladies.

The road to the railway station lay through a wood and she had felt that out of that wood must come a sign, a miraculous manifestation which would give her strength to resist temptation. But the wood was silent, nothing stirred in the trees, and at every station she determined to take the next train back, till at last she could stand the strain no longer, and jumped out at a little wayside station. But her lover was waiting there for her, his impatience having sent him to meet her half-way; and from that moment she knew that no divinity could prevent her from doing what she felt sure was both her wish and her will. Some phrases in her letter rose up in my mind. ‘I can conceive no more perfect union than ours was, satisfying as it did every desire of soul, mind, and body; in all the years that it lasted we never had a quarrel, not even the slightest misunderstanding; it all seemed to grow more beautiful from day to day until even I, sceptic at heart, began to believe in the everlastingness of love.’

But one day her lover confessed to her that his conscience had awakened and that he must begin a new life. ‘He was a man,’ she wrote, ‘without any religious convictions at all; but now it appeared to him, all at once, that he was leading an immoral life, and with this conviction there seemed to be born in him the wish for the legitimate joys of a bourgeois existence.’ ‘For after she had given him his freedom, he married a pretty Italian governess. It was at the end of her happiness, after reading of Evelyn Innes, that she wrote asking me to come to Frankfort; but as I was not able to go she went to the little Bavarian town where once she had been very happy, ‘and where freed from the cares and thoughts of home, she now meditates and remembers,’ I said, like myself in this chair. Every year,’ I added, ‘she will struggle back to that little town, but the summer will come when she will lack strength to return there, preferring to remember its streets and fields by her own fireside.’

I only just escaped meeting her; for when I was in Munich for the festival, it seemed but a mere politeness to write suggesting that she should come to me or that I should go to her, but she discovered an excuse for not meeting me. ‘You ask what is the matter?’ she wrote. ‘Well, the naked truth is that I have had a severe attack of some liver complaint, and have burnt myself so badly with a hot water bag that I am only able to hang on my garments any sort of way. I am sure you don’t want to meet such a woman. There would be no disappointment for me, of that I am sure; whereas you, as a man, look for other qualities in a woman. You cannot, if you would, ignore the physical side of the question except in one way, by avoiding the woman, by not seeing her, letting the imagination paint her picture.’ A sincere woman. It is months since I have heard from her; and it may well be that I shall never hear from her again, and it may be that we might have had some happy moments together if she had not waited till her lover had married the Italian governess. Surmise, surmise! But she was certainly right to avoid seeing me when I was in Munich. All the same, it was a pity not to have seen her, and I am sorry that I did not go to the inn at Toelz without warning her, putting down a false name in the visitor’s book. It would have been amusing to have made her acquaintance casually in the dining-room and to have gone for walks with her and sat with her under the same trees as she had sat under with her lover, and wheedled her into telling me all about him. A comedy unfolded in the fire, and presently another face rose up in my mind: the straight nose and clear eyes of an American poetess who did not fear that I might be disillusioned, for after a long correspondence she sent me some snapshots that a girl friend had taken of her while bathing in some brook in the Andes; and as these suggested a model that the sculptor of the Venus de Milo would have implored a sitting from, her letter inviting me to come to see her in Paris some two years later was welcomed. Here was the chance of seeing in the flesh one of those ladies who admired my writings, and I went to Paris, and we meta single meeting with these last words, ‘And now I cease to be a naked woman for you’—one immemorial afternoon in Paris, and since then no letter or poem. Nothing.

A sudden recollection propelled me out of my chair, and I sought her letters among the heaps in the Sheraton book-case; but there were too many for reading that evening, and coming upon a single letter in a strange hand-writing, I said, ‘And from whom can this be? But the hand-writing is not altogether strange. I have seen it before. I have had three or four letters from her, but not more.’ And returning to my chair I determined not to yield to the temptation to solve the difficulty by taking the letter out of the envelope, and sat for a long time looking into the fire. At last I cried out, ‘It is she!’ And my thoughts drifted away from the oath given ten years ago to the moment when Agnes, my parlourmaid, came into the room with a letter in her hand, saying that it had just been sent round from the Shelbourne Hotel. The writer mentioned that she had come from Texas. ‘A sufficiently romantic origin,’ I muttered—‘“And I have come to Europe in the hope of making your acquaintance.’’ A little more abrupt than the usual letter,’ I said. ‘One thing, however, distinguishes her from the others. The others have proposed trysts, but this woman has come to me. She is within a few yards, almost within a stone’s throw, on the other side of the Green ... in the prosaic Shelbourne Hotel. But she has come from Texas.’ And a great desire entered into my heart to see the lady who had written so simply, telling me that she had come from Texas, and that one of her objects in coming to Europe was to see me. It had been my pride never to accept trysts from correspondents, but I had gone to Paris, and the distance that Honor had come exceeded by tenfold the journeys that the others had invited me to undertake. Texas was many thousand miles away, and seized, perhaps, by the magnetism to seem to me that it would be mean and cowardly to refuse to see her. ‘Insipid, trite, and cowardly I shall for ever be in my own eyes if I—’ A sudden desire to see this lady from Texas caught me in the throat, and ringing the bell for my parlourmaid. I spoke to her with much gravity lest she should understand the purpose of her errand.

I want you to go to the Shelbourne, and if she should strike you as an intelligent and sprightly woman, who is not likely to bore me, give her this letter.

‘You know, Agnes, that a great many people come here to see me on literary business, and the lady who sent this letter from the Shelbourne has come probably for an interview. My time is valuable just at present and cannot be wasted on answering stupid questions; or it may be that she has come to see me about the serial or dramatic rights of my books. I want you to go to the Shelbourne, and if she should strike you as an intelligent and sprightly woman, who is not likely to bore me, give her this letter. I have noticed that you are a good judge of character and her appearance will tell you much. A good description of her is what I should like; you will be a better judge than I. She will not be able to take you in!’

‘And if she’s an old woman, sir?’

‘Then tell her I am leaving town and am very sorry. Of course, it will be a pity, Agnes, for she has come many thousands of miles, from Texas.’

‘I have always heard, sir, that ladies from Texas are very rich.’

Her remark surprised me, so cheerfully was it spoken, and I watched her as she went down the pavement, evidently pleased at finding herself engaged in a romantic enterprise.

She had risen above herself. On hearing that the lady was in she had said she would take the note upstairs herself and had gone up in the lift. The lady was dressing for dinner and I remembered, smilingly, ‘She had her dress off, sir, and I don’t think she can be more than five or six and twenty. She just glanced at the letter and said that it would be all right.’ Agnes had continued to babble from behind my chair during dinner of to-morrow’s visitor. Becrossing my legs before the blazing fire I ruminated the pleasures of yester-year, myself at the window waiting for my visitor was a dim picture, but myself running to the front door to open it to her was distinct, like looking into a mirror. Her first words are still loud in my ear, and my own words asking her to come upstairs. I followed her thinking that Monet’s flooded meadows with willows rising out of the mist would help us to get over the first five minutes. But her thoughts were too intent on her purpose for her to consider my pictures, and she sank into a chair and sat nervous and perturbed, looking at the pale roses and the purple architecture of the Aubusson carpet. I tried Chelsea china, but she admitted that she had never considered whether Bow was merely a rougher kind of Chelsea, and we did not get more than three minutes’ conversation out of the harpsichord in the next room; Purcell’s Golden Sonata was a failure, and I remembered how I had said to myself, ‘Let us try literature,’ and calling her attention to the original edition of The Human Comedy in the book-case I took down a volume.

‘Your books,’ she said, ‘have meant more to me than any other writer.’

To put her at her ease I asked her which work she preferred, expecting her to say Evelyn Innes, but it was Sister Teresa that had awakened her interest in me, and with curiosity quickening every moment in my visitor I begged her to tell me her story, and learnt that she had decided to become a nun when she was eighteen, and had passed through the novitiate and taken the white veil before she discovered that she had no vocation for religion. It was difficult to bring her to speak of the convent, and lest I might annoy her by pursuing the subject too assiduously I contented myself with remarking that the greatest romance of all is when a man or woman says in early life, ‘I will abjure life; I will forswear it and put my faith in Heaven.’ An angry sourness in her voice announced that her hatred of the convent had deepened considerably since she left it, and to soften her temper, I added: ‘Or else when after the novitiate, or after taking the vows, the nun or monk says, “This life is not for me,” and crosses the threshold of the convent into the open air and walks into the fields and hearkens to the birds singing in the shaws. My little exordium did not seem to interest her as I hoped it would; she merely muttered that she hated to remember that two good years of her life were wasted among nuns.

‘We will speak of something else,’ I said; ‘but remember it was Sister Teresa that you liked more than any other book.’

I should have liked to verify my foreseeing through her, but she would not talk of the convent, and all I could gather was that she held it in detestation. So my imagination began at once to weave an intrigue with a priest, but rejecting this very simple hypothesis as unlikely, and clinging to the hope that a vague sense of sex had led her out of it, I reminded her that it had been said that God only gets the women that men do not want, to which aphorism she made but little answer; whereupon it became plain to me that my endeavour should be to produce inveigling talk, laying stress on the fact that our life can only be given to us for one thing—to live it; the first of our instincts is sex, therefore, for a woman to love a man and to sacrifice herself is her duty» just as a man’s duty is to sacrifice himself for a woman. My efforts were rewarded, she seemed to welcome the turn the conversation was taking; her face became animated, she listened pleased for a while, and then her face clouded, and shyly she confessed to me that she had been attracted to men since she had left the convent. She even hinted at a love story; an ordinary one it seemed to be, she had discovered him to be unworthy in time.

‘But I cannot speak of that. Why do you——’

It was necessary, I felt, to change the conversation, and the plains of Texas started up in my mind with endless cowboys scurrying for ever after wild cattle, and I besought her to tell me if she had ever whirled a lasso or enwound the hind legs of a heifer with a bolus. But the sum of her knowledge of Texas was Austin—a disappointing admission I felt it to be—having conceived Texas as plains with huts out of which men emerged to spring on horses and fire revolvers. But instructed by my visitor, I learnt that Austin is a large town in which she and her two sisters, after finding themselves destitute, had started a store; ‘store’ is American for shop, and they had dealt in general goods until they had made another fortune. Our talk suddenly became pleasant, and I learnt that my visitor’s name was Honor and that she had two sisters; neither was endowed with any remarkable intelligence; one was a good saleswoman, but a bad buyer. Her second sister was a great trial; it was partly on account of her second sister that she had decided to leave the business; and there were other reasons. It was out of the money she had made in the store that she had come to Europe, for she did not want to spend her life piling up money in Austin. No. She wasn’t married, and gave this as a reason: that once a woman decides to marry she must think of the children she may bring into the world. ‘The store.’ I dared to suggest as a career for the children that might come, a suggestion which seemed to displease her amazingly, and I heard her say that for a woman to throw herself into the arms of a man for her pleasure and bring children into the world, infirm in mind and body, was highly immoral. She admitted that she desired intellectual companionship; she could not love a stupid man, and in a primitive place like Texas, a woman who chose to have a child except in wedlock would be misunderstood. Nor had she seen a man in Texas worthy to be the father of her child. The child she desired was an exceptional child, a man of talent, a painter, a poet, a musician.

‘A musician!’ I cried, and we spoke of The Ring, but, despite my praise of it, she inclined more to literature than to music.

‘Have you ever met a man of letters who——’

It is not unlikely that this sentence was never finished, if it were I have forgotten how it ended, but remember well how strained and difficult the conversation became. We began to pick our words, myself asking timorously if a potential father for her son had ever formulated in her mind. She raised her eyes to mine and then, like one speaking out of her deeper self, stirred a little by a sudden thought, a wind, upon the water, she said:

‘I have never thought of anybody definitely, only that I would like to give Texas a literature; and when I read your books——’

‘You thought of me?’

She had paid me the compliment of thinking of me as a possible father for her son, as a man who was likely to beget a son who would give a literature to Texas …

She had paid me the compliment of thinking of me as a possible father for her son, as a man who was likely to beget a son who would give a literature to Texas; and my curiosity now enkindled as it had never been before, and as it will never be again, I asked her how the idea of giving Texas a literature worthy of its name had come to her, and if her knowledge of me was purely literary acquired from reading my books.

‘You didn’t know, for instance, that my age might preclude the possibility——’

She answered quite simply that she had thought a great deal on that question before setting out for Europe, and then, speaking with still greater diffidence, I said:

‘But you must have asked yourself if you would find a man in me whose appearance was not too distasteful, a distaste which you might not be able to overcome, despite the desire to render a great service to your country.’

‘I often thought of that on board the steamer.’

Another question had to be put, the most delicate of all, and I said:

‘Am I to understand that my appearance is not distasteful to you?’

‘No, I don’t think you distasteful.’

At these words a certain imminence seemed to come into the room, and we sat silent, myself seeking for words with desperate eagerness and not finding any, for all seemed inadequate. To thank her for her good opinion of me could not do else than to exhibit me in a prosaic light. I must cross the room boldly and kiss her or plead a pressing engagement, a daring expedient and a vulgar one in ordinary circumstances, but our circumstances were not ordinary. ‘All things considered, it isn’t likely that she will refuse,’ I said to myself, and it was in a hopeful mood that I rose out of my chair. But she rose out of hers at the same moment, and lifting her face, which seemed young and beautiful (I say seemed, for she stood with her back to the light), she extended a frank and fearless hand.

‘I must be going now. I’m afraid I have taken up a great deal of your valuable time, and I thank you very cordially for having received me.’

‘But I hope I shall have the pleasure of receiving you again. I am engaged this evening, but I shall be pleased if you will come to dinner to-morrow night.’

‘I shall be delighted to dine with you.’

And upon these words she passed gracefully and with dignity out of the room, leaving me asking myself whether the strange fortune that had befallen me were for good or evil. ‘She is an American, right enough,’ I answered. ‘But why did she make application to me rather than to Meredith, Swinburne, Yeats, Henry James, or Gosse? Gosse is the leading spirit of the English academy, and his love for literature is pure and disinterested; he could not refuse to— Something in my writings must have appealed to her. Not my style, nor the subjects I choose, but a certain pervading intimacy which I do not seek, but of which I am conscious. And that is why I was chosen instead of Gosse. A very strange and original episode, no doubt, one that a writer of tact would place in the fifteenth century, 1480, or thereabouts. Perhaps some hundreds of years further back. A story quite out of keeping with the genius of the twentieth century. It would be quite all right if the lady had sent me one of my books to write her name in; and quite all right if she had brought me the manuscript of a novel and begged me to advise her about the plot. She might have even gone further and come here with an idea for a play or a story and invited my collaboration. But to come here and invite my collaboration in— A thought like hers rises high above the base conventionalities and the tawdry desires of the ordinary man and woman who merely seek gratifications pecuniary or sexual. We do not know the motive that prompted Bettina to go to Goethe. The nearest thing in literature to my own case is to be found in The Confessions, when Madame de Warens takes Jean Jacques into the garden and confides to him that he has arrived at man’s estate. She does not solicit his favours, but just proposes herself in amiable fashion, telling him that he need not hurry himself to come to a decision. She gives him eight days to consider it, and the few lines in which he describes the episode are perhaps the most truly original in literature. But the episode, so marvellously presented in The Confessions, presents no analogy to my own case. Madame Warens is a widow, whereas Honor might be a virgin. If the unconventional errand she had come to Europe upon be not taken into account, there was nothing to lead me to suppose she was not, and I had invited her to dine with me to-morrow. In the circumstances dinner meant …

‘Good Heavens!’ I cried. ‘What have I not let myself in for? A woman whom I have never seen or heard of before, with whose appearance I am but imperfectly acquainted. She certainly struck me as young and attractive, but the morning was dark; there was some fog in the street, she wore a large hat, and sat all the time with her back to the light. True, it was I who had indicated that chair to her. But why did she get up to go the moment I crossed the room? She must have guessed that I rose to kiss her. But, after all, if her desire to give a literature to her country be a real one she must know that a kiss is preliminary to the literature.’

A hundred different decisions formed in my mind and melted into nothingness. A sudden need to see my agent, an attack of influenza, innumerable letters were composed; one was written, but it was not sent. And while all this mental torment was spending itself, I was sustained by my natural and inveterate desire of the strange, the odd, the bizarre. All my other love affairs were commonplace compared to this one, a literary love par excellence, to which the loves of Musset and George Sand were shallow and without perspective, love stories in two dimensions; whereas this is one in three, and if Texas is considered, in four. With such thoughts did I while away the hours that divided us, and as the hour approached, the pangs of hope grew tenser; a hundred times I asked myself if I had made myself clear; and I was about to send over to the Shelbourne to inquire, when she arrived, beautiful beyond my expectations. She was la symphonie en blanc majeure en personne. But as not one of Gautier’s similes occurred to me on seeing her, I will not quote, but will try to recall instead the sensations that her snow-coloured forehead awakened in me, a forehead round and high, with pale gold curls about it, and a flush of the tenderest rose breaking through the snow of her cheeks. Her eyes were the palest blue, yet it seemed to me that I had never seen blue eyes before, and during dinner I watched her snow-coloured hands lit with pink, almond-shaped nails while seeking to save the conversation from dropping, a difficult task, for Agnes hardly ever left the room. My visitor seemed to speak from the Alpine altitudes. Now and again a pleasant smile floated over her wonderful face, and her remarks, though simple, were never trivial or silly. ‘A little unbending,’ I said to myself, and began to doubt the evidence of my ears. Seeing her eating and talking to me so calmly, it seemed impossible to believe that yesterday she had asked me to enable her to give a literature to Texas. It would be too much to hope that she would undertake the good office of breaking the ice herself and, feeling myself deplorably unequal to the task, I followed her upstairs. It seemed impossible to believe that she would ever submit herself to human love. She seemed so much beyond and above it. Perhaps she was ignorant of human love and believed that a child could be produced by spells and incantations. The five minutes in the drawing-room before Agnes brought up the coffee were an agony, and when she did bring it up she took an incredible time to hand it round. At last the door closed behind her. A dryness came into my throat. It seemed to me that I could never think of anything to say again. The floor seemed to slide beneath my feet when I tried to walk across the room, and several times I changed my chair. My eyes were all the time fixed on the beautiful white forehead. After all, it could not shock her—offend her too utterly and absolutely—if I were to lean over and kiss her on the point of her shoulder. That was how she would like me to break the ice; but instead of kissing her immaculate forehead, I stood by her talking of the pictures in which I had seen her face.

‘There is Bronzino.’

It seemed impossible to believe that she would ever submit herself to human love. She seemed so much beyond and above it. Perhaps she was ignorant of human love and believed that a child could be produced by spells and incantations.

She raised her seraphic eyes to mine and my talk died in my throat. But fortunately my hand dropped on her knee. She withdrew her knee instantly, and I seemed to myself an incredible ruffian and was about to apologise for my hand when her look changed.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said, ‘for withdrawing my knee. There it is. I don’t want you to think me a little fool.’

Well, the dread moment was over and passed, and she seemed to become suddenly interpenetrated with a wonderful tenderness, not love, as we use the word, but some deep feeling of union and sense of destiny and duty seemed to animate her—a feeling easier to attribute to a Hindoo than to a northern woman. But next evening in the drawing-room as I rose from my chair to go to her she almost rushed forward to meet me; it was a beautiful instinctive movement, and a few minutes after she was kneeling in my black satin arm-chair, with her face leaned against the back I remember, her pale golden hair drawn up into a knot and fastened with a large tortoise-shell comb, polished so highly that I could see myself in it as I bent over, and, drawing her face up to mine, tasted the nectar of her tongue.

Manet’s white is the rarest, he alone can endow the breast blossom with a pink that shames a peony, but Manet’s white is mundane, and Honor’s whiteness always seemed benedictive and immortal. Bronzino’s Venus is whiter than sea-foam, but she is vain and frivolous. Francesca attained to a saintly whiteness, and as we walked through the breathless September night to her hotel Honor became intimately associated in my mind with the genius of that painter.

‘You’ll allow me to come to see you again?’ she said, stopping at the comer of the Green.

‘But why do you ask? Is it because you doubt, or have you not been well received?’

‘I’ll not pretend that the evenings I spend with you are not agreeable, and you will forgive me if my thoughts are always a little ahead.’

‘But, Honor, literature was but a pretext in enchanting fantasy.’

‘Besides, I must not interrupt your work.’

Her seriousness perplexed me, and looking back on the episode after many years it does not seem to me that I met her more than seven or eight times during the six weeks she spent in Dublin, ten times at the most. Once there was an interval of a week and, alarmed, I sent round to the Shelbourne to inquire, receiving in reply a gracious note that she would be glad to dine with me. Once, and only once, did I persuade her to go for a walk. She wished to see the Dublin mountains, and we went out Rathfarnham way and wandered about the banks of the Dodder river and returned home talking of the old farmhouse we had seen built out of great cut-stone some two hundred and fifty years ago. She stayed later that evening than was her wont, and it was then that I perceived that, however much I might strain her in my arms, we were apart. Something wider than the Atlantic divided us. Only once, when she came to bid me good-bye, did she seem to descend into the area of human feelings.

‘I am sorry to leave you, for you have been throughout very kind, the very man that I had expected from your books.’

‘But it is not true that you are leaving me?’ And, frightened by her calm eyes, I added: ‘It is not true that I shall never kiss these snow-coloured hands again.’

There is no reason why you should kiss them now,’ she answered, withdrawing her hands. ‘Why make this parting more difficult? Why force me to speak words that hurt me to speak? The end for which we met is accomplished.’

‘All the more reason that I should insist on retaining you.’

‘You wouldn’t have me sacrifice the mission that brought me here for the emotion of a moment.’

‘Of a moment!’

It seems to me that I remember her speech perfectly, and her smooth musical voice still haunts in my ears when the room is lighted by firelight and lamp.

‘You’re not sure that you will think to-morrow as you do to-day. Even so, it is certain that sooner or later you will think differently. If you had not known how to sacrifice certain emotional moments so that you might follow this path that Fate had traced for you, I should not be here to-day. You would have me believe that it would be as well if I had never come? But I know you are merely trying to think that you are sorry you ever saw me, and that I have blighted your life. You will return to your writing to-morrow. You love it better than you can ever love me, and your heart would fail you if I were to throw aside my furs and say: “I’ll stay.” You would despise me. Yes, yes, I should become in your eyes the mere traditional woman without a mission, career, or destination.’

It seems to me that I remember her speech perfectly, and her smooth musical voice still haunts in my ears when the room is lighted by firelight and lamp.

The seed must never know whence it came,’ she said, ‘We must both sacrifice something for our child. I am sacrificing the common respect of society in Texas, and you must forego all knowledge of your boy. Your name has been too intimately associated with art and literature. Swear.’

‘I swear,’ and we spent our last evening crooning names over the fire in Ely Place, for it was necessary to discover a name that would go with Honor’s surname. At last one flamed up in my mind—a name more likely to inspire painting than poetry.

‘But how do you know our child will be a boy?’

Always sure of herself, she smiled and went away, and this letter announcing his birth is all I have. Were it not for this letter her visit might have been a dream of yesternight.

‘And now I’ll doze an hour in this comfortable armchair and dream that I am on my way to Texas to seek out Honor and her boy.’

[George Moore, “Euphorian in Texas,” in Memoirs of My Dead Life: Author’s Edition (New York: Boni and Liveright: 1920), 249–269.]

Top of the page: St. Stephen’s Green looking toward the Shelbourne Hotel (National Library of Ireland)