Home > Authors Index > George Augustus Moore > Celibates > This page
Celibates, a fiction by George Augustus Moore |
||
John Norton - Chapter 7 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ JOHN NORTON CHAPTER VII But if in the morning he were strong, Kitty was more beautiful than ever. They walked towards the tennis seat, with its red-striped awning. They listened to the feeble cawing of young rooks swinging on the branches. They watched the larks nestle in and fly out of the golden meadow. It was May-time, and the air was bright with buds and summer bees. She was dressed in white, and the shadow of the straw hat fell across her eyes when she raised her face. He was dressed in black, and the clerical frock-coat, buttoned by one button at the throat, fell straight. They sat under the red-striped awning of the tennis seat. The large grasping hands holding the polished cane contrasted with the reedy, translucent hands laid upon the white folds. The low, sweet breath of the May-time breathed within them, and their hearts were light; hers was only conscious of the May-time, but his was awake with unconscious love, and he yielded to her, to the perfume of the garden, to the absorbing sweetness of the moment. He was no longer John Norton. His being was part of the May--time; it had gone forth and had mingled with the colour of the fields and sky; with the life of the flowers, with all vague scents and sounds. 'How beautiful the day is,' he said, speaking slowly. 'Is it not all light and colour? And you, in your white dress, with the sunlight on your hair, seem more blossom--like than any flower. I wonder what flower I should compare you to? Shall I say a rose? No, not a rose, nor a lily, nor a violet; you remind me rather of a tall, delicate, pale carnation....' 'Why, John, I never heard you speak like that before. I thought you never paid compliments.' The transparent green of the limes shivered, the young rooks cawed feebly, and the birds flew out of and nestled with amorous wings in the golden meadow. Kitty had taken off her straw hat, the sunlight caressed the delicate plenitudes of the bent neck, the delicate plenitudes bound with white cambric, cambric swelling gently over the bosom into the narrow of the waist, cambric fluting to the little wrist, reedy, translucid hands; cambric falling outwards, and flowing like a great white flower over the greensward, over the mauve stocking, and the little shoe set firmly. The ear like a rose leaf; a fluff of light hair trembling on the curving nape, and the head crowned with thick brown gold. And her pale marmoreal eyes were haunted by a yearning look which he had always loved, and which he had hitherto only found in some beautiful relics of antiquity. She seemed to him purged, as a Greek statue, of all life's grossness; and as the women of Botticelli and Mantegna she seemed to him to live in a long afternoon of unchanging aspiration. And it seemed to him that he thought of her as impersonally as he thought of these women, and the fact that she participated in the life of the flesh neither concerned him nor did it matter. That she lived in the flesh instead of in marble was an accident. He smiled at the paradox, for he had recovered from the fears of overnight and was certain that even the longing to strain her in his arms was only part of the impulse which compels our lips to the rose, which buries our hands in the earth when we lie at length, which fills our souls with longing for white peaks and valleys when the great clouds tower and shine. And that evening, as he sat in his study, his thoughts suddenly said: 'She is the symbol of my inner life.' Surprised and perplexed, he sought the meaning of the words. He was forced to admit that her beauty had penetrated his soul. But was it not natural for him to admire all beautiful things, especially things on a certain plane of idea? He had admired other women: in what then did his admiration for this woman differ from that, which others had drawn from him? In his admiration for other women there had always been a sense of repulsion; this feeling of repulsion seemed to be absent from his admiration for Kitty.... He hardly perceived any sex in her; she was sexless as a work of art, as the women of the first Italian painters, as some Greek statues. Then by natural association of idea his mind was carried back to early youth, to struggles with himself, and to temptations which he had conquered, and the memory of which he was always careful to keep out of mind. In that critical time he had felt that it was essential for him 'to come to terms with life.' And the terms he had discovered were strictest adhesion to the rules laid down by the Catholic Church for the conduct of life. He had lived within these rules and had received peace. Now for the first time that peace was seriously assailed. His thoughts continued their questioning, and he found himself asking if sufficient change had come into his nature to allow him to accept marriage. But before answer could be given an opposing thought asked if this girl were more than a mere emissary of Satan; and with that thought all that was mediaeval in him arose.
He had known the truth, as if by instinct, from the first. No life was possible for him except an ascetic life. But he had no vocation for the priesthood. True that in a moment of weakness, after a severe illness, he had returned to Stanton College with the intention of taking orders; but with renewal of health the truth had come home to him that he was as unfitted to the priesthood as he was for marriage, or nearly so. The path of his life lay between the church and the world; he must remain in the world though he never could be of the world, he could only view the world as a spectator, as a passing pageant it interested him; and with art and literature and music, for necessary distraction, and the fixed resolve to save his soul--nothing really mattered but that--he hoped to achieve his destiny. _ |
||