The World as I Found It (19 page)

Moore's cheeks were inflamed. He could not move as the roué, with his big face, bent closer, in a voice crackling like a freshly wrapped candy. Well you know, laddie, how in Hong Kong the girls take it? Well, as you pump and pump away, they busy themselves shoving a knotted string up your arse, then, when you're ready to blow?
RRRrrrippp
— The antic roué tore his hand away. Why, they give it a Jack the Ripper!
God!

Moore looked as if he'd been stabbed. He gaped at the man, then at Russell, a film forming in his eyes. Russell remembered it struck him as funny, seeing his friend so pigstuck. Russell and the roué did not have long to smile. Jumping up, Moore bellowed:

You're both depraved! Get
out
! Both of you!

What do you mean, boy? demanded the man, angrily. Sit down.

I'll not sit down!
Out
, do you hear me! shouted Moore, hauling him up by the sleeve. You're not a man, you're a filthy beast! You don't deserve to live, to breed such rottenness! Nor you, Russell! Both of you!
Out!

Russell thought Moore was going to strike the man or start throwing things, he was so enraged. With oaths, the man left, but to Russell's disbelief, Moore would not hear him out then, nor even the next morning, when Moore announced that he was continuing on alone.

Why are you being this way? protested Russell. I've never in my life done or even dreamed such things as he described. I was only using him to draw you out as a lesson. You're much too naive.

Moore smacked his fists together. What right have you to presume what
I
need? Malice and depravity! Ignorance! That's all I saw last night. And it's a side of you I loathe, Russell, thinking yourself so superior! What has
filth
to teach? A sloppy raw egg! That's your morality. Man of the world! A
boy
was all I saw, a puling milkfed boy hiding behind a false sheen of rationality. I'm off. I'm off, and not another word from you!

In time, they managed more or less to put this behind them, but it was never the same — never as free or resilient, never with the same innocent trust. Actually, they came fairly early to a grim understanding, of sorts. One day before a group of their friends, Russell succeeded in demonstrating their moral objectivity — and in testing Moore's already mythic honesty — when he pointedly asked:

Moore, do you like me?

Anyone else would have felt sorely put on the spot by this challenge. Moore felt no such awkwardness, however, and he treated it like any other question. Moore answered neither quickly nor painfully, but he did answer succinctly and with his usual candor when he replied:

No.

In a twisted way, Russell was pleased with his answer, which confirmed his anxieties and certainly proved his premise about Moore's sometimes eerie honesty. The others present were highly uncomfortable, but Russell and Moore both took perverse pride in their ability to continue the discussion in seeming amicability. Still, this was a question that only unformed boys could have put to each other, before they were grown men with well-entrenched vanities and reputations to protect. This would be another injury, especially for Moore, who suffered to dispense honesty at another's whim. Yes, this, too, would go down in his debit book on Russell.

For his part, Russell had been able to see Moore with much greater clarity in those early years, in the 1890s, before contention and pride clouded his vision. Russell could readily see that Moore, with his clear, boyish freshness of face, was far handsomer than he. And despite his conflicting feelings, Russell promoted Moore. Championed by Russell and duly approved by McTaggart, Moore was easily elected to the Apostles. And then on the night of his initiation, when it was customary for the newcomer to give a speech, Moore stunned them not merely with his brilliance but with his uncanny ability to project the power and beauty of his character.

They had been talking about the Cambridge life, whether the skepticism and cynicism they learned there wouldn't later render them unfit for the normal round of offices and courtrooms, newspapers and government posts. Moore had done no preparation. It all just poured out of him as he took the stage, saying excitedly, On the contrary, gentlemen! Skepticism is what renders us most fit for life! Skepticism ought to be our religion! A permanent condition!

They had all had some wine, and they thought at first he was drunk, to be so excited. No one, not even Moore, knew what came over him that night. He hadn't felt this way since, as a boy of eleven, he had joined the Children's Special Service Mission, the evangelical crusade then sweeping England. In those days, nothing could have been more beautiful to the boy than saving a soul. Even at Brighton for a seaside holiday — while other boys in boaters and sailor suits went for donkey rides or ate ices — there he would be, dressed in his hot, ill-fitting black suit and lugging his heavy black Bible. In his zeal to save souls, he was unstoppable, gladly suffering the pulled ties and bloody noses. Let them jeer him as a hake and a bum sucker, they could not break him. So mighty was the boy preacher's passion that he even succeeded in converting older, cynical boys, reducing some to tears when he confronted them, demanding like God's own Highwayman that they renounce sloth and tobacco and forthwith surrender their lives to Christ.

That patently religious faith was now gone, but as he stood before the Apostles that night, the young agnostic could still feel that preacher's power. In his exultation, Moore looked as if he would catch the air in his arms. It wasn't a speech so much as a series of titanic outbursts.

Yes! avowed Moore. Skepticism was the soul of truth — why, it was the most beautiful quality in the world! Truth could not be
told
simply. Truth could not exist in the mind unless it was examined personally and hard won — unless every statement was defended against its antithesis, like a gladiatorial contest! And not just every statement, he declared, but
every single man
— here Moore's eyes got big —
every man must defend himself against HIMSELF!
He must defend himself against his own proclivity for dishonesty! And if he does
not
, he swore with a gasp, if he does
not
defend himself against humbug, then he ought to be laughed at! Just, said Moore, taking another lunging breath, just as you are laughing at
me
! And as, indeed, I am laughing at myself! Oh, I know it, he laughed, wagging a knowing finger. I
know
I am a silly.
I am an unholy ass! I
know this, but
you
, my fellow asses, this you must also know of yourselves!

They were all laughing, not at him but rather at the truth of this, swept up in all the Dionysian joy and exultation of truth that Moore seemed to embody like a young god. It wasn't even so much what he was saying as the life and joy they felt swelling within him, fit to explode. Moore was laughing uncontrollably. He was so full and boiling with life that life was snapping off him. Like electricity, it was ripping across the room, this divine discharge.

Moore was so infused with laughter, in fact, that they feared he would suffer an apoplectic fit. First his eyes got big. Then, like a cuckoo, his tongue shot out. And then he suddenly covered his mouth and, in his fullness, turned and pressed his blazing forehead against the cool marble of the mantelpiece behind him.

It was a beautiful, unpremeditated gesture, a gesture of submission and respect, like a priest kissing the altar stone — a gesture beautiful even for the fact that Moore's fanny was in the air as he bent down, panting for breath. The laughter abruptly stopped and anxious looks flew round the room. Was he all right? McTaggart, shuffling along the wall, was starting to go to Moore when the novice abruptly turned, smiling with such ripe, rubicund fullness that it was clear to all in the room that there was nothing more to say; and then, without another word, he shyly sat down.

That night Russell wrote Alys, saying that if Moore did not die or go mad he would be a great genius — perhaps the greatest genius the world had ever known. Not only did Russell believe this, but he believed it without reservation, never thinking what it implied about himself, much less where he might be ranked relative to Moore one day. They were still that young. Two unblemished hills, and not yet a thought about which was the higher.

B
UT IF IT SEEMED
to Russell and others that Moore's genius emanated from an innocence that provided him a moral fulcrum from which to ply his analytical brilliance; if indeed Moore's innocence was what was best and most original in him, it did not always seem so to Moore himself, who feared he might after all be only a silly. He put no garnishings on it. He was not, as Lytton avowed, a divine silly — no latter-day Socrates — but just your ordinary, naive, vacillating ninny. And not just a ninny, either. As things looked now, he was a plain fool who was about to embarrass himself by proposing to a young woman nearly twenty years his junior.

Leaving Hall from dinner that night, Moore was still smarting over Russell's maneuverings and general overbearingness. Moore wasn't bothered about Wittgenstein; it was Russell's whole manner — his overweening confidence — that needled him. Worse, Russell's attitude only showed Moore his own native wooliness, his endless shilly-shallying. And in a way, Moore envied Russell.
Russell
wasn't burdened with this useless Hamletizing.
He
never shrank from going after what he wanted, nor from using whatever casuistry was necessary to justify his actions. But even this, Moore saw, was just another evasion. For him it was not, after all, a matter of
justifying
his actions but of for once going after what he wanted, namely, Miss Dorothy Ely.

The problem was, Moore wasn't entirely sure, or couldn't entirely justify to himself, that he
knew
what he wanted. It was abominably complicated. As he had shown in his
Principia
, it was not a matter of shalts and shalt nots. There were no logical
proofs
by which one could arrive at the Good. A moral law, Moore had found, had the guise not of a law but of a
prediction
of what will generally produce the greatest
sum
of good. That was all. Moore admitted that it was at first a little dispiriting to realize that ethics was really a matter of brokering, in a given instance, something better than worse, and likely rather worse than good. Not, it's true, that one did not always keep the Good shining over one's shoulder like the sun. But still, thought Moore, dogging his way home now from High Table — why did it fall on
him
to be the broker in this case? Why was it that the
man
was saddled with all the moral burden of proposing? Think of the ramifications! Did he, George Moore, wish to take Miss Dorothy Ely freely and simply and lovingly, or was he merely trying to satisfy himself that some woman would have him? That is, did he want Dorothy
as a love
, purely and simply, or did he rather want her as an
end
, a
product
of his affections made flesh, so to speak, by virtue of some flimsy
word?
And besides, wasn't he merely indulging a vanity, seeking to satisfy some agreeable image or ideal of himself as a husband ensconced in a domicile with wife, children, chattels?
Children!

Down the lane now, under the yellow streetlamps, men far younger than Moore — vigorous young men Miss Ely's age — were walking along briskly in the cold air. Moore looked at them striding hungrily into their own steaming breath, eating and inhaling life like fire, not forever analyzing it like a gas. Yet straightaway Moore reverted to the philosopher, asking himself again what it properly
meant
, to love? In his
Principia
, he had written of the Ideal as consisting of certain timeless mental states in which one contemplated truth, beauty, good works, love: sister states of the all-encompassing Good. But man and woman love — this he had skirted almost entirely, and no wonder. What had he known then, in 1903, of love, much less of loving a real flesh and blood woman? Why, even now I hardly know a thing! he thought, inwardly giving himself another good kick. You were describing Platonic doves and halos, you oaf, not people of flesh! Why, even that poor thwarted monk Abelard knew more — vastly more! At least Abelard
knew
he loved!

All the way back to his rooms Moore kicked himself. And once there he dawdled. Looking at himself in the mirror, he thought his suit looked rumpled and shabby, old. He had a good dark suit for special occasions, but this was so predictable — Miss Ely would see him coming a mile off, all ready with her rejection. Christ, where was Smyth, his gyp? Gone for the night and his shoes unshined, and no clean white shirt, either. And even after Moore wiped his shoes with a rag, and wet and combed his hair — even after he reluctantly put on his best suit and brushed his teeth, he still felt a fool, and at that a rather dastardly one for wanting to palm himself off on a former student foolish enough to have trusted him.

Moore had met Miss Ely the year before, when she took his course in moral logic. Miss Ely did well in the course — better than many of his men in fact — but he did not remember thinking much about her until several months later, when he saw her coming out of a seamstress shop on Bridge Street. She looked different outside the classroom, in the daylight. Had she cut her hair? They stopped and spoke, but of course it was the rather dismally formal don-to-undergraduate sort of chat. Moore felt himself straining to seem natural, to appear aboveboard and donlike, rather than a hungry man sniffing. Nevertheless, he noticed her handsome self-sufficiency and her dark straight hair, which she tied up around her close and slender ears with a thin strand of black ribbon. Miss Ely had large, dark eyes, deeply set, and Moore was amazed, from the relative vantage of age, how youthfully clear her features were, as if she were part of the foreground while he was modestly receding. He remembered thinking that she had the most lovely hairless white hands, plump at the palm and slender at the fingers, with fine white slivers of nails. She struck him, correctly as it turned out, as a father's girl, independent and quiet, shy. Why hadn't he asked her out then? He had a sense of her routine. Awkward, stalking, stammering a hasty greeting as he flew by her, Moore kicked himself for the next two weeks for his shyness. Finally, though, after two days of internal arguments and counterarguments, he almost pushed himself in her path, suggesting, sucking his tongue, that they
might
go walking —
if
she didn't mind, of course. Oh! Any day, really, would be fine …