The Egoist

by George Meredith

  ‘All is yours, my Clara.’

  An oppressive load it seemed to her! She passively yielded to the man in his form of attentive courtier; his mansion, estate, and wealth overwhelmed her. They suggested the price to be paid. Yet she recollected that on her last departure through the park she had been proud of the rolling green and spreading trees. Poison of some sort must be operating in her. She had not come to him to-day with this feeling of sullen antagonism; she had caught it here.

  ‘You have been well, my Clara?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Not a hint of illness?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘My bride must have her health if all the doctors in the kingdom die for it! My darling!’

  ‘And tell me: the dogs?’

  ‘Dogs and horses are in very good condition.’

  ‘I am glad. Do you know, I love those ancient French châteaux and farms in one, where salon windows look on poultry-yard and stalls. I like that homeliness with beasts and peasants.’

  He bowed indulgently.

  ‘I am afraid we can’t do it for you in England, my Clara.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I like the farm,’ said he. ‘But I think our drawing-rooms have a better atmosphere off the garden. As to our peasantry, we cannot, I apprehend, modify our class demarcations without risk of disintegrating the social structure.’

  ‘Perhaps. I proposed nothing.’

  ‘My love, I would entreat you to propose if I were convinced that I could obey.’

  ‘You are very good.’

  ‘I find my merit nowhere but in your satisfaction.’

  Although she was not thirsting for dulcet sayings, the peacefulness of other than invitations to the exposition of his mysteries and of their isolation in oneness, inspired her with such calm that she beat about in her brain, as if it were in the brain, for the specific injury he had committed. Sweeping from sensation to sensation, the young, whom sensations impel and distract, can rarely date their disturbance from a particular one; unless it be some great villain injury that has been done; and Clara had not felt an individual shame in his caress; the shame of her sex was but a passing protest, that left no stamp. So she conceived she had been behaving cruelly, and said, ‘Willoughby’; because she was aware of the omission of his name in her previous remarks.

  His whole attention was given to her.

  She had to invent the sequel: ‘I was going to beg you, Willoughby, do not seek to spoil me. You compliment me. Compliments are not suited to me. You think too highly of me. It is nearly as bad as to be slighted. I am… I am a…’ But she could not follow his example; even as far as she had gone, her prim little sketch of herself, set beside her real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang of a mincing simplicity, and was a step in falseness. How could she display what she was?

  ‘Do I not know you?’ he said.

  The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on that point, signified as well as the words that no answer was the right answer. She could not dissent without turning his music to discord, his complacency to amazement. She held her tongue, knowing that he did not know her, and speculating on the division made bare by their degrees of the knowledge, a deep cleft.

  He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own. The bridesmaids were mentioned.

  ‘Miss Dale, you will hear from my aunt Eleanor, declines, on the plea of indifferent health. She is rather a morbid person, with all her really estimable qualities. It will do no harm to have none but young ladies of your own age; a bouquet of young buds: though one blowing flower among them… However, she has decided. My principal annoyance has been Vernon’s refusal to act as my best man.’

  ‘Mr Whitford refuses?’

  ‘He half refuses. I do not take no from him. His pretext is a dislike to the ceremony.’

  ‘I share it with him.’

  ‘I sympathize with you. If we might say the words and pass from sight! There is a way of cutting off the world: I have it at times completely: I lose it again, as if it were a cabalistic phrase one had to utter. But with you! You give it me for good. It will be for ever, eternally, my Clara. Nothing can harm, nothing touch us; we are one another’s. Let the world fight it out; we have nothing to do with it.’

  ‘If Mr Whitford should persist in refusing?’

  ‘So entirely one, that there never can be question of external influences. I am, we will say, riding home from the hunt: I see you awaiting me: I read your heart as though you were beside me. And I know that I am coming to the one who reads mine! You have me, you have me like an open book, you, and only you!’

  ‘I am to be always at home?’ Clara said, unheeded, and relieved by his not hearing.

  ‘Have you realized it? – that we are invulnerable! The world cannot hurt us: it cannot touch us. Felicity is ours, and we are impervious in the enjoyment of it. Something divine! surely something divine on earth? Clara! – being to one another that between which the world can never interpose! What I do is right: what you do is right. Perfect to one another! Each new day we rise to study and delight in new secrets. Away with the crowd! We have not even to say it; we are in an atmosphere where the world cannot breathe.’

  ‘Oh, the world!’ Clara partly carolled on a sigh that sunk deep.

  Hearing him talk as one exulting on the mountain-top, when she knew him to be in the abyss, was very strange, provocative of scorn.

  ‘My letters?’ he said, incitingly.

  ‘I read them.’

  ‘Circumstances have imposed a long courtship on us, my Clara; and I, perhaps lamenting the laws of decorum – I have done so! – still felt the benefit of the gradual initiation. It is not good for women to be surprised by a sudden revelation of man’s character. We also have things to learn – there is matter for learning everywhere. Some day you will tell me the difference of what you think of me now, from what you thought when we first…?’

  An impulse of double-minded acquiescence caused Clara to stammer as on a sob:

  ‘I – I daresay I shall.’

  She added, ‘If it is necessary.’

  Then she cried out: ‘Why do you attack the world? You always make me pity it.’

  He smiled at her youthfulness. ‘I have passed through that stage. It leads to my sentiment. Pity it, by all means.’

  ‘No,’ said she, ‘but pity it, side with it, not consider it so bad. The world has faults; glaciers have crevices, mountains have chasms; but is not the effect of the whole sublime? Not to admire the mountain and the glacier because they can be cruel, seems to me… And the world is beautiful.’

  ‘The world of nature, yes. The world of men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of ball-rooms.’

  ‘I am thinking of the world that contains real and great generosity, true heroism. We see it round us.’

  ‘We read of it. The world of the romance writer!’

  ‘No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am sure we weaken ourselves if we do not. If I did not, I should be looking on mist, hearing a perpetual boom instead of music. I remember hearing Mr Whitford say that cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb’s feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.’

  ‘Old Vernon!’ ejaculated Sir Willoughby, with a countenance rather uneasy, as if it had been flicked with a glove. ‘He strings his phrases by the dozen.’

  ‘Papa contradicts that, and says he is very clever and very simple.’

  ‘As to cynics, my dear Clara, oh, certainly, certainly: you are right. They are laughable, contemptible. But understand me, I mean, we cannot feel, or if we feel we cannot so intensely feel, our oneness, except by dividing ourselves from the world.’

  ‘Is it an art?’

  ‘If you like. It is our poetry! But does not love shun the world? Two that love must have their sustenance in isolation.’

  ‘No:
they will be eating themselves up.’

  ‘The purer the beauty, the more it will be out of the world.’

  ‘But not opposed.’

  ‘Put it in this way,’ Willoughby condescended. ‘Has experience the same opinion of the world as ignorance?’

  ‘It should have more charity.’

  ‘Does virtue feel at home in the world?’

  ‘Where it should be an example, to my idea.’

  ‘Is the world agreeable to holiness?’

  ‘Then, are you in favour of monasteries?’

  He poured a little runlet of half laughter over her head, of the sound assumed by genial compassion.

  It is irritating to hear that when we imagine we have spoken to the point.

  ‘Now in my letters, Clara –’

  ‘I have no memory, Willoughby!’

  ‘You will, however, have observed that I am not completely myself in my letters –’

  ‘In your letters to men you may be.’

  The remark threw a pause across his thoughts. He was of a sensitiveness terribly tender. A single stroke on it reverberated swellingly within the man, and most, and infuriately searching, at the spots where he had been wounded, especially where he feared the world might have guessed the wound. Did she imply that he had no hand for love-letters? Was it her meaning that women would not have much taste for his epistolary correspondence? She had spoken in the plural, with an accent on ‘men’. Had she heard of Constantia? Had she formed her own judgement about the creature? The supernatural sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby shrieked a peal of affirmatives. He had often meditated on the moral obligation of his unfolding to Clara the whole truth of his conduct to Constantia; for whom, as for other suicides, there were excuses. He at least was bound to supply them. She had behaved badly; but had he not given her some cause? If so, manliness was bound to confess it.

  Supposing Clara heard the world’s version first! Men whose pride is their backbone suffer convulsions where other men are barely aware of a shock, and Sir Willoughby was taken with galvanic jumpings of the spirit within him, at the idea of the world whispering to Clara that he had been jilted.

  ‘My letters to men, you say, my love?’

  ‘Your letters of business.’

  ‘Completely myself in my letters of business?’ He stared indeed.

  She relaxed the tension of his figure by remarking: ‘You are able to express yourself to men as your meaning dictates. In writing to… to us it is, I suppose, more difficult.’

  ‘True, my love. I will not exactly say difficult. I can acknowledge no difficulty. Language, I should say, is not fitted to express emotion. Passion rejects it.’

  ‘For dumb-show and pantomime?’

  ‘No; but the writing of it coldly.’

  ‘Ah, coldly!’

  ‘My letters disappoint you?’

  ‘I have not implied that they do.’

  ‘My feelings, dearest, are too strong for transcription. I feel, pen in hand, like the mythological Titan at war with Jove, strong enough to hurl mountains, and finding nothing but pebbles. The simile is a good one. You must not judge of me by my letters.’

  ‘I do not; I like them,’ said Clara.

  She blushed, eyed him hurriedly, and seeing him complacent, resumed, ‘I prefer the pebble to the mountain; but if you read poetry you would not think human speech incapable of…’

  ‘My love, I detest artifice. Poetry is a profession.’

  ‘Our poets would prove to you…’

  ‘As I have often observed, Clara, I am no poet.’

  ‘I have not accused you, Willoughby.’

  ‘No poet, and with no wish to be a poet. Were I one, my life would supply material, I can assure you, my love. My conscience is not entirely at rest. Perhaps the heaviest matter troubling it is that in which I was least wilfully guilty. You have heard of a Miss Durham?’

  ‘I have heard – yes – of her.’

  ‘She may be happy. I trust she is. If she is not, I cannot escape some blame. An instance of the difference between myself and the world, now. The world charges it upon her. I have interceded to exonerate her.’

  ‘That was generous, Willoughby.’

  ‘Stay. I fear I was the primary offender. But I, Clara, I, under a sense of honour, acting under a sense of honour, would have carried my engagement through.’

  ‘What had you done?’

  ‘The story is long, dating from an early day, in the “downy antiquity of my youth”, as Vernon says.’

  ‘Mr Whitford says that?’

  ‘One of old Vernon’s odd sayings. It’s a story of an early fascination.’

  ‘Papa tells me Mr Whitford speaks at times with wise humour.’

  ‘Family considerations – the lady’s health among other things; her position in the calculations of relatives – intervened. Still there was the fascination. I have to own it. Grounds for feminine jealousy.’

  ‘Is it at an end?’

  ‘Now? with you? my darling Clara! indeed at an end, or could I have opened my inmost heart to you! Could I have spoken of myself so unreservedly that in part you know me as I know myself! Oh, but would it have been possible to enclose you with myself in that intimate union? so secret, unassailable!’

  ‘You did not speak to her as you speak to me?’

  ‘In no degree.’

  ‘What could have…’ Clara checked the murmured exclamation.

  Sir Willoughby’s expoundings on his latest of texts would have poured forth, had not a footman stepped across the lawn to inform him that his builder was in the laboratory and requested permission to consult with him.

  Clara’s plea of a horror of the talk of bricks and joists excused her from accompanying him. He had hardly been satisfied by her manner, he knew not why. He left her, convinced that he must do and say more to reach down to her female intelligence.

  She saw young Crossjay, springing with pots of jam in him, join his patron at a bound, and taking a lift of arms, fly aloft, clapping heels. Her reflections were confused. Sir Willoughby was admirable with the lad. ‘Is he two men?’ she thought; and the thought ensued, ‘Am I unjust?’ She headed a run with young Crossjay to divert her mind.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Run with the Truant; a Walk with the Master

  THE sight of Miss Middleton running inflamed young Crossjay with the passion of the game of hare and hounds. He shouted a view-halloo, and flung up his legs. She was fleet; she ran as though a hundred little feet were bearing her onward smooth as water over the lawn and the sweeps of grass of the park, so swiftly did the hidden pair multiply one another to speed her. So sweet was she in her flowing pace, that the boy, as became his age, translated admiration into a dogged frenzy of pursuit, and continued pounding along, when far outstripped, determined to run her down or die. Suddenly her flight wound to an end in a dozen twittering steps, and she sank. Young Crossjay attained her, with just breath enough to say: ‘You are a runner!’

  ‘I forgot you had been having your tea, my poor boy,’ said she.

  ‘And you don’t pant a bit!’ was his encomium.

  ‘Dear me, no; not more than a bird. You might as well try to catch a bird.’

  Young Crossjay gave a knowing nod. ‘Wait till I get my second wind.’

  ‘Now you must confess that girls run faster than boys.’

  ‘They may at the start.’

  ‘They do everything better.’

  ‘They’re flash-in-the-pans.’

  ‘They learn their lessons.’

  ‘You can’t make soldiers or sailors of them, though.’

  ‘And that is untrue. Have you never read of Mary Ambree? and Mistress Hannah Snell of Pondicherry? And there was the bride of the celebrated William Taylor. And what do you say to Joan of Arc? What do you say to Boadicea? I suppose you have never heard of the Amazons.’

  ‘They weren’t English.’

  ‘Then it is your own countrywomen you decry, sir!’

  Young Crossjay betrayed anx
iety about his false position, and begged for the stories of Mary Ambree and the others who were English.

  ‘See, you will not read for yourself, you hide and play truant with Mr Whitford, and the consequence is you are ignorant of your country’s history.’ Miss Middleton rebuked him, enjoying his wriggle between a perception of her fun and an acknowledgment of his peccancy. She commanded him to tell her which was the glorious Valentine’s day of our naval annals;7 the name of the hero of the day, and the name of his ship. To these questions his answers were as ready as the guns of the good ship Captain, for the Spanish four-decker.

  ‘And that you owe to Mr Whitford,’ said Miss Middleton.

  ‘He bought me the books,’ young Crossjay growled, and plucked at grass blades and bit them, foreseeing dimly but certainly the termination of all this.

  Miss Middleton lay back on the grass and said: ‘Are you going to be fond of me, Crossjay?’

  The boy sat blinking. His desire was to prove to her that he was immoderately fond of her already; and he might have flown at her neck had she been sitting up, but her recumbency and eyelids half closed excited wonder in him and awe. His young heart beat fast.

  ‘Because, my dear boy,’ she said, leaning on her elbow, ‘you are a very nice boy, but an ungrateful boy, and there is no telling whether you will not punish any one who cares for you. Come along with me; pluck me some of these cowslips, and the speedwells near them; I think we both love wild flowers.’ She rose and took his arm. ‘You shall row me on the lake while I talk to you seriously.’

  It was she, however, who took the sculls at the boat-house, for she had been a playfellow with boys, and knew that one of them engaged in a manly exercise is not likely to listen to a woman.

  ‘Now, Crossjay,’ she said. Dense gloom overcame him like a cowl. She bent across her hands to laugh. ‘As if I were going to lecture you, you silly boy!’ He began to brighten dubiously. ‘I used to be as fond of birdsnesting as you are. I like brave boys, and I like you for wanting to enter the Royal Navy. Only, how can you if you do not learn? You must get the captains to pass you, you know. Somebody spoils you: Miss Dale or Mr Whitford.’