The Egoist

by George Meredith

  ‘Do they?’ sung out young Crossjay.

  ‘Sir Willoughby does?’

  ‘I don’t know about spoil. I can come round him.’

  ‘I am sure he is very kind to you. I dare say you think Mr Whitford rather severe. You should remember he has to teach you, so that you may pass for the navy. You must not dislike him because he makes you work. Supposing you had blown yourself up to-day! You would have thought it better to have been working with Mr Whitford.’

  ‘Sir Willoughby says, when he’s married you won’t let me hide.’

  ‘Ah! It is wrong to pet a big boy like you. Does not he what you call tip you, Crossjay?’

  ‘Generally half-crown pieces. I’ve had a crown-piece. I’ve had sovereigns.’

  ‘And for that you do as he bids you? And he indulges you because you… Well, but though Mr Whitford does not give you money, he gives you his time, he tries to get you into the navy.’

  ‘He pays for me.’

  ‘What do you say?’

  ‘My keep. And, as for liking him, if he were at the bottom of the water here, I’d go down after him. I mean to learn. We’re both of us here at six o’clock in the morning, when it’s light, and have a swim. He taught me. Only, I never cared for schoolbooks.’

  ‘Are you quite certain that Mr Whitford pays for you?’

  ‘My father told me he did, and I must obey him. He heard my father was poor, with a family. He went down to see my father. My father came here once, and Sir Willoughby wouldn’t see him. I know Mr Whitford does. And Miss Dale told me he did. My mother says she thinks he does it to make up to us for my father’s long walk in the rain and the cold he caught coming here to Patterne.’

  ‘So you see you should not vex him, Crossjay. He is a good friend to your father and to you. You ought to love him.’

  ‘I like him, and I like his face.’

  ‘Why his face?’

  ‘It’s not like those faces! Miss Dale and I talk about him. She thinks that Sir Willoughby is the best-looking man ever born.’

  ‘Were you not speaking of Mr Whitford?’

  ‘Yes; old Vernon. That’s what Sir Willoughby calls him,’ young Crossjay excused himself to her look of surprise. ‘Do you know what he makes me think of? – his eyes, I mean. He makes me think of Robinson Crusoe’s old goat in the cavern. I like him because he’s always the same, and you’re not positive about some people. Miss Middleton, if you look on at cricket, in comes a safe man for ten runs. He may get more, and he never gets less; and you should hear the old farmers talk of him in the booth. That’s just my feeling.’

  Miss Middleton understood that some illustration from the cricketing-field was intended to throw light on the boy’s feeling for Mr Whitford. Young Crossjay was evidently warming to speak from his heart. But the sun was low, she had to dress for the dinner-table, and she landed him with regret, as at a holiday over. Before they parted, he offered to swim across the lake in his clothes, or dive to the bed for anything she pleased to throw, declaring solemnly that it should not be lost.

  She walked back at a slow pace, and sung to herself above her darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed-warbler on the branch beside the night-stream; a simple song of a light-hearted sound, independent of the shifting black and grey of the flood underneath.

  A step was at her heels.

  ‘I see you have been petting my scapegrace.’

  ‘Mr Whitford! Yes; not petting, I hope. I tried to give him a lecture. He’s a dear lad, but, I fancy, trying.’

  She was in fine sunset colour, unable to arrest the mounting tide. She had been rowing, she said; and, as he directed his eyes, according to his wont, penetratingly, she defended herself by fixing her mind on Robinson Crusoe’s old goat in the recess of the cavern.

  ‘I must have him away from here very soon,’ said Vernon. ‘Here he’s quite spoiled. Speak of him to Willoughby. I can’t guess at his ideas of the boy’s future, but the chance of passing for the navy won’t bear trifling with, and if ever there was a lad made for the navy, it’s Crossjay.’

  The incident of the explosion in the laboratory was new to Vernon.

  ‘And Willoughby laughed?’ he said. ‘There are sea-port crammers who stuff young fellows for examination, and we shall have to pack off the boy at once to the best one of the lot we can find. I would rather have had him under me up to the last three months, and have made sure of some roots to what is knocked into his head. But he’s ruined here. And I am going. So I shall not trouble him for many weeks longer. Dr Middleton is well?’

  ‘My father is well, yes. He pounced like a falcon on your notes in the library.’

  Vernon came out with a chuckle.

  ‘They were left to attract him. I am in for a controversy.’

  ‘Papa will not spare you, to judge from his look.’

  ‘I know the look.’

  ‘Have you walked far to-day?’

  ‘Nine and a half hours. My Flibbertigibbet8 is too much for me at times, and I had to walk off my temper.’

  She cast her eyes on him, thinking of the pleasure of dealing with a temper honestly coltish, and manfully open to a specific.

  ‘All those hours were required?’

  ‘Not quite so long.’

  ‘You are training for your Alpine tour.’

  ‘It’s doubtful whether I shall get to the Alps this year. I leave the Hall, and shall probably be in London with a pen to sell.’

  ‘Willoughby knows that you leave him?’

  ‘As much as Mont Blanc knows that he is going to be climbed by a party below. He sees a speck or two in the valley.’

  ‘He has not spoken of it.’

  ‘He would attribute it to changes…’

  Vernon did not conclude the sentence.

  She became breathless, without emotion, but checked by the barrier confronting an impulse to ask, what changes? She stooped to pluck a cowslip.

  ‘I saw daffodils lower down the park,’ she said. ‘One or two; they’re nearly over.’

  ‘We are well off for wild flowers here,’ he answered.

  ‘Do not leave him, Mr Whitford.’

  ‘He will not want me.’

  ‘You are devoted to him.’

  ‘I can’t pretend that.’

  ‘Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee… If any occur, why should they drive you away?’

  ‘Well, I’m two and thirty, and have never been in the fray: a kind of nondescript, half scholar, and by nature half billman or bowman or musketeer; if I’m worth anything London’s the field for me. But that’s what I have to try.’

  ‘Papa will not like your serving with your pen in London: he will say you are worth too much for that.’

  ‘Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked above them.’

  ‘They are wasted, he says.’

  ‘Error! If they have their private ambition, they may suppose they are wasted. But the value to the world of a private ambition, I do not clearly understand.’

  ‘You have not an evil opinion of the world?’ said Miss Middleton, sick at heart as she spoke, with the sensation of having invited herself to take a drop of poison.

  He replied: ‘One might as well have an evil opinion of a river: here it’s muddy, there it’s clear; one day troubled, another at rest. We have to treat it with common sense.’

  ‘Love it?’

  ‘In the sense of serving it.’

  ‘Not think it beautiful?’

  ‘Part of it is, part of it the reverse.’

  ‘Papa would quote the “mulier formosa”.’9

  ‘Except that “fish” is too good for the black extremity. “Woman” is excellent for the upper.’

  ‘How do you say that? – not cynically, I believe. Your view commends itself to my reason.’

  She was grateful to him for not stating it in ideal contrast with Sir Willoughby’s view. If he had, so intensely did her youthful blood desire to be enamoured of the world, that she felt he would have lifted her o
ff her feet. For a moment a gulf beneath had been threatening. When she said, ‘Love it?’ a little enthusiasm would have wafted her into space fierily as wine; but the sober, ‘In the sense of serving it’, entered her brain, and was matter for reflection upon it and him.

  She could think of him in pleasant liberty, uncorrected by her woman’s instinct of peril. He had neither arts nor graces; nothing of his cousin’s easy social front-face. She had once witnessed the military precision of his dancing, and had to learn to like him before she ceased to pray that she might never be the victim of it as his partner. He walked heroically, his pedestrian vigour being famous, but that means one who walks away from the sex, not excelling in the recreations where men and women join hands. He was not much of a horseman either. Sir Willoughby enjoyed seeing him on horseback. And he could scarcely be said to shine in a drawing-room, unless when seated beside a person ready for real talk. Even more than his merits, his demerits pointed him out as a man to be a friend to a young woman who wanted one. His way of life pictured to her troubled spirit an enviable smoothness; and his having achieved that smooth way she considered a sign of strength; and she wished to lean in idea upon some friendly strength. His reputation for indifference to the frivolous charms of girls clothed him with a noble coldness, and gave him the distinction of a far-seen solitary iceberg in Southern waters. The popular notion of hereditary titled aristocracy resembles her sentiment for a man that would not flatter and could not be flattered by her sex: he appeared superior almost to awfulness. She was young, but she had received much flattery in her ears, and by it she had been snared; and he, disdaining to practise the fowler’s arts or to cast a thought on small fowls, appeared to her to have a pride founded on natural loftiness.

  They had not spoken for awhile, when Vernon said abruptly, ‘The boy’s future rather depends on you, Miss Middleton. I mean to leave as soon as possible, and I do not like his being here without me, though you will look after him, I have no doubt. But you may not at first see where the spoiling hurts him. He should be packed off at once to the crammer, before you are Lady Patterne. Use your influence. Willoughby will support the lad at your request. The cost cannot be great. There are strong grounds against my having him in London, even if I could manage it. May I count on you?’

  ‘I will mention it: I will do my best,’ said Miss Middleton, strangely dejected.

  They were now on the lawn, where Sir Willoughby was walking with the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, his maiden aunts.

  ‘You seem to have coursed the hare and captured the hart,’ he said to his bride.

  ‘Started the truant and run down the paedagogue,’ said Vernon.

  ‘Ay, you won’t listen to me about the management of that boy,’ Sir Willoughby retorted.

  The ladies embraced Miss Middleton. One offered up an ejaculation in eulogy of her looks, the other of her healthfulness: then both remarked that with indulgence young Cross-jay could be induced to do anything. Clara wondered whether inclination or Sir Willoughby had disciplined their individuality out of them and made them his shadows, his echoes. She gazed from them to him, and feared him. But as yet she had not experienced the power in him which could threaten and wrestle to subject the members of his household to the state of satellites. Though she had in fact been giving battle to it for several months, she had held her own too well to perceive definitely the character of the spirit opposing her.

  She said to the ladies, ‘Ah, no! Mr Whitford has chosen the only method for teaching a boy like Crossjay.’

  ‘I propose to make a man of him,’ said Sir Willoughby.

  ‘What is to become of him if he learns nothing?’

  ‘If he pleases me, he will be provided for. I have never abandoned a dependent.’

  Clara let her eyes rest on his and, without turning or dropping, shut them.

  The effect was discomforting to him. He was very sensitive to the intentions of eyes and tones; which was one secret of his rigid grasp of the dwellers in his household. They were taught that they had to render agreement under sharp scrutiny. Studious eyes, devoid of warmth, devoid of the shyness of sex, that suddenly closed on their look, signified a want of comprehension of some kind, it might be hostility of understanding. Was it possible he did not possess her utterly? He frowned up.

  Clara saw the lift of his brows, and thought, ‘My mind is my own, married or not.’

  It was the point in dispute.

  CHAPTER 9

  Clara and Laetitia Meet: They Are Compared

  AN hour before the time for lessons next morning young Crossjay was on the lawn with a big bunch of wild flowers. He left them at the hall door for Miss Middleton, and vanished into bushes.

  These vulgar weeds were about to be dismissed to the dust-heap by the great officials of the household; but as it happened that Miss Middleton had seen them from the window in Crossjay’s hands, the discovery was made that they were indeed his presentation-bouquet, and a footman received orders to place them before her. She was very pleased. The arrangement of the flowers bore witness to fairer fingers than the boy’s own in the disposition of the rings of colour, red campion and anemone, cowslip and speedwell, primroses and wood-hyacinths; and rising out of the blue was a branch bearing thick white blossom, so thick, and of so pure a whiteness, that Miss Middleton, while praising Crossjay for soliciting the aid of Miss Dale, was at a loss to name the tree.

  ‘It is a gardener’s improvement on the Vestal of the forest, the wild cherry,’ said Dr Middleton, ‘and in this case we may admit the gardener’s claim to be valid, though I believe that, with his gift of double blossom, he has improved away the fruit. Call this the Vestal of civilization, then; he has at least done something to vindicate the beauty of the office as well as the justness of the title.’

  ‘It is Vernon’s Holy Tree the young rascal has been despoiling,’ said Sir Willoughby merrily.

  Miss Middleton was informed that this double-blossom wild cherry-tree was worshipped by Mr Whitford.

  Sir Willoughby promised he would conduct her to it. ‘You,’ he said to her, ‘can bear the trial; few complexions can; it is to most ladies a crueller test than snow. Miss Dale, for example, becomes old lace within a dozen yards of it. I should like to place her under the tree beside you.’

  ‘Dear me, though; but that is investing the hamadryad with novel and terrible functions,’ exclaimed Dr Middleton.

  Clara said: ‘Miss Dale could drag me into a superior Court to show me fading beside her in gifts more valuable than a complexion.’

  ‘She has a fine ability,’ said Vernon.

  All the world knew, so Clara knew of Miss Dale’s romantic admiration of Sir Willoughby; she was curious to see Miss Dale and study the nature of a devotion that might be, within reason, imitable – for a man who could speak with such steely coldness of the poor lady he had fascinated? Well, perhaps it was good for the hearts of women to be beneath a frost; to be schooled, restrained, turned inward on their dreams. Yes, then, his coldness was desireable; it encouraged an ideal of him. It suggested and seemed to propose to Clara’s mind the divineness of separation instead of the deadly accuracy of an intimate perusal. She tried to look on him as Miss Dale might look, and while partly despising her for the dupery she envied, and more than criticizing him for the inhuman numbness of sentiment which offered up his worshipper to point a complimentary comparison, she was able to imagine a distance whence it would be possible to observe him uncritically, kindly, admiringly; as the moon a handsome mortal, for example.

  In the midst of her thoughts, she surprised herself by saying: ‘I certainly was difficult to instruct. I might see things clearer if I had a fine ability. I never remember to have been perfectly pleased with my immediate lesson…’

  She stopped, wondering whither her tongue was leading her; then added, to save herself, ‘And that may be why I feel for poor Crossjay.’

  Mr Whitford apparently did not think it remarkable that she should have been set off gabbling of ‘a fine abili
ty’, though the eulogistic phrase had been pronounced by him with an impressiveness to make his ear aware of an echo.

  Sir Willoughby dispersed her vapourish confusion. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I have insisted with Vernon, I don’t know how often, that you must have the lad by his affections. He won’t bear driving. It had no effect on me. Boys of spirit kick at it. I think I know boys, Clara.’

  He found himself addressing eyes that regarded him as though he were a small speck, a pin’s head, in the circle of their remote contemplation. They were wide; they closed.

  She opened them to gaze elsewhere.

  He was very sensitive.

  Even then, when knowingly wounding him, or because of it, she was trying to climb back to that altitude of the thin division of neutral ground, from which we see a lover’s faults and are above them, pure surveyors. She climbed unsuccessfully, it is true; soon despairing and using the effort as a pretext to fall back lower.

  Dr Middleton withdrew Sir Willoughby’s attention from the imperceptible annoyance. ‘No, sir, no: the birch! the birch! Boys of spirit commonly turn into solid men, and the solider the men the more surely do they vote for Busby.10 For me, I pray he may be immortal in Great Britain. Sea-air nor mountain-air is half so bracing. I venture to say that the power to take a licking is better worth having than the power to administer one. Horse him and birch him if Crossjay runs from his books.’

  ‘It is your opinion, sir?’ his host bowed to him affably, shocked on behalf of the ladies.

  ‘So positively so, sir, that I will undertake, without knowledge of their antecedents, to lay my finger on the men in public life who have not had early Busby. They are ill-balanced men. Their seat of reason is not a concrete. They won’t take rough and smooth as they come. They make bad blood, can’t forgive, sniff right and left for approbation, and are excited to anger if an East wind does not flatter them. Why, sir, when they have grown to be seniors, you find these men mixed up with the nonsense of their youth; you see they are unthrashed. We English beat the world because we take a licking well. I hold it for a surety of a proper sweetness of blood.’