The Egoist

by George Meredith

  ‘Don’t take away my health, pray,’ cried Willoughby, with a snapping laugh.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Mrs Mountstuart. ‘You have got a sentimental tone. You talk of “feelings crushed of old”. It is to a woman, not to a man that you speak, but that sort of talk is a way of making the ground slippery. I listen in vain for a natural tongue; and when I don’t hear it, I suspect plotting in men. You show your under-teeth too at times when you draw in a breath, like a condemned high-caste Hindoo my husband took me to see in a jail in Calcutta, to give me some excitement when I was pining for England. The creature did it regularly as he breathed; you did it last night, and you have been doing it to-day, as if the air cut you to the quick. You have been spoilt. You have been too much anointed. What I’ve just mentioned is a sign with me of a settled something on the brain of a man.’

  ‘The brain?’ said Sir Willoughby, frowning.

  ‘Yes, you laugh sourly, to look at,’ said she. ‘Mountstuart told me that the muscles of the mouth betray men sooner than the eyes, when they have cause to be uneasy in their minds.’

  ‘But, ma’am, I shall not break my word; I shall not, not; I intend, I have resolved to keep it. I do not fatalize, let my complexion be black or white. Despite my resemblance to a high-caste malefactor of the Calcutta prison-wards…’

  ‘Friend! friend! you know how I chatter.’

  He saluted her finger-ends. ‘Despite the extraordinary display of teeth, you will find me go to execution with perfect calmness; with a resignation as good as happiness.’

  ‘Like a Jacobite lord under the Georges.’

  ‘You have told me that you wept to read of one: like him, then. My principles have not changed, if I have. When I was younger, I had an idea of a wife who would be with me in my thoughts as well as aims: a woman with a spirit of romance, and a brain of solid sense. I shall sooner or later dedicate myself to a public life; and shall, I suppose, want the counsellor or comforter who ought always to be found at home. It may be unfortunate that I have the ideal in my head. But I would never make rigorous demands for specific qualities. The cruellest thing in the world is to set up a living model before a wife, and compel her to copy it. In any case, here we are upon the road: the die is cast. I shall not reprieve myself. I cannot release her. Marriage represents facts, courtship fancies. She will be cured by-and-by of that coveting of everything that I do, feel, think, dream, imagine… ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum. Laetitia was invited here to show her the example of a fixed character – solid as any concrete substance you would choose to build on, and not a whit the less feminine.’

  ‘Ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum. You need not tell me you have a design in all that you do, Willoughby Patterne.’

  ‘You smell the autocrat? Yes, he can mould and govern the creatures about him. His toughest rebel is himself! If you see Clara… You wish to see her, I think you said?’

  ‘Her behaviour to Lady Busshe last night was queer.’

  ‘If you will. She makes a mouth at porcelaine. Toujours la porcelain! For me, her pettishness is one of her charms, I confess it. Ten years younger, I could not have compared them.’

  ‘Whom?’

  ‘Laetitia and Clara.’

  ‘Sir Willoughby, in any case, to quote you, here we are all upon the road, and we must act as if events were going to happen; and I must ask her to help me on the subject of my wedding-present, for I don’t want to have her making mouths at mine, however pretty – and she does it prettily.’

  ‘ “Another dedicatory offering to the rogue in me!” she says of porcelain.’

  ‘Then porcelain it shall not be. I mean to consult her; I have come determined upon a chat with her. I think I understand. But she produces false impressions on those who don’t know you both. “I shall have that porcelain back”, says Lady Busshe to me, when we were shaking hands last night: “I think,” says she, “it should have been the Willow Pattern.” And she really said: “He’s in for being jilted a second time!” ’

  Sir Willoughby restrained a bound of his body that would have sent him up some feet into the air. He felt his skull thundered at within.

  ‘Rather than that it should fall upon her!’ ejaculated he, correcting his resemblance to the high-caste culprit as soon as it recurred to him.

  ‘But you know Lady Busshe,’ said Mrs Mountstuart, genuinely solicitous to ease the proud man of his pain. She could see through him to the depth of the skin, which his fencing sensitiveness vainly attempted to cover as it did the heart of him. ‘Lady Busshe is nothing without her flights, fads, and fancies. She has always insisted that you have an unfortunate nose. I remember her saying on the day of your majority, it was the nose of a monarch destined to lose a throne.’

  ‘Have I ever offended Lady Busshe?’

  ‘She trumpets you. She carries Lady Culmer with her too, and you may expect a visit of nods and hints and pots of alabaster. They worship you: you are the hope of England in their eyes, and no woman is worthy of you: but they are a pair of fatalists, and if you begin upon Letty Dale with them, you might as well forbid your banns. They will be all over the country exclaiming on predestination and marriages made in heaven.’

  ‘Clara and her father!’ cried Sir Willoughby.

  Dr Middleton and his daughter appeared in the circle of shrubs and flowers.

  ‘Bring her to me, and save me from the polyglot,’ said Mrs Mountstuart, in affright at Dr Middleton’s manner of pouring forth into the ears of the downcast girl.

  The leisure he loved that he might debate with his genius upon any next step was denied to Willoughby: he had to place his trust in the skill with which he had sown and prepared Mrs Mountstuart’s understanding to meet the girl – beautiful abhorred that she was! detested darling! thing to squeeze to death and throw to the dust, and mourn over!

  He had to risk it; and at an hour when Lady Busshe’s prognostic grievously impressed his intense apprehensiveness of nature.

  As it happened that Dr Middleton’s notion of a disagreeable duty in colloquy was to deliver all that he contained, and escape the listening to a syllable of reply, Willoughby withdrew his daughter from him opportunely.

  ‘Mrs Mountstuart wants you, Clara.’

  ‘I shall be very happy,’ Clara replied, and put on a new face.

  An imperceptible nervous shrinking was met by another force in her bosom, that pushed her to advance without a sign of reluctance. She seemed to glitter.

  She was handed to Mrs Mountstuart.

  Dr Middleton laid his hand over Willoughby’s shoulder, retiring on a bow before the great lady of the district. He blew and said: ‘An opposition of female instincts to masculine intellect necessarily creates a corresponding antagonism of intellect to instinct.’

  ‘Her answer, sir? Her reasons? Has she named any?’

  ‘The cat,’ said Dr Middleton, taking breath for a sentence, ‘that humps her back in the figure of the letter H, or a Chinese bridge has given the dog her answer and her reasons, we may presume: but he that undertakes to translate them into human speech might likewise venture to propose an addition to the alphabet and a continuation of Homer. The one performance would be not more wonderful than the other. Daughters, Willoughby, daughters! Above most human peccancies, I do abhor a breach of faith. She will not be guilty of that. I demand a cheerful fulfilment of a pledge: and I sigh to think that I cannot count on it without administering a lecture.’

  ‘She will soon be my care, sir.’

  ‘She shall be. Why, she is as good as married. She is at the altar. She is in her house. She is – why, where is she not? She has entered the sanctuary. She is out of the market. This maenad shriek for freedom would happily entitle her to the Republican cap – the Phrygian – in a revolutionary Parisian procession. To me it has no meaning; and but that I cannot credit child of mine with mania, I should be in trepidation of her wits.’

  Sir Willoughby’s livelier fears were pacified by the information that Clara had simply emitted a cry. Clara had once or twice
given him cause for starting and considering whether to think of her sex differently or condemningly of her, yet he could not deem her capable of fully unbosoming herself even to him, and under excitement. His idea of the cowardice of girls combined with his ideal of a waxwork sex to persuade him that though they are often (he had experienced it) wantonly desperate in their acts, their tongues are curbed by rosy prudency. And this was in his favour. For if she proved speechless and stupid with Mrs Mountstuart, the lady would turn her over, and beat her flat, beat her angular, in fine, turn her to any shape, despising her, and cordially believe him to be the model gentleman of Christendom. She would fill in the outlines he had sketched to her of a picture that he had small pride in by comparison with his early vision of a fortune-favoured, triumphing squire, whose career is like the sun’s intelligibly lordly to all comprehensions. Not like your model

  gentleman, that has to be expounded – a thing for abstract esteem! However, it was the choice left to him. And an alternative was enfolded in that. Mrs Mountstuart’s model gentleman could marry either one of two women, throwing the other overboard. He was bound to marry: he was bound to take to himself one of them: and whichever one he selected would cast a lustre on his reputation. At least she would rescue him from from the claws of Lady Busshe, and her owl’s hoot of ‘Willow Pattern’, and her hag’s shriek of ‘twice jilted’. That flying infant Willoughby – his unprotected little incorporeal omnipresent Self (not thought of so much as passionately felt for) – would not be scoffed at as the luckless with women. A fall indeed from his original conception of his name of fame abroad! But Willoughby had the high consolation of knowing that others have fallen lower. There is the fate of the devils to comfort us, if we are driven hard. For one of your pangs another bosom is racked by ten, we read in the solacing Book.

  With all these nice calculations at work, Willoughby stood above himself, contemplating his active machinery, which he could partly criticize but could not stop, in a singular wonderment at the aims and schemes and tremours of one who was handsome, manly, acceptable in the world’s eyes: and had he not loved himself most heartily he would have been divided to the extent of repudiating that urgent and excited half of his being, whose motions appeared as those of a body of insects perpetually erecting and repairing a structure of extraordinary pettiness. He loved himself too seriously to dwell on the division for more than a minute or so. But having seen it, and for the first time, as he believed, his passion for the woman causing it became surcharged with bitterness, atrabiliar.

  A glance behind him, as he walked away with Dr Middleton, showed Clara, cunning creature that she was, airily executing her malicious graces in the preliminary courtesies with Mrs Mountstuart.

  CHAPTER 35

  Miss Middleton and Mrs Mountstuart

  ‘SIT beside me, fair Middleton,’ said the great lady.

  ‘Gladly,’ said Clara, bowing to her title.

  ‘I want to sound you, my dear.’

  Clara presented an open countenance with a dim interrogation on the forehead. ‘Yes?’ she said, submissively.

  ‘You were one of my bright faces last night. I was in love with you. Delicate vessels ring sweetly to a finger-nail, and if the wit is true, you answer to it; that I can see, and that is what I like. Most of the people one has at a table are drums. A ruba-dub-dub on them is the only way to get a sound. When they can be persuaded to do it upon one another, they call it conversation.’

  ‘Colonel De Craye was very funny.’

  ‘Funny, and witty too.’

  ‘But never spiteful.’

  ‘These Irish or half Irishmen are my taste. If they’re not politicians, mind; I mean Irish gentlemen. I will never have another dinner-party without one. Our men’s tempers are uncertain. You can’t get them to forget themselves. And when the wine is in them the nature comes out, and they must be buffeting, and upstart politics, and good-bye to harmony! My husband, I am sorry to say, was one of those who have a long account of ruined dinners against them. I have seen him and his friends red as the roast and white as the boiled with wrath on a popular topic they had excited themselves over, intrinsically not worth a snap of the fingers. In London!’ exclaimed Mrs Mountstuart, to aggravate the charge against her lord in the Shades. ‘But town or country, the table should be sacred. I have heard women say it is a plot on the side of the men to teach us our littleness. I don’t believe they have a plot. It would be to compliment them on a talent. I believe they fall upon one another blindly, simply because they are full: which is, we are told, the preparation for the fighting Englishman. They cannot eat and keep a truce. Did you notice that dreadful Mr Capes?’

  ‘The gentleman who frequently contradicted papa? But Colonel De Craye was good enough to relieve us.’

  ‘How, my dear?’

  ‘You did not hear him? He took advantage of an interval when Mr Capes was breathing after a paean to his friend, the Governor – I think – of one of the Presidencies, to say to the lady beside him: “He was a wonderful administrator and great logician; he married an Anglo-Indian widow, and soon after published a pamphlet in favour of Suttee.” ’

  ‘And what did the lady say?’

  ‘She said: “Oh!” ’

  ‘Hark at her! And was it heard?’

  ‘Mr Capes granted the widow, but declared he had never seen the pamphlet in favour of Suttee, and disbelieved in it. He insisted that it was to be named Sati. He was vehement.’

  ‘Now I do remember: – which must have delighted the colonel. And Mr Capes retired from the front upon a repetition of “in toto, in toto”. As if “in toto” were the language of a dinner-table! But what will ever teach these men? Must we import Frenchmen to give them an example in the art of conversation, as their grandfathers brought over marquises to instruct them in salads? And our young men too! Women have to take to the hunting-field to be able to talk with them, and be on a par with their grooms. Now, there was Willoughby Patterne, a prince among them formerly. Now, did you observe him last night? did you notice how, instead of conversing, instead of assisting me – as he was bound to do doubly owing to the defection of Vernon Whitford: a thing I don’t yet comprehend – there he sat sharpening his lower lip for cutting remarks. And at my best man! at Colonel De

  Craye! If he had attacked Mr Capes, with his Governor of Bomby, as the man pronounces it, or Colonel Wildjohn and his Protestant Church in Danger, or Sir Wilson Pettifer harping on his Monarchical Republic, or any other! No, he preferred to be sarcastic upon friend Horace, and he had the worst of it. Sarcasm is so silly! What is the gain if he has been smart? People forget the epigram and remember the other’s good temper. On that field, my dear, you must make up your mind to be beaten by “friend Horace”. I have my prejudices and I have my prepossessions, but I love good temper, and I love wit, and when I see a man possessed of both, I set my cap at him, and there’s my flat confession, and highly unfeminine it is.’

  ‘Not at all!’ cried Clara.

  ‘We are one, then.’

  Clara put up a mouth empty of words: she was quite one with her. Mrs Mountstuart pressed her hand. ‘When one does get intimate with a dainty rogue!’ she said. ‘You forgive me all that, for I could vow that Willoughby has betrayed me.’

  Clara looked soft, kind, bright, in turns, and clouded instantly when the lady resumed: ‘A friend of my own sex, and young, and a close neighbour, is just what I would have prayed for. And I’ll excuse you, my dear, for not being so anxious about the friendship of an old woman. But I shall be of use to you, you will find. In the first place, I never tap for secrets. In the second, I keep them. Thirdly, I have some power. And fourth, every young married woman has need of a friend like me. Yes, and Lady Patterne heading all the county will be the stronger for my backing. You don’t look so mighty well pleased, my dear. Speak out.’

  ‘Dear Mrs Mountstuart!’

  ‘I tell you, I am very fond of Willoughby, but I saw the faults of the boy and see the man’s. He has the pride of a king, a
nd it’s a pity if you offend it. He is prodigal in generosity, but he can’t forgive. As to his own errors, you must be blind to them as a Saint. The secret of him is, that he is one of those

  excessively civilized creatures who aim at perfection: and I think he ought to be supported in his conceit of having attained it; for the more men of that class, the greater our influence. He excels in manly sports, because he won’t be excelled in anything, but as men don’t comprehend his fineness, he comes to us; and his wife must manage him by that key. You look down at the idea of managing. It has to be done. One thing you may be assured of, he will be proud of you. His wife won’t be very much enamoured of herself if she is not the happiest woman in the world. You will have the best horses, the best dresses, the finest jewels in England; and an incomparable cook. The house will be changed the moment you enter it as Lady Patterne. And, my dear, just where he is, with all his graces, deficient of attraction, yours will tell. The sort of Othello he would make, or Leontes, I don’t know, and none of us ever needs to know. My impression is, that if even a shadow of a suspicion flitted across him, he is a sort of man to double-dye himself in guilt by way of vengeance in

  anticipation of an imagined offence. Not uncommon with men. I have heard strange stories of them: and so will you in your time to come, but not from me. No young woman shall ever be the sourer for having been my friend. One word of advice now we are on the topic: never play at counter-strokes with him. He will be certain to out-stroke you, and you will be driven further than you meant to go. They say we beat men at that game; and so we do, at the cost of beating ourselves. And if once we are started, it is a race-course ending on a precipice – over goes the winner. We must be moderately slavish to keep our place; which is given us in appearance; but appearances make up a remarkably large part of life, and far the most comfortable, so long as we are discreet at the right moment. He is a man whose pride, when hurt, would run his wife to perdition to solace it. If he married a troublesome widow, his pamphlet on Suttee would be out within the year. Vernon Whitford would receive instructions about it the first frosty moon. You like Miss Dale?’