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Diana of the Crossways, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, Complete







CHAPTER X

THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT

Her brain was a steam-wheel throughout the night; everything that could
be thought of was tossed, nothing grasped.

The unfriendliness of the friends who sought to retain her recurred. For
look--to fly could not be interpreted as a flight. It was but a stepping
aside, a disdain of defending herself, and a wrapping herself in her
dignity. Women would be with her. She called on the noblest of them to
justify the course she chose, and they did, in an almost audible murmur.

And O the rich reward. A black archway-gate swung open to the glittering
fields of freedom.

Emma was not of the chorus. Emma meditated as an invalid. How often had
Emma bewailed to her that the most, grievous burden of her malady was her
fatal tendency to brood sickly upon human complications! She could not
see the blessedness of the prospect of freedom to a woman abominably
yoked. What if a miserable woman were dragged through mire to reach it!
Married, the mire was her portion, whatever she might do. That man--but
pass him!

And that other--the dear, the kind, careless, high-hearted old friend. He
could honestly protest his guiltlessness, and would smilingly leave the
case to go its ways. Of this she was sure, that her decision and her
pleasure would be his. They were tied to the stake. She had already
tasted some of the mortal agony. Did it matter whether the flames
consumed her?

Reflecting on the interview with Redworth, though she had performed her
part in it placidly, her skin burned. It was the beginning of tortures if
she stayed in England.

By staying to defend herself she forfeited her attitude of dignity and
lost all chance of her reward. And name the sort of world it is, dear
friends, for which we are to sacrifice our one hope of freedom, that we
may preserve our fair fame in it!

Diana cried aloud, 'My freedom!' feeling as a butterfly flown out of a
box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens. Her bitter
marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was
right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment. She
excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken.
Here, too, in this very house of her happiness with her father, she had
bound herself to the man voluntarily, quite inexplicably. Voluntarily, as
we say. But there must be a spell upon us at times. Upon young women
there certainly is.

The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws
of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she
thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry
and be bound to the end.

It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.

But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.

The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite! The
world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.

Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny
wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of
decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind
the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected,
developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana,
deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly
justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing
him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her--these were
the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the
hypocrite world.

One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have
loved--whom? An ideal. Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her
yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of
the yoke? She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress!
The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of
softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and
leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated. The
regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical sentence of
death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it. She could have loved.
Good-bye to that!

A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her. She was in the
arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others
should have protected her from them. And what had she done to deserve it?
She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to admit
the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and thereby
expose her transparent honesty. The very things awakening a mad suspicion
proved her innocence. But was she this utterly simple person? Oh, no! She
was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with evil--by no means
of the order of those ninny young women who realize the popular
conception of the purely innocent. She had fenced and kept her guard. Of
this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge. But she had been
compelled to fence. Such are men in the world of facts, that when a woman
steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is a tangle, her
rights to partial independence, they sight her for their prey, or at
least they complacently suppose her accessible. Wretched at home, a woman
ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be assured that
not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character.

Against the husband her cause was triumphant. Against herself she decided
not to plead it, for this reason, that the preceding Court, which was the
public and only positive one, had entirely and justly exonerated her. But
the holding of her hand by the friend half a minute too long for
friendship, and the over-friendliness of looks, letters, frequency of
visits, would speak within her. She had a darting view of her husband's
estimation of them in his present mood. She quenched it; they were
trifles, things that women of the world have to combat. The revelation to
a fair-minded young woman of the majority of men being naught other than
men, and some of the friendliest of men betraying confidence under the
excuse of temptation, is one of the shocks to simplicity which leave her
the alternative of misanthropy or philosophy. Diana had not the heart to
hate her kind, so she resigned herself to pardon, and to the recognition
of the state of duel between the sexes-active enough in her sphere of
society. The circle hummed with it; many lived for it. Could she pretend
to ignore it? Her personal experience might have instigated a less clear
and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the opportunity for playing
the popular innocent, who runs about with astonished eyes to find herself
in so hunting a world, and wins general compassion, if not shelter in
unsuspected and unlicenced places. There is perpetually the inducement to
act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world, unless a woman submits to
be the humbly knitting housewife, unquestioningly worshipful of her lord;
for the world is ever gracious to an hypocrisy that pays homage to the
mask of virtue by copying it; the world is hostile to the face of an
innocence not conventionally simpering and quite surprised; the world
prefers decorum to honesty. 'Let me be myself, whatever the martyrdom!'
she cried, in that phase of young sensation when, to the blooming woman;
the putting on of a mask appears to wither her and reduce her to the show
she parades. Yet, in common with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a
sort of mask; the world demands it of them as the price of their station.
That she had never worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it
off altogether, showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming
the first martyr of the modern woman's cause--a grand position! and one
imaginable to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a
critical humour, as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity. She
was, then, this martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it,
and of, confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules,
according to her own ideas of her immunities. O brave!

But was she holding the position by flight? It involved the challenge of
consequences, not an evasion of them.

She moaned; her mental steam-wheel stopped; fatigue brought sleep.

She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to The Crossways,
distilling much poison from thoughts on the way; and there, for the
luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion.




CHAPTER XI

RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF DIALOGUE, AND
A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD

In the morning the fight was over. She looked at the signpost of The
Crossways whilst dressing, and submitted to follow, obediently as a
puppet, the road recommended by friends, though a voice within, that
she took for the intimations of her reason, protested that they were
wrong, that they were judging of her case in the general, and
unwisely--disastrously for her.

The mistaking of her desires for her reasons was peculiar to her
situation.

'So I suppose I shall some day see The Crossways again,' she said, to
conceive a compensation in the abandonment of freedom. The night's red
vision of martyrdom was reserved to console her secretly, among the
unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts. It helped to sustain her;
and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to
bring it to the light of day and examine it. She had a pitiful bit of
pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her
that the journey of the day was backward to Copsley.

'If I may venture to say so, ma'am, I am very glad,' said her maid.

'You must be prepared for the questions of lawyers, Danvers.'

'Oh, ma'am! they'll get nothing out of me, and their wigs won't frighten
me.'

'It is usually their baldness that is most frightening, my poor Danvers.'

'Nor their baldness, ma'am,' said the literal maid; 'I never cared for
their heads, or them. I've been in a Case before.'

'Indeed!' exclaimed her mistress; and she had a chill.

Danvers mentioned a notorious Case, adding, 'They got nothing out of me.'

'In my Case you will please to speak the truth,' said Diana, and beheld
in the looking-glass the primming of her maid's mouth. The sight shot a
sting.

'Understand that there is to be no hesitation about telling the truth of
what you know of me,' said Diana; and the answer was, 'No, ma'am.'

For Danvers could remark to herself that she knew little, and was not a
person to hesitate. She was a maid of the world, with the quality of
faithfulness, by nature, to a good mistress.

Redworth's further difficulties were confined to the hiring of a
conveyance for the travellers, and hot-water bottles, together with a
postillion not addicted to drunkenness. He procured a posting-chariot, an
ancient and musty, of a late autumnal yellow unrefreshed by paint; the
only bottles to be had were Dutch Schiedam. His postillion, inspected at
Storling, carried the flag of habitual inebriation on his nose, and he
deemed it adviseable to ride the mare in accompaniment as far as
Riddlehurst, notwithstanding the postillion's vows upon his honour that
he was no drinker. The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted with his
countrymen, was not reassuring. He had hopes of enlisting a trustier
fellow at Riddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while debating upon
what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the conduct of that
inflamed troughsnout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by an afterthought
of Lady Dunstane's, rushed out of the Riddlehurst inn taproom, and
relieved him of the charge of the mare. He was accommodated with a seat
on a stool in the chariot. 'My triumphal car,' said his captive. She was
very amusing about her postillion; Danvers had to beg pardon for
laughing. 'You are happy,' observed her mistress. But Redworth laughed
too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the temporary
satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast of that little.
She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity, 'Wherever I go now, in
all weathers, I am perfectly naked!' And remembering her readings of a
certain wonderful old quarto book in her father's library, by an
eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the wearing of garments and
sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of human degeneracy, she took
a forced merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of
man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and
thinking. Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of
iridescent humour. Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress's gladness
in not having pursued her bent to quit the country. Redworth saw deeper,
and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her
wit, as she ranged high and low, now capriciously generalizing, now
dropping bolt upon things of passage--the postillion jogging from rum to
gin, the rustics baconly agape, the horse-kneed ostlers. She touched them
to the life in similes and phrases; and next she was aloft, derisively
philosophizing, but with a comic afflatus that dispersed the sharpness of
her irony in mocking laughter. The afternoon refreshments at the inn of
the county market-town, and the English idea of public hospitality, as to
manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, were among the themes
she made memorable to him. She spoke of everything tolerantly, just
naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring and chimed: their
host's ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his contemptuous
disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep
he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the
anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer
over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea,
milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive
genius--these were reviewed in quips of metaphor.

'Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,' said Redworth.

'Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them
with the magic wand of a postillion?' said she.

'It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.'

'Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly "polishing off" the
individual.'

'They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.'

'I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word. It booms--a
curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.'

Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing in
his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow concerning
potation.

'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the
reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.'

Habit enabled him to gain his seat.

'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire;
but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and
there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a
likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in the
frost, to a railway engine. 'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the man.
Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but he
reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling
voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and
men prefer to distantly admire. English women and men feel toward the
quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of
aliens-wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the
sin of posturing. A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a
foreigner and potentially a criminal. She is incandescent to a breath of
rumour. It accounted for her having detractors; a heavy counterpoise to
her enthusiastic friends. It might account for her husband's
discontent-the reduction of him to a state of mere masculine antagonism.
What is the husband of a vanward woman? He feels himself but a diminished
man. The English husband of a voluble woman relapses into a dreary mute.
Ah, for the choice of places! Redworth would have yielded her the loquent
lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who now rejected all,
except the public scourging of her. The conviction was in his mind that
the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than be rid of her. But
a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement.

Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her 'enemies' made him set down
her growing crops of backbiters to the trick she had of ridiculing things
English. If the English do it themselves, it is in a professionally
robust, a jocose, kindly way, always with a glance at the other things,
great things, they excel in; and it is done to have the credit of doing
it. They are keen to catch an inimical tone; they will find occasion to
chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it be the leader of a party,
therefore a power; for they respect a power. Redworth knew their
quaintnesses; without overlooking them he winced at the acid of an irony
that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it, for her sake. He
had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood, bitterly
surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and memorable
phrases of enthusiasm for England--Shakespeareland, as she would
sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet. English
fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do justice to
dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she was always ready to
laud. Only her enthusiasm required rousing by circumstances; it was less
at the brim than her satire. Hence she made enemies among a placable
people.

He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions. The
beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept before
him, and he looked at her, smiling.

'Why do you smile?' she said.

'I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith.'

'Ah! my dear compatriot! And think, too, of Lord Larrian.'

She caught her breath. Instead of recreation, the names brought on a fit
of sadness. It deepened; shy neither smiled nor rattled any more. She
gazed across the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged copses
showing their last leaves in the frost.

'I remember your words: "Observation is the most, enduring of the
pleasures of life"; and so I have found it,' she said. There was a
brightness along her under-eyelids that caused him to look away.

The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the
sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against
the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a
beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown
bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all
boot, in air. No one was hurt. Diana disengaged herself from the shoulder
of Danvers, and mildly said:

'That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.'

Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no
damage, nor had Danvers fainted. The remark was unintelligible to him,
apart from the comforting it had been designed to give. He jumped out,
and held a hand for them to do the same. 'I never foresaw an event more
positively,' said he.

'And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,' said
Diana.

A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the
chariot. The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official
seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was
most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indifferent to what happened
behind him. Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common
sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul.

'Lord!' he cried, 'I been pitched a Somerset in my time, and taken up for
dead, and that didn't beat me!'

Disasters of the present kind could hardly affect such a veteran. But he
was painfully disconcerted by Redworth's determination not to entrust the
ladies any farther to his guidance. Danvers had implored for permission
to walk the mile to the town, and thence take a fly to Copsley. Her
mistress rather sided with the postillion; who begged them to spare him
the disgrace of riding in and delivering a box at the Red Lion.

'What'll they say? And they know Arthur Dance well there,' he groaned.
'What! Arthur! chariotin' a box! And me a better man to his work now than
I been for many a long season, fit for double the journey! A bit of a
shake always braces me up. I could read a newspaper right off, small
print and all. Come along, sir, and hand the ladies in.'

Danvers vowed her thanks to Mr. Redworth for refusing. They walked ahead;
the postillion communicated his mixture of professional and human
feelings to the waggoners, and walked his horses in the rear, meditating
on the weak-heartedness of gentryfolk, and the means for escaping being
chaffed out of his boots at the Old Red Lion, where he was to eat, drink,
and sleep that night. Ladies might be fearsome after a bit of a shake; he
would not have supposed it of a gentleman. He jogged himself into an
arithmetic of the number of nips of liquor he had taken to soothe him on
the road, in spite of the gentleman. 'For some of 'em are sworn enemies
of poor men, as yonder one, ne'er a doubt.'

Diana enjoyed her walk beneath the lingering brown-red of the frosty
November sunset, with the scent of sand-earth strong in the air.

'I had to hire a chariot because there was no two-horse carriage,' said
Redworth, 'and I wished to reach Copsley as early as possible.'

She replied, smiling, that accidents were fated. As a certain marriage
had been! The comparison forced itself on her reflections.

'But this is quite an adventure,' said she, reanimated by the brisker
flow of her blood. 'We ought really to be thankful for it, in days when
nothing happens.'

Redworth accused her of getting that idea from the perusal of romances.

'Yes, our lives require compression, like romances, to be interesting,
and we object to the process,' she said. 'Real happiness is a state of
dulness. When we taste it consciously it becomes mortal--a thing of the
Seasons. But I like my walk. How long these November sunsets burn, and
what hues they have! There is a scientific reason, only don't tell it me.
Now I understand why you always used to choose your holidays in
November.'

She thrilled him with her friendly recollection of his customs.

'As to happiness, the looking forward is happiness,' he remarked.

'Oh, the looking back! back!' she cried.

'Forward! that is life.'

'And backward, death, if you will; and still at is happiness. Death, and
our postillion!'

'Ay; I wonder why the fellow hangs to the rear,' said Redworth, turning
about.

'It's his cunning strategy, poor creature, so that he may be thought to
have delivered us at the head of the town, for us to make a purchase or
two, if we go to the inn on foot,' said Diana. 'We 'll let the manoeuvre
succeed.'

Redworth declared that she had a head for everything, and she was
flattered to hear him.

So passing from the southern into the western road, they saw the
town-lights beneath an amber sky burning out sombrely over the woods of
Copsley, and entered the town, the postillion following.




CHAPTER XII

BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA

Diana was in the arms of her friend at a late hour of the evening, and
Danvers breathed the amiable atmosphere of footmen once more, professing
herself perished. This maid of the world, who could endure hardships and
loss of society for the mistress to whom she was attached, no sooner saw
herself surrounded by the comforts befitting her station, than she
indulged in the luxury of a wailful dejectedness, the better to
appreciate them. She was unaffectedly astonished to find her outcries
against the cold and the journeyings to and fro interpreted as a
serving-woman's muffled comments on her mistress's behaviour. Lady
Dunstane's maid Bartlett, and Mrs. Bridges the housekeeper, and Foster
the butler, contrived to let her know that they could speak an if they
would; and they expressed their pity of her to assist her to begin the
speaking. She bowed in acceptance of Fosters offer of a glass of wine
after supper, but treated him and the other two immediately as though
they had been interrogating bigwigs.

'They wormed nothing out of me,' she said to her mistress at night,
undressing her. 'But what a set they are! They've got such comfortable
places, they've all their days and hours for talk of the doings of their
superiors. They read the vilest of those town papers, and they put their
two and two together of what is happening in and about. And not one of
the footmen thinks of staying, because it 's so dull; and they and the
maids object--did one ever hear?--to the three uppers retiring, when they
've done dining, to the private room to dessert.'

'That is the custom?' observed her mistress.