The Amazing Marriage, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Amazing Marriage, Complete

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It happened, that midway on the lake he perceived his boatman about to
prime a pistol to murder the mild-eyed stillness, and he called to the
man in his best German to desist. During the altercation, there passed a
countryman of his in another of the punts, who said gravely: 'I thank you
for that.' It was early morning, and they had the lake to themselves,
each deeming the other an intruder; for the courtship of solitude wanes
when we are haunted by a second person in pursuit of it; he is
discolouring matter in our pure crystal cup. Such is the worship of the
picturesque; and it would appear to say, that the spirit of man finds
itself yet in the society of barbarians. The case admits of good pleading
either way, even upon the issue whether the exclusive or the vulgar be
the more barbarous. But in those days the solicitation of the picturesque
had been revived by a poet of some impassioned rhetoric, and two devotees
could hardly meet, as the two met here, and not be mutually obscurants.

They stepped ashore in turn on the same small shoot of land where a
farm-house near a chapel in the shadow of cliffs did occasional service
for an inn. Each had intended to pass a day and a night in this lonely
dwelling-place by the lake, but a rival was less to be tolerated there
than in love, and each awaited the other's departure, with an air that
said: 'You are in my sunlight'; and going deeper, more sternly: 'Sir, you
are an offence to Nature's pudency!'

Woodseer was the more placable of the two; he had taken possession of the
bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up
with it while fish were frying. His countryman had rushed inside to avoid
him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged. Their
boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation of provision and payment.

After eating his fish, Woodseer decided abruptly, that as he could not
have the spot to himself, memorable as it would have been to intermarry
with Nature in so sacred a welldepth of the mountains, he had better be
walking and climbing. Another boat paddling up the lake had been spied:
solitude was not merely shared with a rival, but violated by numbers. In
the first case, we detest the man; in the second, we fly from an outraged
scene. He wrote a line or so in his book, hurriedly paid his bill, and
started, full of the matter he had briefly committed to his pages.

At noon, sitting beside the beck that runs from the lake, he was
overtaken by the gentleman he had left behind, and accosted in the
informal English style, with all the politeness possible to a nervously
blunt manner: 'This book is yours,--I have no doubt it is yours; I am
glad to be able to restore it; I should be glad to be the owner-writer of
the contents, I mean. I have to beg your excuse; I found it lying open; I
looked at the page, I looked through the whole; I am quite at your
mercy.'

Woodseer jumped at the sight of his note-book, felt for the emptiness of
his pocket, and replied: 'Thank you, thank you. It's of use to me, though
to no one else.'

'You pardon me?'

'Certainly. I should have done it myself.'

'I cannot offer you my apologies as a stranger.' Lord Fleetwood was the
name given.

Woodseer's plebeian was exchanged for it, and he stood up.

The young lord had fair, straight, thin features, with large restless
eyes that lighted quickly, and a mouth that was winning in his present
colloquial mood.

'You could have done the same? I should find it hard to forgive the man
who pried into my secret thoughts,' he remarked.

'There they are. If one puts them to paper! . . .' Woodseer shrugged.

'Yes, yes. They never last long enough with me. So far I'm safe. One page
led to another. You can meditate. I noticed some remarks on Religions.
You think deeply.'

Woodseer was of that opinion, but modesty urged him to reply with a small
flourish. 'Just a few heads of ideas. When the wind puffs down a sooty
chimney the air is filled with little blacks that settle pretty much like
the notes in this book of mine. There they wait for another puff, or my
fingers to stamp them.'

'I could tell you were the owner of that book,' said Lord Fleetwood. He
swept his forehead feverishly. 'What a power it is to relieve one's brain
by writing! May I ask you, which one of the Universities . . . ?'

The burden of this question had a ring of irony to one whom it taught to
feel rather defiantly, that he carried the blazon of a reeking tramp. 'My
University,' Woodseer replied, 'was a merchant's office in Bremen for
some months. I learnt more Greek and Latin in Bremen than business. I was
invalided home, and then tried a merchant's office in London. I put on my
hat one day, and walked into the country. My College fellows were
hawkers, tinkers, tramps and ploughmen, choughs and crows. A volume of
our Poets and a History of Philosophy composed my library. I had scarce
any money, so I learnt how to idle inexpensively--a good first lesson.
We're at the bottom of the world when we take to the road; we see men as
they were in the beginning--not so eager for harness till they get
acquainted with hunger, as I did, and studied in myself the old animal
having his head pushed into the collar to earn a feed of corn.'

Woodseer laughed, adding, that he had been of a serious mind in those
days of the alternation of smooth indifference and sharp necessity, and
he had plucked a flower from them.

His nature prompted him to speak of himself with simple candour, as he
had done spontaneously to Chillon Kirby, yet he was now anxious to let
his companion know at once the common stuff he was made of, together with
the great stuff he contained. He grew conscious of an over-anxiety, and
was uneasy, recollecting how he had just spoken about his naturalness,
dimly if at all apprehending the cause of this disturbance within. What
is a lord to a philosopher! But the world is around us as a cloak, if not
a coat; in his ignorance he supposed it specially due to a lord seeking
acquaintance with him, that he should expose his condition: doing the
which appeared to subject him to parade his intellectual treasures and
capacity for shaping sentences; and the effect upon Lord Fleetwood was an
incentive to the display. Nevertheless he had a fretful desire to escape
from the discomposing society of a lord; he fixed his knapsack and began
to saunter.

The young lord was at his elbow. 'I can't part with you. Will you allow
me?'

Woodseer was puzzled and had to say: 'If you wish it.'

'I do wish it: an hour's walk with you. One does not meet a man like you
every day. I have to join a circle of mine in Baden, but there's no
hurry; I could be disengaged for a week. And I have things to ask you,
owing to my indiscretion--but you have excused it.'

Woodseer turned for a farewell gaze at the great Watzmann, and saluted
him.

'Splendid,' said Lord Fleetwood; 'but don't clap names on the
mountains.--I saw written in your book: "A text for Dada." You write: "A
despotism would procure a perfect solitude, but kill the ghost." That was
my thought at the place where we were at the lake. I had it. Tell
me--though I could not have written it, and "ghost" is just the word, the
exact word--tell me, are you of Welsh blood? "Dad" is good
Welsh--pronounce it hard.'

Woodseer answered: 'My mother was a Glamorganshire woman. My father, I
know, walked up from Wales, mending boots on his road for a livelihood.
He is not a bad scholar, he knows Greek enough to like it. He is a
Dissenting preacher. When I strike a truism, I 've a habit of scoring it
to give him a peg or tuning-fork for one of his discourses. He's a man of
talent; he taught himself, and he taught me more than I learnt at school.
He is a thinker in his way. He loves Nature too. I rather envy him in
some respects. He and I are hunters of Wisdom on different tracks; and
he, as he says, "waits for me." He's patient!'

Ah, and I wanted to ask you,' Lord Fleetwood observed, bursting with it,
'I was puzzled by a name you write here and there near the end, and
permit me to ask, it: Carinthia! It cannot be the country? You write
after, the name: "A beautiful Gorgon--a haggard Venus." It seized me. I
have had the face before my eyes ever since. You must mean a woman. I
can't be deceived in allusions to a woman: they have heart in them. You
met her somewhere about Carinthia, and gave her the name? You write--may
I refer to the book?'

He received the book and flew through the leaves:

'Here--"A panting look": you write again: "A look of beaten flame: a look
of one who has run and at last beholds!" But that is a living face: I see
her! Here again: "From minute to minute she is the rock that loses the
sun at night and reddens in the morning." You could not create an idea of
a woman to move you like that. No one could, I am certain of it, certain;
if so, you 're a wizard--I swear you are. But that's a face high over
beauty. Just to know there is a woman like her, is an antidote. You
compare her to a rock. Who would imagine a comparison of a woman to a
rock! But rock is the very picture of beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus.
Tell me you met her, you saw her. I want only to hear she lives, she is
in the world. Beautiful women compared to roses may whirl away with their
handsome dragoons! A pang from them is a thing to be ashamed of. And
there are men who trot about whining with it! But a Carinthia makes pain
honourable. You have done what I thought impossible--fused a woman's face
and grand scenery, to make them inseparable. She might be wicked for me.
I should see a bright rim round hatred of her!--the rock you describe. I
could endure horrors and not annihilate her! I should think her sacred.'

Woodseer turned about to have a look at the man who was even quicker than
he at realizing a person from a hint of description, and almost insanely
extravagant in the pitch of the things he uttered to a stranger. For
himself, he was open with everybody, his philosophy not allowing that
strangers existed on earth. But the presence of a lord brought the
conventional world to his feelings, though at the same time the title
seemed to sanction the exceptional abruptness and wildness of this lord.
As for suspecting him to be mad, it would have been a common idea: no
stretching of speech or overstepping of social rules could waken a
suspicion so spiritless in Woodseer.

He said: 'I can tell you I met her and she lives. I could as soon swim in
that torrent or leap the mountain as repeat what she spoke, or sketch a
feature of her. She goes into the blood, she is a new idea of women. She
has the face that would tempt a gypsy to evil tellings. I could think of
it as a history written in a line: Carinthia, Saint and Martyr! As for
comparisons, they are flowers thrown into the fire.'

'I have had that--I have thought that,' said Lord Fleetwood. 'Go on; talk
of her, pray; without comparisons. I detest them. How did you meet her?
What made you part? Where is she now? I have no wish to find her, but I
want thoroughly to believe in her.'

Another than Woodseer would have perceived the young lord's malady. Here
was one bitten by the serpent of love, and athirst for an image of the
sex to serve for the cooling herb, as youth will be. Woodseer put it down
to a curious imaginative fellowship with himself. He forgot the lord, and
supposed he had found his own likeness, less gifted in speech. After
talking of Carinthia more and more in the abstract, he fell upon his
discovery of the Great Secret of life, against which his hearer struggled
for a time, though that was cooling to him too; but ultimately there was
no resistance, and so deep did they sink into the idea of pure
contemplation, that the idea of woman seemed to have become a part of it.
No stronger proof of their aethereal conversational earnestness could be
offered. A locality was given to the Great Secret, and of course it was
the place where the most powerful recent impression had been stamped on
the mind of the discoverer: the shadowy valley rolling from the
slate-rock. Woodseer was too artistic a dreamer to present the passing
vision of Carinthia with any associates there. She passed: the solitude
accepted her and lost her; and it was the richer for the one swift gleam:
she brought no trouble, she left no regrets; she was the ghost of the
rocky obscurity. But now remembering her mountain carol, he chanced to
speak of her as a girl.

'She is a girl?' cried Lord Fleetwood, frowning over an utter revolution
of sentiment at the thought of the beautiful Gorgon being a girl; for,
rapid as he was to imagine, he had raised a solid fabric upon his
conception of Carinthia the woman, necessarily the woman--logically. Who
but the woman could look the Gorgon! He tried to explain it to be
impossible for a girl to wear the look: and his notion evidently was,
that it had come upon a beautiful face in some staring horror of a world
that had bitten the tender woman. She touched him sympathetically through
the pathos.

Woodseer flung out vociferously for the contrary. Who but a girl could
look the beautiful Gorgon! What other could seem an emanation of the
mountain solitude? A woman would instantly breathe the world on it to
destroy it. Hers would be the dramatic and not the poetic face. It would
shriek of man, wake the echoes with the tale of man, slaughter all.
quietude. But a girl's face has no story of poisonous intrusion. She
indeed may be cast in the terrors of Nature, and yet be sweet with
Nature, beautiful because she is purely of Nature. Woodseer did his best
to present his view irresistibly. Perhaps he was not clear; it was a
piece of skiamachy, difficult to render clear to the defeated.

Lord Fleetwood had nothing to say but 'Gorgon! a girl a Gorgon!' and it
struck Woodseer as intensely unreasonable, considering that he had seen
the girl whom, in his effort to portray her, he had likened to a
beautiful Gorgon. He recounted the scene of the meeting with her,
pictured it in effective colours, but his companion gave no response, nor
a nod. They ceased to converse, and when the young lord's hired carriage
drew up on the road, Woodseer required persuasion to accompany him. They
were both in their different stations young tyrants of the world, ready
to fight the world and one another for not having their immediate view of
it such as they wanted it. They agreed, however, not to sleep in the
city. Beds were to be had near the top of a mountain on the other side of
the Salza, their driver informed them, and vowing themselves to that
particular height, in a mutual disgust of the city, they waxed
friendlier, with a reserve.

Woodseer soon had experience that he was receiving exceptional treatment
from Lord Fleetwood, whose manservant was on the steps of the hotel in
Salzburg on the lookout for his master.

'Sir Meeson has been getting impatient, my lord,' said the man.

Sir Meeson Corby appeared; Lord Fleetwood cut him short: 'You 're in a
hurry; go at once, don't wait for me; I join you in Baden.--Do me the
favour to eat with me,' he turned to Woodseer. 'And here, Corby! tell the
countess I have a friend to bear me company, and there is to be an extra
bedroom secured at her hotel. That swinery of a place she insists on
visiting is usually crammed. With you there,' he turned to Woodseer, 'I
might find it agreeable.--You can take my man, Corby; I shall not want
the fellow.'

'Positively, my dear Fleetwood, you know,' Sir Meeson expostulated, 'I am
under orders; I don't see how--I really can't go on without you.'

'Please yourself. This gentleman is my friend, Mr. Woodseer.'

Sir Meeson Corby was a plump little beau of forty, at war with his fat
and accounting his tight blue tail coat and brass buttons a victory. His
tightness made his fatness elastic; he looked wound up for a dance, and
could hardly hold on a leg; but the presentation of a creature in a
battered hat and soiled garments, carrying a tattered knapsack half
slung, lank and with disorderly locks, as the Earl of Fleetwood's
friend--the friend of the wealthiest nobleman of Great Britain!--fixed
him in a perked attitude of inquiry that exhausted interrogatives.
Woodseer passed him, slouching a bow. The circular stare of Sir Meeson
seemed unable to contract. He directed it on Lord Fleetwood, and was then
reminded that he dealt with prickles.

'Where have you been?' he said, blinking to refresh his eyeballs. 'I
missed you, I ran round and round the town after you.'

'I have been to the lake.'

'Queer fish there!' Sir Meeson dropped a glance on the capture.

Lord Fleetwood took Woodseer's arm. 'Do you eat with us?' he asked the
baronet, who had stayed his eating for an hour and was famished; so they
strode to the dining-room.

'Do you wash, sir, before eating?' Sir Meeson said to Woodseer, caressing
his hands when they had seated themselves at table. 'Appliances are to be
found in this hotel.'

'Soap?' said Lord Fleetwood.

'Soap--at least, in my chamber.'

'Fetch it, please.'

Sir Meeson, of course, could not hear that. He requested the waiter to
show the gentleman to a room.

Lord Fleetwood ordered the waiter to bring a handbasin and towel. 'We're
off directly and must eat at once,' he said.

'Soap--soap! my dear Fleetwood,' Sir Meeson knuckled on the table, to
impress it that his appetite and his gorge demanded a thorough cleansing
of those fingers, if they were to sit at one board.

'Let the waiter fetch it.'

'The soap is in my portmanteau.'

'You spoke of it as a necessity for this gentleman and me. Bring it.'

Woodseer had risen. Lord Fleetwood motioned him down. He kept an eye
dead--as marble on Corby, who muttered: 'You can't mean that you ask
me . . . ?' But the alternative was forced on Sir Meeson by too strong a
power of the implacable eye; there was thunder in it, a continuity of
gaze forcefuller than repetitions of the word. He knew Lord Fleetwood.
Men privileged to attend on him were dogs to the flinty young despot:
they were sure to be called upon to expiate the faintest offence to him.
He had hastily to consider, that he was banished beyond appeal, with the
whole torture of banishment to an adorer of the Countess Livia, or else
the mad behest must be obeyed. He protested, shrugged, sat fast, and
sprang up, remarking, that he went with all the willingness imaginable.
It could not have been the first occasion.

He was affecting the excessively obsequious when he came back bearing his
metal soap-case. The performance was checked by another look solid as
shot, and as quick. Woodseer, who would have done for Sir Meeson Corby or
Lazarus what had been done for him, thought little of the service, but so
intense a peremptoriness in the look of an eye made him uncomfortable in
his own sense of independence. The humblest citizen of a free nation has
that warning at some notable exhibition of tyranny in a neighbouring
State: it acts like a concussion of the air.

Lord Fleetwood led an easy dialogue with him and Sir Meeson, on their
different themes immediately, which was not less impressive to an
observer. He listened to Sir Meeson's entreaties that he should start at
once for Baden, and appeared to pity the poor gentleman, condemned by his
office to hang about him in terror of his liege lady's displeasure.
Presently, near the close of the meal, drawing a ring from his finger, he
handed it to the baronet, and said, 'Give her that. She knows I shall
follow that.' He added to himself:--I shall have ill-luck till I have it
back! and he asked Woodseer whether he put faith in the virtue of
talismans.

'I have never possessed one,' said Woodseer, with his natural frankness.
'It would have gone long before this for a night's lodging.'

Sir Meeson heard him, and instantly urged Lord Fleetwood not to think of
dismissing his man Francis. 'I beg it, Fleetwood! I beg you to take the
man. Her ladyship will receive me badly, ring or no ring, if she hears of
your being left alone. I really can't present myself. I shall not go, not
go. I say no.'

'Stay, then,' said Fleetwood.

He turned to Woodseer with an air of deference, and requested the
privilege of glancing at his notebook again, and scanned it closely at
one of the pages. 'I believe it true,' he cried; 'I had a half
recollection of it--I have had some such thought, but never could put it
in words. You have thought deeply.'

'That is only a surface thought, or common reflection,' said Woodseer.

Sir Meeson stared at them in turn. Judging by their talk and the effect
produced on the earl, he took Woodseer for a sort of conjuror.

It was his duty to utter a warning.

He drew Fleetwood aside. A word was whispered, and they broke asunder
with a snap. Francis was called. His master gave him his keys, and
despatched him into the town to purchase a knapsack or bag for the outfit
of a jolly beggar. The prospect delighted Lord Fleetwood. He sang notes
from the deep chest, flaunting like an opera brigand, and contemplating
his wretched satellite's indecision with brimming amusement.

'Remember, we fight for our money. I carry mine,' he said to Woodseer.

'Wouldn't it be expedient, Fleetwood . . .' Sir Meeson suggested a
treasurer in the person of himself.

'Not a florin, Corby! I should find it all gambled away at Baden.'

'But I am not Abrane, I'm not Abrane! I never play, I have no mania,
none. It would be prudent, Fleetwood.'

'The slightest bulging of a pocket would show on you, Corby; and they
would be at you, they would fall on you and pluck you to have another
fling. I 'd rather my money should go to a knight of the road than feed
that dragon's jaw. A highwayman seems an honest fellow compared with your
honourable corporation of fly-catchers. I could surrender to him with
some satisfaction after a trial of the better man. I 've tried these
tables, and couldn't stir a pulse. Have you?'

It had to be explained to Woodseer what was meant by trying the tables.
'Not I,' said he, in strong contempt of the queer allurement.

Lord Fleetwood studied him half a minute, as if measuring and discarding
a suspicion of the young philosopher's possible weakness under
temptation.

Sir Meeson Corby accompanied the oddly assorted couple through the town
and a short way along the road to the mountain, for the sake of quieting
his conscience upon the subject of his leaving them together. He could
not have sat down a second time at a table with those hands. He said
it:--he could not have done the thing. So the best he could do was to let
them go. Like many of his class, he had a mind open to the effect of
striking contrasts, and the spectacle of the wealthiest nobleman in Great
Britain tramping the road, pack on back, with a young nobody for his
comrade, a total stranger, who might be a cut-throat, and was avowedly
next to a mendicant, charged him with quantities of interjectory matter,
that he caught himself firing to the foreign people on the highway.
Hundreds of thousands a year, and tramping it like a pedlar, with a
beggar for his friend! He would have given something to have an English
ear near him as he watched them rounding under the mountain they were
about to climb.

CHAPTER IX

CONCERNING THE BLACK GODDESS FORTUNE AND THE WORSHIP OF HER, TOGETHER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION OF SOME OF HER VOTARIES

In those early days of Fortune's pregnant alternations of colour between
the Red and the Black, exhibited publicly, as it were a petroleum spring
of the ebony-fiery lake below, Black-Forest Baden was the sprightliest'
of the ante-chambers of Hades. Thither in the ripeness of the year
trooped the devotees of the sable goddess to perform sacrifice; and
annually among them the beautiful Livia, the Countess of Fleetwood; for
nowhere else had she sensation of the perfect repose which is rocked to a
slumber by gales.

She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of
excitement; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and
swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master
passions about her; one or two of which her dainty hand caressed,
fearless of a sting; the lady petted them as her swans. It surprised her
to a gentle contempt of men and women, that they should be ruffled either
by love or play. A withholding from the scene will naturally arouse
disturbing wishes; but to be present lulls; for then we live, we are in
our element. And who could expect, what sane person can desire, perpetual
good luck? Fortune, the goddess, and young Love, too, are divine in their
mutability: and Fortune would resemble a humdrum housewife, Love a
droning husband, if constancy were practised by them. Observe the
staggering and plunging of the blindfold wretch seeking to be persuaded
of their faithfulness.

She could make for herself a quiet centre in the heart of the whirlwind,
but the whirlwind was required. The clustered lights at the corner of the
vale under forest hills, the burst of music, the blazing windows of the
saloons of the Furies, and the gamblers advancing and retreating, with
their totally opposite views of consequences, and fashions of wearing or
tearing the mask; and closer, the figures shifting up and down the
promenade, known and unknown faces, and the histories half known, half
woven, weaving fast, which flew their threads to provoke speculation;
pleasantly embraced and diverted the cool-blooded lady surrounded by her
courtiers, who could upon occasion supply the luminous clue or anecdote.
She had an intuitive liveliness to detect interchanges of eyes, the
shuttle of intrigue; the mild hypocrisy, the clever audacity, the
suspicion confirmed, the complication threatening to become resonant and
terrible; and the old crossing the young and the young outwitting the
old, wiles of fair traitors and dark, knaves of all suits of the pack. A
more intimate acquaintance with their lineaments inspired a regard for
them, such as poets may feign the throned high moon to entertain for
objects causing her rays to flash.

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