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Charles Darwin - "The Effects of Cross & Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom"

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The Tragic Comedians, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Tragic Comedians, Complete




The look was the truth revealed-her soul. It begged for life like an
infant; and the man's face was an iron rock in reply! No wonder--he
worshipped the baroness! So great was Clotilde's hatred of him that it
overflooded the image of Alvan, who called him friend, and deputed him to
act as friend. Such blindness, weakness, folly, on the part of one of
Alvan's pretensions, incurred a shade of her contempt. She had not ever
thought of him coldly: hitherto it would have seemed a sacrilege; but now
she said definitely, the friend of Tresten cannot be the man I supposed
him! and she ascribed her capacity for saying it, and for perceiving and
adding up Alvan's faults of character, to the freezing she had taken from
that most antipathetic person. She confessed to sensations of spite which
would cause her to reject and spurn even his pleadings for Alvan, if they
were imaginable as actual. Their not being imaginable allowed her to
indulge her naughtiness harmlessly, for the gratification of the idea of
wounding some one, though it were her lover, connected with this Tresten.

The letter of the baroness and the visit of the woman's admirer had
vitiated Clotilde's blood. She was not only not mistress of her thoughts,
she was undirected either in thinking or wishing by any desires, except
that the people about her should caress and warm her, until, with no gaze
backward, she could say good-bye to them, full of meaning as a good-bye
to the covered grave, as unreluctantly as the swallow quits her
eaves-nest in autumn: and they were to learn that they were chargeable
with the sequel of the history. There would be a sequel, she was sure, if
it came only to punish them for the cruelty which thwarted her timid
anticipation of it by pressing on her natural instinct at all costs to
bargain for an escape from pain, and making her simulate contentment to
cheat her muffled wound and them.




CHAPTER XIII

His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he was not
ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was not done
troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tuneful emotions
beseeching sympathy. He was liker to a sturdy beggar demanding his crust,
to support life, of corporations that can be talked into admitting the
rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation, on the basis
of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunder in his breast
and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashing while the
electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings of Clotilde, and the
success of his efforts caught her back to him. Daily many times he
reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and his arms withered
with emptiness. The ground he won quaked under him. All the evidence
opposed it, but he was in action, and his reason swore that he had her
fast. He had seen and felt his power over her; his reason told him by
what had been that it must be. Could he doubt? He battled for his reason.
Doubt was an extinguishing wave, and he clung to his book of the Law,
besieging Church and State with it, pointing to texts of the law which
proved her free to choose her lord and husband for herself, expressing
his passionate love by his precise interpretation of the law: and still
with the cold sentience gaining on him, against the current of his
tumultuous blood and his hurried intelligence, of her being actually what
he had named her in moments of playful vision--slippery, a serpent, a
winding hare; with the fear that she might slip from him, betray, deny
him, deliver him to ridicule, after he had won his way to her over every
barrier. During his proudest exaltations in success, when his eyes were
sparkling, there was a wry twitch inward upon his heart of hearts.

But if she was a hare, he was a hunter, little inclining to the chase now
for mere physical recreation. She had roused the sportsman's passion as
well as the man's; he meant to hunt her down, and was not more scrupulous
than our ancient hunters, who hunted for a meal and hunted to kill, with
none of the later hesitations as to circumventing, trapping, snaring by
devices, and the preservation of the animal's coat spotless. Let her be
lured from her home, or plucked from her home, and if reluctant,
disgraced, that she may be dependent utterly on the man stooping to pick
her up! He was equal to the projecting of a scheme socially infamous,
with such fanatical intensity did the thought of his losing the woman
harass him, and the torrent of his passion burst restraint to get to her
to enfold her--this in the same hour of the original wild monster's
persistent and sober exposition of the texts of the law with the voice of
a cultivated modern gentleman; and, let it be said, with a modern
gentleman's design to wed a wife in honour. All means were to be tried.
His eye burned on his prize, mindless of what she was dragged through, if
there was resistance, or whether by the hair of her head or her skirts,
or how she was obtained. His interpretation of the law was for the powers
of earth, and other plans were to propitiate the powers under the earth,
and certain distempered groanings wrenched from him at intervals he
addressed (after they were out of him, reflectively) to the powers above,
so that nothing of him should be lost which might get aid of anything
mundane, infernal, or celestial.

Thus it is when Venus bites a veritable ancient male. She puts her venom
in a magnificent beast, not a pathetic Phaedra. She does it rarely, for
though to be loved by a bitten giant is one of the dreams of woman, the
considerate Mother of Love knows how needful it is to protect the
sentiment of the passion and save them from an exhibition of the fires of
that dragon's breath. Do they not fly shrieking when they behold it?
Barely are they able to read of it. Men, too, accustomed to minor doses
of the goddess, which moderate, soften, counteract, instead of inflicting
the malady, abhor and have no brotherhood with its turbulent victim.

It was justly matter for triumph, due to an extraordinary fervour of
pleading upon a plain statement of the case, that Alvan should return
from his foray bringing with him an emissary deputed by General von
Rudiger's official chief to see that the young lady, so passionately
pursued by the foremost of his time in political genius and oratory, was
not subjected to parental tyranny, but stood free to exercise her choice.
Of the few who would ever have thought of attempting, a diminished number
would have equalled that feat. Alvan was no vain boaster; he could gain
the ears of grave men as well as mobs and women. The interview with
Clotilde was therefore assured to him, and the distracting telegrams and
letters forwarded to him by Tresten during his absence were consequently
stabs already promising to heal. They were brutal stabs--her packet of
his letters and presents on his table made them bleed afresh, and the odd
scrawl of the couple of words on the paper set him wondering at the
imbecile irony of her calling herself 'The child' in accompaniment to
such an act, for it reminded him of his epithet for her, while it dealt
him a tremendous blow; it seemed senselessly malign, perhaps flippant, as
she could be, he knew. She could be anything weak and shallow when out of
his hands; she had recently proved it still, in view of the interview,
and on the tide of his labours to come to that wished end, he struck his
breast to brave himself with a good hopeful spirit. 'Once mine!' he said.

Moreover, to the better account, Clotilde's English friend had sent him
the lines addressed to her, in which the writer dwelt on her love of him
with a whimper of the voice of love. That was previous to her perjury by
little, by a day-eighteen hours. How lurid a satire was flung on events
by the proximity of the dates! But the closeness of the time between this
love-crooning and the denying of him pointed to a tyrannous intervention.
One could detect it. Full surely the poor craven was being tyrannized and
tutored to deny him! though she was a puss of the fields too, as the
mounted sportsman was not unwilling to think.

Before visiting his Mentor, Alvan applied for an audience of General von
Rudiger, who granted it at once to a man coming so well armed to claim
the privilege. Tresten walked part of the way to the General's house with
him, and then turned aside to visit the baroness.

Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, was one of those persons who, after a
probationary term in the character of woman, have become men, but of whom
offended man, amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jaw from the
tender blooming promise of a petticoat, finds it impossible to imagine
they had once on a sweet Spring time the sex's gentleness and charm of
aspect. Mistress Flanders, breeched and hatted like a man, pulling at the
man's short pipe and heartily invoking frouzy deities, committing a whole
sackful of unfeminine etcaetera, is an impenetrable wall to her maiden
past; yet was there an opening day when nothing of us moustached her. She
was a clear-faced girl and mother of young blushes before the years were
at their work of transformation upon her countenance and behind her
bosom. The years were rough artists: perhaps she was combative, and
fought them for touching her ungallantly; and that perhaps was her first
manly step. Baroness Lucie was of high birth, a wife openly maltreated, a
woman of breeding, but with a man's head, capable of inspiring man-like
friendships, and of entertaining them. She was radically-minded, strongly
of the Radical profession of faith, and a correspondent of revolutionary
chiefs; both the trusted adviser and devoted slave of him whose future
glorious career she measured by his abilities. Rumour blew out a candle
and left the wick to smoke in relation to their former intercourse. The
Philistines revenged themselves on an old aristocratic Radical and a Jew
demagogue with the weapon that scandal hands to virtue. They are virtuous
or nothing, and they must show that they are so when they can; and best
do they show it by publicly dishonouring the friendship of a man and a
woman; for to be in error in malice does not hurt them, but they
profoundly feel that they are fools if they are duped.

She was aware of the recent course of events; she had as she protested,
nothing to accuse herself of, and she could hardly part her lips without
a self-exculpation.

'It will fall on me!' she said to Tresten, in her emphatic tone. 'He will
have his interview with the girl. He will subdue the girl. He will
manacle himself in the chains he makes her wear. She will not miss her
chance! I am the object of her detestation. I am the price paid for their
reconcilement. She will seize her opportunity to vilipend me, and I shall
be condemned by the kind of court-martial which hurries over the forms of
a brial to sign the execution-warrant that makes it feel like justice.
You will see. She cannot forgive me for not pretending to enter into her
enthusiasm. She will make him believe I conspired against her. Men in
love are children with their mistresses--the greatest of them; their
heads are under the woman's feet. What have I not done to aid him! At his
instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes of the
Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrous and a
shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. I obeyed his
wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I would not have it on my
conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic, however unwonted, was
refused by me to serve Alvan. You are my witness, Tresten, that for a
young woman of common honesty I was ready to pack and march. Qualities of
mind-mind! They were out of the question. He had a taste for a wife. If
he had hit on a girl commonly honest, she might not have harmed him--the
contrary; cut his talons. What is this girl? Exactly what one might be
sure his appreciation, in woman-flesh, would lead him to fix on; a
daughter of the Philistines, naturally, and precisely the one of all on
earth likely to confound him after marriage as she has played fast and
loose with him before it. He has never understood women--cannot read
them. Could a girl like that keep a secret? She's a Cressida--a creature
of every camp! Not an idea of the cause he is vowed to! not a sentiment
in harmony with it! She is viler than any of those Berlin light o' loves
on the eve of Jena. Stable as a Viennese dancing slut home from
Mariazell! This is the girl-transparent to the whole world! But his heart
is on her, and he must have her, I suppose; and I shall have to bear her
impertinences, or sign my demission and cease to labour for the cause at
least in conjunction with Alvan. And how other wise? He is the life of
it, and I am doomed to uselessness.'

Tresten nodded a protesting assent.

'Not quite so bad,' he said, with the encouraging smile which could
persuade a friend to put away bilious visions. 'Of the two, if you two
are divisible, we could better dispense with him. She'll slip him, she's
an eel. I have seen eels twine on a prong of the fork that prods them;
but she's an actress, a slippery one through and through, with no real
embrace in her, not even a common muscular contraction. Of every camp! as
you say. She was not worth carrying off. I consented to try it to quiet
him. He sets no bounds to his own devotion to friendship, and we must
take pattern by him. It's a mad love.'

'A Titan's love!' the baroness exclaimed, groaning. 'The woman!--no
matter how or at what cost! I can admire that primal barbarism of a great
man's passion, which counts for nothing the stains and accidents fraught
with extinction for it to meaner men. It reads ill, it sounds badly, but
there is grand stuff in it. See the royalty of the man, for whom no
degradation of the woman can be, so long as it brings her to him!
He--that great he--covers all. He burns her to ashes, and takes the
flame--the pure spirit of her--to himself. Were men like him!--they would
have less to pardon. We must, as I have ever said, be morally on alpine
elevations to comprehend Alvan; he is Mont Blanc above his fellows. Do
not ask him to be considerate of her. She has planted him in a storm, and
the bigger the mountain, the more savage, monstrous, cruel--yes, but she
blew up the tourmente! That girl is the author of his madness. It is the
snake's nature of the girl which distracts him; she is in his blood. Had
she come to me, I would have helped her to cure him; or had you succeeded
in carrying her off, I would have stood by their union; or were she a
different creature, and not the shifty thing she is, I could desire him
to win her. A peasant girl, a workman's daughter, a tradesman's, a
professional singer, actress, artist--I would have given my hand to one
of these in good faith, thankful to her! As it is, I have acted in
obedience to his wishes, without idle remonstrances--I know him too well;
and with as much cordiality as I could put into an evil service. She will
drag him down, down, Tresten!'

'They are not joined yet,' said the colonel.

'She has him by the worst half of him. Her correspondence with me--her
letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit--throws a
light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trick her
out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours to
consolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through her
hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She is one of
the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they enjoy
comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and that palling,
they are ravenously ambitious. She will drive him at his mark before the
time is ripe--ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, though god-like he
seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough in any hands.
This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.'

'She shows mighty little of the inclination,' said the colonel.

'To you. But when they come together? I know his voice!'

The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.

'Ultimately?' the baroness asked, and brooded. 'But she will have to see
him; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if she
does.'

'She will shirk the interview,' Tresten remarked. 'Supposing they meet: I
don't think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he has
an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's as calm as the
face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just as unconcernedly
as a clock's pendulum. I've spoken to many a sentinel outpost who wasn't
deader on the subject in monosyllables than mademoiselle. She has a
military erectness, and answers you and looks you straight at the eyes,
perfectly unabashed by your seeing "the girl she is," as you say. She
looked at me downright defying me to despise her. Alvan has been tricked
by her colour: she's icy. She has no passion. She acts up to him when
they're together, and that deceives him. I doubt her having
blood--there's no heat in it, if she has.'

'And he cajoled Count Hollinger to send an envoy to see him righted!' the
baroness ejaculated. 'Hollinger is not a sentimental person, I assure
you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile to the
Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan. What
character of man is this Dr. Storchel?'

Tresten described Count Hollinger's envoy, so quaintly deputed to act the
part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mild man of law with no
ideas or interests outside the law; spectacled, nervous, formal, a
stranger to the passions; and the baroness was amused to hear of Storchel
and Alvan's placid talk together upon themes of law, succeeded by the
little advocate's bewildered fright at one of Alvan's gentler explosions.
Tresten sketched it. The baroness realized it, and shut her lips tight
for a laugh of essential humour.




CHAPTER HIV

Late in the day Alvan was himself able to inform her that he had overcome
Clotilde's father after a struggle of hours. The General had not
consented to everything: he had granted enough, evidently in terror of
the man who had captured Count Hollinger; and it way arranged that
Tresten and Storchel were to wait on Clotilde next morning, and hear from
her mouth whether she yielded or not to Alvan's request to speak with her
alone before the official interview in the presence of the notary, when
she was publicly to state her decision and freedom of choice, according
to Count Hollinger's amicable arrangement through his envoy.

'She will see me-and the thing is done!' said Alvan. 'But I have worked
for it--I have worked! I have been talking to-day for six hours
uninterruptedly at a stretch to her father, who reminds me of a caged
bear I saw at a travelling menagerie, and the beast would perform none of
his evolutions for the edification of us lads till his keeper touched a
particular pole, and the touch of it set him to work like the winding of
a key. Hollinger's name was my magic wand with the General. I could get
no sense from him, nor any acquiescence in sense, till I called up
Hollinger, when the General's alacrity was immediately that of the bear,
or a little boy castigated for his share of original sin. They have been
hard at her, the whole family! and I shall want the two hours I
stipulated for to the full. What do you say?--come, I wager I do it
within one hour! They have stockaded her pretty closely, and it will be
some time before I shall get her to have a clear view of me behind her
defences; but an hour's an age with a woman. Clotilde? I wager I have her
on her knees in half an hour! These notions of duty, and station, and her
fiddle-de-dee betrothal to that Danube osier with Indian-idol eyes, count
for so much mist. She was and is mine. I swear to strike to her heart in
ten minutes! But, madam, if not, you may pronounce me incapable of
conquering any woman, or of taking an absolute impression of facts. I say
I will do it! I am insane if I may not judge from antecedents that my
voice, my touch, my face, will draw her to me at one signal--at a look! I
am prepared to stake my reason on her running to me before I speak a
word:--and I will not beckon. I promise to fold my arms and simply look.'

'Your task of two hours, then, will be accomplished, I compute, in about
half a minute--but it is on the assumption that she consents to see you
alone,' said the baroness.

Alvan opened his eyes. He perceived in his deep sagaciousness woman at
the bottom of her remark, and replied: 'You will know Clotilde in time.
She points to me straight; but of course if you agitate the compass the
needle's all in a tremble: and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the
instinct's positive. To doubt it would upset my understanding. I have had
three distinct experiences of my influence over her, and each time,
curiously each time exactly in proportion to my degree of resolve--but,
baroness, I tell you it was minutely in proportion to it; weighed down to
the grain!--each time did that girl respond to me with a similar degree
of earnestness. As I waned, she waned; as I heated, so did she, and from
spark-heat to flame and to furnace-heat!'

'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,' observed
the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the
condition of the man who could accept it for that.

He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste
on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies,
which he called the sapping of language. She forbore to remind him in
retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.

'Marvellously,' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to my lead!
and to-morrow--you'll own me right--I must double the attraction. I shall
have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and the dose
must be doubled to keep her fast and safe. You see I read her flatly. I
read and am charitable. I have a perfect philosophical tolerance. I'm in
the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair Greeks.'

'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,' interposed the baroness.
'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any; and the
small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take up. It is
the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants,
gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men who have
given over thinking, and young men who never had feeling--the philosophy
of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to fat in the sun. Horace
avaunt! You have too much poetry in you to quote that unsanguine
sensualist for your case. His love distressed his liver, and gave him a
jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its poor ghost to his
philosophy, yours begins its labours. That everlasting Horace! He is the
versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march along flinty ways:
the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the conforming unbelievers!'

'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,' Alvan murmured, amorous of the
musical names. 'Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian. I see
her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors which
give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant, not
much bigger than a dewdrop. And so should a man's heart reflect her! Take
her on the light in it, she is perfection. We won't take her in the shady
part or on your flat looking-glasses. There never was necessity for
accuracy of line in the portraiture of women. The idea of them is all we
want: it's the best of them. You will own she's Greek; she's a
Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian. One of those delicious
girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called THE POSTPONER, THE
DEFERRER, or, as we might say, THE TO-MORROWER. There you have Clotilde:
she's a TO-MORROWER. You climb the peak of to-morrow, and to see her at
all you must see her on the next peak: but she leaves you her promise to
hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going. Ay, so we have
patience! Feeding on a young woman's promises of yesterday in one's
fortieth year!--it must end to-morrow, though I kill something.'

Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character,
when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.

'What do you meditate killing?' said the baroness.

'The fool of the years behind me,' he replied, 'and entering on my
forty-first a sage.'

'To be the mate and equal of your companion?'

'To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide
and master.'

'If she--' the baroness checked her exclamation, saying: 'She declined to
come to me. I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something to
rest one's faith on. Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like, were
not stable persons for a man of our days to bind his life to one of them.
Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proud career
deviate.'