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Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Little Annie's Ramble (From Twice Told Tales)"

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Arthur Conan Doyle - "Beyond the City"

The Tragic Comedians, Complete

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




'But I give her a soul!' said Alvan. 'I am the wine, and she the crystal
cup. She has avowed it again and again. You read her as she is when away
from me. Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfit to
contend when she stands alone. But when I am beside her, when we are
together--the moment I have her at arms' length she will be part of me by
the magic I have seen each time we encountered. She knows it well.'

'She may know it too well.'

'For what?' He frowned.

'For the chances of your meeting.'

'You think it possible she will refuse?'

A blackness passing to lividness crossed his face. He fetched a big
breath.

'Then finish my history, shut up the book; I am a phantom of a man, and
everything written there is imposture! I can account for all that she has
done hitherto, but not that she should refuse to see me. Not that she
should refuse to see me now when I come armed to demand it! Refuse? But I
have done my work, done what I said I would do. I stand in my order of
battle, and she refuses? No! I stake my head on it! I have not a clod's
perception, I have not a spark of sense to distinguish me from a
flat-headed Lapp, if she refuses:--call me a mountebank who has gained
his position by clever tumbling; a lucky gamester; whatever plays blind
with chance.'

He started up in agitation. 'Lucie! I am a grinning skull without a brain
if that girl refuses! She will not.' He took his hat to leave, adding, to
seem rational to the cool understanding he addressed: 'She will not
refuse; I am bound to think so in common respect for myself; I have done
tricks to make me appear a rageing ape if she--oh! she cannot, she will
not refuse. Never! I have eyes, I have wits, I am not tottering yet on my
grave--or it's blindly, if I am. I have my clear judgement, I am not an
imbecile. It seems to me a foolish suspicion that she can possibly
refuse. Her manners are generally good; freakish, but good in the main.
Perhaps she takes a sting . . . but there is no sting here. It would be
bad manners to refuse; to say nothing of . . . she has a heart! Well,
then, good manners and right feeling forbid her to refuse. She is an
exceedingly intelligent girl, and I half fear I have helped you to a
wrong impression of her. You will really appreciate her wit; you will
indeed; believe me, you will. We pardon nonsense in a girl. Married, she
will put on the matron with becoming decency, and I am responsible for
her then; I stand surety for her then; when I have her with me I warrant
her mine and all mine, head and heels, at a whistle, like the Cossack's
horse. I fancy that at forty I am about as young as most young men. I
promise her another forty manful working years. Are you dubious of that?'

'I nod to you from the palsied summit of ninety,' said the baroness.

Alvan gave a short laugh and stammered excuses for his naked egoism,
comparing himself to a forester who has sharpened such an appetite in
toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the fire
preparing the feast.

'Hymen and things hymenaeal!' he said, laughing at himself for resuming
the offence on the apology for it. 'I could talk with interest of a
trousseau. I have debated in my mind with parliamentary acrimony about a
choice of wedding-presents. As she is legally free to bestow her hand on
me--and only a brute's horns could contest the fact--she may decide to be
married the day after to-morrow, and get the trousseau in Paris. She has
a turn for startling. I can imagine that if I proposed a run for it she
would be readier to spring to be on the road with me than in acquiescing
in a quiet arrangement about a ceremonial day; partly because, in the
first case, she would throw herself and the rest of the adventure on me,
at no other cost than the enjoyment of one of her impulses; and in the
second, because she is a girl who would require a full band of the best
Berlin orchestra in perpetual play to keep up her spirits among her
people during the preparations for espousing a democrat, demagogue, and
Jew, of a presumed inferior station by birth to her own. Give Momus a
sister, Clotilde is the lady! I know her. I would undertake to put a
spell on her and keep her contented on a frontier--not Russian, any
barbarous frontier where there is a sun. She must have sun. One might
wrap her in sables, but sun is best. She loves it best, though she looks
remarkably well in sables. Never shall I forget . . . she is frileuse,
and shivers into them! There are Frenchmen who could paint it--only
Frenchmen. Our artists, no. She is very French. Born in France she would
have been a matchless Parisienne. Oh! she's a riddle of course. I don't
pretend to spell every letter of her. The returning of my presents is
odd. No, I maintain that she is a coward acting under domination, and
there's no other way of explaining the puzzle. I was out of sight, they
bullied her, and she yielded--bewilderingly, past comprehension it
seems--cat!--until you remember what she's made of: she's a reed. Now I
reappear armed with powers to give her a free course, and she, that
abject whom you beheld recently renouncing me, is, you will see, the
young Aurora she was when she came striking at my door on the upper Alp.
That was a morning! That morning is Clotilde till my eyes turn over! She
is all young heaven and the mountains for me! She's the filmy light above
the mountains that weds white snow and sky. By the way, I dreamt last
night she was half a woman, half a tree, and her hair was like a dead
yewbough, which is as you know of a brown burnt-out colour, suitable to
the popular conception of widows. She stood, and whatever turning you
took, you struck back on her. Whether my widow, I can't say: she must
first be my wife. Oh, for tomorrow!'

'What sort of evening is it?' said the baroness.

'A Mont Blanc evening: I saw him as I came along,' Alvan replied, and
seized his hat to be out to look on the sovereign mountain again. They
touched hands. He promised to call in the forenoon next day.

'Be cool,' she counselled him.

'Oh!' He flung back his head, making light of the crisis. 'After all,
it's only a girl. But, you know, what I set myself to win! . . . The
thing's too small--I have been at such pains about it that I should be
ridiculous if I allowed myself to be beaten. There is no other reason for
the trouble we 're at, except that, as I have said a thousand times, she
suits me. No man can be cooler than I.'

'Keep so,' said the baroness.

He walked to where the strenuous blue lake, finding outlet, propels a
shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes the
Rhone-stream. There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpid liquid
tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knows no
abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citied plains
ahead.

His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (to
mixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if this
one were granted him!

He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on the
task; and he rejoiced in winning it: his heart leapt, his imagination
spun radiant webs of colour: but he was a little ashamed of his frenzies,
though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he had made some
noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so pure that it was
infamous to thwart them. At a certain age honest men made sacrifice of
their liberty to society, and he had been ready to perform the duty of
husbanding a woman. A man should have a wife and rear children, not to be
forgotten in the land, and to help mankind by transmitting to future
times qualities he has proved priceless: he thought of the children, and
yearned to the generations of men physically and morally through them.

This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excesses
of temper.

Was she so small a thing? Not if she succumbed. She was petty, vexatious,
irritating, stinging, while she resisted: she cast an evil beam on his
reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused the giants of
his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they were by his
pure intentions and the approbation of society. But he had a broad full
heart for the woman who would come to him, forgiving her, uplifting her,
richly endowing her. No meanness of heart was in him. He lay down at
night thinking of Clotilde in an abandonment of tenderness. 'Tomorrow!
you bird of to-morrow!' he let fly his good-night to her.




CHAPTER XV

He slept. Near upon morning he roused with his tender fit strong on him,
but speechless in the waking as it had been dreamless in sleep. It was a
happy load on his breast, a life about to be born, and he thought that a
wife beside him would give it language. She should have, for she would
call out, his thousand flitting ideas now dropped on barren ground for
want of her fair bosom to inspire, to vivify, to receive. Poetry laid a
hand on him: his desire of the wife, the children, the citizen's good
name--of these our simple civilized ambitions--was lowly of the earth,
throbbing of earth, and at the same time magnified beyond scope of speech
in vast images and emblems resembling ranges of Olympian cloud round the
blue above earth, all to be decipherable, all utterable, when she was by.
What commoner word!--yet wife seemed to him the word most reverberating
of the secret sought after by man, fullest at once of fruit and of
mystery, or of that light in the heart of mystery which makes it
magically fruitful.

He felt the presence of Clotilde behind the word; but in truth the
delicate sensations breeding these half-thoughts of his, as he lay
between sleeping and waking, shrank from conjuring up the face of the
woman who had wounded them, and a certain instinct to preserve and be
sure of his present breathing-space of luxurious tranquillity kept her
veiled. Soon he would see her as his wife, and then she would be she,
unveiled ravishingly, the only she, the only wife! He knew the cloud he
clasped for Clotilde enough to be at pains to shun a possible prospect of
his execrating it. Oh, the only she, the only wife! the wild man's
reclaimer! the sweet abundant valley and channel of his river of
existence henceforward! Doubting her in the slightest was doubting her
human. It is the brain, the satanic brain which will ever be pressing to
cast its shadows: the heart is clearer and truer.

He multiplied images, projected visions, nestled in his throbs to drug
and dance his brain. He snatched at the beauty of a day that outrolled
the whole Alpine hand-in-hand of radiant heaven-climbers for an assurance
of predestined celestial beneficence; and again, shadowily thoughtful of
the littleness of the thing he exalted and claimed, he staked his reason
on the positive blessing to come to him before nightfall, telling himself
calmly that he did so because there would be madness in expecting it
otherwise: he asked for so little! Since he asked for so little, to
suppose that it would not be granted was irrational. None but a very
coward could hesitate to stake his all on the issue.

Singularly small indeed the other aims in life appeared by comparison
with this one, but his intellect, in the act of pleading excuses for his
impatience, distinguished why it should be so. The crust, which is not
much, is everything to the starving beggar; and he was eager for the
crust that he might become sound and whole again, able to give their just
proportion to things, as at present he acknowledged himself hardly able
to do. He could not pursue two thoughts on a political question, or grasp
the idea of a salutary energy in the hosts animated by his leadership.
There would have to be an end of it speedily, else men might name him
worthless dog!

Morning swam on the lake in her beautiful nakedness, a wedding of white
and blue, of purest white and bluest blue. Alvan crossed the island
bridges when the sun had sprung on his shivering fair prey, to make the
young fresh Morning rosy, and was glittering along the smooth
lake-waters. Workmen only were abroad, and Alvan was glad to be out with
them to feel with them as one of them. Close beside him the vivid genius
of the preceding century, whose love of workmen was a salt of heaven in
his human corruptness, looked down on the lake in marble. Alvan cherished
a worship of him as of one that had first thrilled him with the feeling
of our common humanity, with the tenderness for the poor, with the
knowledge of our frailty. Him, as well as the great Englishman and a
Frenchman, his mind called Father, and his conscience replied to that
progenitor's questioning of him, but said 'You know the love of woman: He
loved indeed, but he was not an amatory trifler. He too was a worker, a
champion worker. He doated on the prospect of plunging into his work; the
vision of jolly giant labours told of peace obtained, and there could be
no peace without his prize.

He listened to the workmen's foot-falls. The solitary sound and steady
motion of their feet were eloquent of early morning in a city, not less
than the changes of light in heaven above the roofs. With the golden
light came numbers, workmen still. Their tread on the stones roused some
of his working thoughts, like an old tune in his head, and he watched the
scattered files passing on, disciplined by their daily necessities,
easily manageable if their necessities are but justly considered. These
numbers are the brute force of earth, which must have the earth in time,
as they had it in the dawn of our world, and then they entered into
bondage for not knowing how to use it. They will have it again: they have
it partially, at times, in the despot, who is only the reflex of their
brute force, and can give them only a shadow of their claim. They will
have it all, when they have illumination to see and trust to the
leadership of a greater force than they--in force of brain, in the
spiritual force of ideas; ideas founded on justice; and not the justice
of these days of the governing few whose wits are bent to steady our
column of civilized humanity by a combination of props and jugglers'
arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, which
will base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base of
yonder mountain's towering white immensity--and will be the guarantee for
the solid uplifting of our civilization at last. 'Right, thou!' he
apostrophized--the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation. 'And right,
thou! more largely right!' he thought, further advanced in it, of the
great Giuseppe, the Genoese. 'And right am I too, between that metal-rail
of a politician and the deep dreamer, each of them incomplete for want of
an element of the other!' Practically and in vision right was Alvan, for
those two opposites met fusing in him: like the former, he counted on the
supremacy of might; like the latter, he distinguished where it lay in
perpetuity.

During his younger years he had been like neither in the moral curb they
could put on themselves--particularly the southern-blooded man. He had
resembled the naturally impatient northerner most, though not so supple
for business as he. But now he possessed the calmness of the Genoese; he
had strong self-command now; he had the principle that life is too short
for the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels; too
valuable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the shedding
of blood on personal grounds. Oh! he had himself well under, fear not.

He could give and take from opposition. And rightly so, seeing that he
confessed to his own bent for sarcastically stinging: he was therefore
bound to endure a retort. Speech for speech, pamphlet for pamphlet, he
could be temperate. Nay, he defied an adversary to produce in him the
sensation of intemperateness; so there would not be much danger of his
being excited to betray it. Shadowily he thought of the hard words hurled
at him by the Rudigers, and of the injury Clotilde's father did him by
plotting to rob him of his daughter. But how had an Alvan replied?--with
the arts of peaceful fence victoriously. He conceived of no temptation to
his repressed irascibility save the political. A day might come for him
and the vehement old Ironer to try their mettle in a tussle. On that day
he would have to be wary, but, as Alvan felt assured, he would be more
master of himself than his antagonist. He was for the young world, in the
brain of a new order of things; the other based his unbending system on
the visions of a feudal chief, and would win a great step perchance, but
there he would stop: he was not with the future!

This immediate prospect of a return to serenity after his recent
charioteering, had set him thinking of himself and his days to come,
which hung before him in a golden haze that was tranquillizing. He had a
name, he had a station: he wanted power and he saw it approaching.

He wanted a wife too. Colonel von Tresten took coffee with him previous
to the start with Dr. Storchel to General von Rudiger's house. Alvan
consequently was unable any longer to think of a wife in the abstract. He
wanted Clotilde. Here was a man going straight to her, going to see her,
positively to see her and hear her voice!--almost instantly to hear her
voice, and see her eyes and hair, touch her hand. Oh! and rally her,
rouse her wit; and be able to tell him the flower she wore for the day,
and where she wore it--at her temples, or sliding to the back hair, or in
her bosom, or at her waist! She had innumerable tricks of indication in
these shifty pretty ways of hers, and was full of varying speech to the
cunning reader of her.

'But keep her to seriousness,' Alvan said. 'Our meeting must be early
to-day--early in the afternoon. She is not unlikely to pretend to trifle.
She has not seen me for some time, and will probably enough play at
emancipation and speak of the "singular impatience of the seigneur
Alvan." Don't you hear her? I swear to those very words! She "loves her
liberty," and she curves her fan and taps her foot. "The seigneur Alvan
appears pressed for time:" She has "letters to write to friends to-day."
Stop that! I can't join in play: to-morrow, if she likes; not to-day. Or
not till I have her by the hand. She shall be elf and fairy, French
coquette, whatever she pleases to-morrow, and I'll be satisfied. All I
beg is for plain dealing on a business matter. This is a business matter,
a business meeting. I thoroughly know the girl's heart, and know that in
winning the interview I win her. Only'--he pressed his friend's
arm--'but, my dear Tresten, you understand. You're a luckier fellow than
I--for the time, at all events. Make it as short as you can. You'll find
me here. I shall take a book--one of the Pandects. I don't suppose I
shall work. I feel idle. Any book handy; anything will interest me. I
should walk or row on the lake, but I would rather be sure of readiness
for your return. You meet Storchel at the General's house?'

'The appointment was at the house,' Tresten said.

'I have not seen him this morning. I know of nothing to prepare him for.
You see, it was invariable with her: as soon as she met me she had twice
her spirit: and that she knows;--she was a new woman, ten times the
happier for having some grains of my courage. So she'll be glad to come
to terms and have me by to support her. Press it, if necessary; otherwise
she might be disappointed, my dear fellow. Storchel looks on, and
observes, and that 's about all he can do, or need do. Up Mont Blanc
to-day, Tresten! It's the very day for an ascent:--one of the rare
crystalline jewels coming in a Swiss August; we should see the kingdoms
of the earth--and a Republic! But I could climb with all my heart in a
snowstorm to-day. Andes on Himalayas! as high as you like. The Republic
by the way, small enough in the ring of empires and monarchies, if you
measure it geometrically! You remember the laugh at the exact elevation
of Mount Olympus? But Zeus's eagle sat on it, and top me Olympus, after
you have imagined the eagle aloft there! after Homer, is the meaning.
That will be one of the lessons for our young Republicans--to teach them
not to give themselves up to the embrace of dead materialism because, as
they fancy, they have had to depend on material weapons for carving their
way, and have had no help from other quarters. A suicidal delusion! The
spiritual weapon has done most, and always does. They are sons of an
idea. They deny their parentage when they scoff at idealism. It's a
tendency we shall have to guard against; it leads back to the old order
of things, if we do not trim our light. She is waiting for you! Go. You
will find me here. And don't forget my instructions. Appoint for the
afternoon--not late. Too near night will seem like Orpheus going below,
and I hope to meet a living woman, not a ghost--ha! coloured like a
lantern in a cavern, good Lord! Covered with lichen! Say three o'clock,
not later. The reason is, I want to have it over early and be sure of
what I am doing; I'm bothered by it; I shall have to make arrangements
. . . a thousand little matters . . . telegraph to Paris, I daresay; she's
fond of Paris, and I must learn who's there to meet her. Now start. I'll
walk a dozen steps with you. I think of her as if, since we parted, she
had been sitting on a throne in Erebus, and must be ghastly. I had a
dream of a dead tree that upset me. In fact, you see I must have it over.
The whole affair makes me feel too young.'

Tresten advised him to spend an hour with the baroness.

'I can't; she makes me feel too old,' said Alvan. 'She talks. She
listens, but I don't want to speak. Dead silence!--let it be a dash of
the pen till you return. As for these good people hurrying to their
traffic, and tourists and loungers, they have a trick for killing time
without hurting him. I wish I had. I try to smother a minute, and up the
old fellow jumps quivering all over and threatening me body and soul.
They don't appear as if they had news on their faces this morning. I've
not seen a newspaper and won't look at one. Here we separate. Be formal
in mentioning me to her but be particularly civil. I know you have the
right tone: she's a critical puss. Days like these are the days for her
to be out. There goes a parasol like one I 've seen her carry. Stay--no!
Don't forget my instructions. Paris for a time. It may be the Pyrenees.
Paris on our way back. She would like the Pyrenees. It's not too late for
society at Luchon and Cauterets. She likes mountains, she mounts well: in
any case, plenty of mules can be had. Paris to wind up with. Paris will
be fuller about the beginning of October.'

He had quitted Tresten, and was talking to himself, cheating' himself,
not discordantly at all. The poet of the company within him claimed the
word and was allowed by the others to dilate on Clotilde's likings, and
the honeymoon or post-honeymoon amusements to be provided for her in
Pyrenean valleys, and Parisian theatres and salons. She was friande of
chocolates, bon-bons: she enjoyed fine pastry, had a real relish of good
wine. She should have the best of everything; he knew the spots of the
very best that Paris could supply, in confiseurs and restaurants, and in
millinery likewise. A lively recollection of the prattle of Parisian
ladies furnished names and addresses likely to prove invaluable to
Clotilde. He knew actors and actresses, and managers of theatres, and
mighty men in letters. She should have the cream of Paris. Does she hint
at rewarding him for his trouble? The thought of her indebted lips, half
closed, asking him how to repay him, sprang his heart to his throat.




CHAPTER XVI

Then he found himself saying: 'At the age I touch!' . . .

At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly. If the love is plucked
from them, the life goes with it.

He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark. His forty years--the
forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties
of other men.

Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to plant his
affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural. Fairer, dearer than
she was never one on earth! He stood bareheaded for coolness, looking in
the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining and eyes charged
with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intensely all who
passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects in their passage.
The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from a whirring of
wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel when imagination
shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if the wheels be not
stilled. The world created by the furnaces of vitality inside him
absorbed his mind; and strangely, while receiving multitudinous vivid
impressions, he did not commune with one, was unaware of them. His thick
black hair waved and glistened over the fine aquiline of his face. His
throat was open to the breeze. His great breast and head were joined by a
massive column of throat that gave volume for the coursing of the blood
to fire the battery of thought, perchance in a tempest overflood it,
extinguish it. His fortieth year was written on his complexion and
presence: it was the fortieth of a giant growth that will bend at the
past eightieth as little as the rock-pine, should there come no uprooting
tempest. It said manhood, and breathed of settled strength of muscle,
nerve, and brain.