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Charles Darwin - "Coral Reefs"

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The Tragic Comedians, Complete

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




Of the people passing, many knew him not, but marked him; some knew him
by repute, one or two his person. To all of them he was a noticeable
figure; even those of sheeplike nature, having an inclination to start
upon the second impulse in the flanks of curious sheep when their first
had been arrested by the appearance of one not of their kind,
acknowledged the eminence of his bearing. There may have been a passenger
in the street who could tell the double tale of the stick he swung in his
hand, showing a gleam of metal, whereon were engraved names of the lurid
historic original owner, and of the donor and the recipient. According to
the political sentiments of the narrator would his tale be coloured, and
a simple walking-stick would be clothed in Tarquin guilt for striking off
heads of the upper ranks of Frenchmen till the blood of them topped the
handle, or else wear hues of wonder, seem very memorable; fit at least
for a museum. If the Christian aristocrat might shrink from it in terror
and loathing, the Paynim Republican of deep dye would be ready to kiss it
with veneration. But, assuming them to have a certain bond of manliness,
both agree in pronouncing the deed a right valiant and worthy one, which
caused this instrument to be presented to Alvan by a famous doctor, who,
hearing of his repudiation of the duel, and of his gallant and triumphant
defence of himself against a troop of ruffians, enemies or scum of their
city, at night, by the aid of a common stout pedestrian stick, alone in a
dark alley of the public park, sent him, duly mounted and engraved, an
illustrious fellow to the weapon of defence, as a mode of commemorating
his just abhorrence of bloodshed and his peaceful bravery.

Observers of him would probably speculate on his features and the
carriage of his person as he went by them; with a result in their minds
that can be of no import to us, men's general speculations being directed
by their individual aims and their moods, their timidities, prejudices,
envies, rivalries; but none could contest that he was a potential figure.
If to know him the rising demagogue of the time dressed him in such
terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila of the voracious hordes
which live from hand to mouth, without intervention of a banker and
property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shone under a different
aspect enough to send them to the poets to solve their perplexity, had
the knowledge been subjoined that this terrific devastator swinging the
sanguinary stick was a slave of love, who staked his all upon his love,
loved up to his capacity desperately, loved a girl, and hung upon her
voice to hear whether his painful knocking at a door should
gain him admittance to the ranks of the orderly citizens of the
legitimately-satiated passions, or else--the voice of a girl annihilate
him.

He loved like the desert-bred Eastern, as though his blood had never
ceased to be steeped in its fountain Orient; loved barbarously, but with
a compelling resolve to control his blood and act and be the civilized
man, sober by virtue of his lady's gracious aid. In fact, it was the
civilized man in him that had originally sought the introduction to her,
with a bribe to the untameable. The former had once led, and hoped to
lead again. Alvan was a revolutionist in imagination, the workman's
friend in rational sympathy, their leader upon mathematical calculation,
but a lawyer, a reasoner in law, and therefore of necessity a cousin
germane, leaning to become an ally, of the Philistines--the founders and
main supporters of his book of the Law. And so, between the nature of his
blood, and the inclination of his mind, Alvan set his heart on a damsel
of the Philistines, endowed with their trained elegancies and governed by
some of their precepts, but suitable to his wildness in her reputation
for originality, suiting him in her cultivated liveliness and her turn
for luxury. Only the Philistines breed these choice beauties, put forth
these delicate fresh young buds of girls; and only here and there among
them is there an exquisite, eccentric, yet passably decorous Clotilde.
What his brother politicians never discovered in him, and the baroness
partly suspected, through her interpretation of things opposing her
sentiments, Clotilde uncloaks. Catching and mastering her, his wilder
animation may be appeased, but his political life is threatened with a
diversion of its current, for he will be uxorious, impassioned to gratify
the tastes and whims of a youthful wife; the Republican will be in danger
of playing prematurely for power to seat her beside him high: while at
the same time, children, perchance, and his hardening lawyer's head are
secretly Philistinizing the demagogue, blunting the fine edge of his
Radicalism, turning him into a slow-stepping Liberal, otherwise your
half-Conservative in his convictions. Can she think it much to have
married that drab-coloured unit? Power must be grasped . . . .

His watch told him that Tresten was now beholding her, or just about to.
The stillness of the heavens was remarkable. The hour held breath. She
delayed her descent from her chamber. He saw how she touched at her hair,
more distinctly than he saw the lake before his eyes. He watched her, and
the growl of a coming roar from him rebuked her tricky deliberateness.
Deciding at last, she slips down the stairs like a waterfall, and is in
the room, erect, composed--if you do not lay ear against her bosom.
Tresten stares at her, owns she is worth a struggle. Love does this,
friend Tresten! Love, that stamps out prejudice and bids inequality be
smooth. Tresten stares and owns she is worth heavier labours, worse than
his friend has endured. Love does it! Love, that hallows a stranger's
claim to the flower of a proud garden: Love has won her the freedom to
suffer herself to be chosen by the stranger. What matters which of them
toiled to bring them to so sweet an end! It was not either of them, but
Love. By and by, after acting serenest innocent, suddenly broken, she
will be copious of sad confessions. That will be in their secresy: in the
close and boundless together of clasped hands. Deep eyes, that give him
in realms of light within light all that he has dreamed of rapturousness
and blessedness, you are threatened with a blinding kiss if you look
abashed:--if her voice shall dare repeat another of those foolish
self-reproaches, it shall be construed as a petition for further kisses.
Silence! he said to her, imagining that he had been silent, and enjoying
silence with a perfect quietude beyond the trouble of a thought of her
kisses and his happiness. His full heart craved for the infinity of
silence.

Another moment and he was counting to her the days, hours, minutes, which
had been the gulf of torture between then and now--the separation and the
reunion: he was voluble, living to speak, and a pause was only for the
drawing of most blissful breath.

His watch went slowly. She was beginning to drop her eyelids in front of
Tresten. Oh! he knew her so well. He guessed the length of her acting,
and the time for her earnestness. She would have to act a coquette at
first to give herself a countenance; and who would not pardon the girl
for putting on a mask? who would fail to see the mask? But he knew her so
well: she would not trifle very long: his life on it, that she will soon
falter! her bosom will lift, lift and check: a word from Tresten then, if
he is a friend, and she melts to the truth in her. Alvan heard her
saying: 'I will see him yes, to-day. Let him appoint. He may come when he
likes--come at once!'

'My life on it!' he swore by his unerring knowledge of her, the certainty
that she loved him.

He had walked into a quarter of the town strange to him, he thought; he
had no recollection of the look of the street. A friend came up and put
him in the right way, walking back with him. This was General Leczel, a
famous leader of one of the heroical risings whose passage through blood
and despair have led to the broader law men ask for when they name
freedom devotedly. Alvan stated the position of his case to Leczel with
continental frankness regarding a natural theme, and then pursued the
talk on public affairs, to the note of: 'What but knocks will ever open
the Black-Yellow Head to the fact that we are no longer in the first
years of the eighteenth century!'

Leczel left him at his hotel steps, promising to call on him before
night. Tresten had not returned, neither he nor the advocate, and he had
been absent fully an hour. He was not in sight right or left. Alvan went
to his room, looked at his watch, and out of the window, incapable of
imagining any event. He began to breathe as if an atmosphere thick as
water were pressing round him. Unconsciously he had staked his all on the
revelation the moment was to bring. So little a thing! His intellect
weighed the littleness of it, but he had become level with it; he
magnified it with the greatness of his desire, and such was his nature
that the great desire of a thing withheld from him and his own, as he
could think, made the world a whirlpool till he had it. He waited,
figureable by nothing so much as a wild horse in captivity sniffing the
breeze, when the flanks of the quivering beast are like a wind-struck
barley-field, and his nerves are cords, and his nostrils trumpet him: he
is flame kept under and straining to rise.




CHAPTER XVII

The baroness expected to see Alvan in the morning, for he kept
appointments, and he had said he would come. She conceived that she was
independent of personal wishes on the subject of Clotilde; the fury of
his passion prohibited her forming any of the wishes we send up to
destiny when matters interesting us are in suspense, whether we have
liberated minds or not. She thought the girl would grant the interview;
was sure the creature would yield in his presence; and then there was an
end to the shining of Alvan! Supposing the other possibility, he had
shown her such fierce illuminations of eye and speech that she foresaw it
would be a blazing of the insurrectionary beacon-fires of hell with him.
He was a man of angels and devils. The former had long been conquering,
but the latter were far from extinct. His passion for this shallow girl
had consigned him to the lower host. Let him be thwarted, his desperation
would be unlikely to stop at legal barriers. His lawyer's head would be
up and armed astoundingly to oppose the law; he would read, argue, and
act with hot conviction upon the reverse of every text of law. She beheld
him storming the father's house to have out Clotilde, reluctant or
conniving; and he harangued the people, he bore off his captive, he held
her firmly as he had sworn he would; he defied authority, he was a public
rebel--he with his detected little secret aim, which he nursed like a
shamed mother of an infant, fond but afraid to be proud of it! She had
seen that he aimed at standing well with the world and being one with it
honourably: holding to his principles of course: but a disposition that
way had been perceived, and the vision of him in open rebellion because
of his shy catching at the thread of an alliance with the decorous world,
carved an ironic line on her jaw.

Full surely he would not be baffled without smiting the world on the
face. And he might suffer for it; the Rudigers would suffer likewise.

She considered them very foolish people. Her survey of the little
nobility beneath her station had previously enabled her to account for
their disgust of such a suitor as Alvan, and maintain that they would
oppose him tooth and nail. Owing to his recent success, the anticipation
of a peaceful surrender to him seemed now on the whole to carry most
weight. This girl gives Alvan her hand and her family repudiate her.
Volatile, flippant, shallow as she is, she must have had some turn for
him; a physical spell was on her once, and it will be renewed when they
meet. It sometimes inspires a semblance of courage; she may determine;
she may be stedfast long enough for him to take his measures to bear her
away. And the Brocken witches congratulate him on his prize!

Almost better would it be, she thought, that circumstance should thwart
him and kindle his own demon element.

The forenoon, the noon, the afternoon, went round.

Late in the evening her door was flung wide for Colonel von Tresten.

She looked her interrogative 'Well?' His features were not used to betray
the course of events.

'How has it gone?' she said.

He replied: 'As I told you. I fancied I gauged the hussy pretty closely.'

'She will not see him?'

'Not she.'

The baroness crossed her arms.

'And Alvan?'

The colonel shrugged. It was not done to tease a tremulous woman, for she
was calm. It painted the necessary consequence of the refusal: an
explosion of AEtna, and she saw it.

'Where is he now?' said she.

'At his hotel.'

'Alone?'

'Leczel is with him.'

'That looks like war.'

Tresten shrugged again. 'It might have been foreseen by everybody
concerned in the affair. The girl does not care for him one corner of an
eye! She stood up before us cool as at a dancing-lesson, swore she had
never committed herself to an oath to him, sneered at him. She positively
sneered. Her manner to me assures me without question that if he had
stood in my place she would have insulted him:

'Scarcely. She would do in his absence what she would not do under his
eyes,' remarked the baroness. 'It's decided, then?'

'Quite.'

'Will he be here to-night?'

'I think not.'

'Was she really insolent?'

'For a girl in her position, she was.'

'Did you repeat her words to him?'

'Some of them.'

'What description of insolence?'

'She spoke of his vanity . . . .'

'Proceed.'

'It was more her manner to me, as the one of the two appearing as his
friend. She was tolerably civil to Storchel: and the difference of
behaviour must have been designed, for she not only looked at Storchel in
a way to mark the difference, she addressed him rather eagerly before we
turned on our heels, to tell him she would write to him, and let him have
her reply in a letter. He will get some coquettish rigmarole.'

'That seems monstrous!--if one could be astonished by her,' said the
baroness. 'When is she to write?'

'She may write: the letter will find no receiver,' said Tresten,
significantly raising his eyebrows. 'The legal gentleman is gone--blown
from a gun! He's off home. He informed me that he should write to the
General, throwing up his office, and an end to his share in the
business.'

'There was no rudeness to the poor man?'

'Dear me, no. But imagine a quiet little advocate, very precise and
silky--you've had a hint of him--and all of a sudden the client he has by
the ear swells into a tremendous beast--a combination of lion and
elephant--bellows and shakes the room, stops and stamps before him,
discharging an unintelligible flood of racy vernacular punctuated in
thunder. You hear him and see him! Alvan lost his head--some of his hair
too. The girl is not worth a lock. But he's past reason.'

'He takes it so,' said the baroness, musing. 'It will be the sooner over.
She never cared for him a jot. And there's the sting. He has called up
the whole world in an amphitheatre to see a girl laugh him to scorn. Hard
for any man to bear!--Alvan of all men! Why does he not come here? He
might rage at me for a day and a night, and I would rock him to sleep in
the end. However, he has done nothing?'

That was the point. The baroness perceived it to be a serious point, and
repeated the question sharply. 'Has he been to the house?--no?--writing?'

Tresten dropped a nod.

'Not to the girl, I suppose. To the father?' said she.

'He has written to the General.'

'You should have stopped it.'

'Tell a vedette to stop cavalry. You're not thinking of the man. He's in
a white frenzy.'

'I will go to him.'

'You will do wrong. Leave him to spout the stuff and get rid of his
poison. I remember a sister of poor Nuciotti's going to him after he had
let his men walk into a trap--and that was through a woman: and he was
quieted; and the chief overlooked it; and two days after, Nuciotti blew
his brains out. He'd have been alive now if he had been left alone.
Furious cursing is a natural relief to some men, like women's weeping. He
has written a savage letter to her father, sending the girl to the deuce
with the name she deserves, and challengeing the General.'

'That letter is despatched?'

'Rudiger has it by this time.'

The baroness fixed her eyes on Tresten: she struck her lap. 'Alvan! Is it
he? But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists. There can be no
fighting. He apologized to you for his daughter's insolence to me. He
will not fight, be sure.'

'Perhaps not,' Tresten said.

'As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her: it cannot be
too widely known. I could cry: "What wisdom there is in men when they are
mad!" We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary courtesy.
"With the name--she deserves," you say?

He pitched the very name at her character plainly?--called her what she
is?'

The baroness could have borne to hear it: she had no feminine horror of
the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinction between
camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a discharge of
cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added: 'The bath's a
black one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regrettable, no
doubt, but it 's probably true, and he 's out of his mind. It would be
dangerous to check him: he'd force his best friend to fight. Leczel is
with him and gives him head. It 's about time for me to go back to him,
for there may be business.'

The baroness thought it improbable. She was hoping that with Alvan's
eruption the drop-scene would fall.

Tresten spoke of the possibility. He knew the contents of the letter, and
knew further that a copy of it, with none of the pregnant syllables
expunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko. He counselled calm waiting
for a certain number of hours. The baroness committed herself to a
promise to wait. Now that Alvan had broken off from the baleful girl, the
worst must have been passed, she thought.

He had broken with the girl: she reviewed him under the light of that
sole fact. So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and he
would again be the man she prized and hoped much of! How thickly he had
been obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of scorn
of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself to entertain
while he was writhing in the toils, and very bluntly and dismissingly
felt now that his madness was at its climax. An outrageous lunatic fit,
that promised to release him from his fatal passion, seemed, on the
contrary, respectable in essence if not in the display. Wives he should
have by fifties and hundreds if he wanted them, she thought in her
great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatened pretensions to
be his mate were slain by the title flung at her, and merited. The word
(she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a wound beyond healing. It
pronounced in a single breath the girl's right name and his pledge of a
return to sanity. For it was the insanest he could do; it uttered
anathema on his love of her; it painted his white glow of unreason and
fierce ire at the scorn which her behaviour flung upon every part of his
character that was tenderest with him. After speaking such things a man
comes to his senses or he dies. So thought the baroness, and she was not
more than commonly curious to hear how the Rudigers had taken the insult
they had brought on themselves, and not unwilling to wait to see Alvan
till he was cool. His vanity, when threatening to bleed to the death,
would not be civil to the surgeon before the second or third dressing of
his wound.




CHAPTER XVIII

In the house of the Rudigers there was commotion. Clotilde sat apart from
it, locked in her chamber. She had performed her crowning act of
obedience to her father by declining the interview with Alvan, and as a
consequence she was full of grovelling revolt.

Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in this
final instance of dutifulness--one was the sight of that hateful rigid
face and glacier eye of Tresten; the other was the loophole she left for
subsequent insurgency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger's envoy,
Dr. Storchel. She had gazed most earnestly at him, that he might not
mistake her meaning, and the little man's pair of spectacles had, she
fancied, been dim. He was touched. Here was a friend! Here was the friend
she required, the external aid, the fresh evasion, the link with Alvan!
Now to write to him to bind him to his beautiful human emotion. By
contrast with the treacherous Tresten, whose iciness roused her to
defiance, the nervous little advocate seemed an emissary of the skies,
and she invoked her treasure-stores of the craven's craftiness in revolt
to compose a letter that should move him, melt the good angel to espouse
her cause. He was to be taught to understand--nay, angelically he would
understand at once--why she had behaved apparently so contradictorily.
Fettered, cruelly constrained by threats and wily sermons upon her duty
to her family, terrorized, a prisoner 'beside this blue lake, in sight of
the sublimest scenery of earth,' and hating his associate--hating him,
she repeated and underscored--she had belied herself; she was willing to
meet Alvan, she wished to meet him. She could open her heart to Alvan's
true friend--his only true friend. He would instantly discern her unhappy
plight. In the presence of his associate she could explain nothing, do
nothing but what she had done. He had frozen her. She had good reason to
know that man for her enemy. She could prove him a traitor to Alvan.
Certain though she was from the first moment of Dr. Storchel's integrity
and kindness of heart, she had stood petrified before him, as if affected
by some wicked spell. She owned she had utterly belied herself; she
protested she had been no free agent.

The future labours in her cause were thrown upon Dr. Storchel's
shoulders, but with such compliments to him on his mission from above as
emissary angels are presumed to be sensibly affected by.

The letter was long, involved, rather eloquent when she forgot herself
and wrote herself, and intentionally very feminine, after the manner of
supplicatory ladies appealing to lawyers, whom they would sway by the
feeble artlessness of a sex that must confide in their possession of a
heart, their heads being too awful.

She was directing the letter when Marko Romaris gave his name outside her
door. He was her intimate, her trustiest ally; he was aware of her design
to communicate with Dr. Storchel, and came to tell her it would be a
waste of labour. He stood there singularly pale and grave, unlike the
sprightly slave she petted on her search for a tyrant. 'Too late,' he
said, pointing to the letter she held. 'Dr. Storchel has gone.'

She could not believe it, for Storchel had informed her that he would
remain three days. Her powers of belief were more heavily taxed when
Marko said: 'Alvan has challenged your father to fight him.' With that he
turned on his heel; he had to assist in the deliberations of the family.

She clasped her temples. The collision of ideas driven together by Alvan
and a duel--Alvan challengeing her father--Alvan, the contemner of the
senseless appeal to arms for the settlement 'of personal
disputes!--darkened her mind. She ran about the house plying all whom she
met for news and explanations; but her young brother was absent, her
sisters were ignorant, and her parents were closeted in consultation with
the gentleman. At night Marko sent her word that she might sleep in
peace, for things would soon be arranged and her father had left the
city.

She went to her solitude to study the hard riddle of her shattered
imagination of Alvan. The fragments would not suffer joining, they
assailed her in huge heaps; and she did not ask herself whether she had
ever known him, but what disruption it was that had unsettled the reason
of the strongest man alive. At times he came flashing through the scud of
her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendid
figure of manhood on a madman's conduct was the task she supposed herself
to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped the figure,
abhorred the deed. She could not unite them. He was like some great
cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons. He, whose lucent
reason was an unclouded sky over every complexity of our sphere, he to
crave to fight! to seek the life-blood of the father of his beloved! More
unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he must know the
challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotilde ever again.
She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state of mental drowning
for a truce to the bitter riddle.

Quiet reigned in the household next day, and for the length of the day.
Her father had departed, her mother treated her vixenishly, snubbing her
for a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settled
and dismissed. Alvan, then, had been appeased. He was not a man of blood:
he was the humanest of men. She was able to reconstruct him under the
beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile. She could
occasionally conjure them up in their vividness; but had she not in truth
been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photographs of him
with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant of the
gifts he asked for? Had he really asked to have anything back? She
inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since their
separation--if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showing
him as he was actually before their misunderstanding! The sun-tracing
would not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do: seeing him as
he was then, the hour would be revived,--she would certainly feel him as
he lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him to
her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a
stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character.