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Unknown - "The Bible, Douay Rheims, Book 64: Philemon"

Jack London - "The Sea Wolf"

William Morris - "Chants for Socialists"

Georg Ebers - "The Story of My Life, Volume 4."

The Tragic Comedians, Complete

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




Alvan shaped a comparison of her with Paris, his beloved of cities--the
symbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive,
eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting him to
proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; light in
light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and therefore not
light, anything but light in strong hands, very stedfast rather: and oh!
constantly entertaining.

The comparison had to be strained to fit the living lady's shape. Did he
think it, or a dash of something like it?

His mood was luxurious. He had found the fair and youthful original woman
of refinement and station desired by him. He had good reason to wish to
find her. Having won a name, standing on firm ground, with promise of a
great career, chief of what was then taken for a growing party and is not
yet a collapsed, nor will be, though the foot on it is iron, his youth
had flown under the tutelage of an extraordinary Mentor, whom to call
Athene robs the goddess of her personal repute for wisdom in conduct, but
whose head was wise, wise as it was now grey. Verily she was original;
and a grey original should seem remarkable above a blooming blonde. If
originality in woman were our prime request, the grey should bear the
palm. She has gone through the battle, retaining the standard she carried
into it, which is a victory. Alas, that grey, so spirit-touching in Art,
should be so wintry in reality!

The discovery of a feminine original breathing Spring, softer, warmer
than the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepid
as devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan. He took it luxuriously because
he believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage of
the adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in return for
energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his natural
longings.

Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long. All the sweeter was the breath
of the young Spring. That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde in the
attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively
assuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winning
her. Barriers are for those who cannot fly. The barriers were palpable
about a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her which
would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the
mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior. He
saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it
sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his
courage to support the originality she was famed for.

They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan for
counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exact phrasing
of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature. He satisfied
them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace that night.
Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of a contested
verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping verses of
the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious flavour of acid,
and a lively sting in the tail of the honey. Sentiment, cynicism, and
satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses, where pure poetry
has a recognized voice; but the lower elements constitute the popularity
in a cultivated society inclining to wantonness out of bravado as well as
by taste. Alvan, looking indolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a
verse that speaks of the superfluousness of a faithless lady's vowing
bite:

'The kisses were in the course of things,
The bite was a needless addition.'

Clotilde could not repress her reddening--Count Kollin had repeated too
much! She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their
chatter. He spared her the allusion to Pompeius. She convinced him of her
capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with her
blush. She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility
forbade her touching on with him: not that she would not have had an airy
latitude with him to touch on what she pleased: he liked her for her
boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it: he liked
also the distinction she made.

The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to his
requirements in a wife. They marched to the table together, and sat
together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together--true Rauenthal. His
robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife
might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his
possible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful
heavens, blessing mankind in chorus. It belonged to his hearty dream of
the wife he would choose, were she to be had. The position of interpreter
of heaven's benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment of the
gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing it with
the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than he on
this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation. Clotilde kindled to the
hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet. She was not devoid
of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her father's
board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that vineyard and
vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to be enthusiastic
for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty from much talking and
excitement. She drank her glass relishingly, declaring the wine princely.
Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: 'You are not for the extract of
raisin our people have taken to copy from French Sauternes, to suit a
female predilection for sugar?'

'No, no, the grape for me!' said she: 'the Rhine grape with the elf in
it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!'

'Glorious!'

He toasted the grape. 'Wine of the grape is the young bride--the young
sun-bride! divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered
sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten of
gout. No raisin-juice for us! None of their too-long-on-the-stem
clusters! We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her
heaven-kissing ardour. I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the
Rhine. We--will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come?
we two!' The picture of his bride and him drinking the sun down after a
day of savage toil was in the shout--a burst unnoticed in the incessantly
verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table. Clotilde acquiesced: she
chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollicking faun. She was
realizing fairyland.

They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between them as
with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting and
branching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of the
harmony. So ran their chirping arguments and diversions. The carrying on
of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to those
undetermined floating atoms about us that a certain sacred something is
in process of formation, or has formed; and people looked; and looked
hard at the pair, and at one another afterward: none approached them. The
Signor conjuror who has a thousand arts for conjuring with nature was
generally considered to have done that night his most ancient and
reputedly fabulous trick--the dream of poets, rarely witnessed anywhere,
and almost too wonderful for credence in a haunt of our later
civilization. Yet there it was: the sudden revelation of the intense
divinity to a couple fused in oneness by his apparition, could be
perceived of all having man and woman in them; love at first sight, was
visible. 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?' And if nature,
character, circumstance, and a maid clever at dressing her mistress's
golden hair, did prepare them for Love's lightning-match, not the less
were they proclaimingly alight and in full blaze. Likewise, Time,
imperious old gentleman though we know him to be, with his fussy
reiterations concerning the hour for bed and sleep, bowed to the magical
fact of their condition, and forbore to warn them of his passing from
night to day. He had to go, he must, he has to be always going, but as
long as he could he left them on their bank by the margin of the stream,
where a shadow-cycle of the eternal wound a circle for them and allowed
them to imagine they had thrust that old driver of the dusty high-road
quietly out of the way. They were ungrateful, of course, when the
performance of his duties necessitated his pulling them up beside him
pretty smartly, but he uttered no prophecy of ever intending to rob them
of the celestial moments they had cut from him and meant to keep between
them 'for ever,' and fresh.

The hour was close on the dawn of a March morning. Alvan assisted at the
cloaking and hooding of Clotilde. Her relatives were at hand; they hung
by while he led her to the stairs and down into a spacious moonlight that
laid the traceries of the bare tree-twigs clear-black on grass and stone.

'A night to head the Spring!' said Alvan. 'Come.'

He lifted her off the steps and set her on the ground, as one who had an
established right to the privilege and she did not contest it, nor did
her people, so kingly was he, arrayed in the thunder of the bolt which
had struck the pair. These things, and many things that islands know not
of, are done upon continents, where perhaps traditions of the awfulness
of Love remain more potent in society; or it may be, that an island
atmosphere dispossesses the bolt of its promptitude to strike, or the
breastplates of the islanders are strengthened to resist the bolt, or no
tropical heat is there to create and launch it, or nothing is to be seen
of it for the haziness, or else giants do not walk there. But even where
he walked, amid a society intellectually fostering sentiment, in a land
bowing to see the simplicity of the mystery paraded, Alvan's behaviour
was passing heteroclite. He needed to be the kingly fellow he was,
crowned by another kingly fellow--the lord of hearts--to impose it
uninterruptedly. 'She is mine; I have won her this night!' his bearing
said; and Clotilde's acquiesced; and the worthy couple following them had
to exhibit a copy of the same, much wondering. Partly by habit, and of
his natural astuteness, Alvan peremptorily usurped a lead that once taken
could not easily be challenged, and would roll him on a good tideway
strong in his own passion and his lady's up against the last
defences--her parents. A difficulty with them was foreseen. What is a
difficulty!--a gate in the hunting-field: an opponent on a platform: a
knot beneath a sword: the dam to waters that draw from the heavens. Not
desiring it in this case--it would have been to love the difficulty
better than the woman--he still enjoyed the bracing prospect of a
resistance, if only because it was a portion of the dowry she brought
him. Good soldiers (who have won their grades) are often of a peaceful
temper and would not raise an invocation to war, but a view of the enemy
sets their pugnacious forces in motion, the bugle fills their veins with
electrical fire, till they are as racers on the race-course.--His inmost
hearty devil was glad of a combat that pertained to his possession of
her, for battle gives the savour of the passion to win, and victory
dignifies a prize: he was, however, resolved to have it, if possible,
according to the regular arrangement of such encounters, formal, without
snatchings, without rash violence; a victory won by personal ascendancy,
reasoning eloquence.

He laughed to hear her say, in answer to a question as to her present
feelings: 'I feel that I am carried away by a centaur!' The comparison
had been used or implied to him before.

'No!' said he, responding to a host of memories, to shake them off, 'no
more of the quadruped man! You tempt him--may I tell you that? Why, now,
this moment, at the snap of my fingers, what is to hinder our taking the
short cut to happiness, centaur and nymph? One leap and a gallop, and we
should be into the morning, leaving night to grope for us, parents and
friends to run about for the wits they lose in running. But no! No more
scandals. That silver moon invites us by its very spell of bright
serenity, to be mad: just as, when you drink of a reverie, the more
prolonged it is the greater the readiness for wild delirium at the end of
the draught. But no!' his voice deepened--'the handsome face of the orb
that lights us would be well enough were it only a gallop between us two.
Dearest, the orb that lights us two for a lifetime must be taken all
round, and I have been on the wrong side of the moon.

I have seen the other face of it--a visage scored with regrets, dead
dreams, burnt passions, bald illusions, and the like, the like!--sunless,
waterless, without a flower! It is the old volcano land: it grows one
bitter herb: if ever you see my mouth distorted you will know I am
revolving a taste of it; and as I need the antidote you give, I will not
be the centaur to win you, for that is the land where he stables himself;
yes, there he ends his course, and that is the herb he finishes by
pasturing on. You have no dislike of metaphors and parables? We Jews are
a parable people.'

'I am sure I do understand . . .' said Clotilde, catching her breath to
be conscientious, lest he should ask her for an elucidation.

'Provided always that the metaphor be not like the metaphysician's
treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise!--You were going to add?'

'I was going to say, I think I understand, but you run away with me
still.'

'May the sensation never quit you!'

'It will not.'

'What a night!' Alvan raised his head: 'A night cast for our first
meeting and betrothing! You are near home?'

'The third house yonder in the moonlight.'

'The moonlight lays a white hand on it!'

'That is my window sparkling.'

'That is the vestal's cresset. Shall I blow it out?'

'You are too far. And it is a celestial flame, sir!'

'Celestial in truth! My hope of heaven! Dian's crescent will be ever on
that house for me, Clotilde. I would it were leagues distant, or the door
not forbidden!'

'I could minister to a good knight humbly.'

Alvan bent to her, on a sudden prompting:

'When do father and mother arrive?'

'To-morrow.'

He took her hand. 'To-morrow, then! The worst of omens is delay.'

Clotilde faintly gasped. Could he mean it?--he of so evil a name in her
family and circle!

Her playfulness and pleasure in the game of courtliness forsook her.

'Tell me the hour when it will be most convenient to them to receive me,'
said Alvan.

She stopped walking in sheer fright.

'My father--my mother?' she said, imaging within her the varied horror of
each and the commotion.

'To-morrow or the day after--not later. No delays! You are mine, we are
one; and the sooner my cause is pleaded the better for us both. If I
could step in and see them this instant, it would be forestalling
mischances. Do you not see, that time is due to us, and the minutes are
our gold slipping away?'

She shrank her hand back: she did not wish to withdraw the hand, only to
shun the pledge it signified. He opened an abyss at her feet, and in
deadly alarm of him she exclaimed: 'Oh! not yet; not immediately.' She
trembled, she made her petition dismal by her anguish of speechlessness.
'There will be such . . . not yet! Perhaps later. They must not be
troubled yet--at present. I am . . . I cannot--pray, delay!'

'But you are mine!' said Alvan. 'You feel it as I do. There can be no
real impediment?'

She gave an empty sigh that sought to be a run of entreaties. In fear of
his tongue she caught at words to baffle it, senseless of their
imbecility: 'Do not insist: yes, in time: they will--they--they may. My
father is not very well . . . my mother: she is not very well. They are
neither of them very well: not at present!--Spare them at present.'

To avoid being carried away, she flung herself from the centaur's back to
the disenchanting earth; she separated herself from him in spirit, and
beheld him as her father and mother and her circle would look on this
pretender to her hand, with his lordly air, his Jew blood, and his
hissing reputation--for it was a reputation that stirred the snakes and
the geese of the world. She saw him in their eyes, quite coldly: which
imaginative capacity was one of the remarkable feats of cowardice, active
and cold of brain even while the heart is active and would be warm.

He read something of her weakness. 'And supposing I decide that it must
be?'

'How can I supplicate you!' she replied with a shiver, feeling that she
had lost her chance of slipping from his grasp, as trained women of the
world, or very sprightly young wits know how to do at the critical
moment: and she had lost it by being too sincere. Her cowardice appeared
to her under that aspect.

'Now I perceive that the task is harder,' said Alvan, seeing her huddled
in a real dismay. 'Why will you not rise to my level and fear nothing!
The way is clear: we have only to take the step. Have you not seen
tonight that we are fated for one another? It is your destiny, and
trifling with destiny is a dark business. Look at me. Do you doubt my
having absolute control of myself to bear whatever they put on me to
bear, and hold firmly to my will to overcome them! Oh! no delays.'

'Yes!' she cried; 'yes, there must be.'

'You say it?'

The courage to repeat her cry was wanting.

She trembled visibly: she could more readily have bidden him bear her
hence than have named a day for the interview with her parents; but
desperately she feared that he would be the one to bid; and he had this
of the character of destiny about him, that she felt in him a maker of
facts. He was her dream in human shape, her eagle of men, and she felt
like a lamb in the air; she had no resistance, only terror of his power,
and a crushing new view of the nature of reality.

'I see!' said he, and his breast fell. Her timid inability to join with
him for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights: a bad
name among her people and class, and chains in private. He was old enough
to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood less fiery
than the junction of his passions. 'Well, well!--but we might so soon
have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad! It is but to
determine to do it--to take the bold short path instead of the wearisome
circuit. Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of the
heart. Battles are won in that way: not by tender girls! and she is a
girl, and the task is too much for her. So, then, we are in your hands,
child! Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and
sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is not
a wedded soul. Is she not a serpent? gold-crested, all the world may see;
and with a mortal bite, I know. I have had the bite before the kisses.
That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things. Apropos, Hamlet
was poisoned--ghost-poisoned.'

'Mad, he was mad!' said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.

'He was born bilious; he partook of the father's constitution, not the
mother's. High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought, reflective,
if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was by nature
two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that sleeps beside
her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry. Before the ghost
walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action would have whiffed
away his melancholy. After it, he was a dizzy moralizer, waiting for the
winds to blow him to his deed-ox out. The apparition of his father to him
poisoned a sluggish run of blood, and that venom in the blood distracted
a head steeped in Wittenberg philosophy. With metaphysics in one and
poison in the other, with the outer world opened on him and this world
stirred to confusion, he wore the semblance of madness; he was throughout
sane; sick, but never with his reason dethroned.'

'Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!'

'Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.'

'No!'

'Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?' said Alvan.

Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to
be able to laugh. Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells
were spoken, Alvan had gone. And then she thought of the person that
Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for him
in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed
gold-crested serpent.

He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit of
likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.

And she? She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had
returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her with
were no longer imminent.




CHAPTER V

Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a short
sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to her own
sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest in her. The
exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the art to frame
her apology. The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan, she saw
Prince Marko. She was gentle to him, in anticipation of his grief; she
could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequious beauty, and when
her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acute sensibility to the
blow, honourably she inflicted it.

'Marko, my friend, you know that I cannot be false; then let me tell you
I yesterday met the man who has but to lift his hand and I go to him, and
he may lead me whither he will.'

The burning eyes of her Indian Bacchus fixed on her till their brightness
moistened and flashed.

Whatever was for her happiness he bowed his head to, he said. He knew the
man.

Her duty was thus performed; she had plighted herself. For the first few
days she was in dread of meeting, seeing, or hearing of Alvan. She feared
the mention of a name that rolled the world so swiftly. Her parents had
postponed their coming, she had no reason for instant alarm; it was his
violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence that she feared, as
nervous people shrink from cannon: and neither meeting, seeing, nor
hearing of him, she began to yearn, like the child whose curiosity is
refreshed by a desire to try again the startling thing which frightened
it. Her yearning grew, the illusion of her courage flooded back; she
hoped he would present himself to claim her, marvelled that he did not,
reproached him; she could almost have scorned him for listening to the
hesitations of the despicable girl so little resembling what she really
was--a poor untried girl, anxious only on behalf of her family to spare
them a sudden shock. Remembering her generous considerations in their
interests, she thought he should have known that the creature he called a
child would have yielded upon supplication to fly with him. Her
considerateness for him too, it struck her next, was the cause of her
seeming cowardly, and the man ought to have perceived it and put it
aside. He should have seen that she could be brave, and was a mate for
him. And if his shallow experience of her wrote her down nerveless, his
love should be doing.

Was it love? Her restoration to the belief in her possessing a decided
will whispered of high achievements she could do in proof of love, had
she the freedom of a man. She would not have listened (it was quite true)
to a silly supplicating girl; she would not have allowed an interval to
yawn after the first wild wooing of her. Prince Marko loved. Yes, that
was love! It failed in no sign of the passion. She set herself to study
it in Marko, and was moved by many sentiments, numbering among them pity,
thankfulness, and the shiver of a feeling between admiration and pathetic
esteem, like that the musician has for a precious instrument giving sweet
sound when shattered. He served her faithfully, in spite of his distaste
for some of his lady's commissions. She had to get her news of Alvan
through Marko. He brought her particulars of the old trial of Alvan, and
Alvan's oration in defence of himself for a lawless act of devotion to
the baroness; nothing less than the successfully scheming to wrest by
force from that lady's enemy a document precious to her lawful interests.
It was one of those cases which have a really high gallant side as well
as a bad; an excellent case for rhetoric. Marko supplied the world's
opinion of the affair, bravely owning it to be not unfavourable. Her
worthy relatives, the Frau v. Crestow and husband, had very properly
furnished a report to the family of the memorable evening; and the hubbub
over it, with the epithets applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have
been received on a visit to demand her in marriage. There was no chance
of her being allowed to enter houses where this 'rageing demagogue and
popular buffoon' was a guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so
she was compelled to have recourse to Marko. Unable to take such services
without rewarding him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer.
Those who toss crumbs to their domestic favourites will now and then be
moved to toss meat, which is not so good for them, but the dumb
mendicant's delight in it is winning, and a little cannot hurt. Besides,
if any one had a claim on her it was the prince; and as he was always
adoring, never importunate, he restored her to the pedestal she had been
really rudely shaken from by that other who had caught her up suddenly
into the air, and dropped her! A hand abandoned to her slave rewarded him
immeasurably. A heightening of the reward almost took his life. In the
peacefulness of dealing with a submissive love that made her queenly, the
royal, which plucked her from throne to footstool, seemed predatory and
insolent. Thus, after that scene of 'first love,' in which she had been
actress, she became almost (with an inward thrill or two for the
recovering of him) reconciled to the not seeing of the noble actor; for
nothing could erase the scene--it was historic; and Alvan would always be
thought of as a delicious electricity. She and Marko were together on the
summer excursion of her people, and quite sisterly, she could say, in her
delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions. True gentlemen are
imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow of giants; but still
Clotilde's experience of a giant's manners was favourable to the liberty
she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this kind, rather warmer than
her word for it would imply. She owned that she could better live the
poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the
society of Marko. He was very young, he was little more than an
adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or
slacken him. One could play on him securely, thinking of a distant
day--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when he might be
made happy.