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Gilbert Parker - "You Never Know Your Luck, Volume 2."

Unknown - "The Bible, Douay Rheims, Book 18: Judith"

Gilbert Parker - "No Defense, Volume 1."

Gilbert Parker - "When Valmond Came to Pontiac, Volume 3."

The Tragic Comedians, Complete

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




Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to
anatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him in her
likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling,
now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the
pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic
home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked
self-knowledge, and of her saying: 'That is like me: that is very like
me: that is terribly like': up to the point where the comparison wooed
her no longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped her so
shrewdly as to force her to say: 'That is he, not I': and the vivisected
youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch. It
was given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him. Anatomy is the title
for the operation, because the probing of herself in another, with the
liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt
to feel that she prosecuted her researches in a dead body. The moment her
strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank under a stroke of pain, she
abstained from carving, and simultaneously conscious that he lived, she
was kind to him.

'This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?'

'I love you.'

'You think me the highest and best?'

'You are.'

'So deep that you could bear anything from me?'

'Try me!'

'Unfaithfulness?'

'You would be you!'

'Do you not say that because you cannot suspect evil of me?'

'Let me only see you!'

'You are sure that happiness would not smother it?'

'Has it done so yet?'

'Though you know I am a serpent to that man's music?'

'Ah, heaven! Oh!--do not say music. Yes! though anything!'

'And if ever you were to witness the power of his just breathing to me?'

'I would . . . . Ah!'

'What? If you saw his music working the spell?--even the first notes of
his prelude!'

'I would wait'

'It might be for long.'

'I would eat my heart.'

'Bitter! bitter!'

'I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you.'

She had a seizure of the nerves.

The likeness between them was, she felt, too flamingly keen to be looked
at further. She reached to the dim idea of some such nauseous devotion,
and took a shot in her breast as she did so, and abjured it, and softened
to her victim. Clotilde opened her arms, charming away her wound, as she
soothed him, both by the act of soothing and the reflection that she
could not be so very like one whom she pitied and consoled.

She was charitably tender. If it be thought that she was cruel to excess,
plead for her the temptation to simple human nature at sight of a youth
who could be precipitated into the writhings of dissolution, and raised
out of it by a smile. This young man's responsive spirit acted on her as
the discovery of specifics for restoring soundness to the frame excites
the brilliant empiric: he would slay us with benevolent soul to show the
miracle of our revival. Worship provokes the mortal goddess to a
manifestation of her powers; and really the devotee is full half to
blame.

She had latterly been thinking of Alvan's rejection of the part of
centaur; and his phrase, the quadruped man, breathed meaning. He was to
gain her lawfully after dominating her utterly. That was right, but it
levelled imagination. There is in the sentimental kingdom of Love a form
of reasoning, by which a lady of romantic notions who is dominated
utterly, will ask herself why she should be gained lawfully: and she is
moved to do so by the consideration that if the latter, no necessity can
exist for the former: and the reverse. In the union of the two conditions
she sees herself slavishly domesticated. With her Indian Bacchus
imagination rose, for he was pliant: she had only to fancy, and he was
beside her.--Quick to the saddle, away! The forest of terrors is ahead;
they are at the verge of it; a last hamlet perches on its borders; the
dwellers have haunted faces; the timbers of their huts lean to an upright
in wry splinters; warnings are moaned by men and women with the voice of
a night-wind; but on and on! the forest cannot be worse than a world
defied. They drain a cup of milk apiece and they spur, for this is the
way to the golden Indian land of the planted vine and the lover's
godship.--Ludicrous! There is no getting farther than the cup of milk
with Marko. They curvet and caper to be forward unavailingly. It should
be Alvan to bring her through the forest to the planted vine in sunland.
Her splendid prose Alvan could do what the sprig of poetry can but
suggest. Never would malicious fairy in old woman's form have offered
Alvan a cup of milk to paralyze his bride's imagination of him
confronting perils. Yet, O shameful contrariety of the fates! he who
could, will not; he who would, is incapable. Let it not be supposed that
the desire of her bosom was to be run away with in person. Her simple
human nature wished for the hero to lift her insensibly over the
difficult opening chapter of the romance--through 'the forest,' or half
imagined: that done, she felt bold enough to meet the unimagined, which,
as there was no picture of it to terrify her, seemed an easy gallop into
sunland.--Yes, but in the grasp of a great prose giant, with the poetic
departed! Naturally she turned to caress the poetic while she had it
beside her. And it was a wonder to observe the young prince's heavenly
sensitiveness to every variation of her moods. He knew without hearing
when she had next seen Alvan, though it had not been to speak to him. He
looked, and he knew. The liquid darkness of his large eastern eyes cast a
light that brought her heart out: she confessed it, and she comforted
him. The sweetest in the woman caused her double-dealing.

Now she was aware that Alvan moved behind the screen concealing him. A
common friend of Alvan and her family talked to her of him. He was an
eminent professor, a middleaged, grave and honourable man, not ignorant
that her family entertained views opposed to the pretensions of such a
man as the demagogue and Jew. Nevertheless Alvan could persuade him to
abet the scheme for his meeting Clotilde; nay, to lead to it; ultimately
to allow his own house to be their place of meeting. Alvan achieved the
first of the steps unassisted. Whether or not his character stood well
with a man of the world, his force of character, backed by solid
attainments in addition to brilliant gifts, could win a reputable citizen
and erudite to support him. Rhetoric in a worthy cause has good chances
of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seem excellent to
the professor when one promising fair to be the political genius of his
time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could make him believe
that marriage with this girl would be his clear salvation. The second
step was undesignedly Clotilde's.

She was on the professor's arm at one of the great winter balls of her
conductor's brethren in the law, and he said: 'Alvan is here.' She
answered: 'No, he has not yet come.'--How could she tell that he was not
present in the crowd?

'Has he come now?' said the professor.

'No.'

And no Alvan was discernible.

'Now?'

'Not yet.'

The professor stared about. She waited.

'Now he has come; he is in the room now,' said Clotilde.

Alvan was perceived. He stood in the centre of the throng surrounding him
to buzz about some recent pamphlet.

She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as by
degrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him,
it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for the
physical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late,
Alvan happened to have arrived. The touch of his hand, the instant
naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if
there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence on
her, almost to the making it planetary. And a glance at the professor
revealed how picturesque it was. Alvan and he murmured aside. They spoke
of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her in
the dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the limbs
in his desperate poor lover's little flitting eternity of the possession
of her--should say, after she had been led back to her friends: 'That is
he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the Hesperides, whom I
must brush away.'

'He?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional a
weight as her tone declared him. 'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does
not count among the dragons.'

But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark, a
manful thickness of voice in Alvan's 'That is he!' The rivals had
fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the
wrestlers' first grapple. In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.

'He does not count? With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed. He knew
something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the
character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of
rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and
made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it that his
vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception; all, everything;
all! I repeat. But what of it, if I win you? as I shall--only aid me a
little.'

She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the import of
the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to his
penetrative knowledge. Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, of excellent
substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose for
themselves--the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grand
accusation; and they have had to drink it, and they have blinked over the
tonic draught with such power of taking a bracing as their constitutions
could summon. At no moment of their quaint mutual history are the sexes
to be seen standing more acutely divided. Well may the lady be silent;
her little sins are magnified to herself to the proportion of the
greatness of heart forgiving her; and that, with his mysterious
penetration and a throb of her conscience, holds her tongue-tied. She
does not imagine the effect of her silence upon the magnanimous wretch.
Some of these lovers, it has to be stated in sadness for the good name of
man, have not preserved an attitude that said so nobly, 'Child, thou art
human--thou art woman!' They have undone it and gone to pieces with an
injured lover's babble of persecuting inquiries for confessions. Some, on
the contrary, retaining the attitude, have been unable to digest the
tonic; they did not prepare their systems as they did their dose,
possibly thinking the latter a supererogatory heavy thump on a trifle,
the which was performed by them artfully for a means of swallowing and
getting that obnoxious trifle well down. These are ever after love's
dyspeptics. Very few indeed continue at heart in harmony with their
opening note to the silent fair, because in truth the general
anticipation is of her proclaiming, if not angelical innocence, a softly
reddened or blush-rose of it, where the little guiltiness lies pathetic
on its bed of white.

Alvan's robustness of temper, as a conqueror pleased with his capture,
could inspirit him to feel as he said it:

'I know all; what matters that to me?' Even her silence, extending the
'all' beyond limits, as it did to the over-knowing man, who could number
these indicative characteristics of the young woman: impulsive, without
will, readily able to lie: her silence worked no discord in him. He would
have remarked, that he was not looking out for a saint, but rather for a
sprightly comrade, perfectly feminine, thoroughly mastered, young,
graceful, comely, and a lady of station. Once in his good keeping, her
lord would answer for her. And this was a manfully generous view of the
situation. It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror's mood. But how
of his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse, a
defeat? Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as a
heroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself! Wise are the
mothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it only
to guard them at present, from the gentleman's condescending generosity,
until he has become something more than robust in his ideas of the
sex--say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal.

Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, the origin
of the black thing flung at her in time to come--when the man was
frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth of
madness.

After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof of the
amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxing
anxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to the
sister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair through
a demi-ceremony of betrothal. It sprang Clotilde astride nearer to
reality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the change
at home. A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan's
pushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been. She waited
for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet to take; she
feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; the old wheel
revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait for circumstances to
bring the change they cannot work for themselves; and once more the two
fell asunder. She had thoughts of the cloister. Her venerable relative
died joining her hand to Prince Marko's; she was induced to think of
marriage. An illness laid her prostrate; she contemplated the peace of
death.

Shortly before she fell sick the prince was a guest of her father's, and
had won the household by his perfect amiability as an associate. The
grace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an Indian
Bacchus were native to him. In her convalescence, she asked herself what
more she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she in
return might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness. For
she had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in the
Spartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently. But he was a flower
in sunshine to happiness, and he looked to her for it. Why should she
withhold from him a thing so easily given? The convalescent is receptive
and undesiring, or but very faintly desiring: the new blood coming into
the frame like first dawn of light has not stirred the old passions; it
is infant nature, with a tinge of superadded knowledge that is not cloud
across it and lends it only a tender wistfulness.

Her physician sentenced her to the Alps, whither a friend, a daughter of
our island, whose acquaintance she had made in Italy, was going, and at
an invitation Clotilde accompanied her, and she breathed Alpine air.
Marko sank into the category of dreams during sickness. There came a
letter from the professor mentioning that Alvan was on one of the kingly
Alpine heights in view, and the new blood running through her veins
became a torrent. He there! So near! Could he not be reached?

He had a saying: Two wishes make a will.

The wishes of two lovers, he meant. A prettier sentence for lovers, and
one more intoxicating to them, was never devised. It chirrups of the dear
silly couple. Well, this was her wish. Was it his? Young health on the
flow of her leaping blood cried out that it could not be other than
Alvan's wish; she believed in his wishing it. Then as he wished and she
wished, she had the will immediately, and it was all the more her own for
being his as well. She hurried her friend and her friend's friends on
horseback off to the heights where the wounded eagle lodged overlooking
mountain and lake. The professor reported him outwearied with excess of
work. Alvan lived the lives of three; the sins of thirty were laid to his
charge. Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men? Her reckless defence of
him, half spoken, half in her mind, helped her to comprehend his dealings
with her, and how it was that he stormed her and consented to be beaten.
He had a thousand occupations, an ambition out of the world of love,
chains to break, temptations, leanings . . . tut, tut! She had not lived
in her circle of society, and listened to the tales of his friends and
enemies, and been the correspondent of flattering and flattered men of
learning, without understanding how a man like Alvan found diversions
when forbidden to act in a given direction: and now that her healthful
new blood inspired the courage to turn two wishes to a will, she saw both
herself and him very clearly, enough at least to pardon the man more than
she did herself. She had perforce of her radiant new healthfulness
arrived at an exact understanding of him. Where she was deluded was in
supposing that she would no longer dread his impetuous disposition to
turn rosy visions into facts. But she had the revived convalescent's
ardour to embrace things positive while they were not knocking at the
door; dreams were abhorrent to her, tasteless and innutritious; she cast
herself on the flood, relying on his towering strength and mastery of men
and events to bring her to some safe landing--the dream of hearts athirst
for facts.




CHAPTER VI

Alvan was at his writing-table doing stout gladiator's work on paper in a
chamber of one of the gaunt hotels of the heights, which are Death's
Heads there in Winter and have the tongues in Summer, when a Swiss lad
entered with a round grin to tell him that a lady on horseback below had
asked for him--Dr. Alvan. Who could the lady be? He thought of too many.
The thought of Clotilde was dismissed in its dimness. Issuing and
beholding her, his face became illuminated as by a stroke of sunlight.

'Clotilde! by all the holiest!'

She smiled demurely, and they greeted.

She admired the look of rich pleasure shining through surprise in him.
Her heart thanked him for appearing so handsome before her friends.

'I was writing,' said he. 'Guess to whom?--I had just finished my
political stuff, and fell on a letter to the professor and another for an
immediate introduction to your father.'

'True?'

'The truth, as you shall see. So, you have come, you have found me! This
time if I let you slip, may I be stamped slack-fingered!'

'"Two wishes make a will," you say.'

He answered her with one of his bursts of brightness.

Her having sought him he read for the frank surrender which he was ready
to match with a loyal devotion to his captive. Her coming cleared
everything.

Clotilde introduced him to her friends, and he was enrolled a member of
the party. His appearance was that of a man to whom the sphinx has
whispered. They ascended to the topmost of the mountain stages, to
another caravanserai of tourists, whence the singular people emerge in
morning darkness night-capped and blanketed, and behold the great orb of
day at his birth--he them.

Walking slowly beside Clotilde on the mountain way, Alvan said: 'Two
wishes! Mine was in your breast. You wedded yours to it. At last!--and we
are one. Not a word more of time lost. My wish is almost a will in
itself--was it not?--and has been wooing yours all this while!--till the
sleeper awakened, the well-spring leapt up from the earth; and our two
wishes united dare the world to divide them. What can? My wish was your
destiny, yours is mine. We are one.' He poetized on his passion, and
dramatized it: 'Stood you at the altar, I would pluck you from the man
holding your hand! There is no escape for you. Nay, into the vaults, were
you to grow pale and need my vital warmth--down to the vaults! Speak--or
no: look! That will do. You hold a Titan in your eyes, like metal in the
furnace, to turn him to any shape you please, liquid or solid. You make
him a god: he is the river Alvan or the rock Alvan: but fixed or flowing,
he is lord of you. That is the universal penalty: you must, if you have
this creative soul, be the slave of your creature: if you raise him to
heaven, you must be his! Ay, look! I know the eyes! They can melt
granite, they can freeze fire. Pierce me, sweet eyes! And now flutter,
for there is that in me to make them.'

'Consider!' Clotilde flutteringly entreated him.

'The world? you dear heaven of me! Looking down on me does not compromise
you, and I am not ashamed of my devotions. I sat in gloom: you came: I
saw my goddess and worshipped. The world, Lutece, the world is a variable
monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false; but those who weld
strength with sincerity may practise their rites of religion publicly,
and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate. Nay, I say that strength in
love is the sole sincerity, and the world knows it, muffs it in the air
about us, and so we two are privileged. Politically also we know that
strength is the one reality: the rest is shadow. Behind the veil of our
human conventions power is constant as ever, and to perceive the fact is
to have the divining rod-to walk clear of shams. He is the teacher who
shows where power exists: he is the leader who wakens and forms it. Why
have I unfailingly succeeded?--I never doubted! The world voluntarily
opens a path to those who step determinedly. You--to your honour?--I
won't decide--but you have the longest in my experience resisted. I have
a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; I have a voice for ears, a net for
butterflies, a hook for fish, and desperation to plunge into marshes: but
the feu follet will not be caught. One must wait--wait till her desire to
have a soul bids her come to us. She has come! A soul is hers: and see
how, instantly, the old monster, the world, which has no soul--not yet:
we are helping it to get one--becomes a shadow, powerless to stop or
overawe. For I do give you a soul, think as you will of it. I give you
strength to realize, courage to act. It is the soul that does things in
this life--the rest is vapour. How do we distinguish love?--as we do
music by the pure note won from resolute strings. The tense chord is
music, and it is love. This higher and higher mountain air, with you
beside me, sweeps me like a harp.'

'Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!' exclaimed
Clotilde.

'You feel the mountain spirit?'

'I feel that you reveal it.'

'Tell me the books you have been reading.'

'Oh, light literature-poor stuff.'

'When we two read together you will not say that. Light literature is the
garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the view
within us as well as without. Our blood runs through it, our history in
the quick. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view, out or in.
The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled and
sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their pleasures
in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they shall not
degrade the fame of noble fiction. We are the choice public, which will
have good writing for light reading. Poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist,
shall be ranked honourable in my Republic. I am neither, but a man of
law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on the road to government
and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as much from light literature
as from heavy-as much, that is, from the pictures of our human blood in
motion as from the clever assortment of our forefatherly heaps of bones.
Shun those who cry out against fiction and have no taste for elegant
writing. For to have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a
mind: it is a test. But name the books.'

She named one or two.

'And when does Dr. Alvan date the first year of his Republic?'

'Clotilde!' he turned on her.

'My good sir?'

'These worthy good people who are with you: tell me-to-morrow we leave
them!'

'Leave them?'

'You with me. No more partings. The first year, the first day shall be
dated from to-morrow. You and I proclaim our Republic on these heights.
All the ceremonies to follow. We will have a reaping of them, and make a
sheaf to present to the world with compliments. To-morrow!'

'You do not speak seriously?'

'I jest as little as the Talmud. Decide at once, in the happy flush of
this moment.'

'I cannot listen to you, dear sir!'

'But your heart beats!'

'I am not mistress of it.'

'Call me master of it. I make ready for to-morrow.'

'No! no! no! A thousand times no! You have been reading too much fiction
and verse. Properly I should spurn you.'

'Will you fail me, play feu follet, ward me off again?'

'I must be won by rules, brave knight!'

'Will you be won?'

'And are you he--the Alvan who would not be centaur?'

'I am he who chased a marsh-fire, and encountered a retiarius, and the
meshes are on my head and arms. I fancied I dealt with a woman; a woman
needing protection! She has me fast--I am netted, centaur or man. That is
between us two. But think of us facing the world, and trust me; take my
hand, take the leap; I am the best fighter in that fight. Trust it to me,
and all your difficulties are at an end. To fly solves the problem.'