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Samuel Smiles - "Character"

Josephine Lawrence - "Brother and Sister"

Georg Ebers - "The Nuts"

Georg Ebers - "The Sisters, v4"

The Tragic Comedians, Complete

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




'Indeed, indeed, I have more courage than I had,' said Clotilde.

His eyes dilated, steadied, speculated, weighed her.

'Put it to proof while you can believe in it!'

'How is it every one but you thinks me bold?' she complained.

'Because I carry a touchstone that brings out the truth. I am your
reality: all others are phantoms. You can impose on them, not on me.
Courage for one inspired plunge you may have, and it will be your
salvation:--southward, over to Italy, that is the line of flight, and the
subsequent struggle will be mine: you will not have to face it. But the
courage for daily contention at home, standing alone, while I am distant
and maligned--can you fancy your having that? No! be wise of what you
really are; cast the die for love, and mount away tomorrow.'

'Then,' said Clotilde, with elvish cunning, 'do you doubt your ability to
win me without a scandal?'

'Back me, and I win you!' he replied in a tone of unwonted humility: a
sudden droop.

She let her hand fall. He grasped it.

'Gradations appear to be unknown to you,' she said.

He cried out: 'Count the years of life, span them, think of the work to
be done, and ask yourself whether time and strength should run to waste
in retarding the inevitable? Pottering up steps that can be taken at one
bound is very well for peasant pilgrims whose shrine is their bourne, and
their kneecaps the footing stumps. But for us two life begins up there.
Onward, and everywhere around, when we two are together, is our shrine. I
have worked, and wasted life; I have not lived, and I thirst to live.'

She murmured, in a fervour, 'You shall!' and slipped behind her defences.
'To-morrow morning we shall wander about; I must have a little time; all
to-morrow morning we can discuss plans.'

'You know you command me,' said he, and gazed at her.

She was really a child compared with him in years, and if it was an
excuse for taking her destiny into his hands, she consenting,--it was
also a reason why he dared not press his whole weight to win her to the
step.

She had the pride of the secret knowledge of her command of this giant at
the long table of the guests at dinner, where, after some play of knife
and fork among notable professors, Prussian officers, lively Frenchmen
and Italians, and the usual over-supply of touring English of both sexes,
not encouraging to conversation in their look of pallid disgust of the
art, Alvan started general topics and led them. The lead came to him
naturally, because he was a natural speaker, of a mind both stored and
effervescent; and he was genial, interested in every growth of life. She
did not wonder at his popularity among men of all classes and sets, or
that he should be famed for charming women. Her friend was enraptured
with him. Friendly questions pressed in an evening chatter between the
ladies, and Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession.

'But you are not engaged?' said the blunt Englishwoman.

According to the explanation, Clotilde was hardly engaged. It was not an
easy thing to say how she stood definitely. She had obeyed her dying
relative and dearest on earth by joining her hand to Prince Marko's, and
had pleased her parents by following it up with the kindest attentions to
the prince. It had been done, however, for the sake of peace; and chiefly
for his well-being. She had reserved her full consent: the plighting was
incomplete. Prince Marko knew that there was another, a magical person, a
genius of the ring, irresistible. He had been warned, that should the
other come forth to claim her . . . . And she was about to write to him
this very night to tell him . . . tell him fully . . . . In truth, she
loved both, but each so differently! And both loved her! And she had to
make her choice of one, and tell the prince she did love him, but . . .
Dots are the best of symbols for rendering cardisophistical subtleties
intelligible, and as they are much used in dialogue, one should have now
and then permission to print them. Especially feminine dialogue referring
to matters of the uncertain heart takes assistance from troops of dots;
and not to understand them at least as well as words, when words have as
it were conducted us to the brink of expression, and shown us the
precipice, is to be dull, bucolic of the marketplace.

Sunless rose the morning. The blanketed figures went out to salute a
blanketed sky. Drizzling they returned, images of woefulness in various
forms, including laughter's. Alvan frankly declared himself the
disappointed showman; he had hoped for his beloved to see the sight long
loved by him of golden chariot and sun-steeds crossing the peaks and the
lakes; and his disappointment became consternation on hearing Clotilde's
English friend (after objection to his pagan clothing of the solemn
reality of sunrise, which destroyed or minimized by too materially
defining a grandeur that derived its essence from mystery, she thought)
announce the hour for her departure. He promised her a positive sunrise
if she would delay. Her child lay recovering from an illness in the town
below, and she could not stay. But Clotilde had coughed in the damp
morning air, and it would, he urged, be dangerous for her to be exposed
to it. Had not the lady heard her cough? She had, but personally she was
obliged to go; with her child lying ill she could not remain. 'But,
madam, do you hear that cough again? Will you drag her out with such a
cough as that?' The lady repeated 'My child!' Clotilde said it had been
agreed they should descend this day; her friend must be beside her child.
Alvan thundered an 'Impossible!' The child was recovering; Clotilde was
running into danger: he argued with the senseless woman, opposing reason
to the feminine sentiment of the maternal, and of course he was beaten.
He was compelled to sit and gnaw his eloquence. Clotilde likened his
appearance to a strangled roar. 'Mothers and their children are too much
for me!' he said, penitent for his betrayal of over-urgency, as he helped
to wrap her warmly, and counselled her very mode of breathing in the raw
mountain atmosphere.

'I admire you for knowing when to yield,' said she.

He groaned, with frown and laugh: 'You know what I would beg!'

She implored him to have some faith in her.

The missiles of the impassioned were discharged at the poor English: a
customary volley in most places where they intrude after quitting their
shores, if they diverge from the avenue of hotel-keepers and waiters: but
Clotilde pointed out to him that her English friend was not showing
coldness in devoting herself to her child.

'No, they attend to their duties,' he assented generally, desperately
just.

'And you owe it to her that you have seen me.'

'I do,' he said, and forthwith courted the lady to be forgiven.

Clotilde was taken from him in a heavy downpour and trailing of mists.

At the foot of the mountain a boy handed her a letter from Alvan--a
burning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separated on
the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrip
pathfarers. She entered her hotel across the lake, and met a telegram. At
night the wires flashed 'Sleep well' to her; on her awakening, 'Good
morning.' A lengthened history of the day was telegraphed for her
amusement. Again at night there was a 'God guard you!'

'Who can resist him?' sighed Clotilde, excited, nervous, flattered,
happy, but yearning to repose and be curtained from the buzz of the
excess of life that he put about her. This time there was no prospect of
his courtship relapsing.

'He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!' replied her friend.

'If he were only that!' said Clotilde, musing expressively. 'If, dear
Englishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood. But Alvan mounts
high over such lovers: he is a wonderful and ideal man: so great, so
generous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be.'

The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult to
miss--more was expected to be said of him.

'You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan,' she remarked, for she had
heard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also been
polite to her under vexation.

Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, and
disliked the bringing of that island microscope to bear upon a giant. She
found it repugnant to hear a word of Alvan as a perfect gentleman.
Justly, however, she took him for a splendid nature, and assuming upon
good authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed the
lesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace.




BOOK 2.




CHAPTER VII

He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when they
met, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so. He
was like summer's morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantly through
her blood dispersed any hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers
during absences, caused by girlish dread of a step to take, or shame at
the step taken, when coldish gentlemen rather create these backflowings
and gaps in the feelings. She had grown reconciled to the perturbation of
his messages, and would have preferred to have him startling and
thrilling her from a distance; but seeing him, she welcomed him, and
feeling in his bright presence not the faintest chill of the fit of
shyness, she took her bravery of heart for a sign that she had reached
his level, and might own it by speaking of the practical measures to lead
to their union. On one subject sure to be raised against him by her
parents, she had a right to be inquisitive: the baroness.

She asked to see a photograph of her.

Alvan gave her one out of his pocketbook, and watched her eyelids in
profile as she perused those features of the budless grey woman. The
eyelids in such scrutinies reveal the critical mind; Clotilde's drooped
till they almost closed upon their lashes--deadly criticism.

'Think of her age,' said Alvan, colouring. He named a grandmaternal date
for the year of the baroness's birth.

Her eyebrows now stood up; her contemplation of those disenchanting
lineaments came to an abrupt finish.

She returned the square card to him, slowly shaking her head, still
eyeing earth as her hand stretched forth the card laterally. He could not
contest the woeful verdict.

'Twenty years back!' he murmured, writhing. The baroness was a woman fair
to see in the days twenty years back, though Clotilde might think it
incredible: she really was once.

Clotilde resumed her doleful shaking of the head; she sighed. He
shrugged; she looked at him, and he blinked a little. For the first time
since they had come together she had a clear advantage, and as it was
likely to be a rare occasion, she did not let it slip. She sighed again.
He was wounded by her underestimate of his ancient conquest.

'Yes--now,' he said, impatiently.

'I cannot feel jealousy, I cannot feel rivalry,' said she, sad of voice.

The humour of her tranced eyes in the shaking head provoked him to defend
the baroness for her goodness of heart, her energy of brain.

Clotilde 'tolled' her naughty head.

'But it is a strong face,' she said, 'a strong face--a strong jaw, by
Lavater! You were young--and daringly adventurous; she was captivating in
her distress. Now she is old--and you are friends.'

'Friends, yes,' Alvan replied, and praised the girl, as of course she
deserved to be praised for her open mind.

'We are friends!' he said, dropping a deep-chested breath. The title this
girl scornfully supplied was balm to the vanity she had stung, and his
burnt skin was too eager for a covering of any sort to examine the mood
of the giver. She had positively humbled him so far as with a single word
to relieve him; for he had seen bristling chapters in her look at the
photograph. Yet for all the natural sensitiveness of the man's vanity, he
did not seek to bury the subject at the cost of a misconception injurious
in the slightest degree to the sentiments he entertained toward the older
lady as well as the younger. 'Friends! you are right; good friends; only
you should know that it is just a little--a trifle different. The fact
is, I cannot kill the past, and I would not. It would try me sharply to
break the tie connecting us, were it possible to break it. I am bound to
her by gratitude. She is old now; and were she twice that age, I should
retain my feeling for her. You raise your eyes, Clotilde! Well, when I
was much younger I found this lady in desperate ill-fortune, and she
honoured me with her confidence. Young man though I was, I defended her;
I stopped at no measure to defend her: against a powerful husband,
remember--the most unscrupulous of foes, who sought to rob her of every
right she possessed. And what I did then I again would do. I was vowed to
her interests, to protect a woman shamefully wronged; I did not stick at
trifles, as you know; you have read my speech in defence of myself before
the court. By my interpretation of the case, I was justified; but I
estranged my family and made the world my enemy. I gave my time and
money, besides the forfeit of reputation, to the case, and reasonably
there was an arrangement to repay me out of the estate reserved for her,
so that the baroness should not be under the degradation of feeling
herself indebted. You will not think that out of the way: men of the
world do not. As for matters of the heart between us, we're as far apart
as the Poles.'

He spoke hurriedly. He had said all that could be expected of him.

They were in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden
green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed
fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping
branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its
shadow; a vision of blackness.

'I will compose a beautiful, dutiful, modest, oddest, beseeching,
screeching, mildish, childish epistle to her, and you shall read it, and
if you approve it, we shall despatch it,' said Clotilde.

'There speaks my gold-crested serpent at her wisest!' replied Alvan. 'And
now for my visit to your family: I follow you in a day. En avant! contre
les canons! A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in the afternoon. I
shall see you in the evening. So our separation won't be for long this
time. All the auspices are good. We shall not be rich--nor poor.'

Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to the
store by her.

'We don't count it,' said he. 'Not rich, certainly. And you will not
expect me to make money by my pen. Above all things I detest the writing
for money. Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges of
the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt! And
journalism for money is Egyptian bondage. No slavery is comparable to the
chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain--the key of me; and I
give my self, I do not sell. I write when I have matter in me and in the
direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!'

'I would never ask you to sell yourself,' said Clotilde. 'I would rather
be in want of common comforts.'

He squeezed her wrist. They were again in front of the black-draped
blighted tree. It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurf
bearing a semblance of livid metal. They looked at it as having seen it
before, and passed on.

'But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!' he resumed,
radiating his full bloom on her.

'My highest ambition is to be Sigismund Alvan's wife!' she exclaimed.

To hear her was as good as wine, and his heart came out on a genial
chuckle. 'Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad.
Sigismund Alvan's wife shall take the foremost place of all. Look at me.'
He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening his eagle
eyes. He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element,
expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man's vanity under the
glances of a girl. 'Do you take me for one who could be content with the
part of second? I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I will have
too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly. I was not
fashioned to be the lean meek martyr of a cause, not I. I carry too
decisive a weight in the balance to victory. I have a taste for fruits,
my fairest! And Republics, my bright Lutetia, can give you splendid
honours.' He helped her to realize this with the assuring splendour of
his eyes.

'"Bride of the Elect of the People!" is not that as glorious a title,
think you, as queen of an hereditary sovereign mumbling of God's grace on
his worm-eaten throne? I win that seat by service, by the dedication of
this brain to the people's interests. They have been ground to the dust,
and I lift them, as I did a persecuted lady in my boyhood. I am the
soldier of justice against the army of the unjust. But I claim my reward.
If I live to fight, I live also to enjoy. I will have my station. I win
it not only because I serve, but because also I have seen, have seen
ahead, seen where all is dark, read the unwritten--because I am soldier
and prophet. The brain of man is Jove's eagle and his lightning on
earth--the title to majesty henceforth. Ah! my fairest; entering the city
beside me, and the people shouting around, she would not think her choice
a bad one?'

Clotilde made sign and gave some earnest on his arm of ecstatic hugging.

'We may have hard battles, grim deceptions, to go through before that day
comes,' he continued after a while. 'The day is coming, but we must wait
for it, work on. I have the secret of how to head the people--to put a
head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it will be
beneficent. I set them moving on the lines of the law of things. I am no
empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of science in
politics. When my system is grasped by the people, there is but a step to
the realization of it. One step. It will be taken in my time, or
acknowledged later. I stand for index to the people of the path they
should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later:
not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh! That is a middle-class
invention to effect a compromise. With the people the matter rests with
their intelligence! meanwhile my star is bright and shines reflected.'

'I notice,' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid
lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you never look on the
ground, but always either up or straight before you.'

'People have remarked it,' said he, smiling. 'Here we are at this
funereal tree again. All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct
us perpetually to this tree. It 's the only dead one here.'

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches
decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the
small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.
It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.

'Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said
Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. 'This is a tree for a
melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after
a scene with his mistress, or tales of her! By the way and by the way, my
fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for
me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below. Women
who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered women,
though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!'

He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not
sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive
in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true love's hair.
The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards: her
locks were golden serpents.

'Shall I soon see your baroness?' Clotilde asked him.

'Not in advance of the ceremony,' he answered. 'In good time. You
understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young
and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first . . . ! But her heart is
quite sound. Have no fear! I guarantee it; I know her to the roots. She
desires my welfare, she does my behests. If I am bound to her by
gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me. The utmost she will
demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me in the
fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my heart;
therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.'

They left the tree behind them.

'We will take good care not to return this way again,' said Alvan,
without looking back. 'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under
world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has
looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself. Hecate and
Hermes know about it. Phoebus cannot light it. That tree stands for Death
blooming. We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely tree. Down
there! When do we go? The shudder in that tree is the air exchanging
between Life and Death--the ghosts going and coming: it's on the border
line. I just felt the creep. I think you did. The reason is--there is
always a material reason--that you were warm, and a bit of chill breeze
took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imagining at that very
moment what of all possible causes might separate us, and I acknowledged
that death could do the trick. But death, my love, is far from us two!'

'Does she look as grimmish as she does in the photograph?' said Clotilde.

'Who? the baroness?' Alvan laughed. The baroness was not so easily
defended from a girl as from her husband, it appeared. 'She is the best
of comrades, best of friends. She has her faults; may not relish the writ
announcing her final deposition, but be you true to me, and as true as
she has unfailingly been to me, she will be to you. That I can promise.
My poor Lucie! She is winter, if you will. It is not the winter of the
steppes; you may compare her to winter in a noble country; a fine
landscape of winter. The outlines of her face . . . . She has a great
brain. How much I owe that woman for instruction! You meet now and then
men who have the woman in them without being womanized; they are the pick
of men. And the choicest women are those who yield not a feather of their
womanliness for some amount of manlike strength. And she is one; man's
brain, woman's heart. I thought her unique till I heard of you. And how
do I stand between you two? She has the only fault you can charge me
with; she is before me in time, as I am before you. Shall I spoil you as
she spoilt me? No, no! Obedience to a boy is the recognition of the
heir-apparent, and I respect the salique law as much as I love my love. I
do not offer obedience to a girl, but succour, support. You will not rule
me, but you will invigorate, and if you are petted, you shall not be
spoilt. Do not expect me to show like that undertakerly tree till my
years are one hundred. Even then it will be dangerous to repose beneath
my branches in the belief that I am sapless because I have changed
colour. We Jews have a lusty blood. We are strong of the earth. We serve
you, but you must minister to us. Sensual? We have truly excellent
appetites. And why not? Heroical too! Soldiers, poets, musicians; the
Gentile's masters in mental arithmetic--keenest of weapons: surpassing
him in common sense and capacity for brotherhood. Ay, and in charity; or
what stores of vengeance should we not have nourished! Already we have
the money-bags. Soon we shall hold the chief offices. And when the
popular election is as unimpeded as the coursing of the blood in a
healthy body, the Jew shall be foremost and topmost, for he is
pre-eminently by comparison the brain of these latter-day communities.
But that is only my answer to the brutish contempt of the Jew. I am no
champion of a race. I am for the world, for man!'

Clotilde remarked that he had many friends, all men of eminence, and a
large following among the people.

He assented: 'Yes: Tresten, Retka, Kehlen, the Nizzian. Yes, if I were
other than for legality:--if it came to a rising, I could tell off able
lieutenants.'

'Tell me of your interview with Ironsides,' she said proudly and fondly.

'Would this ambitious little head know everything?' said Alvan, putting
his lips among the locks. 'Well, we met: he requested it. We agreed that
we were on neutral ground for the moment: that he might ultimately have
to decapitate me, or I to banish him, but temporarily we could compare
our plans for governing. He showed me his hand. I showed him mine. We
played open-handed, like two at whist. He did not doubt my honesty, and I
astonished him by taking him quite in earnest. He has dealt with
diplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old Ironer! I love
him for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean deceit. He will
outwit you, but his dexterity is a giant's--a simple evolution rapidly
performed: and nothing so much perplexes pygmies! Then he has them,
bagsful of them! The world will see; and see giant meet giant, I suspect.
He and I proposed each of us in the mildest manner contrary
schemes--schemes to stiffen the hair of Europe! Enough that we parted
with mutual respect. He is a fine fellow: and so was my friend the
Emperor Tiberius, and so was Richelieu. Napoleon was a fine
engine:--there is a difference. Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow! but he
and I may cross. His ideas are not many. The point to remember is that he
is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density of the globe. He
has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up, penetrate, and
traverse complications--an enemy's plans, all that the enemy will be able
to combine, and the likeliest that he will do. Good. We opine that we are
equal to the same. He is for kingcraft to mask his viziercraft--and save
him the labour of patiently attempting oratory and persuasion, which
accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not in iron. We think the more
precious metal will beat him when the broader conflict comes. But such an
adversary is not to be underrated. I do not underrate him: and certainly
not he me. Had he been born with the gifts of patience and a fluent
tongue, and not a petty noble, he might have been for the people, as
knowing them the greater power. He sees that their knowledge of their
power must eventually come to them. In the meantime his party is forcible
enough to assure him he is not fighting a losing game at present: and he
is, no doubt, by lineage and his traditions monarchical. He is curiously
simple, not really cynical. His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability.
His contemptuous phrases are directed against obstacles: against things,
persons, nations that oppose him or cannot serve his turn against his
king, if his king is restive; but he respects his king: against your
friends' country, because there is no fixing it to a line of policy, and
it seems to have collapsed; but he likes that country the best in Europe
after his own. He is nearest to contempt in his treatment of his dupes
and tools, who are dropped out of his mind when he has quite squeezed
them for his occasion; to be taken up again when they are of use to him.
Hence he will have no following. But let me die to-morrow, the party I
have created survives. In him you see the dam, in me the stream. Judge,
then, which of them gains the future!--admitting that, in the present he
may beat me. He is a Prussian, stoutly defined from a German, and yet
again a German stoutly defined from our borderers: and that completes
him. He has as little the idea of humanity as the sword of our Hermann,
the cannon-ball of our Frederick. Observe him. What an eye he has! I
watched it as we were talking: and he has, I repeat, imagination; he can
project his mind in front of him as far as his reasoning on the possible
allows: and that eye of his flashes; and not only flashes, you see it
hurling a bolt; it gives me the picture of a Balearic slinger about to
whizz the stone for that eye looks far, and is hard, and is dead certain
of its mark-within his practical compass, as I have said. I see farther,
and I fancy I proved to him that I am not a dreamer. In my opinion, when
we cross our swords I stand a fair chance of not being worsted. We shall:
you shrink? Figuratively, my darling have no fear! Combative as we may
be, both of us, we are now grave seniors, we have serious business: a
party looks to him, my party looks to me. Never need you fear that I
shall be at sword or pistol with any one. I will challenge my man,
whoever he as that needs a lesson, to touch buttons on a waistcoat with
the button on the foil, or drill fiver and eights in cards at twenty
paces: but I will not fight him though he offend me, for I am stronger
than my temper, and as I do not want to take his nip of life, and judge
it to be of less value than mine, the imperilling of either is an
absurdity.'