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John Burroughs - "Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and Other Papers"

J. Clontz - "The Gospels in Four Part Harmony"

Georg Ebers - "Uarda, Volume 3."

Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint - "The Blind Spot"

The Tragic Comedians, Complete

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




The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force. The giant in
him loved her warmly. Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her
lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender
eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying
shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water,
swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers distinctly
beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in
his passion than before this tempest. A giant going through a giant's
contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful,
likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was
great-hearted: he could love in his giant's fashion, love and lay down
life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not
heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for
the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites. He was true
man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to
pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in
the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of
timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved,
to his depths.

We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man. Love
and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry
instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them is
indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald
harmonies have been heard. But Love, which purifies and enlarges us, and
sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and
space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance that
the man is a temple fit for the rites. Out of romances, he is not
melodiously composed. And in a giant are various giants to be slain, or
thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader. It is not done
by miracle.

As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant
indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery
stedfastness. His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor
indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome
boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and
she required for her mate a master: she felt it and she sided to him
quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of
a mutual fitness. Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of
his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again,
she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she
was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his
physical influence. Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she
kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through
sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it
was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.

'They are undermining her now--now--now!'

He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already
indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on
his agitation. Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would
have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to
nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart's
faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his
mastery, took her for sand. Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?
The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman. But
how had he come to be guilty of it? he asked himself again; and, without
answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to
complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant
Duplicity. He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their
favour, with another commanding her to break it. He gathered and drilled
a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the
letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.




CHAPTER X

His friend Colonel von Tresten was beside him when he received the
enemy's counter-stroke. Count Walburg and his companion brought a letter
from Clotilde--no reply; a letter renouncing him.

Briefly, in cold words befitting the act, she stated that the past must
be dead between them; for the future she belonged to her parents; she had
left the city. She knew not where he might be, her letter concluded, but
henceforward he should know that they were strangers.

Alvan held out the deadly paper when he had read the contents; he smote a
forefinger on it and crumpled it in his hand. That was the dumb oration
of a man shocked by the outrage upon passionate feeling to the state of
brute. His fist, outstretched to the length of his arm, shook the reptile
letter under a terrible frown.

Tresten saw that he supposed himself to be perfectly master of his acts
because he had not spoken, and had managed to preserve the ordinary
courtesies.

'You have done your commission,' the colonel said to Count Walburg, whose
companion was not disposed to go without obtaining satisfactory
assurances, and pressed for them.

Alvan fastened on him. 'You adopt the responsibility of this?' He
displayed the letter.

'I do.'

'It lies.'

Tresten remarked to Count Walburg: 'These visits are provocations.'

'They are not so intended,' said the count, bowing pacifically. His
friend was not a man of the sword, and was not under the obligation to
accept an insult. They left the letter to do its work.

Big natures in their fits of explosiveness must be taken by flying shots,
as dwarfs peep on a monster, or the Scythian attacked a phalanx. Were we
to hear all the roarings of the shirted Heracles, a world of comfortable
little ones would doubt the unselfishness of his love of Dejaneira. Yes,
really; they would think it was not a chivalrous love: they would
consider that he thought of himself too much. They would doubt, too, of
his being a gentleman! Partial glimpses of him, one may fear, will be
discomposing to simple natures. There was a short black eruption. Alvan
controlled it, to ask hastily what the baroness thought and what she had
heard of Clotilde. Tresten made sign that it was nothing of the best.

'See! my girl has hundreds of enemies, and I, only I, know her and can
defend her--weak, base shallow trickster, traitress that she is!' cried
Alvan, and came down in a thundershower upon her: 'Yesterday--the day
before--when? just now, here, in this room; gave herself--and now!' He
bent, and immediately straightening his back, addressed Colonel von
Tresten as her calumniator, 'Say your worst of her, and I say I will make
of that girl the peerless woman of earth! I! in earnest! it's no dream.
She can be made . . . . O God! the beast has turned tail! I knew she
could. There 's three of beast to one of goddess in her, and set her
alone, and let her be hunted and I not by, beast it is with her! cowardly
skulking beast--the noblest and very bravest under my wing!
Incomprehensible to you, Tresten? But who understands women! You hate
her. Do not. She 's a riddle, but no worse than the rest of the tangle.
She gives me up? Pooh! She writes it. She writes anything. And that
vilest, I say, I will make more enviable, more Clotilde! he thundered her
signature in an amazement, broken suddenly by the sight of her putting
her name to the letter. She had done that, written her name to the
renunciation of him! No individual could bear the sight of such a crime,
and no suffering man could be appeased by a single victim to atone for
it. Her sex must be slaughtered; he raged against the woman; she became
that ancient poisonous thing, the woman; his fury would not distinguish
her as Clotilde, though the name had started him, and it was his
knowledge of the particular sinner which drew down his curses on the sex.
He twisted his body, hugging at his breast as if he had her letter
sticking in his ribs. The letter was up against his ribs, and he thumped
it, crushed it, patted it; he kissed it, and flung it, stamped on it, and
was foul-mouthed. Seeing it at his feet, he bent to it like a man snapped
in two, lamenting, bewailing himself, recovering sight of her
fragmentarily. It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, and
sceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke the
shaft, but left the rankling arrow-head:--she had traced the lines, and
though tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed her hand
over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like the
deadly-toothed arrow-head called asp, and there was no uprooting it. The
thing lived; her deed was the woman; there was no separating them:
witness it in love murdered.

O that woman! She has murdered love. She has blotted love completely out.
She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind--the female Apollyon. He
lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex with a cowl
of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the one and all
alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless, clogs on
us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinner peeped out on
him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of his great-heartedness.
'For that woman--Tresten, you know me--I would have sacrificed for that
woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty, my immortality. She knew it,
and she--look!' he unwrinkled the letter carefully for it to be legible,
and clenched it in a ball.' Signs her name, signs her name, her
name!--God of heaven! it would be incredible in a holy chronicle--signs
her name to the infamous harlotry! See: "Clotilde von Rudiger." It's her
writing; that's her signature: "Clotilde" in full. You'd hardly fancy
that, now? But look!' the colonel's eyelids were blinking, and Alvan
dinted his finger-nail under her name: 'there it is: Clotilde: signed
shamelessly. Just as she might have written to one of her friends about
bonnets, and balls, and books! Henceforward strangers, she and I?'

His laughter, even to Tresten, a man of camps, sounded profane as a yell
beneath a cathedral dome. 'Why, the woman has been in my hands--I
released her, spared her, drilled brain and blood, ransacked all the
code, to do her homage and honour in every mortal way; and we two
strangers! Do you hear that, Tresten? Why, if you had seen her!--she was
lost, and I, this man she now pierces with ice, kept hell down under bolt
and bar-worse, I believe, broke a good woman's heart! that never a breath
should rise that could accuse her on suspicion, or in malice, or by
accident, justly, or with a shadow of truth. "I think it best for us
both." So she thinks for me! She not only decides, she thinks; she is the
active principle; 'tis mine to submit.--A certain presumption was in that
girl always. Ha! do you hear me? Her letter may sting, it shall not dupe.
Strangers? Poor fool! You see plainly she was nailed down to write the
thing. This letter is a flat lie. She can lie--Oh! born to the art! born
to it!--lies like a Saint tricking Satan! But she says she has left the
city. Now to find her!'

He began marching about the room with great strides. 'I 'll have the
whole Continent up; her keepers shall have no rest; I 'll have them by
the Law Courts; and by stratagem, and, if law and cunning fail, force. I
have sworn it. I have done all that honour can ask of a man; more than
any man, to my knowledge, would have done, and now it's war. I declare
war on them. They will have it! I mean to take that girl from
them--snatch or catch! The girl is my girl, and if there are laws against
my having my own, to powder with the laws! Well, and do you suppose me
likely to be beaten? Then Cicero was a fiction, and Caesar a people's
legend. Not if they are history, and eloquence and commandership have
power over the blood and souls of men. First, I write to her!'

His friend suggested that he knew not where she was. But already the pen
was at work, the brain pouring as from a pitcher.

Writing was blood-letting, and the interminable pages drained him of his
fever. As he wrote, she grew more radiant, more indistinct, more fiercely
desired. The concentration of his active mind directed his whole being on
the track of Clotilde, idealizing her beyond human. That last day when he
had seen her appeared to him as the day of days. That day was Clotilde
herself, she in person; he saw it as the woman, and saw himself
translucent in the great luminousness; and behind it all was dark, as in
front. That one day was the sun of his life. It had been a day of rain,
and he beheld it in memory just as it had been, with the dark threaded
air, the dripping streets; and he glorified it past all daily radiance.
His letter was a burning hymn to the day. His moral grandeur on the day
made him live as part of the splendour. Was it possible for the woman who
had seen him then to be faithless to him? The swift deduction from his
own feelings cleansed her of a suspicion to the contrary, and he became
lighthearted. He hummed an air when he had finished his letter to her.

Councils with his adherents and couriers were held, and some were
despatched to watch the house and slip the letter to her maid; others
were told off to bribe and hound their way on the track of Clotilde. His
gold rained into their hands with the directions.

Colonel von Tresten was the friend of his attachment to the baroness; a
friend of both, and a warm one. Men coming into contact with Alvan took
their shape of friend or enemy sharply, for he was friend or enemy of no
dubious feature, devoted to them he loved, and a battery on them he
opposed. The colonel had been the confidant of the baroness's grief over
this love-passion of Alvan's, and her resignation. He shared her doubts
of Clotilde's nobility of character: the reports were not favourable to
the young lady. But the baroness and he were of one opinion, that Alvan
in love was not likely to be governable by prudent counsel. He dropped a
word of the whispers of Clotilde's volatility.

Alvan nodded his perfect assent. 'She is that, she is anything you like;
you cannot exaggerate her for good or evil. She is matchless, colour her
as you please.' Adopting the tone of argument, he said: 'She writes that
letter. Well? It is her writing, and the moment, I am sure of it as hers,
I would not have it unwritten. I love it!' He looked maddish with his
love of the horrible thing, and resumed soberly: 'The point is, that she
has the charm for me. She is plastic in my hands. Other men would waste
the treasure. I make of her what I will, and she knows it, and knows that
she hangs on me to flourish worthily. I breathe the very soul of the
woman into her. As for that letter of hers--' it burnt him this time to
speak of the letter: 'she may write and write! She's weak, thin, a reed;
she--let her be! Say of her when she plays beast--she is absent from
Alvan! I can forgive. The letter's nothing; it means nothing--except
"Thou fool, Alvan, to let me go." Yes, that! Her people are acting tyrant
with her--as legally they have no right to do in this country, and I
shall prove it to them. When I have gained admission to her--and I soon
shall: it can't be refused: I am off to the head of her father's office
to-morrow, and I have only to represent the state of affairs to the
Minister in my language to obtain his authority to demand admission to
her:--then, friend, you will see! I lift my finger, and you will see! At
my request she went back to her mother. I have but to beckon.'

He had cooled to the happy assurance of his authority over her, all the
giants of his system being well in action, and when that is the case with
a big nature it is at rest, or such is the condition of repose granted it
in life.

On the morrow he was off to batter at doors which would have expected
rather the summons of an armed mob at his heels than the strange cry of
the Radical man maltreated by love.




CHAPTER XI

The story of Clotilde's departure from the city, like that of Alvan's,
communicated to her by her maid, was an anticipation of the truth,
disseminated by her parents. She was removed when the swarm of spies and
secret letter-bearers were attaining a position of dignity through the
rumour of legal gentlemen about to direct the movements of the besieging
army.

A stir seemed to her to prognosticate a rescue and she went not
unwillingly. To be in motion, to see roadside faces, pricked her senses
with some hope. She had gained the peace she needed, and in that state
her heart began to be agitated by a fresh awakening, luxurious at first
rather than troublesome. She had sunk so low that the light of Alvan
seemed too distant for a positive expectation of him; but few approached
her whom she did not fancy under strange disguises: the gentlemen were
servants, the blouses were gentlemen; she looked wistfully at old women
bearing baskets, for the forbidden fruit to peep out in the form of an
envelope. All passed her blankly, noticing her eyes.

The journey was short; she was taken to a place a little beyond the head
of the lake, and there, though she had liberty to breathe the air, fast
fixed within the walls of a daily sameness that became gradually the hum
of voices accusing Alvan of one in excess of the many sins laid against
him by his enemies. Was he not possibly an empty pretender to power--a
mere great talker?

Her bit of liberty increased her chafing at the deadly monotony of this
existence, and envenomed the accusation by seeming to push her forth
quite half way to meet him, if he would but come or show sign! She
impetuously vindicated him from the charge of crediting the sincerity of
any words she might have committed to paper at the despotic dictation of
her father. Oh, no; Alvan could not be guilty of such folly as that; he
could not; it would be to suppose him unacquainted with her, ignorant of
the nature of women. He would know that she wrote the words--why? She
could not perfectly recollect how she had come to write them, and found
it easier to extinguish the act of having written them at all, which was
done by the angry recurrence to his failure to intervene now when the
drama cried for his godlike appearance. Perhaps he was really
unacquainted with her thought her stronger than she was! The idea
reflected a shadow on his intelligence. She was not in a situation that
could bear of her blaming herself.

While she was thus devoured by the legions of her enfeebled wits,
Clotilde was assiduously courted by her family, and her father from time
to time brought pen and paper for her to write anew from his dictation.
He was pleased to hail her as his fair secretary, and when the letters
were unimportant she wrote flowingly, happy to be praised. They were
occasionally addressed to friends; she discovered herself writing one to
the professor, in which he was about to be informed that she had resolved
to banish Alvan from her mind for ever. She stopped; her heart stopped;
the pen fell from her hand, in loathing. Her father warily bade her
proceed. She could not; she signified it choking. Only a few days before
she had written to the professor exultingly of her engagement. She
refused to belie herself in such a manner; retrospectively her rapid
contradictions appeared impossible; the picture of her was not human, and
she gave out a negative of her whole frame convulsed, whereat the General
was not slow to remind her of the scourgings she had undergone by a
sudden burst of his wrath. He knew the proper physic. 'You girls want the
lesson we read to skittish recruits; you shall have it. Write: "He is now
as nothing to me." You shall write that you hate him, if you hesitate!
Why, you unreasonable slut, you have given him up; you have told him you
have given him up, and what objection can you have to telling others now
you have done it?'

'I was forced to it, body and soul!' cried Clotilde, sobbing and bursting
into desperation out of a weak show of petulance that she had put on to
propitiate him. 'If I have to tell, I will tell how it was. For that my
heart is unchanged, and Alvan is, and will be, my lord, all the world may
see. I would rather write that I hate him.'

'You write, the man is now as nothing to me!' said her father, dashing
his finger in a fiery zig-zag along the line for her pen to follow. 'Or
else, my girl, you've been playing us a pretty farce!' He strung himself
for a mad gallop of wrath, gave her a shudder, and relapsed. 'No, no,
you're wiser, you're a better girl than that. Write it. I must have it
written-here, come! The worst is over; the rest is child's play. Come,
take the pen, I'll guide your hand.'

The pen was fixed in her hand, and the first words formed. They looked
such sprawling skeletons that Clotilde had the comfort of feeling sure
they would be discerned as the work of compulsion. So she wrote on
mechanically, solacing herself for what she did with vows of future
revolt. Alvan had a saying, that want of courage is want of sense; and
she remembered his illustration of how sense would nourish courage by
scattering the fear of death, if we would only grasp the thought that we
sink to oblivion gladly at night, and, most of us, quit it reluctantly in
the morning. She shut her eyes while writing; she fancied death would be
welcome; and as she certainly had sense, she took it for the promise of
courage. She flattered herself by believing, therefore, that she who did
not object to die was only awaiting the cruelly-delayed advent of her
lover to be almost as brave as he--the feminine of him. With these ideas
in her head much clearer than when she wrote the couple of lines to
Alvan--for then her head was reeling, she was then beaten and
prostrate--she signed her name to a second renunciation of him, and was
aware of a flush of self-reproach at the simple suspicion of his being
deceived by it; it was an insult to his understanding. Full surely the
professor would not be deceived, and a lover with a heart to reach to her
and read her could never be hoodwinked by so palpable a piece of
slavishness. She was indeed slavish; the apology necessitated the
confession. But that promise of courage, coming of her ownership of
sense, vindicated her prospectively; she had so little of it that she
embraced it as a present possession, and she made it Alvan's task to put
it to the trial. Hence it became Alvan's offence if, owing to his
absence, she could be charged with behaving badly. Her generosity
pardoned him his inexplicable delay to appear in his might: 'But see what
your continued delay causes!' she said, and her tone was merely
sorrowful.

She had forgotten her signature to the letter to the professor when his
answer arrived. The sight of the handwriting of one of her lover's
faithfullest friends was like a peal of bells to her, and she tore the
letter open, and began to blink and spell at a strange language, taking
the frosty sentences piecemeal. He begged her to be firm in her
resolution, give up Alvan and obey her parents! This man of high
intelligence and cultivation wrote like a provincial schoolmistress
moralizing. Though he knew the depth of her passion for Alvan, and had
within the month received her lark-song of her betrothal, he, this
man--if living man he could be thought--counselled her to endeavour to
deserve the love and respect of her parents, alluded to Alvan's age and
her better birth, approved her resolve to consult the wishes of her
family, and in fine was as rank a traitor to friendship as any
chronicled. Out on him! She swept him from earth.

And she had built some of her hopes on the professor. 'False friend!' she
cried.

She wept over Alvan for having had so false a friend.

There remained no one that could be expected to intervene with a strong
arm save the baroness. The professor's emphasized approval of her resolve
to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy, and
Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to the baroness. The
tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone of gosling innocent
new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumph of candour. She
repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuring herself that such
affectionately reverential prattle would have moved her, and with the
strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer: it had been composed
to be moving to a woman, to any woman. The old woman was entreated to
bestow her blessing on the young one, all in Arcadia, and let the young
one nestle to the bosom she had not an idea of robbing. She could not
have had the idea, else how could she have made the petition? And in
order to compliment a venerable dame on her pure friendship for a
gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea. Besides, after seeing
the photograph of the baroness, common civility insisted on the purity of
her friendship. Nay, in mercy to the poor gentleman, friendship it must
be.