The Egoist
George Meredith
CHAPTER XXXVII Page 1
CONTAINS CLEVER FENCING AND INTIMATIONS OF THE NEED FOR IT
That woman, Lady Busshe, had predicted, after the event, Constantia Durham's defection. She had also, subsequent to Willoughby's departure on his travels, uttered sceptical things concerning his rooted attachment to Laetitia Dale. In her bitter vulgarity, that beaten rival of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson for the leadership of the county had taken his nose for a melancholy prognostic of his fortunes; she had recently played on his name: she had spoken the hideous English of his fate. Little as she knew, she was alive to the worst interpretation of appearances. No other eulogy occurred to her now than to call him the best of cousins, because Vernon Whitford was housed and clothed and fed by him. She had nothing else to say for a man she thought luckless! She was a woman barren of wit, stripped of style, but she was wealthy and a gossip--a forge of showering sparks--and she carried Lady Culmer with her. The two had driven from his house to spread the malignant rumour abroad; already they blew the biting world on his raw wound. Neither of them was like Mrs. Mountstuart, a witty woman, who could be hoodwinked; they were dull women, who steadily kept on their own scent of the fact, and the only way to confound such inveterate forces was to be ahead of them, and seize and transform the expected fact, and astonish them, when they came up to him, with a totally unanticipated fact.
"You see, you were in error, ladies."
"And so we were, Sir Willoughby, and we acknowledge it. We never could have guessed that!"
Thus the phantom couple in the future delivered themselves, as well they might at the revelation. He could run far ahead.
Ay, but to combat these dolts, facts had to be encountered, deeds done, in groaning earnest. These representatives of the pig-sconces of the population judged by circumstances: airy shows and seems had no effect on them. Dexterity of fence was thrown away.
A flying peep at the remorseless might of dulness in compelling us to a concrete performance counter to our inclinations, if we would deceive its terrible instinct, gave Willoughby for a moment the survey of a sage. His intensity of personal feeling struck so vivid an illumination of mankind at intervals that he would have been individually wise, had he not been moved by the source of his accurate perceptions to a personal feeling of opposition to his own sagacity. He loathed and he despised the vision, so his mind had no benefit of it, though he himself was whipped along. He chose rather (and the choice is open to us all) to be flattered by the distinction it revealed between himself and mankind.
But if he was not as others were, why was he discomfited, solicitous, miserable? To think that it should be so, ran dead against his conqueror's theories wherein he had been trained, which, so long as he gained success awarded success to native merit, grandeur to the grand in soul, as light kindles light: nature presents the example. His early training, his bright beginning of life, had taught him to look to earth's principal fruits as his natural portion, and it was owing to a girl that he stood a mark for tongues, naked, wincing at the possible malignity of a pair of harridans. Why not whistle the girl away?
Why, then he would be free to enjoy, careless, younger than his youth in the rebound to happiness!
And then would his nostrils begin to lift and sniff at the creeping up of a thick pestiferous vapour. Then in that volume of stench would he discern the sullen yellow eye of malice. A malarious earth would hunt him all over it. The breath of the world, the world's view of him, was partly his vital breath, his view of himself. The ancestry of the tortured man had bequeathed him this condition of high civilization among their other bequests. Your withered contracted Egoists of the hut and the grot reck not of public opinion; they crave but for liberty and leisure to scratch themselves and soothe an excessive scratch. Willoughby was expansive, a blooming one, born to look down upon a tributary world, and to exult in being looked to. Do we wonder at his consternation in the prospect of that world's blowing foul on him? Princes have their obligations to teach them they are mortal, and the brilliant heir of a tributary world is equally enchained by the homage it brings him;--more, inasmuch as it is immaterial, elusive, not gathered by the tax, and he cannot capitally punish the treasonable recusants. Still must he be brilliant; he must court his people. He must ever, both in his reputation and his person, aching though he be, show them a face and a leg.
The wounded gentleman shut himself up in his laboratory, where he could stride to and fro, and stretch out his arms for physical relief, secure from observation of his fantastical shapes, under the idea that he was meditating. There was perhaps enough to make him fancy it in the heavy fire of shots exchanged between his nerves and the situation; there were notable flashes. He would not avow he was in an agony: it was merely a desire for exercise.
Quintessence of worldliness, Mrs. Mountstuart appeared through his farthest window, swinging her skirts on a turn at the end of the lawn, with Horace De Craye smirking beside her. And the woman's vaunted penetration was unable to detect the histrionic Irishism of the fellow. Or she liked him for his acting and nonsense; nor she only. The voluble beast was created to snare women. Willoughby became smitten with an adoration of stedfastness in women. The incarnation of that divine quality crossed his eyes. She was clad in beauty. A horrible nondescript convulsion composed of yawn and groan drove him to his instruments, to avert a renewal of the shock; and while arranging and fixing them for their unwonted task, he compared himself advantageously with men like Vernon and De Craye, and others of the county, his fellows in the hunting-field and on the Magistrate's bench, who neither understood nor cared for solid work, beneficial practical work, the work of Science.
He was obliged to relinquish it: his hand shook.
"Experiments will not advance much at this rate," he said, casting the noxious retardation on his enemies.
Clara's features gave the answer.
They were implacable. And he could be the same.
In the solitude of his room he cried right out: "I swear it, I will never yield her to Horace De Craye! She shall feel some of my torments, and try to get the better of them by knowing she deserves them." He had spoken it, and it was an oath upon the record.
Desire to do her intolerable hurt became an ecstasy in his veins, and produced another stretching fit that terminated in a violent shake of the body and limbs; during which he was a spectacle for Mrs. Mountstuart at one of the windows. He laughed as he went to her, saying: "No, no work to-day; it won't be done, positively refuses."
"I am taking the Professor away," said she; "he is fidgety about the cold he caught."
Sir Willoughby stepped out to her. "I was trying at a bit of work for an hour, not to be idle all day."
"You work in that den of yours every day?"
"Never less than an hour, I can snatch it."
"It is a wonderful resource!"
The remark set him throbbing and thinking that a prolongation of his crisis exposed him to the approaches of some organic malady, possibly heart-disease.
"A habit," he said. "In there I throw off the world."
"We shall see some results in due time."
"I promise none: I like to be abreast of the real knowledge of my day, that is all."
"And a pearl among country gentlemen!"
"Laetitia Dale appreciates it."
A smile of enforced ruefulness, like a leaf curling in heat, wrinkled his mouth.
"Have they caught Crossjay?" he said.
"Apparently they are giving chase to him."
"Must you leave us?"
"I think it prudent to take Professor Crooklyn away."
"He still . . . ?"
"The extraordinary resemblance!"
"A word aside to Dr. Middleton will dispel that."
"You are thoroughly good."
This hateful encomium of commiseration transfixed him. Then she knew of his calamity!
"Philosophical," he said, "would be the proper term, I think."
"To-morrow?"
"The earlier the better. He is too captivating; he is delightful. He won me in five minutes. I don't accuse him. Nature gifted him to cast the spell. We are weak women, Sir Willoughby."
She knew!
"Like to like: the witty to the witty, ma'am."
"You won't compliment me a little bit of jealousy?"
"I forbear from complimenting him."
"Be philosophical, of course, if you have the philosophy."
"I pretend to it. Probably I suppose myself to succeed because I have no great requirement of it; I cannot say. We are riddles to ourselves."
Mrs. Mountstuart pricked the turf with the point of her parasol. She looked down and she looked up.
"Well?" said he to her eyes.
"Well, and where is Laetitia Dale?"
He turned about to show his face elsewhere.
When he fronted her again, she looked very fixedly, and set her head shaking.
"It will not do, my dear Sir Willoughby!"
"What?"
"I never could solve enigmas."
"Playing ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum, then. Things have gone far. All parties would be happier for an excursion. Send her home."
Mrs. Mountstuart put a tooth on her under lip as her head renewed its brushing negative.
"In what way can it be hurtful that she should be here, ma'am?" he ventured to persist.
"Think."
"She is proof."
"Twice!"
The word was big artillery. He tried the affectation of a staring stupidity. She might have seen his heart thump, and he quitted the mask for an agreeable grimace.
"She is inaccessible. She is my friend. I guarantee her, on my honour. Have no fear for her. I beg you to have confidence in me. I would perish rather. No soul on earth is to be compared with her."
Mrs. Mountstuart repeated "Twice!"
The low monosyllable, musically spoken in the same tone of warning of a gentle ghost, rolled a thunder that maddened him, but he dared not take it up to fight against it on plain terms.
"Is it for my sake?" he said.
"It will not do, Sir Willoughby."
She spurred him to a frenzy.
"My dear Mrs. Mountstuart, you have been listening to tales. I am not a tyrant. I am one of the most easy-going of men. Let us preserve the forms due to society: I say no more. As for poor old Vernon, people call me a good sort of cousin; I should like to see him comfortably married; decently married this time. I have proposed to contribute to his establishment. I mention it to sthe case has been practically considered. He has had a tolerably souring experience of the state; he might be inclined if, say, you took him in hand, for another venture. It's a demoralizing lottery. However, Government sanctions it."
"But, Sir Willoughby, what is the use of my taking him in hand when, as you tell me, Laetitia Dale holds back?"
"She certainly does."
"Then we are talking to no purpose, unless you undertake to melt her."
He suffered a lurking smile to kindle to some strength of meaning.
"You are not over-considerate in committing me to such an office."
Sharpened by her tone, he said, "I have such a love of stedfastness of character, that I should be a poor advocate in the endeavour to break it. And frankly, I know the danger. I saved my honour when I made the attempt: that is all I can say."
"Upon my word," Mrs. Mountstuart threw back her head to let her eyes behold him summarily over their fine aquiline bridge, "you have the art of mystification, my good friend."
"Abandon the idea of Laetitia Dale."
"And marry your cousin Vernon to whom? Where are we?"
"As I said, ma'am, I am an easy-going man. I really have not a spice of the tyrant in me. An intemperate creature held by the collar may have that notion of me, while pulling to be released as promptly as it entered the noose. But I do strictly and sternly object to the scandal of violent separations, open breaches of solemn engagements, a public rupture. Put it that I am the cause, I will not consent to a violation of decorum. Is that clear? It is just possible for things to be arranged so that all parties may be happy in their way without much hubbub. Mind, it is not I who have willed it so. I am, and I am forced to be, passive. But I will not be obstructive."
He paused, waving his hand to signify the vanity of the more that might be said.
Some conception of him, dashed by incredulity, excited the lady's intelligence.
"Well!" she exclaimed, "you have planted me in the land of conjecture. As my husband used to say, I don't see light, but I think I see the lynx that does. We won't discuss it at present. I certainly must be a younger woman than I supposed, for I am learning hard.--Here comes the Professor, buttoned up to the ears, and Dr. Middleton flapping in the breeze. will be a cough, and a footnote referring to the young lady at the station, if we stand together, so please order my carriage."
"You found Clara complacent? roguish?"
"I will call to-morrow. You have simplified my task, Sir Willoughby, very much; that is, assuming I have not entirely mistaken you. I am so far in the dark that I have to help myself by recollecting how Lady Busshe opposed my view of a certain matter formerly. Scepticism is her forte. It will be the very oddest thing if after all . . . ! No, I shall own, romance has not departed. Are you fond of dupes?"
"I detest the race."