The Egoist

by George Meredith

  ‘A few trifling errors are of no consequence when you are in the vein of satire,’ said Vernon. ‘Be satisfied with knowing a nation in the person of a cook.’

  ‘They may be reading us English off in a jockey!’ said Dr Middleton. ‘I believe that jockeys are the exchange we make for cooks; and our neighbours do not get the best of the bargain.’

  ‘No; but, my dear good Vernon, it’s nonsensical,’ said Sir Willoughby; ‘why be bawling every day the names of men of letters?’

  ‘Philosophers.’

  ‘Well, philosophers.’

  ‘Of all countries and times. And they are the benefactors of humanity.’

  ‘Bene – !’ Sir Willoughby’s derisive laugh broke the word. ‘There’s a pretension in all that, irreconcilable with English sound sense. Surely you see it?’

  ‘We might,’ said Vernon, ‘if you like, give alternative titles to the days, or have alternating days, devoted to our great families that performed meritorious deeds upon such a day.’

  The rebel Clara, delighting in his banter, was heard: ‘Can we furnish sufficient?’

  ‘A poet or two could help us.’

  ‘Perhaps a statesman,’ she suggested.

  ‘A pugilist, if wanted.’

  ‘For blowy days,’ observed Dr Middleton, and hastily in penitence picked up the conversation he had unintentionally prostrated, with a general remark on new-fangled notions, and a word aside to Vernon; which created the blissful suspicion in Clara that her father was indisposed to second Sir Willoughby’s opinions even when sharing them.

  Sir Willoughby had led the conversation. Displeased that the lead should be withdrawn from him, he turned to Clara and related one of the after-dinner anecdotes of Dr Corney; and another, with a vast deal of human nature in it, concerning a valetudinarian gentleman, whose wife chanced to be desperately ill, and he went to the physicians assembled in consultation outside the sick-room, imploring them by all he valued, and in tears, to save the poor patient for him, saying: ‘She is everything to me, everything; and if she dies I am compelled to run the risks of marrying again; I must marry again; for she has accustomed me so to the little attentions of a wife, that in truth I can’t, I can’t lose her! She must be saved!’ And the loving husband of any devoted wife wrung his hands.

  ‘Now, there, Clara, there you have the Egoist,’ added Sir Willoughby. ‘That is the perfect Egoist. You see what he comes to – and his wife! The man was utterly unconscious of giving vent to the grossest selfishness.’

  ‘An Egoist!’ said Clara.

  ‘Beware of marrying an Egoist, my dear!’ He bowed gallantly; and so blindly fatuous did he appear to her, that she could hardly believe him guilty of uttering the words she had heard from him, and kept her eyes on him vacantly till she came to a sudden full stop in the thoughts directing her gaze. She looked at Vernon, she looked at her father, and at the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. None of them saw the man in the word, none noticed the word; yet this word was her medical herb, her illuminating lamp, the key of him (and, alas, but she thought it by feeling her need of one), the advocate pleading in apology for her. Egoist! She beheld him – unfortunate, self-designated man that he was! – in his good qualities as well as bad under the implacable lamp, and his good were drenched in his first person singular. His generosity roared of I louder than the rest. Conceive him at the age of Dr Corney’s hero: ‘Pray, save my wife for me. I shall positively have to get another if I lose her, and one who may not love me half so well, or understand the peculiarities of my character and appreciate my attitudes.’ He was in his thirty-second year, therefore a young man, strong and healthy, yet his garrulous return to his principal theme, his emphasis on I and me, lent him the seeming of an old man spotted with decaying youth.

  ‘Beware of marrying an Egoist.’

  Would he help her to escape? The idea of the scene ensuing upon her petition for release, and the being dragged round the walls of his egoism, and having her head knocked against the corners, alarmed her with sensations of sickness.

  There was the example of Constantia. But that desperate young lady had been assisted by a gallant, loving gentleman; she had met a Captain Oxford.

  Clara brooded on those two until they seemed heroic. She questioned herself. Could she –? were one to come? She shut her eyes in languor, leaning the wrong way of her wishes, yet unable to say No.

  Sir Willoughby had positively said beware! Marrying him would be a deed committed in spite of his express warning. She went so far as to conceive him subsequently saying: ‘I warned you.’ She conceived the state of marriage with him as that of a woman tied not to a man of heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him expound them, relishing renewing his lectures on them.

  Full surely this immovable stone-man would not release her. This petrifaction of egoism would from amazedly to austerely refuse the petition. His pride would debar him from understanding her desire to be released. And if she resolved on it, without doing it straightway in Constantia’s manner, the miserable bewilderment of her father, for whom such a complication would be a tragic dilemma, had to be thought of. Her father, with all his tenderness for his child, would make a stand on the point of honour; though certain to yield to her, he would be distressed in a tempest of worry; and Dr Middleton thus afflicted threw up his arms, he shunned books, shunned speech, and resembled a castaway on the ocean, with nothing between himself and his calamity. As for the world, it would be barking at her heels. She might call the man she wrenched her hand from, Egoist; jilt, the world would call her. She dwelt bitterly on her agreement with Sir Willoughby regarding the world, laying it to his charge that her garden had become a place of nettles, her horizon an unlighted fourth side of a square.

  Clara passed from person to person visiting the Hall. There was universal, and as she was compelled to see, honest admiration of the host. Not a soul had a suspicion of his cloaked nature. Her agony of hypocrisy in accepting their compliments as the bride of Sir Willoughby Patterne was poorly moderated by contempt of them for their infatuation. She tried to cheat herself with the thought that they were right and that she was the foolish and wicked inconstant. In her anxiety to strangle the rebelliousness which had been communicated from her mind to her blood, and was present with her whether her mind was in action or not, she encouraged the ladies Eleanor and Isabel to magnify the fictitious man of their idolatry, hoping that she might enter into them imaginatively, that she might to some degree subdue herself to the necessity of her position. If she partly succeeded in stupefying her antagonism, five minutes of him undid the work.

  He requested her to wear the Patterne pearls for a dinner-party of grand ladies, telling her that he would commission Miss Isabel to take them to her. Clara begged leave to decline them, on the plea of having no right to wear them. He laughed at her modish modesty. ‘But really it might almost be classed with affection,’ said he. ‘I give you the right. Virtually you are my wife.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Before heaven?’

  ‘No. We are not married.’

  ‘As my betrothed, will you wear them, to please me?’

  ‘I would rather not. I cannot wear borrowed jewels. These I cannot wear. Forgive me, I cannot. And, Willoughby,’ she said, scorning herself for want of fortitude in not keeping to the simply blunt provocative refusal, ‘does one not look like a victim decked for the sacrifice? – the garlanded heifer you see on Greek vases, in that array of jewellery?’

  ‘My dear Clara!’ exclaimed the astonished lover, ‘how can you term them borrowed, when they are the Patterne jewels, our family heirloom pearls, unmatched, I venture to affirm, decidedly in my county and many others, and passing to the use of the mistress of the house in the natural course of things?’

  ‘They are yours, they are not mine.’

  ‘Prospectively they are yours.’

  ‘It would be to anticipate the fact to wear them.’

  ‘With my consent, my app
roval? at my request?’

  ‘I am not yet… I never may be…’

  ‘My wife?’ He laughed triumphantly, and silenced her by manly smothering.

  Her scruple was perhaps an honourable one, he said. Perhaps the jewels were safer in their iron box. He had merely intended a surprise and gratification to her.

  Courage was coming to enable her to speak more plainly, when his discontinuing to insist on her wearing the jewels, under an appearance of deference of her wishes, disarmed her by touching her sympathies.

  She said, however, ‘I fear we do not often agree, Willoughby.’

  ‘When you are a little older!’ was the irritating answer.

  ‘It would then be too late to make the discovery.’

  ‘The discovery, I apprehend, is not imperative, my love.’

  ‘It seems to me that our minds are opposed.’

  ‘I should,’ said he, ‘have been awake to it at a single indication, be sure.’

  ‘But I know,’ she pursued, ‘I have learned that the ideal of conduct for women is to subject their minds to the part of an accompaniment.’

  ‘For women, my love? my wife will be in natural harmony with me.’

  ‘Ah!’ She compressed her lips. The yawn would come. ‘I am sleepier here than anywhere.’

  ‘Ours, my Clara, is the finest air of the kingdom. It has the effect of sea-air.’

  ‘But if I am always asleep here?’

  ‘We shall have to make a public exhibition of the Beauty.’

  This dash of his liveliness defeated her.

  She left him, feeling the contempt of the brain feverishly quickened and fine-pointed, for the brain chewing the cud in the happy pastures of unawakedness. So violent was the fever, so keen her introspection, that she spared few, and Vernon was not among them. Young Crossjay, whom she considered the least able of all to act as an ally, was the only one she courted with a real desire to please him, he was the one she affectionately envied; he was the youngest, the freest, he had the world before him, and he did not know how horrible the world was, or could be made to look. She loved the boy from expecting nothing of him. Others, Vernon Whitford, for instance, could help, and moved no hand. He read her case. A scrutiny so penetrating under its air of abstract thoughtfulness, though his eyes did but rest on her a second or two, signified that he read her line by line, and to the end – excepting what she thought of him for probing her with that sharp steel of insight without a purpose.

  She knew her mind’s injustice. It was her case, her lamentable case – the impatient panic-stricken nerves of a captured wild creature which cried for help. She exaggerated her sufferings to get strength to throw them off, and lost it in the recognition that they were exaggerated: and out of the conflict issued recklessness, with a cry as wild as any coming of madness; for she did not blush in saying to herself: ‘If some one loved me!’ Before hearing of Constantia, she had mused upon liberty as a virgin Goddess – men were out of her thoughts; even the figure of a rescuer, if one dawned in her mind, was more angel than hero. That fair childish maidenliness had ceased. With her body straining in her dragon’s grasp, with the savour of loathing, unable to contend, unable to speak aloud, she began to speak to herself, and all the health of her nature made her outcry womanly: ‘If I were loved!’ –not for the sake of love, but for free breathing; and her utterance of it was to insure life and enduringness to the wish, as the yearning of a mother on a drowning ship is to get her infant to shore. ‘If some noble gentleman could see me as I am and not disdain to aid me! Oh! to be caught up out of this prison of thorns and brambles. I cannot tear my own way out. I am a coward. My cry for help confesses that. A beckoning of a finger would change me, I believe. I could fly bleeding and through hootings to a comrade. Oh! a comrade! I do not want a lover. I should find another Egoist, not so bad, but enough to make me take a breath like death. I could follow a

  soldier, like poor Sally or Molly. He stakes his life for his country, and a woman may be proud of the worst of men who do that. Constantia met a soldier. Perhaps she prayed and her prayer was answered. She did ill. But, oh, how I love her for it! His name was Harry Oxford. Papa would call him her Perseus. She must have felt that there was no explaining what she suffered. She had only to act, to plunge. First she fixed her mind on Harry Oxford. To be able to speak his name and see him awaiting her, must have been relief, a reprieve. She did not waver, she cut the links, she signed herself over. Oh, brave girl! what do you think of me? But I have no Harry Whitford, I am alone. Let anything be said against women; we must be very bad to have such bad things written of us: only, say this, that to ask them to sign themselves over by oath and ceremony, because of an ignorant promise, to the man they have been mistaken in, is – it is –’ the sudden consciousness that she had put another name for Oxford, struck her a buffet, drowning her in crimson.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Double-Blossom Wild Cherry-Tree

  SIR WILLOUGHBY chose a moment when Clara was with him and he had a good retreat through folding-windows to the lawn, in case of cogency on the enemy’s part, to attack his cousin regarding the preposterous plot to upset the family by a scamper to London: ‘By the way, Vernon, what is this you’ve been mumbling to everybody save me, about leaving us to pitch yourself into the stew-pot and be made broth of? London is no better, and you are fit for considerably better. Don’t, I beg you, continue to annoy me. Take a run abroad, if you are restless. Take two or three months, and join us as we are travelling home; and then think of settling, pray. Follow my example, if you like. You can have one of my cottages, or a place built for you. Anything to keep a man from destroying the sense of stability about one. In London, my dear old fellow, you lose your identity. What are you there? I ask you, what? One has the feeling of the house crumbling when a man is perpetually for shifting and cannot fix himself. Here you are known, you can study at your ease; up in London you are nobody; I tell you honestly, I feel it myself; a week of London literally drives me home to discover the individual where I left him. Be advised. You don’t mean to go.’

  ‘I have the intention,’ said Vernon.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve mentioned it to you.’

  ‘To my face?’

  ‘Over your shoulder is generally the only chance you give me.’

  ‘You have not mentioned it to me, to my knowledge. As to the reason, I might hear a dozen of your reasons, and I should not understand one. It’s against your interests and against my wishes. Come, friend, I am not the only one you distress. Why, Vernon, you yourself have said that the English would be very perfect Jews if they could manage to live on the patriarchal system. You said it, yes, you said it! – but I recollect it clearly. Oh, as for your double-meanings, you said the thing, and you jeered at the incapacity of English families to live together, on account of bad temper; and now you are the first to break up our union! I decidedly do not profess to be a perfect Jew, but I do…’

  Sir Willoughby caught signs of a probably smiling commerce between his bride and his cousin. He raised his face, appeared to be consulting his eyelids, and resolved to laugh: ‘Well, I own it. I do like the idea of living patriarchally.’ He turned to Clara. ‘The Rev. Doctor one of us!’

  ‘My father?’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Papa’s habits are those of a scholar.’

  ‘That you might not be separated from him, my dear!’

  Clara thanked Sir Willoughby for the kindness of thinking of her father, mentally analysing the kindness, in which at least she found no unkindness, scarcely egoism, though she knew it to be there.

  ‘We might propose it,’ said he.

  ‘As a compliment?’

  ‘If he would condescend to accept it as a compliment. These great scholars!… And if Vernon goes, our inducement for Dr Middleton to stay… But it is too absurd for discussion. Oh, Vernon, about Master Crossjay; I will see to it.’

  He was about to give Vernon his shoulder and step into the g
arden, when Clara said, ‘You will have Crossjay trained for the navy, Willoughby? There is not a day to lose.’

  ‘Yes, yes; I will see to it. Depend on me for holding the young rascal in view.’

  He presented his hand to her to lead her over the step to the gravel, surprised to behold how flushed she was.

  She responded to the invitation by putting her hand forth from a bent elbow, with hesitating fingers. ‘It should not be postponed, Willoughby.’

  Her attitude suggested a stipulation before she touched him.

  ‘It’s an affair of money, as you know, Willoughby,’ said Vernon. ‘If I’m in London, I can’t well provide for the boy for some time to come, or it’s not certain that I can.’

  ‘Why on earth should you go?’

  ‘That’s another matter. I want you to take my place with him.’

  ‘In which case the circumstances are changed. I am responsible for him, and I have a right to bring him up according to my own prescription.’

  ‘We are likely to have one idle lout the more.’

  ‘I guarantee to make a gentleman of him.’

  ‘We have too many of your gentlemen already.’

  ‘You can’t have enough, my good Vernon.’

  ‘They’re the national apology for indolence. Training a penniless boy to be one of them is nearly as bad as an education in a thieves’ den; he will be just as much at war with society, if not game for the police.’

  ‘Vernon, have you seen Crossjay’s father, the now Captain of Marines? I think you have.’

  ‘He’s a good man and a very gallant officer.’

  ‘And in spite of his qualities he’s a cub, and an old cub. He is a captain now, but he takes that rank very late, you will own. There you have what you call a good man, undoubtedly a gallant officer, neutralized by the fact that he is not a gentleman. Holding intercourse with him is out of the question. No wonder Government declines to advance him rapidly. Young Crossjay does not bear your name. He bears mine, and on that point alone I should have a voice in the settlement of his career. And I say emphatically that a drawing-room approval of a young man is the best certificate for his general chances in life. I know of a City of London merchant of some sort, and I know a firm of lawyers, who will have none but University men in their office; at least, they have the preference.’