The Egoist

by George Meredith

  After a fall of tears, upon looking at the scraps, she dressed herself, and sat by the window and watched the blackbird on the lawn as he hopped from shafts of dewy sunlight to the long-stretched dewy tree-shadows, considering in her mind that dark dews are more meaningful than bright, the beauty of the dews of woods more sweet than meadow-dews. It signified only that she was quieter. She had gone through her crisis in the anticipation of it. That is how quick natures will often be cold and hard, or not much moved, when the positive crisis arrives, and why it is that they are prepared for astonishing leaps over the gradations which should render their conduct comprehensible to us, if not excuseable. She watched the blackbird throw up his head stiff, and peck to right and left,

  dangling the worm on each side his orange beak. Speckle-breasted thrushes were at work, and a wagtail that ran as with Clara’s own rapid little steps. Thrush and blackbird flew to the nest. They had wings. The lovely morning breathed of sweet earth into her open window, and made it painful, in the dense twitter, chirp, cheep, and song of the air, to resist the innocent intoxication. O to love! was not said by her, but if she had sung, as her nature prompted, it would have been. Her war with Willoughby sprang of a desire to love repelled by distaste. Her cry for freedom was a cry to be free to love: she discovered it, half shuddering: to love, oh! no – no shape of man, nor impalpable nature either: but to love unselfishness, and helpfulness, and planted strength in something. Then,

  loving and being loved a little, what strength would be hers! She could utter all the words needed to Willoughby and to her father, locked in her love: walking in this world, living in that.

  Previously she had cried, despairing: If I were loved! Jealousy of Constantia’s happiness, envy of her escape, ruled her then: and she remembered the cry, though not perfectly her plain-speaking to herself: she chose to think she had meant: If Willoughby were capable of truly loving! For now the fire of her brain had sunk, and refuges and subterfuges were round about it. The thought of personal love was encouraged, she chose to think, for the sake of the strength it lent her to carve her way to freedom. She had just before felt rather the reverse, but she could not exist with that feeling; and it was true that freedom was not so indistinct in her fancy as the idea of love.

  Were men, when they were known, like him she knew too well?

  The arch-tempter’s question to her was there.

  She put it away. Wherever she turned it stood observing her. She knew so much of one man, nothing of the rest: naturally she was curious. Vernon might be sworn to be unlike. But he was exceptional. What of the other in the house?

  Maidens are commonly reduced to read the masters of their destinies by their instincts; and when these have been edged by over-activity they must hoodwink their maidenliness to suffer themselves to read; and then they must dupe their minds, else men would soon see they were gifted to discern. Total ignorance being their pledge of purity to men, they have to expunge the writing of their perceptives on the tablets of the brain: they have to know not when they do know. The instinct of seeking to know, crossed by the task of blotting knowledge out, creates that conflict of the natural with the artificial creature to which their ultimately revealed doubleface, complained of by ever-dissatisfied men, is owing. Wonder in no degree that they indulge a craving to be fools, or that many of them act the character. Jeer at them as little for not showing growth. You have reared them to this pitch, and at this pitch they have partly civilized you. Supposing you to want it done wholly, you must yield just as many points in your requisitions as are needed to let the wits of young women reap their due harvest and be of good use to their souls. You will then have a fair battle, a braver, with better results.

  Clara’s inner eye traversed Colonel De Craye at a shot.

  She had immediately to blot out the vision of Captain Oxford in him, the revelation of his laughing contempt for Willoughby, the view of mercurial principles, the scribbled histories of light love-passages.

  She blotted it out, kept it from her mind: so she knew him, knew him to be a sweeter and a variable Willoughby, a generous kind of Willoughby, a Willoughby-butterfly, without having the free mind to summarize him and picture him for a warning. Scattered features of him, such as the instincts call up, were not sufficiently impressive. Besides, the clouded mind was opposed to her receiving impressions.

  Young Crossjay’s voice in the still morning air came to her ears. The dear guileless chatter of the boy’s voice. Why, assuredly it was young Crossjay who was the man she loved. And he loved her. And he was going to be an unselfish, sustaining, true, strong man, the man she longed for, for anchorage. Oh, the dear voice! woodpecker and thrush in one. He never ceased to chatter to Vernon Whitford walking beside him with a swinging stride off to the lake for their morning swim. Happy couple! The morning gave them both a freshness and innocence above human. They seemed to Clara made of morning air and clear lake water. Crossjay’s voice ran up and down a diatonic scale with here and there a query in semitone and a laugh on a ringing note. She wondered what he could have to talk of so incessantly, and imagined all the dialogue. He prattled of his yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, which did not imply past and future, but his vivid present. She felt like one vainly trying to fly in hearing him; she felt old. The consolation she arrived at was to feel maternal. She wished to hug the boy.

  Trot and stride, Crossjay and Vernon entered the park, careless about wet grass, not once looking at the house. Crossjay ranged ahead and picked flowers, bounding back to show them. Clara’s heart beat at a fancy that her name was mentioned. If those flowers were for her she would prize them.

  The two bathers dipped over an undulation.

  Her loss of them rattled her chains.

  Deeply dwelling on their troubles has the effect upon the young of helping to forgetfulness; for they cannot think without imagining, their imaginations are saturated with their pleasures, and the collision, though they are unable to exchange sad for sweet, distills an opiate.

  ‘Am I solemnly engaged?’ she asked herself. She seemed to be awakening.

  She glanced at her bed, where she had passed the night of ineffectual moaning, and out on the high wave of grass, where Crossjay and his good friend had vanished.

  Was the struggle all to be gone over again?

  Little by little her intelligence of her actual position crept up to submerge her heart.

  ‘I am in his house!’ she said. It resembled a discovery, so strangely had her opiate and power of dreaming wrought through her tortures. She said it gasping. She was in his house, his guest, his betrothed, sworn to him. The fact stood out cut in steel on the pitiless daylight.

  That consideration drove her to be an early wanderer in the wake of Crossjay.

  Her station was among the beeches on the flank of the boy’s return; and while waiting there the novelty of her waiting to waylay anyone – she who had played the contrary part! – told her more than it pleased her to think. Yet she could admit that she did desire to speak with Vernon, as with a counsellor, harsh and curt, but wholesome.

  The bathers reappeared on the grass-ridge, racing and flapping wet towels.

  Some one hailed them. A sound of the galloping hoof drew her attention to the avenue. She saw Willoughby dash across the park level, and dropping a word to Vernon, ride away. Then she allowed herself to be seen.

  Crossjay shouted. Willoughby turned his head, but not his horse’s head. The boy sprang up to Clara. He had swum across the lake and back; he had raced Mr Whitford – and beaten him! How he wished Miss Middleton had been able to be one of them!

  Clara listened to him enviously. Her thought was: We women are nailed to our sex!

  She said: ‘And you have just been talking to Sir Willoughby.’

  Crossjay drew himself up to give an imitation of the baronet’s hand-moving in adieu.

  He would not have done that had he not smelled sympathy with the performance.

  She declined to smile. Crossjay repeated it, and laughed.
He made a broader exhibition of it to Vernon approaching: ‘I say, Mr Whitford, who’s this?’

  Vernon doubled to catch him. Crossjay fled and resumed his magnificent air in the distance.

  ‘Good-morning, Miss Middleton; you are out early,’ said Vernon, rather pale and stringy from his cold swim, and rather hard-eyed with the sharp exercise following it.

  She had expected some of the kindness she wanted to reject, for he could speak very kindly, and she regarded him as her doctor of medicine, who would at least present the futile drug.

  ‘Good-morning,’ she replied.

  ‘Willoughby will not be home till the evening.’

  ‘You could not have had a finer morning for your bath.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I will walk as fast as you like.’

  ‘I’m perfectly warm.’

  ‘But you prefer fast walking.’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Ah! yes, that I understand. The walk back! Why is Willoughby away to-day?’

  ‘He has business.’

  After several steps she said: ‘He makes very sure of papa.’

  ‘Not without reason, you will find,’ said Vernon.

  ‘Can it be? I am bewildered. I had papa’s promise.’

  ‘To leave the Hall for a day or two.’

  ‘It would have been…’

  ‘Possibly. But other heads are at work as well as yours. If you had been in earnest about it you would have taken your father into your confidence at once. That was the course I ventured to propose, on the supposition.’

  ‘In earnest! I cannot imagine that you doubt it. I wished to spare him.’

  ‘This is a case in which he can’t be spared.’

  ‘If I had been bound to any other. I did not know then who held me a prisoner. I thought I had only to speak to him sincerely.’

  ‘Not many men would give up their prize for a word, Willoughby the last of any.’

  ‘Prize’ rang through her thrillingly from Vernon’s mouth, and soothed her degradation.

  She would have liked to protest that she was very little of a prize; a poor prize; not one at all in general estimation; only one to a man reckoning his property; no prize in the true sense.

  The importunity of pain saved her.

  ‘Does he think I can change again? Am I treated as something won in a lottery? To stay here is indeed more than I can bear. And if he is calculating – Mr Whitford, if he calculates on another change, his plotting to keep me here is inconsiderate, not very wise. Changes may occur in absence.’

  ‘Wise or not, he has the right to scheme his best to keep you.’

  She looked on Vernon with a shade of wondering reproach.

  ‘Why? What right?’

  ‘The right you admit when you ask him to release you. He has the right to think you deluded; and to think you may come to a better mood if you remain – a mood more agreeable to him, I mean. He has that right absolutely. You are bound to remember also that you stand in the wrong. You confess it when you appeal to his generosity. And every man has the right to retain a treasure in his hand if he can. Look straight at these facts.’

  ‘You expect me to be all reason!’

  ‘Try to be. It’s the way to learn whether you are really in earnest.’

  ‘I will try. It will drive me to worse!’

  ‘Try honestly. What is wisest now is, in my opinion, for you to resolve to stay. I speak in the character of the person you sketched for yourself as requiring. Well, then, a friend repeats the same advice. You might have gone with your father: now you will only disturb him and annoy him. The chances are he will refuse to go.’

  ‘Are women ever so changeable as men, then! Papa consented; he agreed; he had some of my feeling; I saw it. That was yesterday. And at night. He spoke to each of us at night in a different tone from usual. With me he was hardly affectionate. But when you advise me to stay, Mr Whitford, you do not perhaps reflect that it would be at the sacrifice of all candour.’

  ‘Regard it as a probational term.’

  ‘It has gone too far with me.’

  ‘Take the matter into the head: try the case there.’

  ‘Are you not counselling me as if I were a woman of intellect?’

  The crystal ring in her voice told him that tears were near to flowing.

  He shuddered slightly. ‘You have intellect,’ he said, nodded, and crossed the lawn, leaving her. He had to dress.

  She was not permitted to feel lonely, for she was immediately joined by Colonel De Craye.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Ride

  CROSSJAY darted up to her a nose ahead of the colonel.

  ‘I say, Miss Middleton, we’re to have the whole day to ourselves, after morning lessons. Will you come and fish with me and see me bird’s-nest?’

  ‘Not for the satisfaction of beholding another cracked crown, my son,’ the colonel interposed: and bowing to Clara: ‘Miss Middleton is handed over to my exclusive charge for the day, with her consent?’

  ‘I scarcely know,’ said she, consulting a sensation of languor that seemed to contain some reminiscence. ‘If I am here. My father’s plans are uncertain. I will speak to him. If I am here, perhaps Crossjay would like a ride in the afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ cried the boy; ‘out over Bournden, through Mewsey up to Closham Beacon, and down on Aspenwell, where there’s a common for racing. And ford the stream!’

  ‘An inducement for you,’ De Craye said to her.

  She smiled and squeezed the boy’s hand.

  ‘We won’t go without you, Crossjay.’

  ‘You don’t carry a comb, my man, when you bathe?’

  At this remark of the colonel’s young Crossjay conceived the appearance of his matted locks in the eyes of his adorable lady. He gave her one dear look through his redness, and fled.

  ‘I like that boy,’ said De Craye.

  ‘I love him,’ said Clara.

  Crossjay’s troubled eyelids in his honest young face became a picture for her.

  ‘After all, Miss Middleton, Willoughby’s notions about him are not so bad, if we consider that you will be in the place of a mother to him.’

  ‘I think them bad.’

  ‘You are disinclined to calculate the good fortune of the boy in having more of you on land than he would have in crown and anchor buttons!’

  ‘You have talked of him with Willoughby.’

  ‘We had a talk last night.’

  Of how much? thought she.

  ‘Willoughby returns?’ she said.

  ‘He dines here, I know; for he holds the key of the inner cellar, and Doctor Middleton does him the honour to applaud his wine. Willoughby was good enough to tell me that he thought I might contribute to amuse you.’

  She was brooding in stupefaction on her father and the wine as she requested Colonel De Craye to persuade Willoughby to take the general view of Crossjay’s future and act on it.

  ‘He seems fond of the boy, too,’ said De Craye, musingly.

  ‘You speak in doubt?’

  ‘Not at all. But is he not – men are queer fish! – make allowance for us – a trifle tyrannical, pleasantly, with those he is fond of?’

  ‘If they look right and left?’

  It was meant for an interrogation; it was not with the sound of one that the words dropped. ‘My dear Crossjay!’ she sighed. ‘I would willingly pay for him out of my own purse, and I will do so rather than have him miss his chance. I have not mustered resolution to propose it.’

  ‘I may be mistaken, Miss Middleton. He talked of the boy’s fondness of him.’

  ‘He would.’

  ‘I suppose he is hardly peculiar in liking to play Pole-star.’

  ‘He may not be.’

  ‘For the rest, your influence should be all-powerful.’

  ‘It is not.’

  De Craye looked with a wandering eye at the heavens.

  ‘We are having a spell of weather perfectly superb. And the odd thing is, that whenever
we have splendid weather at home we’re all for rushing abroad. I’m booked for a Mediterranean cruise – postponed to give place to your ceremony.’

  ‘That?’ she could not control her accent.

  ‘What worthier?’

  She was guilty of a pause.

  De Craye saved it from an awkward length. ‘I have written half an essay on Honeymoons, Miss Middleton.’

  ‘Is that the same as a half-written essay, Colonel De Craye?’

  ‘Just the same, with the difference that it’s a whole essay written all on one side.’

  ‘On which side?’

  ‘The bachelor’s.’

  ‘Why does he trouble himself with such topics?’

  ‘To warm himself for being left out in the cold.’

  ‘Does he feel envy?’

  ‘He has to confess it.’

  ‘He has liberty.’

  ‘A commodity he can’t tell the value of if there’s no one to buy.’

  ‘Why should he wish to sell?’

  ‘He’s bent on completing his essay.’

  ‘To make the reading dull.’

  ‘There we touch the key of the subject. For what is to rescue the pair from a monotony multiplied by two? And so a bachelor’s recommendation, when each has discovered the right sort of person to be dull with, pushes them from the church-door on a round of adventures containing a spice of peril, if

  ’tis to be had. Let them be in danger of their lives the first or second day. A bachelor’s loneliness is a private affair of his own; he hasn’t to look into a face to be ashamed of feeling it and inflicting it at the same time; ’tis his pillow; he can punch it an he pleases, and turn it over t’other side, if he’s for a mighty variation; there’s a dream in it. But our poor couple are staring wide awake. All their dreaming’s done. They’ve emptied their bottle of elixir, or broken it; and she has a thirst for the use of the tongue, and he to yawn with a crony; and they may converse, they’re not aware of it, more than the desert that has drunk a shower. So as soon as possible she’s away to the ladies, and he puts on his Club. That’s what your bachelor sees and would like to spare them; and if he didn’t see something of the sort he’d be off with a noose round his neck, on his knees in the dew to the morning milkmaid.’