The Egoist

by George Meredith

  The latter touched his hat till he had drawn attention to himself, when he exclaimed, with rosy melancholy: ‘Ah! my lady, ah! colonel, if ever I lives to drink some of the old port wine in the old Hall at Christmastide!’ Their healths would on that occasion be drunk, it was implied. He threw up his eyes at the windows, humped his body and drove away.

  ‘Then Mr Whitford has not come back?’ said Clara to Crossjay.

  ‘No, Miss Middleton. Sir Willoughby has, and he’s upstairs in his room dressing.’

  ‘Have you seen Barclay?’

  ‘She has just gone into the laboratory. I told her Sir Willoughby wasn’t there.’

  ‘Tell me, Crossjay, had she a letter?’

  ‘She had something.’

  ‘Run: say I am here; I want the letter, it is mine.’

  Crossjay sprang away and plunged into the arms of Sir Willoughby.

  ‘One has to catch the fellow like a foot-ball,’ exclaimed the injured gentleman, doubled across the boy and holding him fast, that he might have an object to trifle with, to give himself countenance: he needed it. ‘Clara, you have not been exposed to the weather?’

  ‘Hardly at all.’

  ‘I rejoice. You found shelter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In one of the cottages?’

  ‘Not in a cottage; but I was perfectly sheltered. Colonel De Craye passed a fly before he met me…’

  ‘Flitch again!’ ejaculated the colonel.

  ‘Yes, you have luck, you have luck,’ Willoughby addressed him, still clutching Crossjay and treating his tugs to get loose as an invitation to caresses. But the foil barely concealed his livid perturbation.

  ‘Stay by me, sir,’ he said at last sharply to Crossjay, and Clara touched the boy’s shoulder in admonishment of him.

  She turned to the colonel as they stepped into the hall: ‘I have not thanked you, Colonel De Craye.’ She dropped her voice to its lowest: ‘A letter in my handwriting in the laboratory.’

  Crossjay cried aloud with pain.

  ‘I have you!’ Willoughby rallied him with a laugh not unlike the squeak of his victim.

  ‘You squeeze awfully hard, sir.’

  ‘Why, you milksop!’

  ‘Am I! But I want to get a book.’

  ‘Where is the book?’

  ‘In the laboratory.’

  Colonel De Craye, sauntering by the laboratory door, sung out: ‘I’ll fetch you your book. What is it? EARLY NAVIGATORS? INFANT HYMNS? I think my cigar-case is in here.’

  ‘Barclay speaks of a letter for me,’ Willoughby said to Clara, ‘marked to be delivered to me at noon!’

  ‘In case of my not being back earlier; it was written to avert anxiety,’ she replied.

  ‘You are very good.’

  ‘Oh, good! Call me anything but good. Here are the ladies. Dear ladies!’ Clara swam to meet them as they issued from a morning-room into the hall, and interjections reigned for a couple of minutes.

  Willoughby relinquished his grasp of Crossjay, who darted instantaneously at an angle to the laboratory, whither he followed, and he encountered De Craye coming out, but passed him in silence.

  Crossjay was rangeing and peering all over the room. Willoughby went –to his desk and the battery-table and the mantelpiece. He found no letter. Barclay had undoubtedly informed him that she had left a letter for him in the laboratory, by order of her mistress after breakfast.

  He hurried out and ran upstairs in time to see De Craye and Barclay breaking a conference.

  He beckoned to her. The maid lengthened her upper lip and beat her dress down smooth: signs of the apprehension of a crisis and of the getting ready for action.

  ‘My mistress’s bell has just rung, Sir Willoughby.’

  ‘You had a letter for me.’

  ‘I said…’

  ‘You said when I met you at the foot of the stairs that you had left a letter for me in the laboratory.’

  ‘It is lying on my mistress’s toilet-table.’

  ‘Get it.’

  Barclay swept round with another of her demure grimaces. It was apparently necessary with her that she should talk to herself in this public manner.

  Willoughby waited for her; but there was no reappearance of the maid.

  Struck by the ridicule of his posture of expectation, and of his whole behaviour, he went to his bedroom suite, shut himself in, and paced the chambers, amazed at the creature he had become. Agitated like the commonest of wretches, destitute of self-control, not able to preserve a decent mask, he, accustomed to inflict these emotions and tremours upon others, was at once the puppet and dupe of an intriguing girl. His very stature seemed lessened. The glass did not say so, but the shrunken heart within him did, and wailfully too. Her compunction – ‘Call me anything but good’ – coming after her return to the Hall beside De Craye, and after the visible passage of a secret between them in his presence, was a confession: it blew at him with the fury of a furnace-blast in his face. Egoist agony wrung the outcry from him that dupery is a more blessed condition. He desired to be deceived.

  He could desire such a thing only in a temporary transport; for above all he desired that no one should know of his being deceived; and were he a dupe the deceiver would know it, and her accomplice would know it, and the world would soon know of it: that world against whose tongue he stood defenceless. Within the shadow of his presence he compressed opinion, as a strong frost binds the springs of earth, but beyond it his shivering sensitiveness ran about in dread of a stripping in a wintry atmosphere. This was the ground of his hatred of the world: it was an appalling fear on behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender infant Self swaddled in his name before the world, for which he felt as the most highly civilized of men alone can feel, and which it was impossible for him to stretch out hands to protect. There the poor little loveable creature ran for any mouth to blow on; and frost-nipped and bruised, it cried to him, and he was of no avail! Must we not detest a world that so treats us? We loathe it the more, by the measure of our contempt for them, when we have made the people within the shadow-circle of our person slavish.

  And he had been once a young prince in popularity: the world had been his possession. Clara’s treatment of him was a robbery of land and subjects. His grander dream had been a marriage with a lady of so glowing a fame for beauty and attachment to her lord that the world perforce must take her for witness to merits which would silence detraction and almost, not quite (it was undesireable), extinguish envy. But for the nature of women his dream would have been realized. He could not bring himself to denounce Fortune. It had cost him a grievous pang to tell Horace De Craye he was lucky; he had been educated in the belief that Fortune specially prized and cherished little Willoughby: hence of necessity his maledictions fell upon women, or he would have forfeited the last blanket of a dream warm as poets revel in.

  But if Clara deceived him, he inspired her with timidity. There was matter in that to make him wish to be deceived. She had not looked him much in the face: she had not crossed his eyes: she had looked deliberately downward, keeping her head up, to preserve an exterior pride. The attitude had its bewitchingness: the girl’s physical pride of stature scorning to bend under a load of conscious guilt, had a certain black-angel beauty for which he felt a hugging hatred: and according to his policy when these fits of amorous meditation seized him, he burst from the present one in the mood of his more favourable conception of Clara, and sought her out.

  The quality of the mood of hugging hatred is, that if you are disallowed the hug, you do not hate the fiercer.

  Contrariwise the prescription of a decorous distance of two feet ten inches, which is by measurement the delimitation exacted of a rightly respectful deportment, has this miraculous effect on the great creature man, or often it has: that his peculiar hatred returns to the reluctant admiration begetting it, and his passion for the hug falls prostrate as one of the Faithful before the shrine; he is reduced to worship by fasting.

  (For these mysteries,
consult the sublime chapter in the GREAT BOOK, the Seventy-first on LOVE, wherein nothing is written, but the Reader receives a Lanthorn, a Powder-cask, and a Pick-axe, and therewith pursues his yellow-dusking path across the rubble of preceding excavators in the solitary quarry: a yet more instructive passage than the overscrawled Seventieth, or French Section, whence the chapter opens, and where hitherto the polite world has halted.)

  The hurry of the hero is on us, we have no time to spare for mining works: he hurried to catch her alone, to wreak his tortures on her in a bitter semblance of bodily worship, and satiated, then comfortably to spurn. He found her protected by Barclay on the stairs.

  ‘That letter for me?’ he said.

  ‘I think I told you, Willoughby, there was a letter I left with Barclay to reassure you in case of my not returning early,’ said Clara. ‘It was unnecessary for her to deliver it.’

  ‘Indeed? But any letter, any writing of yours, and from you to me! You have it still?’

  ‘No, I have destroyed it.’

  ‘That was wrong,’

  ‘It could not have given you pleasure.’

  ‘My dear Clara, one line from you!’

  ‘There were but three.’

  Barclay stood sucking her lips. A maid in the secrets of her mistress is a purchaseable maid, for if she will take a bribe with her right hand she will with her left; all that has to be calculated is the nature and amount of the bribe: such was the speculation indulged by Sir Willoughby, and he shrank from the thought and declined to know more than that he was on a volcanic hillside where a thin crust quaked over lava. This was a new condition with him, representing Clara’s gain in their combat. Clara did not fear his questioning so much as he feared her candour.

  Mutually timid, they were of course formally polite, and no plain speaking could have told one another more distinctly that each was defensive. Clara stood pledged to the fib; packed, sealed and posted; and he had only to ask to have it, supposing that he asked with a voice not exactly peremptory.

  She said in her heart, ‘It is your fault: you are relentless and you would ruin Crossjay to punish him for devoting himself to me, like the poor thoughtless boy he is! and so I am bound in honour to do my utmost for him.’

  The reciprocal devotedness, moreover, served two purposes: it preserved her from brooding on the humiliation of her lame flight, and flutter back, and it quieted her mind in regard to the precipitate intimacy of her relations with Colonel De Craye. Willoughby’s boast of his implacable character was to blame. She was at war with him, and she was compelled to put the case in that light. Crossjay must be shielded from one who could not spare an offender, so Colonel De Craye quite naturally was called on for his help, and the colonel’s dexterous aid appeared to her more admirable than alarming.

  Nevertheless, she would not have answered a direct question falsely. She was for the fib, but not the lie; at a word she could be disdainful of subterfuges. Her look said that. Willoughby perceived it. She had written him a letter of three lines: ‘There were but three’: and she had destroyed the letter. Something perchance was repented by her? Then she had done him an injury! Between his wrath at the suspicion of an injury, and the prudence enjoined by his abject coveting of her, he consented to be fooled for the sake of vengeance, and something besides.

  ‘Well! here you are, safe; I have you!’ said he, with courtly exultation: ‘and that is better than your handwriting. I have been all over the country after you.’

  ‘Why did you? We are not in a barbarous land,’ said Clara.

  ‘Crossjay talks of your visiting a sick child, my love: – you have changed your dress?’

  ‘You see.’

  ‘The boy declared you were going to that farm of Hoppner’s, and some cottage. I met at my gates a tramping vagabond who swore to seeing you and the boy in a totally contrary direction.’

  ‘Did you give him money?’

  ‘I fancy so.’

  ‘Then he was paid for having seen me.’

  Willoughby tossed his head: it might be as she suggested; beggars are liars.

  ‘But who sheltered you, my dear Clara? You had not been heard of at Hoppner’s.’

  ‘The people have been indemnified for their pains. To pay them more would be to spoil them. You disperse money too liberally. There was no fever in the place. Who could have anticipated such a downpour! I want to consult Miss Dale on the important theme of a dress I think of wearing at Mrs Mountstuart’s to-night.’

  ‘Do. She is unerring.’

  ‘She has excellent taste.’

  ‘She dresses very simply herself.’

  ‘But it becomes her. She is one of the few women whom I feel I could not improve with a touch.’

  ‘She has judgement.’

  He reflected and repeated his encomium.

  The shadow of a dimple in Clara’s cheek awakened him to the idea that she had struck him somewhere: and certainly he would never again be able to put up the fiction of her jealousy of Laetitia. What, then, could be this girl’s motive for praying to be released? The interrogation humbled him: he fled from the answer.

  Willoughby went in search of De Craye. That sprightly intriguer had no intention to let himself be caught solus. He was undiscoverable until the assembly sounded, when Clara dropped a public word or two, and he spoke in perfect harmony with her. After that, he gave his company to Willoughby for an hour at billiards, and was well beaten.

  The announcement of a visit of Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson took the gentlemen to the drawing-room, rather suspecting that something stood in the way of her dinner-party. As it happened, she was lamenting only the loss of one of the jewels of the party: to wit, the great Professor Crooklyn, invited to meet Dr Middleton at her table; and she related how she had driven to the station by appointment, the professor being notoriously a bother-headed traveller: as was shown by the fact that he had missed his train in town, for he had not arrived; nothing had been seen of him. She cited Vernon Whitford for her authority that the train had been inspected, and the platform scoured to find the professor.

  ‘And so,’ said she, ‘I drove home your Green Man to dry him; he was wet through and chattering; the man was exactly like a skeleton wrapped in a sponge, and if he escapes a cold he must be as invulnerable as he boasts himself. These athletes are terrible boasters.’

  ‘They climb their Alps to crow,’ said Clara, excited by her apprehension that Mrs Mountstuart would speak of having seen the colonel near the station.

  There was a laugh, and Colonel De Craye laughed loudly as it flashed through him that a quick-witted impressionable girl like Miss Middleton must, before his arrival at the Hall, have speculated on such obdurate clay as Vernon Whitford was, with humourous despair at his uselessness to her. Glancing round, he saw Vernon standing fixed in a stare at the young lady.

  ‘You heard that, Whitford?’ he said, and Clara’s face betokening an extremer contrition than he thought was demanded, the colonel rallied the Alpine climber for striving to be the tallest of them – Signor Excelsior! – and described these conquerors of mountains pancaked on the rocks in desperate embraces, bleached here, burned there, barked all over, all to be able to say they had been up ‘so high’ – had conquered another mountain! He was extravagantly funny and self-satisfied: a conqueror of the sex having such different rewards of enterprise.

  Vernon recovered in time to accept the absurdities heaped on him.

  ‘Climbing peaks won’t compare with hunting a wriggler,’ said he.

  His allusion to the incessant pursuit of young Crossjay to pin him to lessons was appreciated.

  Clara felt the thread of the look he cast from herself to Colonel De Craye. She was helpless, if he chose to misjudge her. Colonel De Craye did not!

  Crossjay had the misfortune to enter the drawing-room while Mrs Mountstuart was compassionating Vernon for his ducking in pursuit of the wriggler; which De Craye likened to ‘going through the river after his eel:’ and immediately there was a cross-ques
tioning of the boy between De Craye and Willoughby on the subject of his latest truancy, each gentleman trying to run him down in a palpable fib. They were succeeding brilliantly when Vernon put a stop to it by marching him off to hard labour. Mrs Mountstuart was led away to inspect the beautiful porcelain service, the present of Lady Busshe. ‘Porcelain again!’ she said to Willoughby, and would have signalled to the ‘dainty rogue’ to come with them, had not Clara been leaning over to Laetitia, talking to her in an attitude too graceful to be disturbed. She called his attention to it, slightly wondering at his impatience. She departed to meet an afternoon train on the chance that it would land the professor. ‘But tell Dr Middleton,’ said she, ‘I fear I shall have no one worthy of him! And,’ she added to Willoughby, as she walked out to her carriage, ‘I shall expect you to do the great-gunnery talk at table.’

  ‘Miss Dale keeps it up with him best,’ said Willoughby.

  ‘She does everything best! But my dinner-table is involved, and I cannot count on a young woman to talk across it. I would hire a lion of a menagerie, if one were handy, rather than have a famous scholar at my table, unsupported by another famous scholar. Doctor Middleton would ride down a duke when the wine is in him. He will terrify my poor flock. The truth is, we can’t leaven him: I foresee undigested lumps of conversation, unless you devote yourself.’

  ‘I will devote myself,’ said Willoughby.

  ‘I can calculate on Colonel De Craye and our porcelain beauty for any quantity of sparkles, if you promise that. They play well together. You are not to be one of the gods to-night, but a kind of Jupiter’s cup-bearer; – Juno’s, if you like; and Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, and all your admirers shall know subsequently what you have done. You see my alarm. I certainly did not rank Professor Crooklyn among the possibly faithless, or I never would have ventured on Doctor Middleton at my table. My dinner-parties have hitherto been all successes. Naturally I feel the greater anxiety about this one. For a single failure is all the more conspicuous. The exception is everlastingly cited! It is not so much what people say, but my own sentiments. I hate to fail. However, if you are true, we may do.’