The Egoist

by George Meredith

  ‘I hear that he had a cold,’ Vernon remarked. ‘I hope the wine was good, sir.’

  As when the foreman of a sentimental jury is commissioned to inform an awful Bench exact in perspicuous English, of a verdict that must of necessity be pronounced in favour of the hanging of the culprit, yet would fain attenuate the crime of a palpable villain by a recommendation to mercy, such foreman, standing in the attentive eye of a master of grammatical construction, and feeling the weight of at least three sentences on his brain, together with a prospect of judicial interrogation for the discovery of his precise meaning, is oppressed, himself is put on trial in turn, and he hesitates, he recapitulates, the fear

  of involution leads him to be involved; as far as a man so posted may, he on his own behalf appeals for mercy; entreats that his indistinct statement of preposterous reasons may be taken for understood, and would gladly, were permission to do it credible, throw in an imploring word that he may sink back among the crowd without for the one imperishable moment publicly swinging in his lordship’s estimation: – much so, moved by chivalry toward a lady, courtesy to the recollection of a hostess, and particularly by the knowledge that his hearer would expect with a certain frigid rigour charity of him, Dr Middleton paused, spoke and paused: he stammered. Ladies, he said, were famous poisoners in the Middle Ages. His opinion was, that we had a class of manufacturing wine merchants on the watch for widows in this country. But he was bound to state the fact of his waking at his usual hour to the minute unassailed by headache. On the other hand, this was a condition of blessedness unanticipated when he went to bed. Mr Whitford, however, was not to think that he entertained rancour toward the wine. It was no doubt dispensed with the honourable intention of cheering. In point of flavour execrable, judging by results it was innocuous.

  ‘The test of it shall be the effect of it upon Professor Crooklyn, and his appearance in the forenoon according to promise,’ Dr Middleton came to an end with his perturbed balancings. ‘If I hear more of the eight or twelve winds discharged at once upon a railway platform, and the young lady who dries herself of a drenching by drinking brandy and water with a gentleman at a railway inn, I shall solicit your sanction to my condemnation of the wine as anti-Bacchic and a counterfeit presentment. Do not misjudge me. Our hostess is not responsible. But widows should marry.’

  ‘You must contrive to stop the Professor, sir, if he should attack his hostess in that manner,’ said Vernon.

  ‘Widows should marry!’ Dr Middleton repeated.

  He murmured of objecting to be at the discretion of a butler; unless, he was careful to add, the aforesaid functionary could boast of an University education; and even then, said he, it requires a line of ancestry to train a man’s taste.

  The Rev. Doctor smothered a yawn. The repression of it caused a second one, a real monster, to come, big as our old friend of the sea advancing on the chained-up Beauty.

  Disconcerted by this damning evidence of indigestion, his countenance showed that he considered himself to have been too lenient to the wine of an unhusbanded hostess. He frowned terribly.

  In the interval Laetitia told Vernon of Crossjay’s flight for the day, hastily bidding the master to excuse him: she had no time to hint the grounds of excuse. Vernon mentally made a guess.

  Dr Middleton took his arm and discharged a volley at the crotchetty scholarship of Professor Crooklyn, whom to confute by book, he directed his march to the library. Having persuaded himself that he was dyspeptic, he had grown irascible. He denounced all dining out, eulogized Patterne Hall as if it were his home, and remembered he had dreamed in the night – a most humiliating sign of physical disturbance. ‘But let me find a house in proximity to Patterne, as I am induced to suppose I shall,’ he said, ‘and here only am I to be met when I stir abroad.’

  Laetitia went to her room. She was complacently anxious enough to prefer solitude and be willing to read. She was more seriously anxious about Crossjay than about any of the others. For Clara would be certain to speak very definitely, and how then could a gentleman oppose her? He would supplicate, and could she be brought to yield? It was not to be expected of a young lady who had turned from Sir Willoughby. His inferiors would have had a better chance. Whatever his faults, he had that element of greatness which excludes the intercession of pity. Supplication would be with him a form of condescension. It would be seen to be such. His was a monumental pride that could not stoop. She had preserved this image of the gentleman for a relic in the shipwreck of her idolatry. So she mused between the lines of her book, and finishing her reading and marking the page, she glanced down on the lawn. Dr Middleton was there, and alone; his hands behind his back, his head bent. His meditative pace and unwonted perusal of the turf proclaimed that a non-sentimental jury within had delivered an unmitigated verdict upon the widow’s wine. Laetitia hurried to find Vernon.

  He was in the hall. As she drew near him, the laboratory door opened and shut.

  ‘It is being decided,’ said Laetitia.

  Vernon was paler than the hue of perfect calmness.

  ‘I want to know whether I ought to take to my heels like Crossjay, and shun the Professor,’ he said.

  They spoke in under-tones, furtively watching the door.

  ‘I wish what she wishes, I am sure; but it will go badly with the boy,’ said Laetitia.

  ‘Oh, well, then I’ll take him,’ said Vernon, ‘I would rather. I think I can manage it.’

  Again the laboratory door opened. This time it shut behind Miss Middleton. She was highly flushed. Seeing them, she shook the storm from her brows, with a dead smile; the best piece of serenity she could put on for public wear.

  She took a breath before she moved.

  Vernon strode out of the house.

  Clara swept up to Laetitia.

  ‘You were deceived!’

  The hard sob of anger barred her voice.

  Laetitia begged her to come to her room with her.

  ‘I want air: I must be by myself,’ said Clara, catching at her garden-hat.

  She walked swiftly to the portico steps and turned to the right, to avoid the laboratory windows.

  CHAPTER 33

  In Which the Comic Muse Has an Eye on Two Good Souls

  CLARA met Vernon on the bowling-green among the laurels. She asked him where her father was.

  ‘Don’t speak to him now,’ said Vernon.

  ‘Mr Whitford, will you?’

  ‘It is not advisable just now. Wait.’

  ‘Wait? Why not now?’

  ‘He is not in the right humour.’

  She choked. There are times when there is no medicine for us in sages, we want slaves; we scorn to temporize, we must overbear. On she sped, as if she had made the mistake of exchanging words with a post.

  The scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick mist in her head, except the burden and result of it, that he held to her fast, would neither assist her to depart nor disengage her.

  Oh, men! men! They astounded the girl; she could not define them to her understanding. Their motives, their tastes, their vanity, their tyranny, and the domino on their vanity, the baldness of their tyranny, clinched her in feminine antagonism to brute power. She was not the less disposed to rebellion by a very present sense of the justice of what could be said to reprove her. She had but one answer: ‘Anything but marry him!’ It threw her on her nature, our last and headlong advocate, who is quick as the flood to hurry us from the heights to our level, and lower, if there be accidental gaps in the channel. For say we have been guilty of misconduct: can we redeem it by violating that which we are and live by? The question sinks us back to the luxuriousness of a sunny relinquishment of effort in the direction against tide. Our nature, becomes ingenious in devices, penetrative of the enemy, confidently citing its cause for being frankly elfish or worse. Clara saw a particular way of forcing herself to be surrendered. She shut her eyes from it: the sight carried her too violently to her escape; but her heart caught it up and huzzaed. To pre
ss the points of her fingers at her bosom, looking up to the sky as she did, and cry: ‘I am not my own; I am his!’ was instigation sufficient to make her heart leap up with all her body’s blush to urge it to recklessness. A despairing creature then may say she has addressed the heavens and has had no answer to restrain her.

  Happily for Miss Middleton, she had walked some minutes in her chafing fit before the falcon eye of Colonel De Craye spied her away on one of the beech-knots.

  Vernon stood irresolute. It was decidedly not a moment for disturbing Dr Middleton’s composure. He meditated upon a conversation, as friendly as possible, with Willoughby. Round on the front-lawn, he beheld Willoughby and Dr Middleton together, the latter having halted to lend attentive ear to his excellent host. Unnoticed by them or disregarded, Vernon turned back to Laetitia, and sauntered, talking with her of things current for as long as he could endure to listen to praise of his pure self-abnegation; proof of how well he had disguised himself, but it smacked unpleasantly to him. His humourous intimacy with men’s minds likened the source of this distaste to the gallant all-or-nothing of the gambler, who hates the little when he cannot have the much, and would rather stalk from the tables clean-picked than suffer ruin to be tickled by driblets of the glorious fortune he has played for and lost. If we are not to be beloved, spare us the small coin of compliments on character; especially when they compliment only our acting. It is partly endurable to win eulogy for our stately fortitude in losing, but Laetitia was unaware that he flung away a stake; so she could not praise him for his merits.

  ‘Willoughby makes the pardoning of Crossjay conditional,’ he said, ‘and the person pleading for him has to grant the terms. How could you imagine Willoughby would give her up! How could he! Who!… He should, is easily said. I was no witness of the scene between them just now, but I could have foretold the end of it; I could almost recount the passages. The consequence is, that everything depends upon the amount of courage she possesses. Dr Middleton won’t leave Patterne yet. And it is of no use to speak to him to-day. And she is by nature impatient, and is rendered desperate.’

  ‘Why is it of no use to speak to Dr Middleton today?’ cried Laetitia.

  ‘He drank wine yesterday that did not agree with him; he can’t work. To-day he is looking forward to Patterne Port. He is not likely to listen to any proposals to leave to-day.’

  ‘Goodness!’

  ‘I know the depth of that cry!’

  ‘You are excluded, Mr Whitford.’

  ‘Not a bit of it; I am in with the rest. Say that men are to be exclaimed at. Men have a right to expect you to know your own minds when you close on a bargain. You don’t know the world or yourselves very well, it’s true; still the original error is on your side, and upon that you should fix your attention. She brought her father here, and no sooner was he very comfortably established than she wished to dislocate him.’

  ‘I cannot explain it; I cannot comprehend it,’ said Laetitia.

  ‘You are Constancy.’

  ‘No.’ She coloured. ‘I am “in with rest”. I do not say I should have done the same. But I have the knowledge that I must not sit in judgement on her. I can waver.’

  She coloured again. She was anxious that he should know her to be not that stupid statue of Constancy in a corner doating on the antic Deception. Reminiscences of the interview overnight made it oppressive to her to hear herself praised for always pointing like the needle. Her newly enfranchised individuality pressed to assert its existence. Vernon, however, not

  seeing this novelty, continued, to her excessive discomfort, to baste her old abandoned image with his praises. They checked hers; and, moreover, he had suddenly conceived an envy of her life-long, uncomplaining, almost unaspiring, constancy of sentiment. If you know lovers when they have not reason to be blissful, you will remember that in this mood of admiring envy they are given to fits of uncontrollable maundering. Praise of constancy, moreover, smote shadowily a certain inconstant, enough to seem to ruffle her smoothness and do no hurt. He found his consolation in it, and poor Laetitia writhed. Without designing to retort, she instinctively grasped at a weapon of defence in further exalting his devotedness; which reduced him to cast his head to the

  heavens and implore them to partially enlighten her. Nevertheless, maunder he must; and he recurred to it in a way so utterly unlike himself that Laetitia stared in his face. She wondered whether there could be anything secreted behind this everlasting theme of constancy. He took her awakened gaze for a summons to asseverations of sincerity, and out they came. She would have fled from him, but to think of flying was to think how little it was that urged her to fly, and yet the thought of remaining and listening to praises undeserved and no longer flattering, was a torture.

  ‘Mr Whitford, I bear no comparison with you.’

  ‘I do and must set you for my example, Miss Dale.’

  ‘Indeed, you do wrongly; you do not know me.’

  ‘I could say that. For years…!’

  ‘Pray, Mr Whitford!’

  ‘Well, I have admired it. You show us how self can be smothered.’

  ‘An echo would be a retort on you!’

  ‘On me? I am never thinking of anything else.’

  ‘I could say that.’

  ‘You are necessarily conscious of not swerving.’

  ‘But I do; I waver dreadfully; I am not the same two days running.’

  ‘You are the same, with “ravishing divisions” upon the same.’

  ‘And you without the “divisions”. I draw such support as I have from you.’

  ‘From some simulacrum of me, then. And that will show you how little you require support.’

  ‘I do not speak my own opinion only.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘I am not alone.’

  ‘Again let me say, I wish I were like you!’

  ‘Then let me add, I would willingly make the exchange!’

  ‘You would be amazed at your bargain.’

  ‘Others would be!’

  ‘Your exchange would give me the qualities I’m in want of, Miss Dale.’

  ‘Negative, passive, at the best, Mr Whitford. But I should have…’

  ‘Oh! – pardon me. But you inflict the sensations of a boy, with a dose of honesty in him, called up to receive a prize he has won by the dexterous use of a crib.’

  ‘And how do you suppose she feels who has a crown of Queen o’ the May forced on her head when she is verging on November?’

  He rejected her analogy, and she his. They could neither of them bring to light the circumstances which made one another’s admiration so unbearable. The more he exalted her for constancy, the more did her mind become bent upon critically examining the object of that imagined virtue; and the more she praised him for possessing the spirit of perfect friendliness, the fiercer grew the passion in him which disdained the imputation, hissing like a heated iron-bar that flings the water-drops to steam. He would none of it; would rather have stood exposed in his profound foolishness.

  Amiable though they were, and mutually affectionate, they came to a stop in their walk, longing to separate, and not seeing how it was to be done, they had so knit themselves together with the pelting of their interlaudation.

  ‘I think it is time for me to run home to my father for an hour,’ said Laetitia.

  ‘I ought to be working,’ said Vernon.

  Good progress was made to the disgarlanding of themselves thus far; yet, an acutely civilized pair, the abruptness of the transition from floweriness to commonplace affected them both, Laetitia chiefly, as she had broken the pause, and she remarked: ‘I am really Constancy in my opinions.’

  ‘Another title is customary where stiff opinions are concerned. Perhaps by and by you will learn your mistake, and then you will acknowledge the name for it.’

  ‘How?’ said she. ‘What shall I learn?’

  ‘If you learn that I am a grisly Egoist?’

  ‘You? And it would not be egoism,’ added Laeti
tia, revealing to him at the same instant as to herself that she swung suspended on a scarce credible guess.

  ‘– Will nothing pierce your ears, Mr Whitford?’

  He heard the intruding voice, but he was bent on rubbing out the cloudy letters Laetitia had begun to spell, and he stammered, in a tone of matter-of-fact: ‘Just that and no better’; then turned to Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson.

  ‘– Or are you resolved you will never see Professor Crooklyn when you look on him?’ said the great lady.

  Vernon bowed to the Professor and apologized to him shufflingly and rapidly, incoherently, and with a red face; which induced Mrs Mountstuart to scan Laetitia’s.

  After lecturing Vernon for his abandonment of her yesterday evening, and flouting his protestations, she returned to the business of the day. ‘We walked from the lodge-gates to see the park and prepare ourselves for Dr Middleton. We parted last night in the middle of a controversy and are rageing to resume it. Where is our redoubtable antagonist?’

  Mrs Mountstuart wheeled Professor Crooklyn round to accompany Vernon.

  ‘We,’ she said, ‘are for modern English scholarship, opposed to the champion of German.’

  ‘The contrary,’ observed Professor Crooklyn.

  ‘Oh! We,’ she corrected the error serenely, ‘are for German scholarship opposed to English.’

  ‘Certain editions.’

  ‘We defend certain editions.’

  ‘Defend is a term of imperfect application to my position, ma’am.’

  ‘My dear Professor, you have in Dr Middleton a match for you in conscientious pugnacity, and you will not waste it upon me. There, there they are; there he is. Mr Whitford will conduct you. I stand away from the first shock.’

  Mrs Mountstuart fell back to Laetitia, saying: ‘He pores over a little inexactitude in phrases, and pecks at it like a domestic fowl.’

  Professor Crooklyn’s attitude and air were so well described that Laetitia could have laughed.

  ‘These mighty scholars have their flavour,’ the great lady hastened to add, lest her younger companion should be misled to suppose that they were not valuable to a governing hostess: ‘their shadow-fights are ridiculous, but they have their flavour at a table. Last night, no: I discard all mention of last night. We failed: as none else in this neighbourhood could fail, but we failed. If we have among us a cormorant-devouring young lady who drinks up all the – ha! – brandy and water – of our inns and occupies all our flys, why, our condition is abnormal, and we must expect to fail: we are deprived of accommodation for accidental circumstances. How Mr Whitford could have missed seeing Professor Crooklyn! And what was he doing at the station, Miss Dale?’