The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. George Meredith
because she was aware of the omission of his name in her previous remarks.
His whole attention was given to her.
She had to invent the sequel. "I was going to beg you, Willoughby, do not seek to spoil me. You compliment me. Compliments are not suited to me. You think too highly of me. It is nearly as bad as to be slighted. I am . . . I am a . . ." But she could not follow his example; even as far as she had gone, her prim little sketch of herself, set beside her real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang of a mincing simplicity, and was a step in falseness. How could she display what she was?
"Do I not know you?" he said.
The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on that point, signified as well as the words that no answer was the right answer. She could not dissent without turning his music to discord, his complacency to amazement. She held her tongue, knowing that he did not know her, and speculating on the division made bare by their degrees of the knowledge, a deep cleft.
He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own. The bridesmaids were mentioned.
"Miss Dale, you will hear from my aunt Eleanor, declines, on the plea of indifferent health. She is rather a morbid person, with all her really estimable qualities. It will do no harm to have none but young ladies of your own age; a bouquet of young buds: though one blowing flower among them . . . However, she has decided. My principal annoyance has been Vernon's refusal to act as my best man."
"Mr. Whitford refuses?"
"He half refuses. I do not take no from him. His pretext is a dislike to the ceremony."
"I share it with him."
"I sympathize with you. If we might say the words and pass from sight! There is a way of cutting off the world: I have it at times completely: I lose it again, as if it were a cabalistic phrase one had to utter. But with you! You give it me for good. It will be for ever, eternally, my Clara. Nothing can harm, nothing touch us; we are one another's. Let the world fight it out; we have nothing to do with it."
"If Mr. Whitford should persist in refusing?"
"So entirely one, that there never can be question of external influences. I am, we will say, riding home from the hunt: I see you awaiting me: I read your heart as though you were beside me. And I know that I am coming to the one who reads mine! You have me, you have me like an open book, you, and only you!"
"I am to be always at home?" Clara said, unheeded, and relieved by his not hearing.
"Have you realized it?—that we are invulnerable! The world cannot hurt us: it cannot touch us. Felicity is ours, and we are impervious in the enjoyment of it. Something divine! surely something divine on earth? Clara!—being to one another that between which the world can never interpose! What I do is right: what you do is right. Perfect to one another! Each new day we rise to study and delight in new secrets. Away with the crowd! We have not even to say it; we are in an atmosphere where the world cannot breathe."
"Oh, the world!" Clara partly carolled on a sigh that sunk deep.
Hearing him talk as one exulting on the mountain-top, when she knew him to be in the abyss, was very strange, provocative of scorn.
"My letters?" he said, incitingly.
"I read them."
"Circumstances have imposed a long courtship on us, my Clara; and I, perhaps lamenting the laws of decorum—I have done so!—still felt the benefit of the gradual initiation. It is not good for women to be surprised by a sudden revelation of man's character. We also have things to learn—there is matter for learning everywhere. Some day you will tell me the difference of what you think of me now, from what you thought when we first . . . ?"
An impulse of double-minded acquiescence caused Clara to stammer as on a sob.
"I—I daresay I shall."
She added, "If it is necessary."
Then she cried out: "Why do you attack the world? You always make me pity it."
He smiled at her youthfulness. "I have passed through that stage. It leads to my sentiment. Pity it, by all means."
"No," said she, "but pity it, side with it, not consider it so bad. The world has faults; glaciers have crevices, mountains have chasms; but is not the effect of the whole sublime? Not to admire the mountain and the glacier because they can be cruel, seems to me . . . And the world is beautiful."
"The world of nature, yes. The world of men?"
"Yes."
"My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of ballrooms."
"I am thinking of the world that contains real and great generosity, true heroism. We see it round us."
"We read of it. The world of the romance writer!"
"No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am sure we weaken ourselves if we do not. If I did not, I should be looking on mist, hearing a perpetual boom instead of music. I remember hearing Mr. Whitford say that cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves."
"Old Vernon!" ejaculated Sir Willoughby, with a countenance rather uneasy, as if it had been flicked with a glove. "He strings his phrases by the dozen."
"Papa contradicts that, and says he is very clever and very simple."
"As to cynics, my dear Clara, oh, certainly, certainly: you are right. They are laughable, contemptible. But understand me. I mean, we cannot feel, or if we feel we cannot so intensely feel, our oneness, except by dividing ourselves from the world."
"Is it an art?"
"If you like. It is our poetry! But does not love shun the world? Two that love must have their sustenance in isolation."
"No: they will be eating themselves up."
"The purer the beauty, the more it will be out of the world."
"But not opposed."
"Put it in this way," Willoughby condescended. "Has experience the same opinion of the world as ignorance?"
"It should have more charity."
"Does virtue feel at home in the world?"
"Where it should be an example, to my idea."
"Is the world agreeable to holiness?"
"Then, are you in favour of monasteries?"
He poured a little runlet of half laughter over her head, of the sound assumed by genial compassion.
It is irritating to hear that when we imagine we have spoken to the point.
"Now in my letters, Clara . . ."
"I have no memory, Willoughby!"
"You will, however, have observed that I am not completely myself in my letters . . ."
"In your letters to men you may be."
The remark threw a pause across his thoughts. He was of a sensitiveness terribly tender. A single stroke on it reverberated swellingly within the man, and most, and infuriately searching, at the spots where he had been wounded, especially where he feared the world might have guessed the wound. Did she imply that he had no hand for love-letters? Was it her meaning that women would not have much taste for his epistolary correspondence? She had spoken in the plural, with an accent on "men". Had she heard of Constantia? Had she formed her own judgement about the creature? The supernatural sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby shrieked a peal of affirmatives. He had often meditated on the moral obligation of his unfolding to Clara the whole truth of his conduct to Constantia; for whom, as for other suicides, there were excuses. He at least was bound to supply them. She had behaved badly; but had he not given her some cause? If so, manliness was bound to confess it.
Supposing Clara heard the world's version first! Men whose pride is their backbone suffer convulsions where other men are barely aware of a shock, and Sir Willoughby was taken with galvanic jumpings of the spirit within him, at the idea of the world whispering to Clara that he had been jilted.
"My