The Amazing Marriage — Complete. George Meredith
the young nobleman as the pupil of his philosophy for the conduct of life; and to fortify him, he replied:
‘Set your mind on the beauty, and there’ll be no room for comparisons. Most of them are unjust, precious few instructive. In this case, they spoil both pictures: and that scene down there rather hooks me; though I prefer the Dachstein in the wane of the afterglow. You called it Carinthia.’
‘I did: the beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus—if she is to be a girl!’ Fleetwood rejoined. ‘She looked burnt out—a spectre.’
‘One of the admirably damned,’ said Woodseer, and he murmured with enjoyment: ‘Between the lights—that ‘s the beauty and the tragedy of Purgatory!’
His comrade fell in with the pictured idea: ‘You hit it:—not what you called the “sublimely milky,” and not squalid as you’ll see the faces of the gambling women at the tables below. Oblige me—may I beg?—don’t clap names on the mountains we’ve seen. It stamps guide-book on them, English tourist, horrors. We’ll moralize over the crowds at the tables down there. On the whole, it’s a fairish game: you know the odds against you, as you don’t on the Turf or the Bourse. Have your fling; but don’t get bitten. There’s a virus. I’m not open to it. Others are.’
Hereupon Woodseer, wishing to have his individuality recognised in the universality it consented to, remarked on an exchequer that could not afford to lose, and a disposition free of the craving to win.
These were, no doubt, good reasons for abstaining, and they were grand morality. They were, at the same time, customary phrases of the unfleshed in folly. They struck Fleetwood with a curious reminder of the puking inexperienced, whom he had seen subsequently plunge suicidally. He had a sharp vision of the attractive forces of the game; and his elemental nature exulted in siding with the stronger against a pretender to the superhuman. For Woodseer had spoken a trifle loftily, as quite above temptation. To see a forewarned philosopher lured to try the swim on those tides, pulled along the current, and caught by the undertug of the lasher, would be fun.
‘We’ll drop down on them, find our hotel, and have a look at what they’re doing,’ he said, and stepped.
Woodseer would gladly have remained. The starlit black ridges about him and the dragon’s mouth yawing underneath were an opposition of spiritual and mundane; innocent, noxious; exciting to the youthful philosopher. He had to follow, and so rapidly in the darkness that he stumbled and fell on an arm; a small matter.
Bed-chambers awaited them at the hotel, none of the party: and Fleetwood’s man-servant was absent.
‘Gambling, the rascal!’ he said. Woodseer heard the first note of the place in that.
His leader was washed, neatly dressed, and knocking at his door very soon, impatient to be off, and he flung a promise of ‘supper presently’ to one whose modest purse had fallen into a debate with this lordly hostelry, counting that a supper and a night there would do for it. They hurried on to the line of promenaders, a river of cross-currents by the side of seated groups; and the willowy swish of silken dresses, feminine perfumery, cigar-smoke, chatter, laughter, told of pleasure reigning.
Fleetwood scanned the groups. He had seen enough in a moment and his face blackened. A darting waiter was called to him.
He said to Woodseer, savagely, as it sounded: ‘You shall have something to joint your bones!’ What cause of wrath he had was past a guess: a wolf at his vitals bit him, hardening his handsome features.
The waiter darted back, bearing a tray and tall glasses filled each with piled parti-coloured liqueurs, on the top of which an egg-yolk swam. Fleetwood gave example. Swallowing your egg, the fiery-velvet triune behind slips after it, in an easy milky way, like a princess’s train on a state-march, and you are completely, transformed, very agreeably; you have become a merry demon. ‘Well, yes, it’s next to magic,’ he replied to Woodseer’s astonished snigger after the draught, and explained, that it was a famous Viennese four-of-the-morning panacea, the revellers’ electrical restorer. ‘Now you can hold on for an hour or two, and then we’ll sup. At Rome?’
‘Ay! Druids to-morrow!’ cried the philosopher bewitched.
He found himself bowing to a most heavenly lady, composed of day and night in her colouring, but more of night, where the western edge has become a pale steel blade. Men were around her, forming a semi-circle. The world of men and women was mere timber and leafage to this flower of her sex, glory of her kind. How he behaved in her presence, he knew not; he was beyond self-criticism or conscious reflection; simply the engine of the commixed three liqueurs, with parlous fine thoughts, and a sense of steaming into the infinite.
To leave her was to have her as a moon in the heavens and to think of her creatively. A swarm of images rushed about her and away, took lustre and shade. She was a miracle of greyness, her eyes translucently grey, a dark-haired queen of the twilights; and his heart sprang into his brain to picture the novel beauty; language became a flushed Bacchanal in a ring of dancing similes. Lying beside a bank of silvery cinquefoil against a clear evening sky, where the planet Venus is a point of new and warmer light, one has the vision of her. Or something of Persephone rising to greet her mother, when our beam of day first melts through her as she kneels to gather an early bud of the year, would be near it. Or there is a lake in mid-forest, that curls part in shadow under the foot of morning: there we have her.
He strained to the earthly and the skyey likenesses of his marvel of human beauty because they bestowed her on him in passing. All the while, he was gazing on a green gaming-table.
The gold glittered, and it heaped or it vanished. Contemptuous of money, beyond the limited sum for his needs, he gazed; imagination was blunted in him to the hot drama of the business. Moreover his mind was engaged in insisting that the Evening Star is not to be called Venus, because of certain stories; and he was vowed to defend his lady from any allusion to them. This occupied him. By degrees, the visible asserted its authority; his look on the coin fell to speculating. Oddly, too, he was often right;—the money, staked on the other side, would have won. He considered it rather a plain calculation than a guess.
Philosophy withdrew him from his temporary interest in the tricks of a circling white marble ball. The chuck farthing of street urchins has quite as much dignity. He compared the creatures dabbling, over the board to summer flies on butcher’s meat, periodically scared by a cloth. More in the abstract, they were snatching at a snapdragon bowl. It struck him, that the gamblers had thronged on an invitation to drink the round of seed-time and harvest in a gulp. Again they were desperate gleaners, hopping, skipping, bleeding, amid a whizz of scythe-blades, for small wisps of booty. Nor was it long before the presidency of an ancient hoary Goat-Satan might be perceived, with skew-eyes and pucker-mouth, nursing a hoof on a knee.
Our mediaeval Enemy sat symbolical in his deformities, as in old Italian and Dutch thick-line engravings of him. He rolled a ball for souls, excited like kittens, to catch it, and tumbling into the dozens of vacant pits. So it seemed to Woodseer, whose perceptions were discoloured by hereditary antagonism. Had he preserved his philosopher’s eye, he would have known that the Hoofed One is too wily to show himself, owing to his ugliness. The Black Goddess and no other presides at her own game. She (it is good for us to know it) is the Power who challenges the individual, it is he who spreads the net for the mass. She liquefies the brain of man; he petrifies or ossifies the heart. From her comes craziness, from him perversity: a more provocative and, on the whole, more contagious disease. The gambler does not seek to lead his fellows into perdition; the snared of the Demon have pleasure in the act. Hence our naturally interested forecasts of the contests between them: for if he is beaten, as all must be at the close of an extended game with her, we have only to harden the brain against her allurements and we enter a clearer field.
Woodseer said to Fleetwood: ‘That ball has a look of a nymph running round and round till she changes to one of the Fates.’
‘We’ll have a run with her,’ said Fleetwood, keener for business than for metaphors—at the moment.
He received gold for a bank-note. Captain Abrane hurriedly begged a loan. Both