The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative

  CHAPTER XI

  THE DOUBLE-BLOSSOM WILD CHERRY-TREE

  Sir Willoughby chose a moment when Clara was with him and he had a goodretreat through folding-windows to the lawn, in case of cogency on theenemy's part, to attack his cousin regarding the preposterous plot toupset the family by a scamper to London: "By the way, Vernon, what isthis you've been mumbling to everybody save me, about leaving us topitch yourself into the stew-pot and be made broth of? London is nobetter, and you are fit for considerably better. Don't, I beg you,continue to annoy me. Take a run abroad, if you are restless. Take twoor three months, and join us as we are travelling home; and then thinkof settling, pray. Follow my example, if you like. You can have one ofmy cottages, or a place built for you. Anything to keep a man fromdestroying the sense of stability about one. In London, my dear oldfellow, you lose your identity. What are you there? I ask you, what?One has the feeling of the house crumbling when a man is perpetuallyfor shifting and cannot fix himself. Here you are known, you can studyat your ease; up in London you are nobody; I tell you honestly, I feelit myself, a week of London literally drives me home to discover theindividual where I left him. Be advised. You don't mean to go."

  "I have the intention," said Vernon.

  "Why?"

  "I've mentioned it to you."

  "To my face?"

  "Over your shoulder is generally the only chance you give me."

  "You have not mentioned it to me, to my knowledge. As to the reason, Imight hear a dozen of your reasons, and I should not understand one.It's against your interests and against my wishes. Come, friend, I amnot the only one you distress. Why, Vernon, you yourself have said thatthe English would be very perfect Jews if they could manage to live onthe patriarchal system. You said it, yes, you said it!--but I recollectit clearly. Oh, as for your double-meanings, you said the thing, andyou jeered at the incapacity of English families to live together, onaccount of bad temper; and now you are the first to break up our union!I decidedly do not profess to be a perfect Jew, but I do . . ."

  Sir Willoughby caught signs of a probably smiling commerce between hisbride and his cousin. He raised his face, appeared to be consulting hiseyelids, and resolved to laugh: "Well, I own it. I do like the idea ofliving patriarchally." He turned to Clara. "The Rev. Doctor one ofus!"

  "My father?" she said.

  "Why not?"

  "Papa's habits are those of a scholar."

  "That you might not be separated from him, my dear!"

  Clara thanked Sir Willoughby for the kindness of thinking of herfather, mentally analysing the kindness, in which at least she found nounkindness, scarcely egoism, though she knew it to be there.

  "We might propose it," said he.

  "As a compliment?"

  "If he would condescend to accept it as a compliment. These greatscholars! . . . And if Vernon goes, our inducement for Dr. Middleton tostay . . . But it is too absurd for discussion . . . Oh, Vernon, aboutMaster Crossjay; I will see to it."

  He was about to give Vernon his shoulder and step into the garden, whenClara said, "You will have Crossjay trained for the navy, Willoughby?There is not a day to lose."

  "Yes, yes; I will see to it. Depend on me for holding the young rascalin view."

  He presented his hand to her to lead her over the step to the gravel,surprised to behold how flushed she was.

  She responded to the invitation by putting her hand forth from a bentelbow, with hesitating fingers. "It should not be postponed,Willoughby."

  Her attitude suggested a stipulation before she touched him.

  "It's an affair of money, as you know, Willoughby," said Vernon. "IfI'm in London, I can't well provide for the boy for some time to come,or it's not certain that I can."

  "Why on earth should you go?"

  "That's another matter. I want you to take my place with him."

  "In which case the circumstances are changed. I am responsible for him,and I have a right to bring him up according to my own prescription."

  "We are likely to have one idle lout the more."

  "I guarantee to make a gentleman of him."

  "We have too many of your gentlemen already."

  "You can't have enough, my good Vernon."

  "They're the national apology for indolence. Training a penniless boyto be one of them is nearly as bad as an education in a thieves' den;he will be just as much at war with society, if not game for thepolice."

  "Vernon, have you seen Crossjay's father, the now Captain of Marines? Ithink you have."

  "He's a good man and a very gallant officer."

  "And in spite of his qualities he's a cub, and an old cub. He is acaptain now, but he takes that rank very late, you will own. There youhave what you call a good man, undoubtedly a gallant officer,neutralized by the fact that he is not a gentleman. Holding intercoursewith him is out of the question. No wonder Government declines toadvance him rapidly. Young Crossjay does not bear your name. He bearsmine, and on that point alone I should have a voice in the settlementof his career. And I say emphatically that a drawing-room approval of ayoung man is the best certificate for his general chances in life. Iknow of a City of London merchant of some sort, and I know a firm oflawyers, who will have none but University men at their office; atleast, they have the preference."

  "Crossjay has a bullet head, fit neither for the University nor thedrawing-room," said Vernon; "equal to fighting and dying for you, andthat's all."

  Sir Willoughby contented himself with replying, "The lad is a favouriteof mine."

  His anxiety to escape a rejoinder caused him to step into the garden,leaving Clara behind him. "My love!" said he, in apology, as he turnedto her. She could not look stern, but she had a look without a dimpleto soften it, and her eyes shone. For she had wagered in her heart thatthe dialogue she provoked upon Crossjay would expose the Egoist. Andthere were other motives, wrapped up and intertwisted, unrecognizable,sufficient to strike her with worse than the flush of herself-knowledge of wickedness when she detained him to speak of Crossjaybefore Vernon.

  At last it had been seen that she was conscious of suffering in herassociation with this Egoist! Vernon stood for the world taken into herconfidence. The world, then, would not think so ill of her, she thoughthopefully, at the same time that she thought most evilly of herself.But self-accusations were for the day of reckoning; she would and musthave the world with her, or the belief that it was coming to her, inthe terrible struggle she foresaw within her horizon of self, now herutter boundary. She needed it for the inevitable conflict. Littlesacrifices of her honesty might be made. Considering how weak she was,how solitary, how dismally entangled, daily disgraced beyond the powerof any veiling to conceal from her fiery sensations, a little hypocrisywas a poor girl's natural weapon. She crushed her conscientious mindwith the assurance that it was magnifying trifles: not entirely unawarethat she was thereby preparing it for a convenient blindness in thepresence of dread alternatives; but the pride of laying such stress onsmall sins gave her purity a blush of pleasure and overcame the innerwarning. In truth she dared not think evilly of herself for long,sailing into battle as she was. Nuns and anchorites may; they haveleisure. She regretted the forfeits she had to pay for self-assistance,and, if it might be won, the world's; regretted, felt the peril of theloss, and took them up and flung them.

  "You see, old Vernon has no argument," Willoughby said to her.

  He drew her hand more securely on his arm to make her sensible that sheleaned on a pillar of strength.

  "Whenever the little brain is in doubt, perplexed, undecided whichcourse to adopt, she will come to me, will she not? I shall alwayslisten," he resumed, soothingly. "My own! and I to you when the worldvexes me. So we round our completeness. You will know me; you will knowme in good time. I am not a mystery to those to whom I unfold myself. Ido not pretend to mystery: yet, I will confess, your home--yourheart's--Willoughby is not exactly identical with the Willoughby beforethe world. One must be armed against that rough beast."

&n
bsp; Certain is the vengeance of the young upon monotony; nothing morecertain. They do not scheme it, but sameness is a poison to theirsystems; and vengeance is their heartier breathing, their stretch ofthe limbs, run in the fields; nature avenges them.

  "When does Colonel De Craye arrive?" said Clara.

  "Horace? In two or three days. You wish him to be on the spot to learnhis part, my love?"

  She had not flown forward to the thought of Colonel De Craye's arrival;she knew not why she had mentioned him; but now she flew back, shocked,first into shadowy subterfuge, and then into the criminal's dock.

  "I do not wish him to be here. I do not know that he has a part tolearn. I have no wish. Willoughby, did you not say I should come to youand you would listen?--will you listen? I am so commonplace that Ishall not be understood by you unless you take my words for the verymeaning of the words. I am unworthy. I am volatile. I love my liberty.I want to be free . . ."

  "Flitch!" he called.

  It sounded necromantic.

  "Pardon me, my love," he said. "The man you see yonder violates myexpress injunction that he is not to come on my grounds, and here Ifind him on the borders of my garden!"

  Sir Willoughby waved his hand to the abject figure of a man standing tointercept him.

  "Volatile, unworthy, liberty--my dearest!" he bent to her when the manhad appeased him by departing, "you are at liberty within the law, likeall good women; I shall control and direct your volatility; and yoursense of worthiness must be re-established when we are more intimate;it is timidity. The sense of unworthiness is a guarantee of worthinessensuing. I believe I am in the vein of a sermon! Whose the fault? Thesight of that man was annoying. Flitch was a stable-boy, groom, andcoachman, like his father before him, at the Hall thirty years; hisfather died in our service. Mr. Flitch had not a single grievance here;only one day the demon seizes him with the notion of bettering himselfhe wants his independence, and he presents himself to me with a storyof a shop in our county town.--Flitch! remember, if you go you go forgood.--Oh, he quite comprehended.--Very well; good-bye, Flitch;--theman was respectful: he looked the fool he was very soon to turn out tobe. Since then, within a period of several years, I have had him,against my express injunctions, ten times on my grounds. It's curiousto calculate. Of course the shop failed, and Flitch's independenceconsists in walking about with his hands in his empty pockets, andlooking at the Hall from some elevation near."

  "Is he married? Has he children?" said Clara.

  "Nine; and a wife that cannot cook or sew or wash linen."

  "You could not give him employment?"

  "After his having dismissed himself?"

  "It might be overlooked."

  "Here he was happy. He decided to go elsewhere, to be free--of course,of my yoke. He quitted my service against my warning. Flitch, we willsay, emigrated with his wife and children, and the ship foundered. Hereturns, but his place is filled; he is a ghost here, and I object toghosts."

  "Some work might be found for him."

  "It will be the same with old Vernon, my dear. If he goes, he goes forgood. It is the vital principle of my authority to insist on that. Adead leaf might as reasonably demand to return to the tree. Once off,off for all eternity! I am sorry, but such was your decision, myfriend. I have, you see, Clara, elements in me--"

  "Dreadful!"

  "Exert your persuasive powers with Vernon. You can do well-nigh whatyou will with the old fellow. We have Miss Dale this evening for a weekor two. Lead him to some ideas of her.--Elements in me, I wasremarking, which will no more bear to be handled carelessly thangunpowder. At the same time, there is no reason why they should not berespected, managed with some degree of regard for me and attention toconsequences. Those who have not done so have repented."

  "You do not speak to others of the elements in you," said Clara.

  "I certainly do not: I have but one bride," was his handsome reply.

  "Is it fair to me that you should show me the worst of you?"

  "All myself, my own?"

  His ingratiating droop and familiar smile rendered "All myself" soaffectionately meaningful in its happy reliance upon her excess oflove, that at last she understood she was expected to worship him anduphold him for whatsoever he might be, without any estimation ofqualities: as indeed love does, or young love does: as she perhaps didonce, before he chilled her senses. That was before her "little brain"had become active and had turned her senses to revolt.

  It was on the full river of love that Sir Willoughby supposed the wholefloating bulk of his personality to be securely sustained; andtherefore it was that, believing himself swimming at his ease, hediscoursed of himself.

  She went straight away from that idea with her mental exclamation:"Why does he not paint himself in brighter colours to me!" and thequestion: "Has he no ideal of generosity and chivalry?"

  But the unfortunate gentleman imagined himself to be loved, on Love'svery bosom. He fancied that everything relating to himself excitedmaidenly curiosity, womanly reverence, ardours to know more of him,which he was ever willing to satisfy by repeating the same things. Hisnotion of women was the primitive black and white: there are goodwomen, bad women; and he possessed a good one. His high opinion ofhimself fortified the belief that Providence, as a matter of justiceand fitness, must necessarily select a good one for him--or what are weto think of Providence? And this female, shaped by that informinghand, would naturally be in harmony with him, from the centre of hisprofound identity to the raying circle of his variations. Know thecentre, you know the circle, and you discover that the variations aresimply characteristics, but you must travel on the rays from the circleto get to the centre. Consequently Sir Willoughby put Miss Middleton onone or other of these converging lines from time to time. Us, too, hedrags into the deeps, but when we have harpooned a whale and areattached to the rope, down we must go; the miracle is to see us riseagain.

  Women of mixed essences shading off the divine to the considerablylower were outside his vision of woman. His mind could as little admitan angel in pottery as a rogue in porcelain. For him they were whatthey were when fashioned at the beginning; many cracked, many stained,here and there a perfect specimen designed for the elect of men. At awhisper of the world he shut the prude's door on them with a slam;himself would have branded them with the letters in the hue of fire.Privately he did so; and he was constituted by his extremesensitiveness and taste for ultra-feminine refinement to be a severecritic of them during the carnival of egoism, the love-season.Constantia . . . can it be told? She had been, be it said, a fair andfrank young merchant with him in that season; she was of a nature to bea mother of heroes; she met the salute, almost half-way, ingenuouslyunlike the coming mothers of the regiments of marionettes, who retirein vapours, downcast, as by convention; ladies most flattering to theegoistical gentleman, for they proclaim him the "first". Constantia'soffence had been no greater, but it was not that dramatic performanceof purity which he desired of an affianced lady, and so the offence wasgreat.

  The love-season is the carnival of egoism, and it brings the touchstoneto our natures. I speak of love, not the mask, and not of the flutingsupon the theme of love, but of the passion; a flame having, like ourmortality, death in it as well as life, that may or may not be lasting.Applied to Sir Willoughby, as to thousands of civilized males, thetouchstone found him requiring to be dealt with by his betrothed as anoriginal savage. She was required to play incessantly on the firstreclaiming chord which led our ancestral satyr to the measures of thedance, the threading of the maze, and the setting conformably to hispartner before it was accorded to him to spin her with both hands and achirrup of his frisky heels. To keep him in awe and hold him enchained,there are things she must never do, dare never say, must not think. Shemust be cloistral. Now, strange and awful though it be to hear, womenperceive this requirement of them in the spirit of the man; theyperceive, too, and it may be gratefully, that they address theirperformances less to the taming of the green and prankish monsieur ofthe fores
t than to the pacification of a voracious aesthetic gluttony,craving them insatiably, through all the tenses, with shrieks of thelamentable letter "I" for their purity. Whether they see that it hasits foundation in the sensual, and distinguish the ultra-refined butlineally great-grandson of the Hoof in this vast and dainty exactingappetite is uncertain. They probably do not; the more the damage; forin the appeasement of the glutton they have to practise muchsimulation; they are in their way losers like their ancient mothers. Itis the palpable and material of them still which they are tempted toflourish, wherewith to invite and allay pursuit: a condition underwhich the spiritual, wherein their hope lies, languishes. Thecapaciously strong in soul among women will ultimately detect aninfinite grossness in the demand for purity infinite, spotless bloom.Earlier or later they see they have been victims of the singularEgoist, have worn a mask of ignorance to be named innocent, have turnedthemselves into market produce for his delight, and have reallyabandoned the commodity in ministering to the lust for it, sufferedthemselves to be dragged ages back in playing upon the fleshlyinnocence of happy accident to gratify his jealous greed of possession,when it should have been their task to set the soul above the fairestfortune and the gift of strength in women beyond ornamental whiteness.Are they not of nature warriors, like men?--men's mates to bear themheroes instead of puppets? But the devouring male Egoist prefers themas inanimate overwrought polished pure metal precious vessels, freshfrom the hands of the artificer, for him to walk away with hugging,call all his own, drink of, and fill and drink of, and forget that hestole them.

  This running off on a by-road is no deviation from Sir WilloughbyPatterne and Miss Clara Middleton. He, a fairly intelligent man, andvery sensitive, was blinded to what was going on within her visiblyenough, by her production of the article he demanded of her sex. He hadto leave the fair young lady to ride to his county-town, and his designwas to conduct her through the covert of a group of laurels, there torevel in her soft confusion. She resisted; nay, resolutely returned tothe lawn-sward. He contrasted her with Constantia in the amorous time,and rejoiced in his disappointment. He saw the goddess Modesty guardingPurity; and one would be bold to say that he did not hear the Precepts,Purity's aged grannams maternal and paternal, cawing approval of herover their munching gums. And if you ask whether a man, sensitive and alover, can be so blinded, you are condemned to re-peruse the foregoingparagraph.

  Miss Middleton was not sufficiently instructed in the position of hersex to know that she had plunged herself in the thick of the strife ofone of their great battles. Her personal position, however, wasinstilling knowledge rapidly, as a disease in the frame teaches us whatwe are and have to contend with. Could she marry this man? He wasevidently manageable. Could she condescend to the use of arts inmanaging him to obtain a placable life?--a horror of swampy flatness!So vividly did the sight of that dead heaven over an unvarying levelearth swim on her fancy, that she shut her eyes in angry exclusion ofit as if it were outside, assailing her; and she nearly stumbled uponyoung Crossjay.

  "Oh, have I hurt you?" he cried.

  "No," said she, "it was my fault. Lead me somewhere away fromeverybody."

  The boy took her hand, and she resumed her thoughts; and, pressing hisfingers and feeling warm to him both for his presence and silence, sodoes the blood in youth lead the mind, even cool and innocent blood,even with a touch, that she said to herself, "And if I marry, and then. . . Where will honour be then? I marry him to be true to my word ofhonour, and if then . . . !" An intolerable languor caused her to sighprofoundly. It is written as she thought it; she thought in blanks, asgirls do, and some women. A shadow of the male Egoist is in the chamberof their brains overawing them.

  "Were I to marry, and to run!" There is the thought; she is offered upto your mercy. We are dealing with a girl feeling herself desperatelysituated, and not a fool.

  "I'm sure you're dead tired, though," said Crossjay.

  "No, I am not; what makes you think so?" said Clara.

  "I do think so."

  "But why do you think so?"

  "You're so hot."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "You're so red."

  "So are you, Crossjay."

  "I'm only red in the middle of the cheeks, except when I've beenrunning. And then you talk to yourself, just as boys do when they areblown."

  "Do they?"

  "They say: 'I know I could have kept up longer', or, 'my buckle broke',all to themselves, when they break down running."

  "And you have noticed that?"

  "And, Miss Middleton, I don't wish you were a boy, but I should like tolive near you all my life and be a gentleman. I'm coming with Miss Dalethis evening to stay at the Hall and be looked after, instead ofstopping with her cousin who takes care of her father. Perhaps you andI'll play chess at night."

  "At night you will go to bed, Crossjay."

  "Not if I have Sir Willoughby to catch hold of. He says I'm anauthority on birds' eggs. I can manage rabbits and poultry. Isn't afarmer a happy man? But he doesn't marry ladies. A cavalry officer hasthe best chance."

  "But you are going to be a naval officer."

  "I don't know. It's not positive. I shall bring my two dormice, andmake them perform gymnastics on the dinnertable. They're such dearlittle things. Naval officers are not like Sir Willoughby."

  "No, they are not," said Clara, "they give their lives to theircountry."

  "And then they're dead," said Crossjay.

  Clara wished Sir Willoughby were confronting her: she could havespoken.

  She asked the boy where Mr. Whitford was. Crossjay pointed verysecretly in the direction of the double-blossom wild-cherry. Comingwithin gaze of the stem, she beheld Vernon stretched at length,reading, she supposed; asleep, she discovered: his finger in the leavesof a book; and what book? She had a curiosity to know the title of thebook he would read beneath these boughs, and grasping Crossjay's handfast she craned her neck, as one timorous of a fall in peeping overchasms, for a glimpse of the page; but immediately, and still with abent head, she turned her face to where the load of virginal blossom,whiter than summer-cloud on the sky, showered and drooped and clusteredso thick as to claim colour and seem, like higher Alpine snows innoon-sunlight, a flush of white. From deep to deeper heavens of white,her eyes perched and soared. Wonder lived in her. Happiness in thebeauty of the tree pressed to supplant it, and was more mortal andnarrower. Reflection came, contracting her vision and weighing her toearth. Her reflection was: "He must be good who loves to be and sleepbeneath the branches of this tree!" She would rather have clung to herfirst impression: wonder so divine, so unbounded, was like soaring intohomes of angel-crowded space, sweeping through folded and on to foldedwhite fountain-bow of wings, in innumerable columns; but the thought ofit was no recovery of it; she might as well have striven to be a child.The sensation of happiness promised to be less short-lived in memory,and would have been had not her present disease of the longing forhappiness ravaged every corner of it for the secret of its existence.The reflection took root. "He must be good . . . !" That reflectionvowed to endure. Poor by comparison with what it displaced, itpresented itself to her as conferring something on him, and she wouldnot have had it absent though it robbed her.

  She looked down. Vernon was dreamily looking up.

  She plucked Crossjay hurriedly away, whispering that he had better notwake Mr. Whitford, and then she proposed to reverse their previouschase, and she be the hound and he the hare. Crossjay fetched amagnificent start. On his glancing behind he saw Miss Middleton walkinglistlessly, with a hand at her side.

  "There's a regular girl!" said he in some disgust; for his theory was,that girls always have something the matter with them to spoil a game.