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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4461 ***
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1892
+
+
+
+BOOK 1.
+
+
+The word 'fantastical' is accentuated in our tongue to so scornful an
+utterance that the constant good service it does would make it seem an
+appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matter
+distasteful to those expository pens.  Upon examination, claimants to the
+epithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters,
+Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost.  Wherever she can
+get to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically.  As for
+that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew and the angry
+captain, called Human Nature, 'fantastical' fits it no less completely
+than a continental baby's skull-cap the stormy infant.
+
+Our sympathies, one may fancy, will be broader, our critical acumen
+shrewder, if we at once accept the thing as a part of us and worthy of
+study.
+
+The pair of tragic comedians of whom there will be question pass under
+this word as under their banner and motto.  Their acts are incredible:
+they drank sunlight and drove their bark in a manner to eclipse
+historical couples upon our planet.  Yet they do belong to history,
+they breathed the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter of them
+is written in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, was
+of a mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modern
+brain which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can create
+them, to set it spinning.
+
+A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil.  He was the
+leader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, well
+hated by his enemies, respected by the intellectual chiefs of his time,
+in the pride of his manhood and his labours when he fell.  And why this
+man should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved him
+have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have to
+study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both.  To ask if it
+was love is useless.  Love may be celestial fire before it enters into
+the systems of mortals.  It will then take the character of its place of
+abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
+passion.  Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes
+of one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature out
+of its fashionable front rank?  The bare railway-line of their story
+tells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related.  Nor is
+there anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents
+could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the
+comic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue.  They are
+real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world
+by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine
+events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read
+us no such furrowing lesson in life.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the
+pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her
+web is for the devouring lion.  At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was
+dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in her
+seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a lively
+fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and
+style.  She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native
+land.  Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime counting
+among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable, though
+sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known as
+aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the contrary
+very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for the imbibing
+of copious draughts of sunlight.  The young lady of charming countenance
+and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her choice to
+be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing instantly,
+after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of pastry.
+These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little so is
+the starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one object of the
+worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his for a nod.
+But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive to taste to
+try for yourself.  Men (the jury of householders empanelled to deliver
+verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that.  And as it
+happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your taste will
+frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: the young
+coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to escape
+drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simple blocks or limp
+festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a knowledge of her
+sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality.  The more
+imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days, the
+more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.
+
+Clotilde's younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in
+the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites.  She
+was not under a French mother's rigid supervision.  In France the mother
+resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of that
+unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory.  Vigilant
+foresight is not so much practised where the world is less accurately
+comprehended.  Young people of Clotilde's upper world everywhere, and the
+young women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from what
+they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, that
+the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this world's elect,
+getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return for a little
+dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin, but
+they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have had the
+world.  The world is the golden apple.  Thirst for it is common during
+youth: and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown of
+wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love from
+the calculations on behalf of her girl.
+
+Say (for Diana's mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that
+Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar trained
+in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the Hungarian Baths
+on the borders of the Styrian highlands.  The scene at all events is
+pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating threads.  A
+stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang from his
+carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the arch of the
+chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a while.  The
+music had seized him.  He snatched bow and fiddle from one of the ring,
+and with a few strokes kindled their faces.  Then seating himself, on a
+bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched the strings and flung
+up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneous notes when Clotilde
+and her cavalier, and other couples of the party, came nigh; for he was
+on the tide of the song, warm in it, and loved it too well to suffer
+intruders to break the flow, or to think of them.  They were close by
+when the last of it rattled (it was a popular song of a fiery tribe) to
+its finish: He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled and jumped back to his
+carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy, lank-locked, leather-
+hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes and skin of burnished walnut
+made him look an offshoot, but one of the celestial branch.
+
+He was in her father's reception-room when she reached home: he was
+paying a visit of ceremony on behalf of his family to General von
+Rudiger; which helped her to remember that he had been expected, and also
+that his favourite colours were known to be white and scarlet.  In those
+very colours, strange to tell, Clotilde was dressed; Prince Marko had
+recognized her by miraculous divination, he assured her he could have
+staked his life on the guess as he bowed to her.  Adieu to Count
+Constantine.  Fate had interposed the prince opportunely, we have to
+suppose, for she received a strong impression of his coming straight from
+her invisible guardian; and the stroke was consequently trenchant which
+sent the conquering Tartar raving of her fickleness.  She struck, like
+fate, one blow.  She discovered that the prince, in addition to his
+beauty and sweet manners and gift of song, was good; she fell in love
+with goodness, whereof Count Constantine was not an example: so she set
+her face another way, soon discovering that there may be fragility in
+goodness.  And now first her imagination conceived the hero who was to
+subdue her.  Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a docile
+infant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?--the hero who would
+wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound?  Siegfried could not be
+dreamed in him, or a Siegfried's baby son-in-arms.  She caught a glorious
+image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and it informed her that
+she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a match for a famous
+conqueror, was a woman of decisive and independent, perhaps unexampled,
+force of character.  Her idea of a spiritual superiority that could soar
+over those two men, the bad and the good--the bad because of his
+vileness, the good because of his frailness--whispered to her of
+deserving, possibly of attracting, the best of men: the best, that is, in
+the woman's view of us--the strongest, the great eagle of men, lord of
+earth and air.
+
+One who will dominate me, she thought.
+
+Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm has brought
+her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, she persuades
+the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long as her
+pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, her
+parents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid's
+presumption, which is ready to take root in any shadow of subserviency.
+Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service,
+disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his
+vehement irritability when roused.  Her mother had been one of the
+beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through the
+conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall.  Her
+brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead.  The temper
+of the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state of
+politics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders know
+that they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confused by
+the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliar to
+history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded state
+paralyzes his wrath.
+
+Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, and it
+was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious
+behaviour.  If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was
+because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs and
+tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids the
+bold advance yet farther into bogland.  Becoming the renowned original of
+her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France,
+she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage to
+our loftiest souls.  Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor supplied
+Prince Marko's title for her, was a pet, not a companion.  She to him was
+what she sought for in another.  As much as she pitied herself for not
+lighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met the woman,
+so that her tenderness for both inspired many signs of warm affection,
+not very unlike the thing it moaned secretly the not being.  For she
+could not but distinguish a more poignant sorrow in the seeing of the
+object we yearn to vainly than in vainly yearning to one unseen.
+Dressed, to delight him, in Prince Marko's colours, the care she bestowed
+on her dressing was for the one absent, the shrouded comer: so she
+pleased the prince to be pleasing to her soul's lord, and this, owing to
+an appearance of satisfactory deception that it bore, led to her thinking
+guiltily.  We may ask it: an eagle is expected, and how is he to declare
+his eagleship save by breaking through our mean conventional systems,
+tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teeth of vulgar ordinances?
+Clotilde's imagination drew on her reading for the knots it tied and
+untied, and its ideas of grandeur.  Her reading was an interfusion of
+philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded.  She tried hard,
+but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero's exhibition of
+flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded woman.  Further
+thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despised the complication,
+yet without perceiving how else he was to manifest himself legitimately
+in a dull modern world.  The rescuing her from death would be a poor
+imitation of worn-out heroes.  His publication of a trumpeting book fell
+appallingly flat in her survey.  Deeds of gallantry done as an officer in
+war (defending his country too) distinguished the soldier, but failed to
+add the eagle feather to the man.  She had a mind of considerable soaring
+scope, and eclectic: it analyzed a Napoleon, and declined the position of
+his empress.  The man must be a gentleman.  Poets, princes, warriors,
+potentates, marched before her speculative fancy unselected.
+
+So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not without
+exemplars in the sex.  Young women have been known to turn from us
+altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so fleshly-bulgy
+have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the right one of
+us to wear becomingly.  But the busy great world was round Clotilde while
+she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh ideas of the
+hammer and the block, and that is a world of much solicitation to induce
+a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image.  Supposing, when she
+has accomplished it, that men justify her choice, the living will retain
+the colours of the ideal.  We have it on record that he may seem an
+eagle.
+
+'You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,' a gentleman of her country
+said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day.  He said
+it musingly.
+
+He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic.  She
+had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing
+universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an envious
+eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the choicest of
+all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she dimpled her
+cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her before.  She
+smiled musingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+'Who is the man they call Alvan?'  She put the question at the first
+opportunity to an aunt of hers.
+
+Up went five-fingered hands.  This violent natural sign of horror was
+comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.
+
+'Alvan!  My dear Clotilde!  What on earth can you want to know about a
+creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a
+Jew!'
+
+Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was.  'Is he clever?'
+
+'He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the
+Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what he
+is.'
+
+'But is he clever?'
+
+'Able as Satan himself, they say.  He is a really dangerous, bad man.
+You could not have been curious about a worse one.'
+
+'Politically, you mean.'
+
+'Of course I do.'
+
+The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that
+station.
+
+The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon him.
+Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembled Alvan's.  He
+being that furious creature, she thought of herself at her wildest, which
+was in her estimation her best; and consequently, she being by no means a
+furious creature, though very original, she could not meditate on him
+without softening the outlines given him by report; all because of the
+likeness between them; and, therefore, as she had knowingly been taken
+for furious by very foolish people, she settled it that Alvan was also a
+victim of the prejudices he scorned.  It had pleased her at times to
+scorn our prejudices and feel the tremendous weight she brought on
+herself by the indulgence.  She drew on her recollections of the Satanic
+in her bosom when so situated, and never having admired herself more
+ardently than when wearing that aspect, she would have admired the man
+who had won the frightful title in public, except for one thing--he was a
+Jew.
+
+The Jew was to Clotilde as flesh of swine to the Jew.  Her parents had
+the same abhorrence of Jewry.  One of the favourite similes of the family
+for whatsoever grunted in grossness, wriggled with meanness, was Jew: and
+it was noteworthy from the fact that a streak of the blood was in the
+veins of the latest generation and might have been traced on the maternal
+side.
+
+Now a meanness that clothes itself in the Satanic to terrify cowards is
+the vilest form of impudence venturing at insolence; and an insolent
+impudence with Jew features, the Jew nose and lips, is past endurance
+repulsive.  She dismissed her contemplation of Alvan.  Luckily for the
+gentleman who had compared her to the Jew politician, she did not meet
+him again in Italy.
+
+She had meanwhile formed an idea of the Alvanesque in dialogue; she
+summoned her forces to take aim at it, without becoming anything Jewish,
+still remaining clean and Christian; and by her astonishing practice of
+the art she could at any time blow up a company--scatter mature and
+seasoned dames, as had they been balloons on a wind, ay, and give our
+stout sex a shaking.
+
+Clotilde rejected another aspirant proposed by her parents, and falling
+into disgrace at home, she went to live for some months with an ancient
+lady who was her close relative residing in the capital city where the
+brain of her race is located.  There it occurred that a dashing officer
+of social besides military rank, dancing with her at a ball, said, for a
+comment on certain boldly independent remarks she had been making: 'I see
+you know Alvan.'
+
+Alvan once more.
+
+'Indeed I do not,' she said, for she was addressing an officer high above
+Alvan in social rank; and she shrugged, implying that she was almost past
+contradiction of the charge.
+
+'Surely you must,' said he; 'where is the lady who could talk and think
+as you do without knowing Alvan and sharing his views!'
+
+Clotilde was both startled and nettled.
+
+'But I do not know him at all; I have never met him, never seen him.
+I am unlikely to meet the kind of person,' she protested; and she was
+amazed yet secretly rejoiced on hearing him, a noble of her own circle,
+and a dashing officer, rejoin: 'Come, come, let us be honest.  That is
+all very well for the little midges floating round us to say of Alvan,
+but we two can clasp hands and avow proudly that we both know and love
+the man.'
+
+'Were it true, I would own it at once, but I repeat, that he is a total
+stranger to me,' she said, seeing the Jew under quite a different
+illumination.
+
+'Actually?'
+
+'In honour.'
+
+'You have never met, never seen him, never read any of his writings?'
+
+'Never.  I have heard his name, that is all.'
+
+'Then,' the officer's voice was earnest, 'I pity him, and you no less,
+while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another.  Those
+ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan's: I have heard
+him use them.  He has just the same original views of society and history
+as yours; they're identical; your features are not unlike . . . you talk
+alike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his.  You look incredulous?
+You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said "Plutarch's Pompeius," and
+more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not
+know and have never listened to Alvan--you said that Pompeius appeared to
+have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the greater
+sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a pretty woman's
+"bite."  Come, now--you must believe me: at a supper at Alvan's table the
+other night, the talk happened to be of a modern Caesar, which led to the
+real one, and from him to "Plutarch's Pompeius," as Alvan called him; and
+then he said of him what you have just said, absolutely the same down to
+the allusion to the bite.  I assure you.  And you have numbers of little
+phrases in common: you are partners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those
+who cannot fly: that is Alvan's.  I could multiply them if I could
+remember; they struck me as you spoke.'
+
+'I must be a shameless plagiarist,' said Clotilde.
+
+'Or he,' said Count Kollin.
+
+It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in the
+air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics and
+pervading literature:  which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch and give
+out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was, original to
+them.  They were not members of a country where literature is confined to
+its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field (part lawn,
+part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in sympathetic action
+with thinkers and literary artists.  Their saying in common, 'Plutarch's
+Pompeius,' may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on
+the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia.  The dainty
+savageness in the 'bite' Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a
+similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with others.  And in regard
+to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she had often wished that
+Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking of him) had been endowed
+with the beauty of his rival: one or two of Plutarch's touches upon the
+earlier history of Pompeius had netted her fancy, faintly (your
+generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung her blood; she liked the
+man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, she would have preferred
+him femininely.  His name was not written Pompey to her, as in English,
+to sound absurd: it was a note of grandeur befitting great and lamentable
+fortunes, which the young lady declined to share solely because of her
+attraction to the victor, her compulsion to render unto the victor the
+sunflower's homage.  She rendered it as a slave: the splendid man beloved
+to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was her natural choice.
+
+Alvan could not be even a Caesar in person, he was a Jew.  Still a Jew
+of whom Count Kollin spoke so warmly must be exceptional, and of the
+exceptional she dreamed.  He might have the head of a Caesar.  She
+imagined a huge head, the cauldron of a boiling brain, anything but
+bright to the eye, like a pot always on the fire, black, greasy,
+encrusted, unkempt: the head of a malicious tremendous dwarf.  Her hungry
+inquiries in a city where Alvan was well known, brought her full
+information of one who enjoyed a highly convivial reputation besides the
+influence of his political leadership; but no description of his aspect
+accompanied it, for where he was nightly to be met somewhere about the
+city, none thought of describing him, and she did not push that question
+because she had sketched him for herself, and rather wished, the more she
+heard of his genius, to keep him repulsive.  It appeared that his bravery
+was as well proved as his genius, and a brilliant instance of it had been
+given in the city not long since.  He had her ideas, and he won
+multitudes with them: he was a talker, a writer, and an orator; and he
+was learned, while she could not pretend either to learning or to a flow
+of rhetoric.  She could prattle deliciously, at times pointedly, relying
+on her intuition to tell her more than we get from books, and on her
+sweet impudence for a richer original strain.  She began to appreciate
+now a reputation for profound acquirements.  Learned professors of
+jurisprudence and history were as enthusiastic for Alvan in their way as
+Count Kollin.  She heard things related of Alvan by the underbreath.
+That circle below her own, the literary and artistic, idolized him; his
+talk, his classic breakfasts and suppers, his undisguised ambition, his
+indomitable energy, his dauntlessness and sway over her sex, were
+subjects of eulogy all round her; and she heard of an enamoured baroness.
+No one blamed Alvan.  He had shown his chivalrous valour in defending
+her.  The baroness was not a young woman, and she was a hardbound Blue.
+She had been the first to discover the prodigy, and had pruned,
+corrected, and published him; he was one of her political works,
+promising to be the most successful.  An old affair apparently; but the
+association of a woman's name with Alvan's, albeit the name of a veteran,
+roused the girl's curiosity, leading her to think his mental and magnetic
+powers must be of the very highest, considering his physical
+repulsiveness, for a woman of rank to yield him such extreme devotion.
+She commissioned her princely serving-man, who had followed and was never
+far away from her, to obtain precise intelligence of this notorious
+Alvan.
+
+Prince Marko did what he could to please her; he knew something of the
+rumours about Alvan and the baroness.  But why should his lady trouble
+herself for particulars of such people, whom it could scarcely be
+supposed she would meet by accident?  He asked her this.  Clotilde said
+it was common curiosity.  She read him a short lecture on the dismal
+narrowness of their upper world; and on the advantage of taking an
+interest in the world below them and more enlightened; a world where
+ideas were current and speech was wine.  The prince nodded; if she had
+these opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he shared
+them, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of time
+that he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one far
+removed from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link; he was
+capable of thinking all that came to him from her a blessing--shocks,
+wounds and disruptions.  He did not add largely to her stock of items,
+nor did he fetch new colours.  The telegraph wire was his model of style.
+He was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus, standing for sign of
+the beauty and vacuity of their world: and how dismally narrow that world
+was, she felt with renewed astonishment at every dive out of her gold-
+fish pool into the world of tides below; so that she was ready to scorn
+the cultivation of the graces, and had, when not submitting to the smell,
+fanciful fits of a liking for tobacco smoke--the familiar incense of
+those homes where speech was wine.
+
+At last she fell to the asking of herself whether, in the same city with
+him, often among his friends, hearing his latest intimate remarks--things
+homely redolent of him as hot bread of the oven--she was ever to meet
+this man upon whom her thoughts were bent to the eclipse of all others.
+She desired to meet him for comparison's sake, and to criticize a popular
+hero.  It was inconceivable that any one popular could approach her
+standard, but she was curious; flame played about him; she had some
+expectation of easing a spiteful sentiment created by the recent
+subjection of her thoughts to the prodigious little Jew; and some feeling
+of closer pity for Prince Marko she had, which urged her to be rid of her
+delusion as to the existence of a wonder-working man on our earth, that
+she might be sympathetically kind to the prince, perhaps compliant, and
+so please her parents, be good and dull, and please everybody, and adieu
+to dreams, good night, and so to sleep with the beasts!  .  .  .
+
+Calling one afternoon on a new acquaintance of the flat table-land she
+liked tripping down to from her heights, Clotilde found the lady in
+supreme toilette, glowing, bubbling: 'Such a breakfast, my dear!' The
+costly profusion, the anecdotes, the wit, the fun, the copious draughts
+of the choicest of life--was there ever anything to match it?  Never in
+that lady's recollection, or her husband's either, she exclaimed.  And
+where was the breakfast?  Why, at Alvan's, to be sure; where else could
+such a breakfast be?
+
+'And you know Alvan!' cried Clotilde, catching excitement from the lady's
+flush.
+
+'Alvan is one of my husband's closest friends'
+
+Clotilde put on the playful frenzy; she made show of wringing her hands:
+'Oh!  happy you!  you know Alvan?  And everybody is to know him except
+me? why? I proclaim it unjust.  Because I am unmarried?  I'll take a
+husband to-morrow morning to be entitled to meet Alvan in the evening.'
+
+The playful frenzy is accepted in its exact innocent signification of
+'this is my pretty wilful will and way,' and the lady responded to it
+cordially; for it is pleasant to have some one to show, and pleasant to
+assist some one eager to see: besides, many had petitioned her for a
+sight of Alvan; she was used to the request.
+
+'You're not obliged to wait for to-morrow,' she said.  'Come to one of
+our gatherings to-night.  Alvan will be here.'
+
+'You invite me?'
+
+'Distinctly.  Pray, come.  He is sure to be here.  We have his promise,
+and Alvan never fails.  Was it not Frau v. Crestow who did us the favour
+of our introduction?  She will bring you.'
+
+The Frau v. Crestow was a cousin of Clotilde's by marriage, sentimental,
+but strict in her reading of the proprieties.  She saw nothing wrong in
+undertaking to conduct Clotilde to one of those famous gatherings of the
+finer souls of the city and the race; and her husband agreed to join them
+after the sitting of the Chamber upon a military-budget vote.  The whole
+plan was nicely arranged and went well.  Clotilde dressed carefully,
+letting her gold-locks cloud her fine forehead carelessly, with finishing
+touches to the negligence, for she might be challenged to take part in
+disputations on serious themes, and a handsome young woman who has to
+sustain an argument against a man does wisely when she forearms her
+beauties for a reserve, to carry out flanking movements if required.  The
+object is to beat him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Her hostess met her at the entrance of the rooms, murmuring that Alvan
+was present, and was there: a direction of a nod that any quick-witted
+damsel must pretend to think sufficient, so Clotilde slipped from her
+companion and gazed into the recess of a doorless inner room, where three
+gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue vapours of
+tobacco.  They were indistinct; she could see that one of them was of
+good stature.  One she knew; he was the master of the house, mildly
+Jewish.  The third was distressingly branded with the slum and gutter
+signs of the Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head could not have done
+it more effectively.  The vindictive caricatures of the God Pan, executed
+by priests of the later religion burning to hunt him out of worship in
+the semblance of the hairy, hoofy, snouty Evil One, were not more
+loathsome.  She sank on a sofa.  That the man?  Oh! Jew, and fifty times
+over Jew! nothing but Jew!
+
+The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably
+magnificent was the first whom she had noticed.
+
+She sat at her lamb's-wool work in the little ivory frame, feeding on the
+contrast.  This man's face was the born orator's, with the light-giving
+eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for speechfulness
+and enterprise, of Cicero's rival in the forum before he took the
+headship of armies and marched to empire.
+
+The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features
+and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness.  Alas, he could
+not be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build!  One could
+vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election.  So vigorously
+rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as he
+talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheet
+lightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing
+outpour.  Looking on him was listening.  Yes, the looking on him
+sufficed.  Here was an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men,
+that drained an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reduced
+him to the state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in the
+contemplation of a girl suddenly plunged on the deeps of her womanhood.
+She shrank to smaller and smaller as she looked.
+
+Be sure that she knew who he was.  No, says she.  But she knew.  It
+terrified her soul to think he was Alvan.  She feared scarcely less that
+it might not be he.  Between these dreads of doubt and belief she played
+at cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse, teased
+herself, and gloated.  It is he! not he! he! not he! most certainly!
+impossible!--And then it ran: If he, oh me!  If another, woe me!  For
+she had come to see Alvan.  Alvan and she shared ideas.  They talked
+marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin: and supposing he was
+not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment.  The supposition that he
+was, threatened her with instant and life-long bondage.
+
+Then again, could that face be the face of a Jew?  She feasted.  It was a
+noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes.  Perchance a Jew of the
+Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish.  There is the noble Jew as
+well as the bestial Gentile.  There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a
+majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect.  He may well think his race
+favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still.  The noble Jew is
+grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery
+eastern blood, and in his manhood he is--ay, what you see there! a figure
+of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to inspirit and
+be tempered by the intellect.
+
+She was therefore prepared all the while for the surprise of learning
+that the gentleman so unlike a Jew was Alvan; and she was prepared to
+express her recordation of the circumstance in her diary with phrases of
+very eminent surprise.  Necessarily it would be the greatest of
+surprises.
+
+The three, this man and his two of the tribe, upon whom Clotilde's
+attention centred, with a comparison in her mind too sacred to be other
+than profane (comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered),
+dropped to the cushions of the double-seated sofa, by one side of which
+she cowered over her wool-work, willing to dwindle to a pin's head if her
+insignificance might enable her to hear the words of the speaker.  He
+pursued his talk: there was little danger of not hearing him.  There was
+only the danger of feeling too deeply the spell of his voice.  His voice
+had the mellow fulness of the clarionet.  But for the subject, she could
+have fancied a noontide piping of great Pan by the sedges.  She had never
+heard a continuous monologue so musical, so varied in music, amply
+flowing, vivacious, interwovenly the brook, the stream, the torrent: a
+perfect natural orchestra in a single instrument.  He had notes less
+pastorally imageable, notes that fired the blood, with the ranging of his
+theme.  The subject became clearer to her subjugated wits, until the
+mental vivacity he roused on certain impetuous phrases of assertion
+caused her pride to waken up and rebel as she took a glance at herself,
+remembering that she likewise was a thinker, deemed in her society an
+original thinker, an intrepid thinker and talker, not so very much
+beneath this man in audacity of brain, it might be.  He kindled her thus,
+and the close-shut but expanded and knew the fretting desire to breathe
+out the secret within it, and be appreciated in turn.
+
+The young flower of her sex burned to speak, to deliver an opinion.  She
+was unaccustomed to yield a fascinated ear.  She was accustomed rather to
+dictate and be the victorious performer, and though now she was not
+anxious to occupy the pulpit--being too strictly bred to wish for a post
+publicly in any of the rostra--and meant still less to dispossess the
+present speaker of the place he filled so well, she yearned to join him:
+and as that could not be done by a stranger approving, she panted to
+dissent.  A young lady cannot so well say to an unknown gentleman: 'You
+have spoken truly, sir,' as, 'That is false!' for to speak in the former
+case would be gratuitous, and in the latter she is excused by the moral
+warmth provoking her.  Further, dissent rings out finely, and approval is
+a feeble murmur--a poor introduction of oneself.  Her moral warmth was
+ready and waiting for the instigating subject, but of course she was
+unconscious of the goad within.  Excitement wafted her out of herself, as
+we say, or out of the conventional vessel into the waves of her troubled
+nature.  He had not yet given her an opportunity for dissenting; she was
+compelled to agree, dragged at his chariot-wheels in headlong agreement.
+
+His theme was Action; the political advantages of Action; and he
+illustrated his view with historical examples, to the credit of the
+French, the temporary discredit of the German and English races, who tend
+to compromise instead.  Of the English he spoke as of a power extinct, a
+people 'gone to fat,' who have gained their end in a hoard of gold and
+shut the door upon bandit ideas.  Action means life to the soul as to the
+body.  Compromise is virtual death: it is the pact between cowardice and
+comfort under the title of expediency.  So do we gather dead matter about
+us.  So are we gradually self-stifled, corrupt.  The war with evil in
+every form must be incessant; we cannot have peace.  Let then our joy be
+in war: in uncompromising Action, which need not be the less a sagacious
+conduct of the war .  .  .  .  Action energizes men's brains, generates
+grander capacities, provokes greatness of soul between enemies, and is
+the guarantee of positive conquest for the benefit of our species.  To
+doubt that, is to doubt of good being to be had for the seeking.  He drew
+pictures of the healthy Rome when turbulent, the doomed quiescent.  Rome
+struggling grasped the world.  Rome stagnant invited Goth and Vandal.  So
+forth: alliterative antitheses of the accustomed pamphleteer.  At last
+her chance arrived.
+
+His opposition sketch of Inaction was refreshed by an analysis of the
+character of Hamlet.  Then he reverted to Hamlet's promising youth.
+How brilliantly endowed was the Prince of Denmark in the beginning!
+
+'Mad from the first!' cried Clotilde.
+
+She produced an effect not unlike that of a sudden crack of thunder.  The
+three made chorus in a noise of boots on the floor.
+
+Her hero faced about and stood up, looking at her fulgently.  Their eyes
+engaged without wavering on either side.  Brave eyes they seemed, each
+pair of them, for his were fastened on a comely girl, and she had strung
+herself to her gallantest to meet the crisis.
+
+His friends quitted him at a motion of the elbows.  He knelt on the sofa,
+leaning across it, with clasped hands.
+
+'You are she!--So, then, is a contradiction of me to be the
+commencement?'
+
+'After the apparition of Hamlet's father the prince was mad,' said
+Clotilde hurriedly, and she gazed for her hostess, a paroxysm of alarm
+succeeding that of her boldness.
+
+'Why should we two wait to be introduced?' said he.  'We know one
+another.  I am Alvan.  You are she of whom I heard from Kollin: who else?
+Lucretia the gold-haired; the gold-crested serpent, wise as her sire;
+Aurora breaking the clouds; in short, Clotilde!'
+
+Her heart exulted to hear him speak her name.  She laughed with a radiant
+face.  His being Alvan, and his knowing her and speaking her name, all
+was like the happy reading of a riddle.  He came round to her, bowing,
+and his hand out.  She gave hers: she could have said, if asked, 'For
+good!'  And it looked as though she had given it for good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+'Hamlet in due season,' said he, as they sat together.  'I shall convince
+you.'
+
+She shook her head.
+
+'Yes, yes, an opinion formed by a woman is inflexible; I know that: the
+fact is not half so stubborn.  But at present there are two more
+important actors: we are not at Elsinore.  You are aware that I hoped to
+meet you?'
+
+'Is there a periodical advertisement of your hopes?--or do they come to
+us by intuition?'
+
+'Kollin was right!--the ways of the serpent will be serpentine.  I knew
+we must meet.  It is no true day so long as the goddess of the morning
+and the sun-god are kept asunder.  I speak of myself, by what I have felt
+since I heard of you.'
+
+'You are sure of your divinity?'
+
+'Through my belief in yours!'
+
+They bowed smiling at the courtly exchanges.
+
+'And tell me,' said he, 'as to meeting me .  .  . ?'
+
+She replied: 'When we are so like the rest of the world we may confess
+our weakness.'
+
+'Unlike! for the world and I meet and part: not we two.'
+
+Clotilde attempted an answer: it would not come.  She tried to be
+revolted by his lording tone, and found it strangely inoffensive.  His
+lording presence and the smile that was like a waving feather on it
+compelled her so strongly to submit to hear, as to put her in danger of
+appearing to embrace this man's rapid advances.
+
+She said: 'I first heed of you at Capri.'
+
+'And I was at Capri seven days after you had left.'
+
+'You knew my name then?'
+
+'Be not too curious with necromancers.  Here is the date--March 15th.
+You departed on the 8th.'
+
+'I think I did.  That is a year from now.'
+
+'Then we missed: now we meet.  It is a year lost.  A year is a great age!
+Reflect on it and what you owe me.  How I wished for a comrade at Capri!
+Not a "young lady," and certainly no man.  The understanding Feminine,
+was my desire--a different thing from the feminine understanding,
+usually.  I wanted my comrade young and fair, necessarily of your sex,
+but with heart and brain: an insane request, I fancied, until I heard
+that you were the person I wanted.  In default of you I paraded the
+island with Tiberius, who is my favourite tyrant.  We took the initiative
+against the patricians, at my suggestion, and the Annals were written by
+a plebeian demagogue, instead of by one of that party, whose account of
+my extinction by command of the emperor was pathetic.  He apologized in
+turn for my imperial master and me, saying truly, that the
+misunderstanding between us was past cement: for each of us loved the man
+but hated his office; and as the man is always more in his office than he
+is in himself, clearly it was the lesser portion of our friend that each
+of us loved.  So, I, as the weaker, had to perish, as he would have done
+had I been the stronger; I admitted it, and sent my emperor my respectful
+adieux, with directions for the avoiding of assassins.  Mademoiselle, by
+delaying your departure seven days you would have saved me from death.
+You see, the official is the artificial man, and I ought to have known
+there is no natural man left in us to weigh against the artificial.  I
+counted on the emperor's personal affection, forgetting that princes
+cannot be our friends.'
+
+'You died bravely?'
+
+Clotilde entered into the extravagance with a happy simulation of zest.
+
+'Simply, we will say.  My time had come, and I took no sturdy pose, but
+let the life-stream run its course for a less confined embankment.
+Sapphire sea, sapphire sky: one believes in life there, thrills with it,
+when life is ebbing: ay, as warmly as when life is at the flow in our
+sick and shrivelled North--the climate for dried fish!  Verily the second
+death of hearing that a gold-haired Lucretia had been on the island seven
+days earlier, was harder to bear.  Tell me frankly--the music in Italy?'
+
+'Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous.'
+
+'Excellent!' his eyes flashed delightedly.  'O comrade of comrades!
+that year lost to me will count heavily as I learn to value those I have
+gained.  Yes, brainless!  There, in music, we beat them, as politically
+France beats us.  No life without brain!  The brainless in Art and in
+Statecraft are nothing but a little more obstructive than the dead.  It
+is less easy to cut a way through them.  But it must be done, or the
+Philistine will be as the locust in his increase, and devour the green
+blades of the earth.  You have been trained to shudder at the demagogue?'
+
+'I do not shudder,' said Clotilde.
+
+'A diamond from the lapidary!--Your sentences have many facets.  Well,
+you are conversing with a demagogue, an avowed one: a demagogue and a
+Jew.  You take it as a matter of course: you should exhibit some
+sparkling incredulity.  The Christian is like the politician in supposing
+the original obverse of him everlastingly the same, after the pattern of
+the monster he was originally taught to hate.  But the Jew has been a
+little christianized, and we have a little bejewed the Christian.  So
+with demagogues: as we see the conservative crumbling, we grow
+conservatived.  Try to think individually upon what you have to learn
+collectively--that is your task.  You are of the few who will be equal to
+it.  We are not men of blood, believe me.  I am not.  For example, I
+detest and I decline the duel.  I have done it, and proved myself a man
+of metal notwithstanding.  To say nothing of the inhumanity, the
+senselessness of duelling revolts me.  'Tis a folly, so your nobles
+practise it, and your royal wiseacre sanctions.  No blood for me: and yet
+I tell you that whatever opposes me, I will sweep away.  How?  With the
+brain.  If we descend to poor brute strength or brutal craft, it is from
+failing in the brain: we quit the leadership of our forces, and the
+descent is the beast's confession.  Do I say how?  Perhaps by your aid.--
+You do not start and cry: "Mine!"  That is well.  I have not much esteem
+for non-professional actresses.  They are numerous and not entertaining.
+--You leave it to me to talk.'
+
+'Could I do better?'
+
+'You listen sweetly.'
+
+'It is because I like to hear.'
+
+'You have the pearly little ear of a shell on the sand.'
+
+'With the great sea sounding near it!'
+
+Alvan drew closer to her.
+
+'I look into your eyes and perceive that one may listen to you and speak
+to you.  Heart to heart, then!  Yes, a sea to lull you, a sea to win you
+--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be.  My prize is found!
+The good friend who did the part of Iris for us came bounding to me: "I
+have discovered the wife for you, Alvan."  I had previously heard of her
+from another as having touched the islet of Capri.  "But," said Kollin,
+"she is a gold-crested serpent--slippery!"  Is she?  That only tells me
+of a little more to be mastered.  I feel my future now.  Hitherto it has
+been a land without sunlight.  Do you know how the look of sunlight on a
+land calms one?  It signifies to the eye possession and repose, the end
+gained--not the end to labour, just heaven!  but peace to the heart's
+craving, which is the renewal of strength for work, the fresh dip in the
+waters of life.  Conjure up your vision of Italy.  Remember the meaning
+of Italian light and colour: the clearness, the luminous fulness, the
+thoughtful shadows.  Mountain and wooded headland are solid, deep to the
+eye, spirit-speaking to the mind.  They throb.  You carve shapes of Gods
+out of that sky, the sea, those peaks.  They live with you.  How they
+satiate the vacant soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from its
+prickly nest!--Well, and you are my sunlighted land.  And you will have
+to be fought for.  And I see not the less repose in the prospect!  Part
+of you may be shifty-sand.  The sands are famous for their golden
+shining--as you shine.  Well, then, we must make the quicksands concrete.
+I have a perfect faith in you, and in the winning of you.  Clearly you
+will have to be fought for.  I should imagine it a tough battle to come.
+But as I doubt neither you nor myself, I see beyond it.--We use phrases
+in common, and aphorisms, it appears.  Why?  but that our minds act in
+unison.  What if I were to make a comparison of you with Paris?--the city
+of Paris, Lutetia.'
+
+'Could you make it good?' said Clotilde.
+
+He laughed and postponed it for a series of skimming discussions, like
+swallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of the
+stream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies,
+leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment that
+must be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mind
+from the touchings and probings of her character on these flights.
+
+She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom the
+appearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful and
+reassuring; and she liked to be discussed, to be compared to anything,
+for the sake of being the subject, so as to be sure it was she that
+listened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sure it
+was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that went
+speeding in this magical rapid round which slung her more and more out of
+her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, denied her
+the right to faint and call upon the world for aid, and catch at it,
+though it was close by and at a signal would stop the terrible circling.
+The world was close by and had begun to stare.  She half apprehended that
+fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible.  In the presence
+of the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away with
+very little creaking of its timbers on the flood.  When we feel its power
+we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space,
+indifferent to nakedness.  And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage
+asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain
+some day to feel.  Had not she trimmed herself?--so much that she had won
+fame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, and
+perilously, for courage.  She had trimmed herself and Alvan too--herself
+to meet it, and Alvan to be it.  Her famous originality was a trumpet
+blown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudly
+his esteem for the quality--in a fair young woman of good breeding.  Each
+had evoked the other.  Their common anticipations differed in this, that
+he had expected comeliness, she the reverse--an Esau of the cities; and
+seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden
+satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on
+its divinest whirlwind.
+
+They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before
+captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractive
+comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear,
+and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple
+of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and the
+extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was
+doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in his
+looks on her.  Her woman's eyes had no guard they had scarcely
+speculation.  She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward,
+under haphazard flashes.  The sight of her hand disengaged told her it
+had been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were
+men and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the
+words she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she
+had crossed.  And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press
+forward to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness
+and at least indicate her force of character.  The splendour of the man
+quite extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she
+set fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her
+fair face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it, some
+truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely womanly,
+a poor charm of her sex.  The intellectual endowment was rarer: still
+rarer the moral audacity.  O, to match this man's embracing
+discursiveness!  his ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound
+he brought out of all subjects!  He struck, and they rang.  There was a
+bell in everything for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance was
+on all sides of the universe; no dead stuff, no longer any afflicting
+lumpishness.  His brain was vivifying light.  And how humane he was! how
+supremely tolerant!  Where she had really thought instead of flippantly
+tapping at the doors of thought, or crying vagrantly for an echo, his
+firm footing in the region thrilled her; and where she had felt deeper
+than fancifully, his wise tenderness overwhelmed.  Strange to consider:
+with all his precious gifts, which must make the gift of life thrice dear
+to him, he was fearless.  Less by what he said than by divination she
+discerned that he knew not fear.  If for only that, she would have hung
+to him like his shadow.  She could have detected a brazen pretender.
+A meaner mortal vaunting his great stores she would have written down
+coxcomb.  Her social training and natural perception raised her to a
+height to measure the bombastical and distinguish it from the eloquently
+lofty.  He spoke of himself, as the towering Alp speaks out at a first
+view, bidding that which he was be known.  Fearless, confident, able, he
+could not but be, as he believed himself, indomitable.  She who was this
+man's mate would consequently wed his possessions, including courage.
+Clotilde at once reached the conclusion of her having it in an equal
+degree.  Was she not displaying it?  The worthy people of the company
+stared, as she now perceived, and she was indifferent; her relatives were
+present without disturbing her exaltation.  She wheeled above their heads
+in the fiery chariot beside her sun-god.  It could not but be courage,
+active courage, superior to her previous tentative steps--the verbal
+temerities she had supposed so dauntless.  For now she was in action, now
+she was being tried to match the preacher and incarnation of the virtues
+of action!
+
+Alvan shaped a comparison of her with Paris, his beloved of cities--the
+symbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive,
+eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting him to
+proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; light in
+light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and therefore not
+light, anything but light in strong hands, very stedfast rather: and oh!
+constantly entertaining.
+
+The comparison had to be strained to fit the living lady's shape.  Did he
+think it, or a dash of something like it?
+
+His mood was luxurious.  He had found the fair and youthful original
+woman of refinement and station desired by him.  He had good reason to
+wish to find her.  Having won a name, standing on firm ground, with
+promise of a great career, chief of what was then taken for a growing
+party and is not yet a collapsed, nor will be, though the foot on it is
+iron, his youth had flown under the tutelage of an extraordinary Mentor,
+whom to call Athene robs the goddess of her personal repute for wisdom in
+conduct, but whose head was wise, wise as it was now grey.  Verily she
+was original; and a grey original should seem remarkable above a blooming
+blonde.  If originality in woman were our prime request, the grey should
+bear the palm.  She has gone through the battle, retaining the standard
+she carried into it, which is a victory.  Alas, that grey, so spirit-
+touching in Art, should be so wintry in reality!
+
+The discovery of a feminine original breathing Spring, softer, warmer
+than the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepid
+as devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan.  He took it luxuriously because
+he believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage of
+the adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in return for
+energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his natural
+longings.
+
+Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long.  All the sweeter was the
+breath of the young Spring.  That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde
+in the attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively
+assuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winning
+her.  Barriers are for those who cannot fly.  The barriers were palpable
+about a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her which
+would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the
+mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior.
+He saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it
+sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his
+courage to support the originality she was famed for.
+
+They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan for
+counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exact phrasing
+of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature.  He
+satisfied them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace
+that night.  Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of
+a contested verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping
+verses of the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious
+flavour of acid, and a lively sting in the tail of the honey.  Sentiment,
+cynicism, and satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses,
+where pure poetry has a recognized voice; but the lower elements
+constitute the popularity in a cultivated society inclining to wantonness
+out of bravado as well as by taste.  Alvan, looking indolently royal and
+royally roguish, quoted a verse that speaks of the superfluousness of a
+faithless lady's vowing bite:
+
+              'The kisses were in the course of things,
+               The bite was a needless addition.'
+
+Clotilde could not repress her reddening--Count Kollin had repeated too
+much!  She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their
+chatter.  He spared her the allusion to Pompeius.  She convinced him of
+her capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with
+her blush.  She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility
+forbade her touching on with him: not that she would not have had an airy
+latitude with him to touch on what she pleased: he liked her for her
+boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it: he liked
+also the distinction she made.
+
+The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to his
+requirements in a wife.  They marched to the table together, and sat
+together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together--true Rauenthal.  His
+robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife
+might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his
+possible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful
+heavens, blessing mankind in chorus.  It belonged to his hearty dream of
+the wife he would choose, were she to be had.  The position of
+interpreter of heaven's benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment
+of the gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing
+it with the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than
+he on this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation.  Clotilde kindled
+to the hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet.  She was not
+devoid of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her
+father's board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that
+vineyard and vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to be
+enthusiastic for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty from much
+talking and excitement.  She drank her glass relishingly, declaring the
+wine princely.  Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: 'You are not for
+the extract of raisin our people have taken to copy from French
+Sauternes, to suit a female predilection for sugar?'
+
+'No, no, the grape for me!' said she: 'the Rhine grape with the elf in
+it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!'
+
+'Glorious!'
+
+He toasted the grape.  'Wine of the grape is the young bride--the young
+sun-bride!  divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered
+sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten of
+gout.  No raisin-juice for us!  None of their too-long-on-the-stem
+clusters!  We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her heaven-
+kissing ardour.  I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the Rhine.
+We--will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come? we two!'
+The picture of his bride and him drinking the sun down after a day of
+savage toil was in the shout--a burst unnoticed in the incessantly
+verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table.  Clotilde acquiesced:
+she chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollicking faun.  She was
+realizing fairyland.
+
+They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between them as
+with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting and
+branching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of the
+harmony.  So ran their chirping arguments and diversions.  The carrying
+on of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to those
+undetermined floating atoms about us that a certain sacred something is
+in process of formation, or has formed; and people looked; and looked
+hard at the pair, and at one another afterward: none approached them.
+The Signor conjuror who has a thousand arts for conjuring with nature was
+generally considered to have done that night his most ancient and
+reputedly fabulous trick--the dream of poets, rarely witnessed anywhere,
+and almost too wonderful for credence in a haunt of our later
+civilization.  Yet there it was: the sudden revelation of the intense
+divinity to a couple fused in oneness by his apparition, could be
+perceived of all having man and woman in them; love at first sight, was
+visible.  'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'  And if nature,
+character, circumstance, and a maid clever at dressing her mistress's
+golden hair, did prepare them for Love's lightning-match, not the less
+were they proclaimingly alight and in full blaze.  Likewise, Time,
+imperious old gentleman though we know him to be, with his fussy
+reiterations concerning the hour for bed and sleep, bowed to the magical
+fact of their condition, and forbore to warn them of his passing from
+night to day.  He had to go, he must, he has to be always going, but as
+long as he could he left them on their bank by the margin of the stream,
+where a shadow-cycle of the eternal wound a circle for them and allowed
+them to imagine they had thrust that old driver of the dusty high-road
+quietly out of the way.  They were ungrateful, of course, when the
+performance of his duties necessitated his pulling them up beside him
+pretty smartly, but he uttered no prophecy of ever intending to rob them
+of the celestial moments they had cut from him and meant to keep between
+them 'for ever,' and fresh.
+
+The hour was close on the dawn of a March morning.  Alvan assisted at the
+cloaking and hooding of Clotilde.  Her relatives were at hand; they hung
+by while he led her to the stairs and down into a spacious moonlight that
+laid the traceries of the bare tree-twigs clear-black on grass and stone.
+
+'A night to head the Spring!' said Alvan.  'Come.'
+
+He lifted her off the steps and set her on the ground, as one who had an
+established right to the privilege and she did not contest it, nor did
+her people, so kingly was he, arrayed in the thunder of the bolt which
+had struck the pair.  These things, and many things that islands know not
+of, are done upon continents, where perhaps traditions of the awfulness
+of Love remain more potent in society; or it may be, that an island
+atmosphere dispossesses the bolt of its promptitude to strike, or the
+breastplates of the islanders are strengthened to resist the bolt, or no
+tropical heat is there to create and launch it, or nothing is to be seen
+of it for the haziness, or else giants do not walk there.  But even where
+he walked, amid a society intellectually fostering sentiment, in a land
+bowing to see the simplicity of the mystery paraded, Alvan's behaviour
+was passing heteroclite.  He needed to be the kingly fellow he was,
+crowned by another kingly fellow--the lord of hearts--to impose it
+uninterruptedly.  'She is mine; I have won her this night!' his bearing
+said; and Clotilde's acquiesced; and the worthy couple following them had
+to exhibit a copy of the same, much wondering.  Partly by habit, and of
+his natural astuteness, Alvan peremptorily usurped a lead that once taken
+could not easily be challenged, and would roll him on a good tideway
+strong in his own passion and his lady's up against the last defences--
+her parents.  A difficulty with them was foreseen.  What is a difficulty!
+--a gate in the hunting-field: an opponent on a platform: a knot beneath
+a sword: the dam to waters that draw from the heavens.  Not desiring it
+in this case--it would have been to love the difficulty better than the
+woman--he still enjoyed the bracing prospect of a resistance, if only
+because it was a portion of the dowry she brought him.  Good soldiers
+(who have won their grades) are often of a peaceful temper and would not
+raise an invocation to war, but a view of the enemy sets their pugnacious
+forces in motion, the bugle fills their veins with electrical fire, till
+they are as racers on the race-course.--His inmost hearty devil was glad
+of a combat that pertained to his possession of her, for battle gives the
+savour of the passion to win, and victory dignifies a prize: he was,
+however, resolved to have it, if possible, according to the regular
+arrangement of such encounters, formal, without snatchings, without rash
+violence; a victory won by personal ascendancy, reasoning eloquence.
+
+He laughed to hear her say, in answer to a question as to her present
+feelings: 'I feel that I am carried away by a centaur!'  The comparison
+had been used or implied to him before.
+
+'No!' said he, responding to a host of memories, to shake them off, 'no
+more of the quadruped man!  You tempt him--may I tell you that?  Why,
+now, this moment, at the snap of my fingers, what is to hinder our taking
+the short cut to happiness, centaur and nymph?  One leap and a gallop,
+and we should be into the morning, leaving night to grope for us, parents
+and friends to run about for the wits they lose in running.  But no!  No
+more scandals.  That silver moon invites us by its very spell of bright
+serenity, to be mad: just as, when you drink of a reverie, the more
+prolonged it is the greater the readiness for wild delirium at the end of
+the draught.  But no!' his voice deepened--'the handsome face of the orb
+that lights us would be well enough were it only a gallop between us two.
+Dearest, the orb that lights us two for a lifetime must be taken all
+round, and I have been on the wrong side of the moon
+
+I have seen the other face of it--a visage scored with regrets, dead
+dreams, burnt passions, bald illusions, and the like, the like!--sunless,
+waterless, without a flower!  It is the old volcano land: it grows one
+bitter herb: if ever you see my mouth distorted you will know I am
+revolving a taste of it; and as I need the antidote you give, I will not
+be the centaur to win you, for that is the land where he stables himself;
+yes, there he ends his course, and that is the herb he finishes by
+pasturing on.  You have no dislike of metaphors and parables?  We Jews
+are a parable people.'
+
+'I am sure I do understand .  .  .' said Clotilde, catching her breath to
+be conscientious, lest he should ask her for an elucidation.
+
+'Provided always that the metaphor be not like the metaphysician's
+treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise!--You were going to add?'
+
+'I was going to say, I think I understand, but you run away with me
+still.'
+
+'May the sensation never quit you!'
+
+'It will not.'
+
+'What a night !' Alvan raised his head: 'A night cast for our first
+meeting and betrothing!  You are near home?'
+
+'The third house yonder in the moonlight.'
+
+'The moonlight lays a white hand on it!'
+
+'That is my window sparkling.'
+
+'That is the vestal's cresset.  Shall I blow it out?'
+
+'You are too far.  And it is a celestial flame, sir!'
+
+'Celestial in truth!  My hope of heaven!  Dian's crescent will be ever on
+that house for me, Clotilde.  I would it were leagues distant, or the
+door not forbidden!'
+
+'I could minister to a good knight humbly.'
+
+Alvan bent to her, on a sudden prompting:
+
+'When do father and mother arrive?'
+
+'To-morrow.'
+
+He took her hand.  'To-morrow, then!  The worst of omens is delay.'
+
+Clotilde faintly gasped.  Could he mean it?--he of so evil a name in her
+family and circle!
+
+Her playfulness and pleasure in the game of courtliness forsook her.
+
+'Tell me the hour when it will be most convenient to them to receive me,'
+said Alvan.
+
+She stopped walking in sheer fright.
+
+'My father--my mother?' she said, imaging within her the varied horror of
+each and the commotion.
+
+'To-morrow or the day after--not later.  No delays!  You are mine, we are
+one; and the sooner my cause is pleaded the better for us both.  If I
+could step in and see them this instant, it would be forestalling
+mischances.  Do you not see, that time is due to us, and the minutes are
+our gold slipping away?'
+
+She shrank her hand back: she did not wish to withdraw the hand, only to
+shun the pledge it signified.  He opened an abyss at her feet, and in
+deadly alarm of him she exclaimed: 'Oh!  not yet; not immediately.'  She
+trembled, she made her petition dismal by her anguish of speechlessness.
+'There will be such .  .  .  not yet!  Perhaps later.  They must not be
+troubled yet--at present.  I am .  .  .  I cannot--pray, delay!'
+
+'But you are mine!' said Alvan.  'You feel it as I do.  There can be no
+real impediment?'
+
+She gave an empty sigh that sought to be a run of entreaties.  In fear
+of his tongue she caught at words to baffle it, senseless of their
+imbecility: 'Do not insist: yes, in time: they will--they--they may.
+My father is not very well .  .  .  my mother: she is not very well.
+They are neither of them very well: not at present!--Spare them at
+present.'
+
+To avoid being carried away, she flung herself from the centaur's back
+to the disenchanting earth; she separated herself from him in spirit,
+and beheld him as her father and mother and her circle would look on this
+pretender to her hand, with his lordly air, his Jew blood, and his
+hissing reputation--for it was a reputation that stirred the snakes and
+the geese of the world.  She saw him in their eyes, quite coldly: which
+imaginative capacity was one of the remarkable feats of cowardice, active
+and cold of brain even while the heart is active and would be warm.
+
+He read something of her weakness.  'And supposing I decide that it must
+be?'
+
+'How can I supplicate you!' she replied with a shiver, feeling that she
+had lost her chance of slipping from his grasp, as trained women of the
+world, or very sprightly young wits know how to do at the critical
+moment: and she had lost it by being too sincere.  Her cowardice appeared
+to her under that aspect.
+
+'Now I perceive that the task is harder,' said Alvan, seeing her huddled
+in a real dismay.  'Why will you not rise to my level and fear nothing!
+The way is clear: we have only to take the step.  Have you not seen
+tonight that we are fated for one another?  It is your destiny, and
+trifling with destiny is a dark business.  Look at me.  Do you doubt my
+having absolute control of myself to bear whatever they put on me to
+bear, and hold firmly to my will to overcome them!  Oh!  no delays.'
+
+'Yes!' she cried; 'yes, there must be.'
+
+'You say it?'
+
+The courage to repeat her cry was wanting.
+
+She trembled visibly: she could more readily have bidden him bear her
+hence than have named a day for the interview with her parents; but
+desperately she feared that he would be the one to bid; and he had this
+of the character of destiny about him, that she felt in him a maker of
+facts.  He was her dream in human shape, her eagle of men, and she felt
+like a lamb in the air; she had no resistance, only terror of his power,
+and a crushing new view of the nature of reality.
+
+'I see!' said he, and his breast fell.  Her timid inability to join with
+him for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights: a bad
+name among her people and class, and chains in private.  He was old
+enough to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood less
+fiery than the junction of his passions.  'Well, well!--but we might so
+soon have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad!  It is but to
+determine to do it--to take the bold short path instead of the wearisome
+circuit.  Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of the
+heart.  Battles are won in that way: not by tender girls!  and she is a
+girl, and the task is too much for her.  So, then, we are in your hands,
+child!  Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and
+sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is not
+a wedded soul.  Is she not a serpent?  gold-crested, all the world may
+see; and with a mortal bite, I know.  I have had the bite before the
+kisses.  That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things.
+Apropos, Hamlet was poisoned--ghost-poisoned.'
+
+'Mad, he was mad!' said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.
+
+'He was born bilious; he partook of the father's constitution, not the
+mother's.  High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought,
+reflective, if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was by
+nature two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that sleeps
+beside her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry.  Before the
+ghost walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action would have
+whiffed away his melancholy.  After it, he was a dizzy moralizer, waiting
+for the winds to blow him to his deed-ox out.  The apparition of his
+father to him poisoned a sluggish run of blood, and that venom in the
+blood distracted a head steeped in Wittenberg philosophy.  With
+metaphysics in one and poison in the other, with the outer world opened
+on him and this world stirred to confusion, he wore the semblance of
+madness; he was throughout sane; sick, but never with his reason
+dethroned.'
+
+'Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!'
+
+'Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.'
+
+' No!'
+
+'Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?' said Alvan.
+
+Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to
+be able to laugh.  Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells
+were spoken, Alvan had gone.  And then she thought of the person that
+Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for him
+in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed
+gold-crested serpent.
+
+He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit of
+likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.
+
+And she?  She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had
+returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her with
+were no longer imminent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a short
+sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to her own
+sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest in her.  The
+exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the art to frame
+her apology.  The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan, she saw
+Prince Marko.  She was gentle to him, in anticipation of his grief; she
+could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequious beauty, and when
+her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acute sensibility to the
+blow, honourably she inflicted it.
+
+'Marko, my friend, you know that I cannot be false; then let me tell you
+I yesterday met the man who has but to lift his hand and I go to him, and
+he may lead me whither he will.'
+
+The burning eyes of her Indian Bacchus fixed on her till their brightness
+moistened and flashed.
+
+Whatever was for her happiness he bowed his head to, he said.  He knew
+the man.
+
+Her duty was thus performed; she had plighted herself.  For the first few
+days she was in dread of meeting, seeing, or hearing of Alvan.  She
+feared the mention of a name that rolled the world so swiftly.  Her
+parents had postponed their coming, she had no reason for instant alarm;
+it was his violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence that she
+feared, as nervous people shrink from cannon: and neither meeting,
+seeing, nor hearing of him, she began to yearn, like the child whose
+curiosity is refreshed by a desire to try again the startling thing which
+frightened it.  Her yearning grew, the illusion of her courage flooded
+back; she hoped he would present himself to claim her, marvelled that he
+did not, reproached him; she could almost have scorned him for listening
+to the hesitations of the despicable girl so little resembling what she
+really was--a poor untried girl, anxious only on behalf of her family to
+spare them a sudden shock.  Remembering her generous considerations in
+their interests, she thought he should have known that the creature he
+called a child would have yielded upon supplication to fly with him.
+Her considerateness for him too, it struck her next, was the cause of
+her seeming cowardly, and the man ought to have perceived it and put it
+aside.  He should have seen that she could be brave, and was a mate for
+him.  And if his shallow experience of her wrote her down nerveless, his
+love should be doing.
+
+Was it love?  Her restoration to the belief in her possessing a decided
+will whispered of high achievements she could do in proof of love, had
+she the freedom of a man.  She would not have listened (it was quite
+true) to a silly supplicating girl; she would not have allowed an
+interval to yawn after the first wild wooing of her.  Prince Marko loved.
+Yes, that was love!  It failed in no sign of the passion.  She set
+herself to study it in Marko, and was moved by many sentiments, numbering
+among them pity, thankfulness, and the shiver of a feeling between
+admiration and pathetic esteem, like that the musician has for a precious
+instrument giving sweet sound when shattered.  He served her faithfully,
+in spite of his distaste for some of his lady's commissions.  She had to
+get her news of Alvan through Marko.  He brought her particulars of the
+old trial of Alvan, and Alvan's oration in defence of himself for a
+lawless act of devotion to the baroness; nothing less than the
+successfully scheming to wrest by force from that lady's enemy a document
+precious to her lawful interests.  It was one of those cases which have a
+really high gallant side as well as a bad; an excellent case for
+rhetoric.  Marko supplied the world's opinion of the affair, bravely
+owning it to be not unfavourable.  Her worthy relatives, the Frau v.
+Crestow and husband, had very properly furnished a report to the family
+of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over it, with the epithets
+applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have been received on a visit
+to demand her in marriage.  There was no chance of her being allowed to
+enter houses where this 'rageing demagogue and popular buffoon' was a
+guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so she was compelled to
+have recourse to Marko.  Unable to take such services without rewarding
+him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer.  Those who toss crumbs
+to their domestic favourites will now and then be moved to toss meat,
+which is not so good for them, but the dumb mendicant's delight in it is
+winning, and a little cannot hurt.  Besides, if any one had a claim on
+her it was the prince; and as he was always adoring, never importunate,
+he restored her to the pedestal she had been really rudely shaken from by
+that other who had caught her up suddenly into the air, and dropped her!
+A hand abandoned to her slave rewarded him immeasurably.  A heightening
+of the reward almost took his life.  In the peacefulness of dealing with
+a submissive love that made her queenly, the royal, which plucked her
+from throne to footstool, seemed predatory and insolent.  Thus, after
+that scene of 'first love,' in which she had been actress, she became
+almost (with an inward thrill or two for the recovering of him)
+reconciled to the not seeing of the noble actor; for nothing could erase
+the scene--it was historic; and Alvan would always be thought of as a
+delicious electricity.  She and Marko were together on the summer
+excursion of her people, and quite sisterly, she could say, in her
+delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions.  True gentlemen are
+imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow of giants; but still
+Clotilde's experience of a giant's manners was favourable to the liberty
+she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this kind, rather warmer than
+her word for it would imply.  She owned that she could better live the
+poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the
+society of Marko.  He was very young, he was little more than an
+adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or
+slacken him.  One could play on him securely, thinking of a distant day
+--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when he might be made
+happy.
+
+Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to
+anatomize him beset her.  The ground of it was, that she found him in her
+likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling,
+now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the
+pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic
+home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked self-
+knowledge, and of her saying: 'That is like me: that is very like me:
+that is terribly like': up to the point where the comparison wooed her no
+longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped her so shrewdly as
+to force her to say: 'That is he, not I': and the vivisected youth
+received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch.  It was
+given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him.  Anatomy is the title
+for the operation, because the probing of herself in another, with the
+liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt
+to feel that she prosecuted her researches in a dead body.  The moment
+her strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank under a stroke of pain,
+she abstained from carving, and simultaneously conscious that he lived,
+she was kind to him.
+
+'This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?'
+
+'I love you.'
+
+'You think me the highest and best?'
+
+'You are.'
+
+'So deep that you could bear anything from me?'
+
+'Try me!'
+
+'Unfaithfulness?'
+
+'You would be you!'
+
+'Do you not say that because you cannot suspect evil of me?'
+
+'Let me only see you!'
+
+'You are sure that happiness would not smother it?'
+
+'Has it done so yet?'
+
+'Though you know I am a serpent to that man's music?'
+
+'Ah, heaven!  Oh!--do not say music.  Yes!  though anything!'
+
+'And if ever you were to witness the power of his just breathing to me?'
+
+'I would .  .  .  .  Ah!'
+
+' What?  If you saw his music working the spell?--even the first notes of
+his prelude!'
+
+'I would wait'
+
+'It might be for long.'
+
+'I would eat my heart.'
+
+'Bitter!  bitter!'
+
+'I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you.'
+
+She had a seizure of the nerves.
+
+The likeness between them was, she felt, too flamingly keen to be looked
+at further.  She reached to the dim idea of some such nauseous devotion,
+and took a shot in her breast as she did so, and abjured it, and softened
+to her victim.  Clotilde opened her arms, charming away her wound, as she
+soothed him, both by the act of soothing and the reflection that she
+could not be so very like one whom she pitied and consoled.
+
+She was charitably tender.  If it be thought that she was cruel to
+excess, plead for her the temptation to simple human nature at sight of a
+youth who could be precipitated into the writhings of dissolution, and
+raised out of it by a smile.  This young man's responsive spirit acted on
+her as the discovery of specifics for restoring soundness to the frame
+excites the brilliant empiric: he would slay us with benevolent soul to
+show the miracle of our revival.  Worship provokes the mortal goddess to
+a manifestation of her powers; and really the devotee is full half to
+blame.
+
+She had latterly been thinking of Alvan's rejection of the part of
+centaur; and his phrase, the quadruped man, breathed meaning.  He was to
+gain her lawfully after dominating her utterly.  That was right, but it
+levelled imagination.  There is in the sentimental kingdom of Love a form
+of reasoning, by which a lady of romantic notions who is dominated
+utterly, will ask herself why she should be gained lawfully: and she is
+moved to do so by the consideration that if the latter, no necessity can
+exist for the former: and the reverse.  In the union of the two
+conditions she sees herself slavishly domesticated.  With her Indian
+Bacchus imagination rose, for he was pliant: she had only to fancy, and
+he was beside her.--Quick to the saddle, away!  The forest of terrors is
+ahead; they are at the verge of it; a last hamlet perches on its borders;
+the dwellers have haunted faces; the timbers of their huts lean to an
+upright in wry splinters; warnings are moaned by men and women with the
+voice of a night-wind; but on and on! the forest cannot be worse than a
+world defied.  They drain a cup of milk apiece and they spur, for this is
+the way to the golden Indian land of the planted vine and the lover's
+godship.--Ludicrous!  There is no getting farther than the cup of milk
+with Marko.  They curvet and caper to be forward unavailingly.  It should
+be Alvan to bring her through the forest to the planted vine in sunland.
+Her splendid prose Alvan could do what the sprig of poetry can but
+suggest.  Never would malicious fairy in old woman's form have offered
+Alvan a cup of milk to paralyze his bride's imagination of him
+confronting perils.  Yet, O shameful contrariety of the fates! he who
+could, will not; he who would, is incapable.  Let it not be supposed that
+the desire of her bosom was to be run away with in person.  Her simple
+human nature wished for the hero to lift her insensibly over the
+difficult opening chapter of the romance--through 'the forest,' or half
+imagined: that done, she felt bold enough to meet the unimagined, which,
+as there was no picture of it to terrify her, seemed an easy gallop into
+sunland.--Yes, but in the grasp of a great prose giant, with the poetic
+departed!  Naturally she turned to caress the poetic while she had it
+beside her.  And it was a wonder to observe the young prince's heavenly
+sensitiveness to every variation of her moods.  He knew without hearing
+when she had next seen Alvan, though it had not been to speak to him.  He
+looked, and he knew.  The liquid darkness of his large eastern eyes cast
+a light that brought her heart out: she confessed it, and she comforted
+him.  The sweetest in the woman caused her double-dealing.
+
+Now she was aware that Alvan moved behind the screen concealing him.
+A common friend of Alvan and her family talked to her of him.  He was an
+eminent professor, a middleaged, grave and honourable man, not ignorant
+that her family entertained views opposed to the pretensions of such a
+man as the demagogue and Jew.  Nevertheless Alvan could persuade him to
+abet the scheme for his meeting Clotilde; nay, to lead to it; ultimately
+to allow his own house to be their place of meeting.  Alvan achieved the
+first of the steps unassisted.  Whether or not his character stood well
+with a man of the world, his force of character, backed by solid
+attainments in addition to brilliant gifts, could win a reputable citizen
+and erudite to support him.  Rhetoric in a worthy cause has good chances
+of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seem excellent to
+the professor when one promising fair to be the political genius of his
+time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could make him believe
+that marriage with this girl would be his clear salvation.  The second
+step was undesignedly Clotilde's.
+
+She was on the professor's arm at one of the great winter balls of her
+conductor's brethren in the law, and he said: 'Alvan is here.'  She
+answered: 'No, he has not yet come.'--How could she tell that he was not
+present in the crowd?
+
+'Has he come now?' said the professor.
+
+'No.'
+
+And no Alvan was discernible.
+
+'Now?'
+
+'Not yet.'
+
+The professor stared about.  She waited.
+
+'Now he has come; he is in the room now,' said Clotilde.
+
+Alvan was perceived.  He stood in the centre of the throng surrounding
+him to buzz about some recent pamphlet.
+
+She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as by
+degrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him,
+it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for the
+physical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late,
+Alvan happened to have arrived.  The touch of his hand, the instant
+naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if
+there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence on
+her, almost to the making it planetary.  And a glance at the professor
+revealed how picturesque it was.  Alvan and he murmured aside.  They
+spoke of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her
+in the dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the
+limbs in his desperate poor lover's little flitting eternity of the
+possession of her--should say, after she had been led back to her
+friends: 'That is he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the
+Hesperides, whom I must brush away.'
+
+'He?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional a
+weight as her tone declared him.  'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does
+not count among the dragons.'
+
+But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark,
+a manful thickness of voice in Alvan's 'That is he!'  The rivals had
+fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the
+wrestlers' first grapple.  In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.
+
+'He does not count?  With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed.  He knew
+something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the
+character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of
+rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and
+made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it that his
+vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception; all, everything;
+all!  I repeat.  But what of it, if I win you?  as I shall--only aid me a
+little.'
+
+She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the import
+of the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to his
+penetrative knowledge.  Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, of excellent
+substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose for themselves--
+the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grand accusation;
+and they have had to drink it, and they have blinked over the tonic
+draught with such power of taking a bracing as their constitutions could
+summon.  At no moment of their quaint mutual history are the sexes to be
+seen standing more acutely divided.  Well may the lady be silent; her
+little sins are magnified to herself to the proportion of the greatness
+of heart forgiving her; and that, with his mysterious penetration and a
+throb of her conscience, holds her tongue-tied.  She does not imagine the
+effect of her silence upon the magnanimous wretch.  Some of these lovers,
+it has to be stated in sadness for the good name of man, have not
+preserved an attitude that said so nobly, 'Child, thou art human--thou
+art woman!' They have undone it and gone to pieces with an injured
+lover's babble of persecuting inquiries for confessions.  Some, on the
+contrary, retaining the attitude, have been unable to digest the tonic;
+they did not prepare their systems as they did their dose, possibly
+thinking the latter a supererogatory heavy thump on a trifle, the which
+was performed by them artfully for a means of swallowing and getting that
+obnoxious trifle well down.  These are ever after love's dyspeptics.
+Very few indeed continue at heart in harmony with their opening note to
+the silent fair, because in truth the general anticipation is of her
+proclaiming, if not angelical innocence, a softly reddened or blush-rose
+of it, where the little guiltiness lies pathetic on its bed of white.
+
+Alvan's robustness of temper, as a conqueror pleased with his capture,
+could inspirit him to feel as he said it:
+
+'I know all; what matters that to me?'  Even her silence, extending the
+'all' beyond limits, as it did to the over-knowing man, who could number
+these indicative characteristics of the young woman: impulsive, without
+will, readily able to lie: her silence worked no discord in him.  He
+would have remarked, that he was not looking out for a saint, but rather
+for a sprightly comrade, perfectly feminine, thoroughly mastered, young,
+graceful, comely, and a lady of station.  Once in his good keeping, her
+lord would answer for her.  And this was a manfully generous view of the
+situation.  It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror's mood.  But
+how of his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse,
+a defeat?  Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as
+a heroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself!  Wise are
+the mothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it
+only to guard them at present, from the gentleman's condescending
+generosity, until he has become something more than robust in his ideas
+of the sex--say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal.
+
+Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, the origin
+of the black thing flung at her in time to come--when the man was
+frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth of
+madness.
+
+After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof of the
+amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxing
+anxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to the
+sister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair through
+a demi-ceremony of betrothal.  It sprang Clotilde astride nearer to
+reality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the change
+at home.  A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan's
+pushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been.  She
+waited for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet to
+take; she feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; the old
+wheel revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait for
+circumstances to bring the change they cannot work for themselves; and
+once more the two fell asunder.  She had thoughts of the cloister.  Her
+venerable relative died joining her hand to Prince Marko's; she was
+induced to think of marriage.  An illness laid her prostrate; she
+contemplated the peace of death.
+
+Shortly before she fell sick the prince was a guest of her father's, and
+had won the household by his perfect amiability as an associate.  The
+grace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an Indian
+Bacchus were native to him.  In her convalescence, she asked herself what
+more she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she in
+return might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness.
+For she had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in the
+Spartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently.  But he was a flower
+in sunshine to happiness, and he looked to her for it.  Why should she
+withhold from him a thing so easily given?  The convalescent is receptive
+and undesiring, or but very faintly desiring: the new blood coming into
+the frame like first dawn of light has not stirred the old passions; it
+is infant nature, with a tinge of superadded knowledge that is not cloud
+across it and lends it only a tender wistfulness.
+
+Her physician sentenced her to the Alps, whither a friend, a daughter of
+our island, whose acquaintance she had made in Italy, was going, and at
+an invitation Clotilde accompanied her, and she breathed Alpine air.
+Marko sank into the category of dreams during sickness.  There came a
+letter from the professor mentioning that Alvan was on one of the kingly
+Alpine heights in view, and the new blood running through her veins
+became a torrent.  He there!  So near!  Could he not be reached?
+
+He had a saying: Two wishes make a will.
+
+The wishes of two lovers, he meant.  A prettier sentence for lovers, and
+one more intoxicating to them, was never devised.  It chirrups of the
+dear silly couple.  Well, this was her wish.  Was it his?  Young health
+on the flow of her leaping blood cried out that it could not be other
+than Alvan's wish; she believed in his wishing it.  Then as he wished and
+she wished, she had the will immediately, and it was all the more her own
+for being his as well.  She hurried her friend and her friend's friends
+on horseback off to the heights where the wounded eagle lodged
+overlooking mountain and lake.  The professor reported him outwearied
+with excess of work.  Alvan lived the lives of three; the sins of thirty
+were laid to his charge.  Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men?  Her
+reckless defence of him, half spoken, half in her mind, helped her to
+comprehend his dealings with her, and how it was that he stormed her and
+consented to be beaten.  He had a thousand occupations, an ambition out
+of the world of love, chains to break, temptations, leanings .  .  .
+tut, tut!  She had not lived in her circle of society, and listened to
+the tales of his friends and enemies, and been the correspondent of
+flattering and flattered men of learning, without understanding how a man
+like Alvan found diversions when forbidden to act in a given direction:
+and now that her healthful new blood inspired the courage to turn two
+wishes to a will, she saw both herself and him very clearly, enough at
+least to pardon the man more than she did herself.  She had perforce of
+her radiant new healthfulness arrived at an exact understanding of him.
+Where she was deluded was in supposing that she would no longer dread his
+impetuous disposition to turn rosy visions into facts.  But she had the
+revived convalescent's ardour to embrace things positive while they were
+not knocking at the door; dreams were abhorrent to her, tasteless and
+innutritious; she cast herself on the flood, relying on his towering
+strength and mastery of men and events to bring her to some safe landing
+--the dream of hearts athirst for facts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Alvan was at his writing-table doing stout gladiator's work on paper in
+a chamber of one of the gaunt hotels of the heights, which are Death's
+Heads there in Winter and have the tongues in Summer, when a Swiss lad
+entered with a round grin to tell him that a lady on horseback below had
+asked for him--Dr. Alvan.  Who could the lady be?  He thought of too
+many.  The thought of Clotilde was dismissed in its dimness.  Issuing and
+beholding her, his face became illuminated as by a stroke of sunlight.
+
+'Clotilde!  by all the holiest!'
+
+She smiled demurely, and they greeted.
+
+She admired the look of rich pleasure shining through surprise in him.
+Her heart thanked him for appearing so handsome before her friends.
+
+'I was writing,' said he.  'Guess to whom?--I had just finished my
+political stuff, and fell on a letter to the professor and another for
+an immediate introduction to your father.'
+
+'True?'
+
+'The truth, as you shall see.  So, you have come, you have found me!
+This time if I let you slip, may I be stamped slack-fingered!'
+
+'"Two wishes make a will," you say.'
+
+He answered her with one of his bursts of brightness.
+
+Her having sought him he read for the frank surrender which he was ready
+to match with a loyal devotion to his captive.  Her coming cleared
+everything.
+
+Clotilde introduced him to her friends, and he was enrolled a member of
+the party.  His appearance was that of a man to whom the sphinx has
+whispered.  They ascended to the topmost of the mountain stages, to
+another caravanserai of tourists, whence the singular people emerge in
+morning darkness night-capped and blanketed, and behold the great orb of
+day at his birth--he them.
+
+Walking slowly beside Clotilde on the mountain way, Alvan said: 'Two
+wishes!  Mine was in your breast.  You wedded yours to it.  At last!--and
+we are one.  Not a word more of time lost.  My wish is almost a will in
+itself--was it not?--and has been wooing yours all this while!--till the
+sleeper awakened, the well-spring leapt up from the earth; and our two
+wishes united dare the world to divide them.  What can?  My wish was your
+destiny, yours is mine.  We are one.'  He poetized on his passion, and
+dramatized it: 'Stood you at the altar, I would pluck you from the man
+holding your hand!  There is no escape for you.  Nay, into the vaults,
+were you to grow pale and need my vital warmth--down to the vaults!
+Speak--or no: look!  That will do.  You hold a Titan in your eyes, like
+metal in the furnace, to turn him to any shape you please, liquid or
+solid.  You make him a god: he is the river Alvan or the rock Alvan: but
+fixed or flowing, he is lord of you.  That is the universal penalty: you
+must, if you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature: if
+you raise him to heaven, you must be his!  Ay, look!  I know the eyes!
+They can melt granite, they can freeze fire.  Pierce me, sweet eyes!  And
+now flutter, for there is that in me to make them.'
+
+'Consider!' Clotilde flutteringly entreated him.
+
+'The world?  you dear heaven of me!  Looking down on me does not
+compromise you, and I am not ashamed of my devotions.  I sat in gloom:
+you came: I saw my goddess and worshipped.  The world, Lutece, the world
+is a variable monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false; but
+those who weld strength with sincerity may practise their rites of
+religion publicly, and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate.  Nay, I
+say that strength in love is the sole sincerity, and the world knows it,
+muffs it in the air about us, and so we two are privileged.  Politically
+also we know that strength is the one reality: the rest is shadow.
+Behind the veil of our human conventions power is constant as ever, and
+to perceive the fact is to have the divining rod-to walk clear of shams.
+He is the teacher who shows where power exists: he is the leader who
+wakens and forms it.  Why have I unfailingly succeeded?--I never doubted!
+The world voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly.  You--
+to your honour?--I won't decide--but you have the longest in my
+experience resisted.  I have a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; I have
+a voice for ears, a net for butterflies, a hook for fish, and desperation
+to plunge into marshes: but the feu follet will not be caught.  One must
+wait--wait till her desire to have a soul bids her come to us.  She has
+come!  A soul is hers: and see how, instantly, the old monster, the
+world, which has no soul--not yet: we are helping it to get one--becomes
+a shadow, powerless to stop or overawe.  For I do give you a soul, think
+as you will of it.  I give you strength to realize, courage to act.  It
+is the soul that does things in this life--the rest is vapour.  How do we
+distinguish love?--as we do music by the pure note won from resolute
+strings.  The tense chord is music, and it is love.  This higher and
+higher mountain air, with you beside me, sweeps me like a harp.'
+
+'Oh!  talk on, talk on!  talk ever!  do not cease talking to me!'
+exclaimed Clotilde.
+
+'You feel the mountain spirit?'
+
+'I feel that you reveal it.'
+
+'Tell me the books you have been reading.'
+
+' Oh, light literature-poor stuff.'
+
+'When we two read together you will not say that.  Light literature is
+the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the
+view within us as well as without.  Our blood runs through it, our
+history in the quick.  The Philistine detests it, because he has no view,
+out or in.  The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled
+and sapless, when they condemn it.  The vulgar demand to have their
+pleasures in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they
+shall not degrade the fame of noble fiction.  We are the choice public,
+which will have good writing for light reading.  Poet, novelist,
+essayist, dramatist, shall be ranked honourable in my Republic.  I am
+neither, but a man of law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on
+the road to government and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as
+much from light literature as from heavy-as much, that is, from the
+pictures of our human blood in motion as from the clever assortment of
+our forefatherly heaps of bones.  Shun those who cry out against fiction
+and have no taste for elegant writing.  For to have no sympathy with the
+playful mind is not to have a mind: it is a test.  But name the books.'
+
+She named one or two.
+
+'And when does Dr. Alvan date the first year of his Republic?'
+
+'Clotilde!' he turned on her.
+
+'My good sir?'
+
+'These worthy good people who are with you: tell me-to-morrow we leave
+them!'
+
+'Leave them?'
+
+'You with me.  No more partings.  The first year, the first day shall be
+dated from to-morrow.  You and I proclaim our Republic on these heights.
+All the ceremonies to follow.  We will have a reaping of them, and make a
+sheaf to present to the world with compliments.  To-morrow!'
+
+'You do not speak seriously?'
+
+'I jest as little as the Talmud.  Decide at once, in the happy flush of
+this moment.'
+
+'I cannot listen to you, dear sir!'
+
+'But your heart beats!'
+
+'I am not mistress of it.'
+
+'Call me master of it.  I make ready for to-morrow.'
+
+' No! no! no!  A thousand times no!  You have been reading too much
+fiction and verse.  Properly I should spurn you.'
+
+'Will you fail me, play feu follet, ward me off again?'
+
+'I must be won by rules, brave knight!'
+
+'Will you be won?'
+
+'And are you he--the Alvan who would not be centaur?'
+
+'I am he who chased a marsh-fire, and encountered a retiarius, and the
+meshes are on my head and arms.  I fancied I dealt with a woman; a woman
+needing protection!  She has me fast--I am netted, centaur or man.  That
+is between us two.  But think of us facing the world, and trust me; take
+my hand, take the leap; I am the best fighter in that fight.  Trust it to
+me, and all your difficulties are at an end.  To fly solves the problem.'
+
+'Indeed, indeed, I have more courage than I had,' said Clotilde.
+
+His eyes dilated, steadied, speculated, weighed her.
+
+'Put it to proof while you can believe in it!'
+
+'How is it every one but you thinks me bold?' she complained.
+
+'Because I carry a touchstone that brings out the truth.  I am your
+reality: all others are phantoms.  You can impose on them, not on me.
+Courage for one inspired plunge you may have, and it will be your
+salvation:--southward, over to Italy, that is the line of flight, and the
+subsequent struggle will be mine: you will not have to face it.  But the
+courage for daily contention at home, standing alone, while I am distant
+and maligned--can you fancy your having that?  No!  be wise of what you
+really are; cast the die for love, and mount away tomorrow.'
+
+'Then,' said Clotilde, with elvish cunning, 'do you doubt your ability to
+win me without a scandal?'
+
+'Back me, and I win you!' he replied in a tone of unwonted humility: a
+sudden droop.
+
+She let her hand fall.  He grasped it.
+
+'Gradations appear to be unknown to you,' she said.
+
+He cried out: 'Count the years of life, span them, think of the work to
+be done, and ask yourself whether time and strength should run to waste
+in retarding the inevitable?  Pottering up steps that can be taken at one
+bound is very well for peasant pilgrims whose shrine is their bourne, and
+their kneecaps the footing stumps.  But for us two life begins up there.
+Onward, and everywhere around, when we two are together, is our shrine.
+I have worked, and wasted life; I have not lived, and I thirst to live.'
+
+She murmured, in a fervour, 'You shall!' and slipped behind her defences.
+'To-morrow morning we shall wander about; I must have a little time; all
+to-morrow morning we can discuss plans.'
+
+'You know you command me,' said he, and gazed at her.
+
+She was really a child compared with him in years, and if it was an
+excuse for taking her destiny into his hands, she consenting,--it was
+also a reason why he dared not press his whole weight to win her to the
+step.
+
+She had the pride of the secret knowledge of her command of this giant at
+the long table of the guests at dinner, where, after some play of knife
+and fork among notable professors, Prussian officers, lively Frenchmen
+and Italians, and the usual over-supply of touring English of both sexes,
+not encouraging to conversation in their look of pallid disgust of the
+art, Alvan started general topics and led them.  The lead came to him
+naturally, because he was a natural speaker, of a mind both stored and
+effervescent; and he was genial, interested in every growth of life.  She
+did not wonder at his popularity among men of all classes and sets, or
+that he should be famed for charming women.  Her friend was enraptured
+with him.  Friendly questions pressed in an evening chatter between the
+ladies, and Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession.
+
+'But you are not engaged?' said the blunt Englishwoman.
+
+According to the explanation, Clotilde was hardly engaged.  It was not an
+easy thing to say how she stood definitely.  She had obeyed her dying
+relative and dearest on earth by joining her hand to Prince Marko's, and
+had pleased her parents by following it up with the kindest attentions to
+the prince.  It had been done, however, for the sake of peace; and
+chiefly for his well-being.  She had reserved her full consent: the
+plighting was incomplete.  Prince Marko knew that there was another, a
+magical person, a genius of the ring, irresistible.  He had been warned,
+that should the other come forth to claim her .  .  .  .  And she was
+about to write to him this very night to tell him .  .  .  tell him fully
+.  .  .  .  In truth, she loved both, but each so differently!  And both
+loved her!  And she had to make her choice of one, and tell the prince
+she did love him, but .  .  .  Dots are the best of symbols for rendering
+cardisophistical subtleties intelligible, and as they are much used in
+dialogue, one should have now and then permission to print them.
+Especially feminine dialogue referring to matters of the uncertain heart
+takes assistance from troops of dots; and not to understand them at least
+as well as words, when words have as it were conducted us to the brink of
+expression, and shown us the precipice, is to be dull, bucolic of the
+marketplace.
+
+Sunless rose the morning.  The blanketed figures went out to salute a
+blanketed sky.  Drizzling they returned, images of woefulness in various
+forms, including laughter's.  Alvan frankly declared himself the
+disappointed showman; he had hoped for his beloved to see the sight long
+loved by him of golden chariot and sun-steeds crossing the peaks and the
+lakes; and his disappointment became consternation on hearing Clotilde's
+English friend (after objection to his pagan clothing of the solemn
+reality of sunrise, which destroyed or minimized by too materially
+defining a grandeur that derived its essence from mystery, she thought)
+announce the hour for her departure.  He promised her a positive sunrise
+if she would delay.  Her child lay recovering from an illness in the town
+below, and she could not stay.  But Clotilde had coughed in the damp
+morning air, and it would, he urged, be dangerous for her to be exposed
+to it.  Had not the lady heard her cough?  She had, but personally she
+was obliged to go; with her child lying ill she could not remain.  'But,
+madam, do you hear that cough again?  Will you drag her out with such a
+cough as that?' The lady repeated 'My child!' Clotilde said it had been
+agreed they should descend this day; her friend must be beside her child.
+Alvan thundered an 'Impossible!' The child was recovering; Clotilde was
+running into danger: he argued with the senseless woman, opposing reason
+to the feminine sentiment of the maternal, and of course he was beaten.
+He was compelled to sit and gnaw his eloquence.  Clotilde likened his
+appearance to a strangled roar.  'Mothers and their children are too much
+for me!' he said, penitent for his betrayal of over-urgency, as he helped
+to wrap her warmly, and counselled her very mode of breathing in the raw
+mountain atmosphere.
+
+'I admire you for knowing when to yield,' said she.
+
+He groaned, with frown and laugh: 'You know what I would beg!'
+
+She implored him to have some faith in her.
+
+The missiles of the impassioned were discharged at the poor English: a
+customary volley in most places where they intrude after quitting their
+shores, if they diverge from the avenue of hotel-keepers and waiters:
+but Clotilde pointed out to him that her English friend was not showing
+coldness in devoting herself to her child.
+
+'No, they attend to their duties,' he assented generally, desperately
+just.
+
+'And you owe it to her that you have seen me.'
+
+'I do,' he said, and forthwith courted the lady to be forgiven.
+
+Clotilde was taken from him in a heavy downpour and trailing of mists.
+
+At the foot of the mountain a boy handed her a letter from Alvan--a
+burning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separated on
+the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrip
+pathfarers.  She entered her hotel across the lake, and met a telegram.
+At night the wires flashed 'Sleep well' to her; on her awakening, 'Good
+morning.'  A lengthened history of the day was telegraphed for her
+amusement.  Again at night there was a 'God guard you!'
+
+'Who can resist him?' sighed Clotilde, excited, nervous, flattered,
+happy, but yearning to repose and be curtained from the buzz of the
+excess of life that he put about her.  This time there was no prospect of
+his courtship relapsing.
+
+'He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!' replied her friend.
+
+'If he were only that!' said Clotilde, musing expressively.  'If, dear
+Englishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood.  But Alvan mounts
+high over such lovers: he is a wonderful and ideal man: so great, so
+generous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be.'
+
+The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult to
+miss--more was expected to be said of him.
+
+'You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan,' she remarked, for she had
+heard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also been
+polite to her under vexation.
+
+Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, and
+disliked the bringing of that island microscope to bear upon a giant.
+She found it repugnant to hear a word of Alvan as a perfect gentleman.
+Justly, however, she took him for a splendid nature, and assuming upon
+good authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed the
+lesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Barriers are for those who cannot fly
+Be good and dull, and please everybody
+Centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies
+Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession
+Comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered
+Compromise is virtual death
+Conservative, whose astounded state paralyzes his wrath
+Creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change
+Dissent rings out finely, and approval is a feeble murmur
+Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men?
+Empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women
+Fantastical
+Finishing touches to the negligence
+Gone to pieces with an injured lover's babble
+Gradations appear to be unknown to you
+He had to go, he must, he has to be always going
+He stormed her and consented to be beaten
+His violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence
+I have learnt as much from light literature as from heavy
+I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you
+If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature
+Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days
+Looking on him was listening
+Love the difficulty better than the woman
+Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise
+Music in Italy?  Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous
+Not much esteem for non-professional actresses
+Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency
+Philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded
+Polished barbarism
+Scorned him for listening to the hesitations (hers)
+She felt in him a maker of facts
+Strength in love is the sole sincerity
+The brainless in Art and in Statecraft
+The way is clear: we have only to take the step
+The worst of omens is delay
+Time and strength run to waste in retarding the inevitable
+Time is due to us, and the minutes are our gold slipping away
+To have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind
+Two wishes make a will
+Venerated by his followers, well hated by his enemies
+Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
+Win you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be
+World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4461 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, v1,
+by George Meredith
+#67 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+Title: The Tragic Comedians, v1
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1892
+
+
+
+BOOK 1.
+
+
+The word 'fantastical' is accentuated in our tongue to so scornful an
+utterance that the constant good service it does would make it seem an
+appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matter
+distasteful to those expository pens.  Upon examination, claimants to the
+epithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters,
+Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost.  Wherever she can
+get to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically.  As for
+that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew and the angry
+captain, called Human Nature, 'fantastical' fits it no less completely
+than a continental baby's skull-cap the stormy infant.
+
+Our sympathies, one may fancy, will be broader, our critical acumen
+shrewder, if we at once accept the thing as a part of us and worthy of
+study.
+
+The pair of tragic comedians of whom there will be question pass under
+this word as under their banner and motto.  Their acts are incredible:
+they drank sunlight and drove their bark in a manner to eclipse
+historical couples upon our planet.  Yet they do belong to history,
+they breathed the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter of them
+is written in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, was
+of a mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modern
+brain which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can create
+them, to set it spinning.
+
+A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil.  He was the
+leader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, well
+hated by his enemies, respected by the intellectual chiefs of his time,
+in the pride of his manhood and his labours when he fell.  And why this
+man should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved him
+have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have to
+study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both.  To ask if it
+was love is useless.  Love may be celestial fire before it enters into
+the systems of mortals.  It will then take the character of its place of
+abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
+passion.  Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes
+of one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature out
+of its fashionable front rank?  The bare railway-line of their story
+tells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related.  Nor is
+there anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents
+could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the
+comic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue.  They are
+real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world
+by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine
+events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read
+us no such furrowing lesson in life.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the
+pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her
+web is for the devouring lion.  At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was
+dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in her
+seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a lively
+fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and
+style.  She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native
+land.  Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime counting
+among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable, though
+sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known as
+aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the contrary
+very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for the imbibing
+of copious draughts of sunlight.  The young lady of charming countenance
+and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her choice to
+be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing instantly,
+after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of pastry.
+These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little so is
+the starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one object of the
+worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his for a nod.
+But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive to taste to
+try for yourself.  Men (the jury of householders empanelled to deliver
+verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that.  And as it
+happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your taste will
+frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: the young
+coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to escape
+drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simple blocks or limp
+festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a knowledge of her
+sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality.  The more
+imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days, the
+more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.
+
+Clotilde's younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in
+the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites.  She
+was not under a French mother's rigid supervision.  In France the mother
+resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of that
+unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory.  Vigilant
+foresight is not so much practised where the world is less accurately
+comprehended.  Young people of Clotilde's upper world everywhere, and the
+young women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from what
+they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, that
+the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this world's elect,
+getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return for a little
+dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin, but
+they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have had the
+world.  The world is the golden apple.  Thirst for it is common during
+youth: and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown of
+wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love from
+the calculations on behalf of her girl.
+
+Say (for Diana's mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that
+Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar trained
+in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the Hungarian Baths
+on the borders of the Styrian highlands.  The scene at all events is
+pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating threads.  A
+stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang from his
+carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the arch of the
+chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a while.  The
+music had seized him.  He snatched bow and fiddle from one of the ring,
+and with a few strokes kindled their faces.  Then seating himself, on a
+bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched the strings and flung
+up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneous notes when Clotilde
+and her cavalier, and other couples of the party, came nigh; for he was
+on the tide of the song, warm in it, and loved it too well to suffer
+intruders to break the flow, or to think of them.  They were close by
+when the last of it rattled (it was a popular song of a fiery tribe) to
+its finish: He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled and jumped back to his
+carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy, lank-locked, leather-
+hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes and skin of burnished walnut
+made him look an offshoot, but one of the celestial branch.
+
+He was in her father's reception-room when she reached home: he was
+paying a visit of ceremony on behalf of his family to General von
+Rudiger; which helped her to remember that he had been expected, and also
+that his favourite colours were known to be white and scarlet.  In those
+very colours, strange to tell, Clotilde was dressed; Prince Marko had
+recognized her by miraculous divination, he assured her he could have
+staked his life on the guess as he bowed to her.  Adieu to Count
+Constantine.  Fate had interposed the prince opportunely, we have to
+suppose, for she received a strong impression of his coming straight from
+her invisible guardian; and the stroke was consequently trenchant which
+sent the conquering Tartar raving of her fickleness.  She struck, like
+fate, one blow.  She discovered that the prince, in addition to his
+beauty and sweet manners and gift of song, was good; she fell in love
+with goodness, whereof Count Constantine was not an example: so she set
+her face another way, soon discovering that there may be fragility in
+goodness.  And now first her imagination conceived the hero who was to
+subdue her.  Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a docile
+infant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?--the hero who would
+wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound?  Siegfried could not be
+dreamed in him, or a Siegfried's baby son-in-arms.  She caught a glorious
+image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and it informed her that
+she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a match for a famous
+conqueror, was a woman of decisive and independent, perhaps unexampled,
+force of character.  Her idea of a spiritual superiority that could soar
+over those two men, the bad and the good--the bad because of his
+vileness, the good because of his frailness--whispered to her of
+deserving, possibly of attracting, the best of men: the best, that is, in
+the woman's view of us--the strongest, the great eagle of men, lord of
+earth and air.
+
+One who will dominate me, she thought.
+
+Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm has brought
+her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, she persuades
+the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long as her
+pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, her
+parents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid's
+presumption, which is ready to take root in any shadow of subserviency.
+Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service,
+disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his
+vehement irritability when roused.  Her mother had been one of the
+beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through the
+conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall.  Her
+brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead.  The temper
+of the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state of
+politics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders know
+that they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confused by
+the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliar to
+history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded state
+paralyzes his wrath.
+
+Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, and it
+was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious
+behaviour.  If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was
+because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs and
+tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids the
+bold advance yet farther into bogland.  Becoming the renowned original of
+her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France,
+she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage to
+our loftiest souls.  Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor supplied
+Prince Marko's title for her, was a pet, not a companion.  She to him was
+what she sought for in another.  As much as she pitied herself for not
+lighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met the woman,
+so that her tenderness for both inspired many signs of warm affection,
+not very unlike the thing it moaned secretly the not being.  For she
+could not but distinguish a more poignant sorrow in the seeing of the
+object we yearn to vainly than in vainly yearning to one unseen.
+Dressed, to delight him, in Prince Marko's colours, the care she bestowed
+on her dressing was for the one absent, the shrouded comer: so she
+pleased the prince to be pleasing to her soul's lord, and this, owing to
+an appearance of satisfactory deception that it bore, led to her thinking
+guiltily.  We may ask it: an eagle is expected, and how is he to declare
+his eagleship save by breaking through our mean conventional systems,
+tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teeth of vulgar ordinances?
+Clotilde's imagination drew on her reading for the knots it tied and
+untied, and its ideas of grandeur.  Her reading was an interfusion of
+philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded.  She tried hard,
+but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero's exhibition of
+flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded woman.  Further
+thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despised the complication,
+yet without perceiving how else he was to manifest himself legitimately
+in a dull modern world.  The rescuing her from death would be a poor
+imitation of worn-out heroes.  His publication of a trumpeting book fell
+appallingly flat in her survey.  Deeds of gallantry done as an officer in
+war (defending his country too) distinguished the soldier, but failed to
+add the eagle feather to the man.  She had a mind of considerable soaring
+scope, and eclectic: it analyzed a Napoleon, and declined the position of
+his empress.  The man must be a gentleman.  Poets, princes, warriors,
+potentates, marched before her speculative fancy unselected.
+
+So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not without
+exemplars in the sex.  Young women have been known to turn from us
+altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so fleshly-bulgy
+have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the right one of
+us to wear becomingly.  But the busy great world was round Clotilde while
+she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh ideas of the
+hammer and the block, and that is a world of much solicitation to induce
+a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image.  Supposing, when she
+has accomplished it, that men justify her choice, the living will retain
+the colours of the ideal.  We have it on record that he may seem an
+eagle.
+
+'You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,' a gentleman of her country
+said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day.  He said
+it musingly.
+
+He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic.  She
+had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing
+universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an envious
+eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the choicest of
+all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she dimpled her
+cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her before.  She
+smiled musingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+'Who is the man they call Alvan?'  She put the question at the first
+opportunity to an aunt of hers.
+
+Up went five-fingered hands.  This violent natural sign of horror was
+comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.
+
+'Alvan!  My dear Clotilde!  What on earth can you want to know about a
+creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a
+Jew!'
+
+Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was.  'Is he clever?'
+
+'He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the
+Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what he
+is.'
+
+'But is he clever?'
+
+'Able as Satan himself, they say.  He is a really dangerous, bad man.
+You could not have been curious about a worse one.'
+
+'Politically, you mean.'
+
+'Of course I do.'
+
+The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that
+station.
+
+The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon him.
+Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembled Alvan's.  He
+being that furious creature, she thought of herself at her wildest, which
+was in her estimation her best; and consequently, she being by no means a
+furious creature, though very original, she could not meditate on him
+without softening the outlines given him by report; all because of the
+likeness between them; and, therefore, as she had knowingly been taken
+for furious by very foolish people, she settled it that Alvan was also a
+victim of the prejudices he scorned.  It had pleased her at times to
+scorn our prejudices and feel the tremendous weight she brought on
+herself by the indulgence.  She drew on her recollections of the Satanic
+in her bosom when so situated, and never having admired herself more
+ardently than when wearing that aspect, she would have admired the man
+who had won the frightful title in public, except for one thing--he was a
+Jew.
+
+The Jew was to Clotilde as flesh of swine to the Jew.  Her parents had
+the same abhorrence of Jewry.  One of the favourite similes of the family
+for whatsoever grunted in grossness, wriggled with meanness, was Jew: and
+it was noteworthy from the fact that a streak of the blood was in the
+veins of the latest generation and might have been traced on the maternal
+side.
+
+Now a meanness that clothes itself in the Satanic to terrify cowards is
+the vilest form of impudence venturing at insolence; and an insolent
+impudence with Jew features, the Jew nose and lips, is past endurance
+repulsive.  She dismissed her contemplation of Alvan.  Luckily for the
+gentleman who had compared her to the Jew politician, she did not meet
+him again in Italy.
+
+She had meanwhile formed an idea of the Alvanesque in dialogue; she
+summoned her forces to take aim at it, without becoming anything Jewish,
+still remaining clean and Christian; and by her astonishing practice of
+the art she could at any time blow up a company--scatter mature and
+seasoned dames, as had they been balloons on a wind, ay, and give our
+stout sex a shaking.
+
+Clotilde rejected another aspirant proposed by her parents, and falling
+into disgrace at home, she went to live for some months with an ancient
+lady who was her close relative residing in the capital city where the
+brain of her race is located.  There it occurred that a dashing officer
+of social besides military rank, dancing with her at a ball, said, for a
+comment on certain boldly independent remarks she had been making: 'I see
+you know Alvan.'
+
+Alvan once more.
+
+'Indeed I do not,' she said, for she was addressing an officer high above
+Alvan in social rank; and she shrugged, implying that she was almost past
+contradiction of the charge.
+
+'Surely you must,' said he; 'where is the lady who could talk and think
+as you do without knowing Alvan and sharing his views!'
+
+Clotilde was both startled and nettled.
+
+'But I do not know him at all; I have never met him, never seen him.
+I am unlikely to meet the kind of person,' she protested; and she was
+amazed yet secretly rejoiced on hearing him, a noble of her own circle,
+and a dashing officer, rejoin: 'Come, come, let us be honest.  That is
+all very well for the little midges floating round us to say of Alvan,
+but we two can clasp hands and avow proudly that we both know and love
+the man.'
+
+'Were it true, I would own it at once, but I repeat, that he is a total
+stranger to me,' she said, seeing the Jew under quite a different
+illumination.
+
+'Actually?'
+
+'In honour.'
+
+'You have never met, never seen him, never read any of his writings?'
+
+'Never.  I have heard his name, that is all.'
+
+'Then,' the officer's voice was earnest, 'I pity him, and you no less,
+while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another.  Those
+ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan's: I have heard
+him use them.  He has just the same original views of society and history
+as yours; they're identical; your features are not unlike . . . you talk
+alike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his.  You look incredulous?
+You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said "Plutarch's Pompeius," and
+more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not
+know and have never listened to Alvan--you said that Pompeius appeared to
+have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the greater
+sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a pretty woman's
+"bite."  Come, now--you must believe me: at a supper at Alvan's table the
+other night, the talk happened to be of a modern Caesar, which led to the
+real one, and from him to "Plutarch's Pompeius," as Alvan called him; and
+then he said of him what you have just said, absolutely the same down to
+the allusion to the bite.  I assure you.  And you have numbers of little
+phrases in common: you are partners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those
+who cannot fly: that is Alvan's.  I could multiply them if I could
+remember; they struck me as you spoke.'
+
+'I must be a shameless plagiarist,' said Clotilde.
+
+'Or he,' said Count Kollin.
+
+It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in the
+air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics and
+pervading literature:  which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch and give
+out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was, original to
+them.  They were not members of a country where literature is confined to
+its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field (part lawn,
+part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in sympathetic action
+with thinkers and literary artists.  Their saying in common, 'Plutarch's
+Pompeius,' may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on
+the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia.  The dainty
+savageness in the 'bite' Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a
+similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with others.  And in regard
+to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she had often wished that
+Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking of him) had been endowed
+with the beauty of his rival: one or two of Plutarch's touches upon the
+earlier history of Pompeius had netted her fancy, faintly (your
+generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung her blood; she liked the
+man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, she would have preferred
+him femininely.  His name was not written Pompey to her, as in English,
+to sound absurd: it was a note of grandeur befitting great and lamentable
+fortunes, which the young lady declined to share solely because of her
+attraction to the victor, her compulsion to render unto the victor the
+sunflower's homage.  She rendered it as a slave: the splendid man beloved
+to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was her natural choice.
+
+Alvan could not be even a Caesar in person, he was a Jew.  Still a Jew
+of whom Count Kollin spoke so warmly must be exceptional, and of the
+exceptional she dreamed.  He might have the head of a Caesar.  She
+imagined a huge head, the cauldron of a boiling brain, anything but
+bright to the eye, like a pot always on the fire, black, greasy,
+encrusted, unkempt: the head of a malicious tremendous dwarf.  Her hungry
+inquiries in a city where Alvan was well known, brought her full
+information of one who enjoyed a highly convivial reputation besides the
+influence of his political leadership; but no description of his aspect
+accompanied it, for where he was nightly to be met somewhere about the
+city, none thought of describing him, and she did not push that question
+because she had sketched him for herself, and rather wished, the more she
+heard of his genius, to keep him repulsive.  It appeared that his bravery
+was as well proved as his genius, and a brilliant instance of it had been
+given in the city not long since.  He had her ideas, and he won
+multitudes with them: he was a talker, a writer, and an orator; and he
+was learned, while she could not pretend either to learning or to a flow
+of rhetoric.  She could prattle deliciously, at times pointedly, relying
+on her intuition to tell her more than we get from books, and on her
+sweet impudence for a richer original strain.  She began to appreciate
+now a reputation for profound acquirements.  Learned professors of
+jurisprudence and history were as enthusiastic for Alvan in their way as
+Count Kollin.  She heard things related of Alvan by the underbreath.
+That circle below her own, the literary and artistic, idolized him; his
+talk, his classic breakfasts and suppers, his undisguised ambition, his
+indomitable energy, his dauntlessness and sway over her sex, were
+subjects of eulogy all round her; and she heard of an enamoured baroness.
+No one blamed Alvan.  He had shown his chivalrous valour in defending
+her.  The baroness was not a young woman, and she was a hardbound Blue.
+She had been the first to discover the prodigy, and had pruned,
+corrected, and published him; he was one of her political works,
+promising to be the most successful.  An old affair apparently; but the
+association of a woman's name with Alvan's, albeit the name of a veteran,
+roused the girl's curiosity, leading her to think his mental and magnetic
+powers must be of the very highest, considering his physical
+repulsiveness, for a woman of rank to yield him such extreme devotion.
+She commissioned her princely serving-man, who had followed and was never
+far away from her, to obtain precise intelligence of this notorious
+Alvan.
+
+Prince Marko did what he could to please her; he knew something of the
+rumours about Alvan and the baroness.  But why should his lady trouble
+herself for particulars of such people, whom it could scarcely be
+supposed she would meet by accident?  He asked her this.  Clotilde said
+it was common curiosity.  She read him a short lecture on the dismal
+narrowness of their upper world; and on the advantage of taking an
+interest in the world below them and more enlightened; a world where
+ideas were current and speech was wine.  The prince nodded; if she had
+these opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he shared
+them, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of time
+that he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one far
+removed from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link; he was
+capable of thinking all that came to him from her a blessing--shocks,
+wounds and disruptions.  He did not add largely to her stock of items,
+nor did he fetch new colours.  The telegraph wire was his model of style.
+He was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus, standing for sign of
+the beauty and vacuity of their world: and how dismally narrow that world
+was, she felt with renewed astonishment at every dive out of her gold-
+fish pool into the world of tides below; so that she was ready to scorn
+the cultivation of the graces, and had, when not submitting to the smell,
+fanciful fits of a liking for tobacco smoke--the familiar incense of
+those homes where speech was wine.
+
+At last she fell to the asking of herself whether, in the same city with
+him, often among his friends, hearing his latest intimate remarks--things
+homely redolent of him as hot bread of the oven--she was ever to meet
+this man upon whom her thoughts were bent to the eclipse of all others.
+She desired to meet him for comparison's sake, and to criticize a popular
+hero.  It was inconceivable that any one popular could approach her
+standard, but she was curious; flame played about him; she had some
+expectation of easing a spiteful sentiment created by the recent
+subjection of her thoughts to the prodigious little Jew; and some feeling
+of closer pity for Prince Marko she had, which urged her to be rid of her
+delusion as to the existence of a wonder-working man on our earth, that
+she might be sympathetically kind to the prince, perhaps compliant, and
+so please her parents, be good and dull, and please everybody, and adieu
+to dreams, good night, and so to sleep with the beasts!  .  .  .
+
+Calling one afternoon on a new acquaintance of the flat table-land she
+liked tripping down to from her heights, Clotilde found the lady in
+supreme toilette, glowing, bubbling: 'Such a breakfast, my dear!' The
+costly profusion, the anecdotes, the wit, the fun, the copious draughts
+of the choicest of life--was there ever anything to match it?  Never in
+that lady's recollection, or her husband's either, she exclaimed.  And
+where was the breakfast?  Why, at Alvan's, to be sure; where else could
+such a breakfast be?
+
+'And you know Alvan!' cried Clotilde, catching excitement from the lady's
+flush.
+
+'Alvan is one of my husband's closest friends'
+
+Clotilde put on the playful frenzy; she made show of wringing her hands:
+'Oh!  happy you!  you know Alvan?  And everybody is to know him except
+me? why? I proclaim it unjust.  Because I am unmarried?  I'll take a
+husband to-morrow morning to be entitled to meet Alvan in the evening.'
+
+The playful frenzy is accepted in its exact innocent signification of
+'this is my pretty wilful will and way,' and the lady responded to it
+cordially; for it is pleasant to have some one to show, and pleasant to
+assist some one eager to see: besides, many had petitioned her for a
+sight of Alvan; she was used to the request.
+
+'You're not obliged to wait for to-morrow,' she said.  'Come to one of
+our gatherings to-night.  Alvan will be here.'
+
+'You invite me?'
+
+'Distinctly.  Pray, come.  He is sure to be here.  We have his promise,
+and Alvan never fails.  Was it not Frau v. Crestow who did us the favour
+of our introduction?  She will bring you.'
+
+The Frau v. Crestow was a cousin of Clotilde's by marriage, sentimental,
+but strict in her reading of the proprieties.  She saw nothing wrong in
+undertaking to conduct Clotilde to one of those famous gatherings of the
+finer souls of the city and the race; and her husband agreed to join them
+after the sitting of the Chamber upon a military-budget vote.  The whole
+plan was nicely arranged and went well.  Clotilde dressed carefully,
+letting her gold-locks cloud her fine forehead carelessly, with finishing
+touches to the negligence, for she might be challenged to take part in
+disputations on serious themes, and a handsome young woman who has to
+sustain an argument against a man does wisely when she forearms her
+beauties for a reserve, to carry out flanking movements if required.  The
+object is to beat him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Her hostess met her at the entrance of the rooms, murmuring that Alvan
+was present, and was there: a direction of a nod that any quick-witted
+damsel must pretend to think sufficient, so Clotilde slipped from her
+companion and gazed into the recess of a doorless inner room, where three
+gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue vapours of
+tobacco.  They were indistinct; she could see that one of them was of
+good stature.  One she knew; he was the master of the house, mildly
+Jewish.  The third was distressingly branded with the slum and gutter
+signs of the Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head could not have done
+it more effectively.  The vindictive caricatures of the God Pan, executed
+by priests of the later religion burning to hunt him out of worship in
+the semblance of the hairy, hoofy, snouty Evil One, were not more
+loathsome.  She sank on a sofa.  That the man?  Oh! Jew, and fifty times
+over Jew! nothing but Jew!
+
+The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably
+magnificent was the first whom she had noticed.
+
+She sat at her lamb's-wool work in the little ivory frame, feeding on the
+contrast.  This man's face was the born orator's, with the light-giving
+eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for speechfulness
+and enterprise, of Cicero's rival in the forum before he took the
+headship of armies and marched to empire.
+
+The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features
+and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness.  Alas, he could
+not be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build!  One could
+vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election.  So vigorously
+rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as he
+talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheet
+lightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing
+outpour.  Looking on him was listening.  Yes, the looking on him
+sufficed.  Here was an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men,
+that drained an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reduced
+him to the state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in the
+contemplation of a girl suddenly plunged on the deeps of her womanhood.
+She shrank to smaller and smaller as she looked.
+
+Be sure that she knew who he was.  No, says she.  But she knew.  It
+terrified her soul to think he was Alvan.  She feared scarcely less that
+it might not be he.  Between these dreads of doubt and belief she played
+at cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse, teased
+herself, and gloated.  It is he! not he! he! not he! most certainly!
+impossible!--And then it ran: If he, oh me!  If another, woe me!  For
+she had come to see Alvan.  Alvan and she shared ideas.  They talked
+marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin: and supposing he was
+not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment.  The supposition that he
+was, threatened her with instant and life-long bondage.
+
+Then again, could that face be the face of a Jew?  She feasted.  It was a
+noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes.  Perchance a Jew of the
+Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish.  There is the noble Jew as
+well as the bestial Gentile.  There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a
+majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect.  He may well think his race
+favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still.  The noble Jew is
+grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery
+eastern blood, and in his manhood he is--ay, what you see there! a figure
+of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to inspirit and
+be tempered by the intellect.
+
+She was therefore prepared all the while for the surprise of learning
+that the gentleman so unlike a Jew was Alvan; and she was prepared to
+express her recordation of the circumstance in her diary with phrases of
+very eminent surprise.  Necessarily it would be the greatest of
+surprises.
+
+The three, this man and his two of the tribe, upon whom Clotilde's
+attention centred, with a comparison in her mind too sacred to be other
+than profane (comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered),
+dropped to the cushions of the double-seated sofa, by one side of which
+she cowered over her wool-work, willing to dwindle to a pin's head if her
+insignificance might enable her to hear the words of the speaker.  He
+pursued his talk: there was little danger of not hearing him.  There was
+only the danger of feeling too deeply the spell of his voice.  His voice
+had the mellow fulness of the clarionet.  But for the subject, she could
+have fancied a noontide piping of great Pan by the sedges.  She had never
+heard a continuous monologue so musical, so varied in music, amply
+flowing, vivacious, interwovenly the brook, the stream, the torrent: a
+perfect natural orchestra in a single instrument.  He had notes less
+pastorally imageable, notes that fired the blood, with the ranging of his
+theme.  The subject became clearer to her subjugated wits, until the
+mental vivacity he roused on certain impetuous phrases of assertion
+caused her pride to waken up and rebel as she took a glance at herself,
+remembering that she likewise was a thinker, deemed in her society an
+original thinker, an intrepid thinker and talker, not so very much
+beneath this man in audacity of brain, it might be.  He kindled her thus,
+and the close-shut but expanded and knew the fretting desire to breathe
+out the secret within it, and be appreciated in turn.
+
+The young flower of her sex burned to speak, to deliver an opinion.  She
+was unaccustomed to yield a fascinated ear.  She was accustomed rather to
+dictate and be the victorious performer, and though now she was not
+anxious to occupy the pulpit--being too strictly bred to wish for a post
+publicly in any of the rostra--and meant still less to dispossess the
+present speaker of the place he filled so well, she yearned to join him:
+and as that could not be done by a stranger approving, she panted to
+dissent.  A young lady cannot so well say to an unknown gentleman: 'You
+have spoken truly, sir,' as, 'That is false!' for to speak in the former
+case would be gratuitous, and in the latter she is excused by the moral
+warmth provoking her.  Further, dissent rings out finely, and approval is
+a feeble murmur--a poor introduction of oneself.  Her moral warmth was
+ready and waiting for the instigating subject, but of course she was
+unconscious of the goad within.  Excitement wafted her out of herself, as
+we say, or out of the conventional vessel into the waves of her troubled
+nature.  He had not yet given her an opportunity for dissenting; she was
+compelled to agree, dragged at his chariot-wheels in headlong agreement.
+
+His theme was Action; the political advantages of Action; and he
+illustrated his view with historical examples, to the credit of the
+French, the temporary discredit of the German and English races, who tend
+to compromise instead.  Of the English he spoke as of a power extinct, a
+people 'gone to fat,' who have gained their end in a hoard of gold and
+shut the door upon bandit ideas.  Action means life to the soul as to the
+body.  Compromise is virtual death: it is the pact between cowardice and
+comfort under the title of expediency.  So do we gather dead matter about
+us.  So are we gradually self-stifled, corrupt.  The war with evil in
+every form must be incessant; we cannot have peace.  Let then our joy be
+in war: in uncompromising Action, which need not be the less a sagacious
+conduct of the war .  .  .  .  Action energizes men's brains, generates
+grander capacities, provokes greatness of soul between enemies, and is
+the guarantee of positive conquest for the benefit of our species.  To
+doubt that, is to doubt of good being to be had for the seeking.  He drew
+pictures of the healthy Rome when turbulent, the doomed quiescent.  Rome
+struggling grasped the world.  Rome stagnant invited Goth and Vandal.  So
+forth: alliterative antitheses of the accustomed pamphleteer.  At last
+her chance arrived.
+
+His opposition sketch of Inaction was refreshed by an analysis of the
+character of Hamlet.  Then he reverted to Hamlet's promising youth.
+How brilliantly endowed was the Prince of Denmark in the beginning!
+
+'Mad from the first!' cried Clotilde.
+
+She produced an effect not unlike that of a sudden crack of thunder.  The
+three made chorus in a noise of boots on the floor.
+
+Her hero faced about and stood up, looking at her fulgently.  Their eyes
+engaged without wavering on either side.  Brave eyes they seemed, each
+pair of them, for his were fastened on a comely girl, and she had strung
+herself to her gallantest to meet the crisis.
+
+His friends quitted him at a motion of the elbows.  He knelt on the sofa,
+leaning across it, with clasped hands.
+
+'You are she!--So, then, is a contradiction of me to be the
+commencement?'
+
+'After the apparition of Hamlet's father the prince was mad,' said
+Clotilde hurriedly, and she gazed for her hostess, a paroxysm of alarm
+succeeding that of her boldness.
+
+'Why should we two wait to be introduced?' said he.  'We know one
+another.  I am Alvan.  You are she of whom I heard from Kollin: who else?
+Lucretia the gold-haired; the gold-crested serpent, wise as her sire;
+Aurora breaking the clouds; in short, Clotilde!'
+
+Her heart exulted to hear him speak her name.  She laughed with a radiant
+face.  His being Alvan, and his knowing her and speaking her name, all
+was like the happy reading of a riddle.  He came round to her, bowing,
+and his hand out.  She gave hers: she could have said, if asked, 'For
+good!'  And it looked as though she had given it for good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+'Hamlet in due season,' said he, as they sat together.  'I shall convince
+you.'
+
+She shook her head.
+
+'Yes, yes, an opinion formed by a woman is inflexible; I know that: the
+fact is not half so stubborn.  But at present there are two more
+important actors: we are not at Elsinore.  You are aware that I hoped to
+meet you?'
+
+'Is there a periodical advertisement of your hopes?--or do they come to
+us by intuition?'
+
+'Kollin was right!--the ways of the serpent will be serpentine.  I knew
+we must meet.  It is no true day so long as the goddess of the morning
+and the sun-god are kept asunder.  I speak of myself, by what I have felt
+since I heard of you.'
+
+'You are sure of your divinity?'
+
+'Through my belief in yours!'
+
+They bowed smiling at the courtly exchanges.
+
+'And tell me,' said he, 'as to meeting me .  .  . ?'
+
+She replied: 'When we are so like the rest of the world we may confess
+our weakness.'
+
+'Unlike! for the world and I meet and part: not we two.'
+
+Clotilde attempted an answer: it would not come.  She tried to be
+revolted by his lording tone, and found it strangely inoffensive.  His
+lording presence and the smile that was like a waving feather on it
+compelled her so strongly to submit to hear, as to put her in danger of
+appearing to embrace this man's rapid advances.
+
+She said: 'I first heed of you at Capri.'
+
+'And I was at Capri seven days after you had left.'
+
+'You knew my name then?'
+
+'Be not too curious with necromancers.  Here is the date--March 15th.
+You departed on the 8th.'
+
+'I think I did.  That is a year from now.'
+
+'Then we missed: now we meet.  It is a year lost.  A year is a great age!
+Reflect on it and what you owe me.  How I wished for a comrade at Capri!
+Not a "young lady," and certainly no man.  The understanding Feminine,
+was my desire--a different thing from the feminine understanding,
+usually.  I wanted my comrade young and fair, necessarily of your sex,
+but with heart and brain: an insane request, I fancied, until I heard
+that you were the person I wanted.  In default of you I paraded the
+island with Tiberius, who is my favourite tyrant.  We took the initiative
+against the patricians, at my suggestion, and the Annals were written by
+a plebeian demagogue, instead of by one of that party, whose account of
+my extinction by command of the emperor was pathetic.  He apologized in
+turn for my imperial master and me, saying truly, that the
+misunderstanding between us was past cement: for each of us loved the man
+but hated his office; and as the man is always more in his office than he
+is in himself, clearly it was the lesser portion of our friend that each
+of us loved.  So, I, as the weaker, had to perish, as he would have done
+had I been the stronger; I admitted it, and sent my emperor my respectful
+adieux, with directions for the avoiding of assassins.  Mademoiselle, by
+delaying your departure seven days you would have saved me from death.
+You see, the official is the artificial man, and I ought to have known
+there is no natural man left in us to weigh against the artificial.  I
+counted on the emperor's personal affection, forgetting that princes
+cannot be our friends.'
+
+'You died bravely?'
+
+Clotilde entered into the extravagance with a happy simulation of zest.
+
+'Simply, we will say.  My time had come, and I took no sturdy pose, but
+let the life-stream run its course for a less confined embankment.
+Sapphire sea, sapphire sky: one believes in life there, thrills with it,
+when life is ebbing: ay, as warmly as when life is at the flow in our
+sick and shrivelled North--the climate for dried fish!  Verily the second
+death of hearing that a gold-haired Lucretia had been on the island seven
+days earlier, was harder to bear.  Tell me frankly--the music in Italy?'
+
+'Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous.'
+
+'Excellent!' his eyes flashed delightedly.  'O comrade of comrades!
+that year lost to me will count heavily as I learn to value those I have
+gained.  Yes, brainless!  There, in music, we beat them, as politically
+France beats us.  No life without brain!  The brainless in Art and in
+Statecraft are nothing but a little more obstructive than the dead.  It
+is less easy to cut a way through them.  But it must be done, or the
+Philistine will be as the locust in his increase, and devour the green
+blades of the earth.  You have been trained to shudder at the demagogue?'
+
+'I do not shudder,' said Clotilde.
+
+'A diamond from the lapidary!--Your sentences have many facets.  Well,
+you are conversing with a demagogue, an avowed one: a demagogue and a
+Jew.  You take it as a matter of course: you should exhibit some
+sparkling incredulity.  The Christian is like the politician in supposing
+the original obverse of him everlastingly the same, after the pattern of
+the monster he was originally taught to hate.  But the Jew has been a
+little christianized, and we have a little bejewed the Christian.  So
+with demagogues: as we see the conservative crumbling, we grow
+conservatived.  Try to think individually upon what you have to learn
+collectively--that is your task.  You are of the few who will be equal to
+it.  We are not men of blood, believe me.  I am not.  For example, I
+detest and I decline the duel.  I have done it, and proved myself a man
+of metal notwithstanding.  To say nothing of the inhumanity, the
+senselessness of duelling revolts me.  'Tis a folly, so your nobles
+practise it, and your royal wiseacre sanctions.  No blood for me: and yet
+I tell you that whatever opposes me, I will sweep away.  How?  With the
+brain.  If we descend to poor brute strength or brutal craft, it is from
+failing in the brain: we quit the leadership of our forces, and the
+descent is the beast's confession.  Do I say how?  Perhaps by your aid.--
+You do not start and cry: "Mine!"  That is well.  I have not much esteem
+for non-professional actresses.  They are numerous and not entertaining.
+--You leave it to me to talk.'
+
+'Could I do better?'
+
+'You listen sweetly.'
+
+'It is because I like to hear.'
+
+'You have the pearly little ear of a shell on the sand.'
+
+'With the great sea sounding near it!'
+
+Alvan drew closer to her.
+
+'I look into your eyes and perceive that one may listen to you and speak
+to you.  Heart to heart, then!  Yes, a sea to lull you, a sea to win you
+--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be.  My prize is found!
+The good friend who did the part of Iris for us came bounding to me: "I
+have discovered the wife for you, Alvan."  I had previously heard of her
+from another as having touched the islet of Capri.  "But," said Kollin,
+"she is a gold-crested serpent--slippery!"  Is she?  That only tells me
+of a little more to be mastered.  I feel my future now.  Hitherto it has
+been a land without sunlight.  Do you know how the look of sunlight on a
+land calms one?  It signifies to the eye possession and repose, the end
+gained--not the end to labour, just heaven!  but peace to the heart's
+craving, which is the renewal of strength for work, the fresh dip in the
+waters of life.  Conjure up your vision of Italy.  Remember the meaning
+of Italian light and colour: the clearness, the luminous fulness, the
+thoughtful shadows.  Mountain and wooded headland are solid, deep to the
+eye, spirit-speaking to the mind.  They throb.  You carve shapes of Gods
+out of that sky, the sea, those peaks.  They live with you.  How they
+satiate the vacant soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from its
+prickly nest!--Well, and you are my sunlighted land.  And you will have
+to be fought for.  And I see not the less repose in the prospect!  Part
+of you may be shifty-sand.  The sands are famous for their golden
+shining--as you shine.  Well, then, we must make the quicksands concrete.
+I have a perfect faith in you, and in the winning of you.  Clearly you
+will have to be fought for.  I should imagine it a tough battle to come.
+But as I doubt neither you nor myself, I see beyond it.--We use phrases
+in common, and aphorisms, it appears.  Why?  but that our minds act in
+unison.  What if I were to make a comparison of you with Paris?--the city
+of Paris, Lutetia.'
+
+'Could you make it good?' said Clotilde.
+
+He laughed and postponed it for a series of skimming discussions, like
+swallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of the
+stream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies,
+leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment that
+must be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mind
+from the touchings and probings of her character on these flights.
+
+She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom the
+appearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful and
+reassuring; and she liked to be discussed, to be compared to anything,
+for the sake of being the subject, so as to be sure it was she that
+listened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sure it
+was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that went
+speeding in this magical rapid round which slung her more and more out of
+her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, denied her
+the right to faint and call upon the world for aid, and catch at it,
+though it was close by and at a signal would stop the terrible circling.
+The world was close by and had begun to stare.  She half apprehended that
+fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible.  In the presence
+of the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away with
+very little creaking of its timbers on the flood.  When we feel its power
+we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space,
+indifferent to nakedness.  And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage
+asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain
+some day to feel.  Had not she trimmed herself?--so much that she had won
+fame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, and
+perilously, for courage.  She had trimmed herself and Alvan too--herself
+to meet it, and Alvan to be it.  Her famous originality was a trumpet
+blown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudly
+his esteem for the quality--in a fair young woman of good breeding.  Each
+had evoked the other.  Their common anticipations differed in this, that
+he had expected comeliness, she the reverse--an Esau of the cities; and
+seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden
+satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on
+its divinest whirlwind.
+
+They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before
+captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractive
+comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear,
+and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple
+of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and the
+extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was
+doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in his
+looks on her.  Her woman's eyes had no guard they had scarcely
+speculation.  She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward,
+under haphazard flashes.  The sight of her hand disengaged told her it
+had been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were
+men and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the
+words she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she
+had crossed.  And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press
+forward to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness
+and at least indicate her force of character.  The splendour of the man
+quite extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she
+set fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her
+fair face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it, some
+truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely womanly,
+a poor charm of her sex.  The intellectual endowment was rarer: still
+rarer the moral audacity.  O, to match this man's embracing
+discursiveness!  his ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound
+he brought out of all subjects!  He struck, and they rang.  There was a
+bell in everything for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance was
+on all sides of the universe; no dead stuff, no longer any afflicting
+lumpishness.  His brain was vivifying light.  And how humane he was! how
+supremely tolerant!  Where she had really thought instead of flippantly
+tapping at the doors of thought, or crying vagrantly for an echo, his
+firm footing in the region thrilled her; and where she had felt deeper
+than fancifully, his wise tenderness overwhelmed.  Strange to consider:
+with all his precious gifts, which must make the gift of life thrice dear
+to him, he was fearless.  Less by what he said than by divination she
+discerned that he knew not fear.  If for only that, she would have hung
+to him like his shadow.  She could have detected a brazen pretender.
+A meaner mortal vaunting his great stores she would have written down
+coxcomb.  Her social training and natural perception raised her to a
+height to measure the bombastical and distinguish it from the eloquently
+lofty.  He spoke of himself, as the towering Alp speaks out at a first
+view, bidding that which he was be known.  Fearless, confident, able, he
+could not but be, as he believed himself, indomitable.  She who was this
+man's mate would consequently wed his possessions, including courage.
+Clotilde at once reached the conclusion of her having it in an equal
+degree.  Was she not displaying it?  The worthy people of the company
+stared, as she now perceived, and she was indifferent; her relatives were
+present without disturbing her exaltation.  She wheeled above their heads
+in the fiery chariot beside her sun-god.  It could not but be courage,
+active courage, superior to her previous tentative steps--the verbal
+temerities she had supposed so dauntless.  For now she was in action, now
+she was being tried to match the preacher and incarnation of the virtues
+of action!
+
+Alvan shaped a comparison of her with Paris, his beloved of cities--the
+symbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive,
+eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting him to
+proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; light in
+light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and therefore not
+light, anything but light in strong hands, very stedfast rather: and oh!
+constantly entertaining.
+
+The comparison had to be strained to fit the living lady's shape.  Did he
+think it, or a dash of something like it?
+
+His mood was luxurious.  He had found the fair and youthful original
+woman of refinement and station desired by him.  He had good reason to
+wish to find her.  Having won a name, standing on firm ground, with
+promise of a great career, chief of what was then taken for a growing
+party and is not yet a collapsed, nor will be, though the foot on it is
+iron, his youth had flown under the tutelage of an extraordinary Mentor,
+whom to call Athene robs the goddess of her personal repute for wisdom in
+conduct, but whose head was wise, wise as it was now grey.  Verily she
+was original; and a grey original should seem remarkable above a blooming
+blonde.  If originality in woman were our prime request, the grey should
+bear the palm.  She has gone through the battle, retaining the standard
+she carried into it, which is a victory.  Alas, that grey, so spirit-
+touching in Art, should be so wintry in reality!
+
+The discovery of a feminine original breathing Spring, softer, warmer
+than the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepid
+as devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan.  He took it luxuriously because
+he believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage of
+the adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in return for
+energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his natural
+longings.
+
+Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long.  All the sweeter was the
+breath of the young Spring.  That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde
+in the attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively
+assuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winning
+her.  Barriers are for those who cannot fly.  The barriers were palpable
+about a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her which
+would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the
+mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior.
+He saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it
+sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his
+courage to support the originality she was famed for.
+
+They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan for
+counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exact phrasing
+of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature.  He
+satisfied them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace
+that night.  Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of
+a contested verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping
+verses of the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious
+flavour of acid, and a lively sting in the tail of the honey.  Sentiment,
+cynicism, and satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses,
+where pure poetry has a recognized voice; but the lower elements
+constitute the popularity in a cultivated society inclining to wantonness
+out of bravado as well as by taste.  Alvan, looking indolently royal and
+royally roguish, quoted a verse that speaks of the superfluousness of a
+faithless lady's vowing bite:
+
+              'The kisses were in the course of things,
+               The bite was a needless addition.'
+
+Clotilde could not repress her reddening--Count Kollin had repeated too
+much!  She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their
+chatter.  He spared her the allusion to Pompeius.  She convinced him of
+her capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with
+her blush.  She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility
+forbade her touching on with him: not that she would not have had an airy
+latitude with him to touch on what she pleased: he liked her for her
+boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it: he liked
+also the distinction she made.
+
+The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to his
+requirements in a wife.  They marched to the table together, and sat
+together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together--true Rauenthal.  His
+robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife
+might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his
+possible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful
+heavens, blessing mankind in chorus.  It belonged to his hearty dream of
+the wife he would choose, were she to be had.  The position of
+interpreter of heaven's benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment
+of the gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing
+it with the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than
+he on this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation.  Clotilde kindled
+to the hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet.  She was not
+devoid of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her
+father's board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that
+vineyard and vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to be
+enthusiastic for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty from much
+talking and excitement.  She drank her glass relishingly, declaring the
+wine princely.  Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: 'You are not for
+the extract of raisin our people have taken to copy from French
+Sauternes, to suit a female predilection for sugar?'
+
+'No, no, the grape for me!' said she: 'the Rhine grape with the elf in
+it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!'
+
+'Glorious!'
+
+He toasted the grape.  'Wine of the grape is the young bride--the young
+sun-bride!  divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered
+sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten of
+gout.  No raisin-juice for us!  None of their too-long-on-the-stem
+clusters!  We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her heaven-
+kissing ardour.  I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the Rhine.
+We--will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come? we two!'
+The picture of his bride and him drinking the sun down after a day of
+savage toil was in the shout--a burst unnoticed in the incessantly
+verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table.  Clotilde acquiesced:
+she chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollicking faun.  She was
+realizing fairyland.
+
+They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between them as
+with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting and
+branching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of the
+harmony.  So ran their chirping arguments and diversions.  The carrying
+on of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to those
+undetermined floating atoms about us that a certain sacred something is
+in process of formation, or has formed; and people looked; and looked
+hard at the pair, and at one another afterward: none approached them.
+The Signor conjuror who has a thousand arts for conjuring with nature was
+generally considered to have done that night his most ancient and
+reputedly fabulous trick--the dream of poets, rarely witnessed anywhere,
+and almost too wonderful for credence in a haunt of our later
+civilization.  Yet there it was: the sudden revelation of the intense
+divinity to a couple fused in oneness by his apparition, could be
+perceived of all having man and woman in them; love at first sight, was
+visible.  'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'  And if nature,
+character, circumstance, and a maid clever at dressing her mistress's
+golden hair, did prepare them for Love's lightning-match, not the less
+were they proclaimingly alight and in full blaze.  Likewise, Time,
+imperious old gentleman though we know him to be, with his fussy
+reiterations concerning the hour for bed and sleep, bowed to the magical
+fact of their condition, and forbore to warn them of his passing from
+night to day.  He had to go, he must, he has to be always going, but as
+long as he could he left them on their bank by the margin of the stream,
+where a shadow-cycle of the eternal wound a circle for them and allowed
+them to imagine they had thrust that old driver of the dusty high-road
+quietly out of the way.  They were ungrateful, of course, when the
+performance of his duties necessitated his pulling them up beside him
+pretty smartly, but he uttered no prophecy of ever intending to rob them
+of the celestial moments they had cut from him and meant to keep between
+them 'for ever,' and fresh.
+
+The hour was close on the dawn of a March morning.  Alvan assisted at the
+cloaking and hooding of Clotilde.  Her relatives were at hand; they hung
+by while he led her to the stairs and down into a spacious moonlight that
+laid the traceries of the bare tree-twigs clear-black on grass and stone.
+
+'A night to head the Spring!' said Alvan.  'Come.'
+
+He lifted her off the steps and set her on the ground, as one who had an
+established right to the privilege and she did not contest it, nor did
+her people, so kingly was he, arrayed in the thunder of the bolt which
+had struck the pair.  These things, and many things that islands know not
+of, are done upon continents, where perhaps traditions of the awfulness
+of Love remain more potent in society; or it may be, that an island
+atmosphere dispossesses the bolt of its promptitude to strike, or the
+breastplates of the islanders are strengthened to resist the bolt, or no
+tropical heat is there to create and launch it, or nothing is to be seen
+of it for the haziness, or else giants do not walk there.  But even where
+he walked, amid a society intellectually fostering sentiment, in a land
+bowing to see the simplicity of the mystery paraded, Alvan's behaviour
+was passing heteroclite.  He needed to be the kingly fellow he was,
+crowned by another kingly fellow--the lord of hearts--to impose it
+uninterruptedly.  'She is mine; I have won her this night!' his bearing
+said; and Clotilde's acquiesced; and the worthy couple following them had
+to exhibit a copy of the same, much wondering.  Partly by habit, and of
+his natural astuteness, Alvan peremptorily usurped a lead that once taken
+could not easily be challenged, and would roll him on a good tideway
+strong in his own passion and his lady's up against the last defences--
+her parents.  A difficulty with them was foreseen.  What is a difficulty!
+--a gate in the hunting-field: an opponent on a platform: a knot beneath
+a sword: the dam to waters that draw from the heavens.  Not desiring it
+in this case--it would have been to love the difficulty better than the
+woman--he still enjoyed the bracing prospect of a resistance, if only
+because it was a portion of the dowry she brought him.  Good soldiers
+(who have won their grades) are often of a peaceful temper and would not
+raise an invocation to war, but a view of the enemy sets their pugnacious
+forces in motion, the bugle fills their veins with electrical fire, till
+they are as racers on the race-course.--His inmost hearty devil was glad
+of a combat that pertained to his possession of her, for battle gives the
+savour of the passion to win, and victory dignifies a prize: he was,
+however, resolved to have it, if possible, according to the regular
+arrangement of such encounters, formal, without snatchings, without rash
+violence; a victory won by personal ascendancy, reasoning eloquence.
+
+He laughed to hear her say, in answer to a question as to her present
+feelings: 'I feel that I am carried away by a centaur!'  The comparison
+had been used or implied to him before.
+
+'No!' said he, responding to a host of memories, to shake them off, 'no
+more of the quadruped man!  You tempt him--may I tell you that?  Why,
+now, this moment, at the snap of my fingers, what is to hinder our taking
+the short cut to happiness, centaur and nymph?  One leap and a gallop,
+and we should be into the morning, leaving night to grope for us, parents
+and friends to run about for the wits they lose in running.  But no!  No
+more scandals.  That silver moon invites us by its very spell of bright
+serenity, to be mad: just as, when you drink of a reverie, the more
+prolonged it is the greater the readiness for wild delirium at the end of
+the draught.  But no!' his voice deepened--'the handsome face of the orb
+that lights us would be well enough were it only a gallop between us two.
+Dearest, the orb that lights us two for a lifetime must be taken all
+round, and I have been on the wrong side of the moon
+
+I have seen the other face of it--a visage scored with regrets, dead
+dreams, burnt passions, bald illusions, and the like, the like!--sunless,
+waterless, without a flower!  It is the old volcano land: it grows one
+bitter herb: if ever you see my mouth distorted you will know I am
+revolving a taste of it; and as I need the antidote you give, I will not
+be the centaur to win you, for that is the land where he stables himself;
+yes, there he ends his course, and that is the herb he finishes by
+pasturing on.  You have no dislike of metaphors and parables?  We Jews
+are a parable people.'
+
+'I am sure I do understand .  .  .' said Clotilde, catching her breath to
+be conscientious, lest he should ask her for an elucidation.
+
+'Provided always that the metaphor be not like the metaphysician's
+treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise!--You were going to add?'
+
+'I was going to say, I think I understand, but you run away with me
+still.'
+
+'May the sensation never quit you!'
+
+'It will not.'
+
+'What a night !' Alvan raised his head: 'A night cast for our first
+meeting and betrothing!  You are near home?'
+
+'The third house yonder in the moonlight.'
+
+'The moonlight lays a white hand on it!'
+
+'That is my window sparkling.'
+
+'That is the vestal's cresset.  Shall I blow it out?'
+
+'You are too far.  And it is a celestial flame, sir!'
+
+'Celestial in truth!  My hope of heaven!  Dian's crescent will be ever on
+that house for me, Clotilde.  I would it were leagues distant, or the
+door not forbidden!'
+
+'I could minister to a good knight humbly.'
+
+Alvan bent to her, on a sudden prompting:
+
+'When do father and mother arrive?'
+
+'To-morrow.'
+
+He took her hand.  'To-morrow, then!  The worst of omens is delay.'
+
+Clotilde faintly gasped.  Could he mean it?--he of so evil a name in her
+family and circle!
+
+Her playfulness and pleasure in the game of courtliness forsook her.
+
+'Tell me the hour when it will be most convenient to them to receive me,'
+said Alvan.
+
+She stopped walking in sheer fright.
+
+'My father--my mother?' she said, imaging within her the varied horror of
+each and the commotion.
+
+'To-morrow or the day after--not later.  No delays!  You are mine, we are
+one; and the sooner my cause is pleaded the better for us both.  If I
+could step in and see them this instant, it would be forestalling
+mischances.  Do you not see, that time is due to us, and the minutes are
+our gold slipping away?'
+
+She shrank her hand back: she did not wish to withdraw the hand, only to
+shun the pledge it signified.  He opened an abyss at her feet, and in
+deadly alarm of him she exclaimed: 'Oh!  not yet; not immediately.'  She
+trembled, she made her petition dismal by her anguish of speechlessness.
+'There will be such .  .  .  not yet!  Perhaps later.  They must not be
+troubled yet--at present.  I am .  .  .  I cannot--pray, delay!'
+
+'But you are mine!' said Alvan.  'You feel it as I do.  There can be no
+real impediment?'
+
+She gave an empty sigh that sought to be a run of entreaties.  In fear
+of his tongue she caught at words to baffle it, senseless of their
+imbecility: 'Do not insist: yes, in time: they will--they--they may.
+My father is not very well .  .  .  my mother: she is not very well.
+They are neither of them very well: not at present!--Spare them at
+present.'
+
+To avoid being carried away, she flung herself from the centaur's back
+to the disenchanting earth; she separated herself from him in spirit,
+and beheld him as her father and mother and her circle would look on this
+pretender to her hand, with his lordly air, his Jew blood, and his
+hissing reputation--for it was a reputation that stirred the snakes and
+the geese of the world.  She saw him in their eyes, quite coldly: which
+imaginative capacity was one of the remarkable feats of cowardice, active
+and cold of brain even while the heart is active and would be warm.
+
+He read something of her weakness.  'And supposing I decide that it must
+be?'
+
+'How can I supplicate you!' she replied with a shiver, feeling that she
+had lost her chance of slipping from his grasp, as trained women of the
+world, or very sprightly young wits know how to do at the critical
+moment: and she had lost it by being too sincere.  Her cowardice appeared
+to her under that aspect.
+
+'Now I perceive that the task is harder,' said Alvan, seeing her huddled
+in a real dismay.  'Why will you not rise to my level and fear nothing!
+The way is clear: we have only to take the step.  Have you not seen
+tonight that we are fated for one another?  It is your destiny, and
+trifling with destiny is a dark business.  Look at me.  Do you doubt my
+having absolute control of myself to bear whatever they put on me to
+bear, and hold firmly to my will to overcome them!  Oh!  no delays.'
+
+'Yes!' she cried; 'yes, there must be.'
+
+'You say it?'
+
+The courage to repeat her cry was wanting.
+
+She trembled visibly: she could more readily have bidden him bear her
+hence than have named a day for the interview with her parents; but
+desperately she feared that he would be the one to bid; and he had this
+of the character of destiny about him, that she felt in him a maker of
+facts.  He was her dream in human shape, her eagle of men, and she felt
+like a lamb in the air; she had no resistance, only terror of his power,
+and a crushing new view of the nature of reality.
+
+'I see!' said he, and his breast fell.  Her timid inability to join with
+him for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights: a bad
+name among her people and class, and chains in private.  He was old
+enough to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood less
+fiery than the junction of his passions.  'Well, well!--but we might so
+soon have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad!  It is but to
+determine to do it--to take the bold short path instead of the wearisome
+circuit.  Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of the
+heart.  Battles are won in that way: not by tender girls!  and she is a
+girl, and the task is too much for her.  So, then, we are in your hands,
+child!  Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and
+sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is not
+a wedded soul.  Is she not a serpent?  gold-crested, all the world may
+see; and with a mortal bite, I know.  I have had the bite before the
+kisses.  That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things.
+Apropos, Hamlet was poisoned--ghost-poisoned.'
+
+'Mad, he was mad!' said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.
+
+'He was born bilious; he partook of the father's constitution, not the
+mother's.  High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought,
+reflective, if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was by
+nature two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that sleeps
+beside her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry.  Before the
+ghost walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action would have
+whiffed away his melancholy.  After it, he was a dizzy moralizer, waiting
+for the winds to blow him to his deed-ox out.  The apparition of his
+father to him poisoned a sluggish run of blood, and that venom in the
+blood distracted a head steeped in Wittenberg philosophy.  With
+metaphysics in one and poison in the other, with the outer world opened
+on him and this world stirred to confusion, he wore the semblance of
+madness; he was throughout sane; sick, but never with his reason
+dethroned.'
+
+'Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!'
+
+'Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.'
+
+' No!'
+
+'Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?' said Alvan.
+
+Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to
+be able to laugh.  Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells
+were spoken, Alvan had gone.  And then she thought of the person that
+Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for him
+in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed
+gold-crested serpent.
+
+He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit of
+likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.
+
+And she?  She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had
+returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her with
+were no longer imminent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a short
+sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to her own
+sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest in her.  The
+exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the art to frame
+her apology.  The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan, she saw
+Prince Marko.  She was gentle to him, in anticipation of his grief; she
+could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequious beauty, and when
+her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acute sensibility to the
+blow, honourably she inflicted it.
+
+'Marko, my friend, you know that I cannot be false; then let me tell you
+I yesterday met the man who has but to lift his hand and I go to him, and
+he may lead me whither he will.'
+
+The burning eyes of her Indian Bacchus fixed on her till their brightness
+moistened and flashed.
+
+Whatever was for her happiness he bowed his head to, he said.  He knew
+the man.
+
+Her duty was thus performed; she had plighted herself.  For the first few
+days she was in dread of meeting, seeing, or hearing of Alvan.  She
+feared the mention of a name that rolled the world so swiftly.  Her
+parents had postponed their coming, she had no reason for instant alarm;
+it was his violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence that she
+feared, as nervous people shrink from cannon: and neither meeting,
+seeing, nor hearing of him, she began to yearn, like the child whose
+curiosity is refreshed by a desire to try again the startling thing which
+frightened it.  Her yearning grew, the illusion of her courage flooded
+back; she hoped he would present himself to claim her, marvelled that he
+did not, reproached him; she could almost have scorned him for listening
+to the hesitations of the despicable girl so little resembling what she
+really was--a poor untried girl, anxious only on behalf of her family to
+spare them a sudden shock.  Remembering her generous considerations in
+their interests, she thought he should have known that the creature he
+called a child would have yielded upon supplication to fly with him.
+Her considerateness for him too, it struck her next, was the cause of
+her seeming cowardly, and the man ought to have perceived it and put it
+aside.  He should have seen that she could be brave, and was a mate for
+him.  And if his shallow experience of her wrote her down nerveless, his
+love should be doing.
+
+Was it love?  Her restoration to the belief in her possessing a decided
+will whispered of high achievements she could do in proof of love, had
+she the freedom of a man.  She would not have listened (it was quite
+true) to a silly supplicating girl; she would not have allowed an
+interval to yawn after the first wild wooing of her.  Prince Marko loved.
+Yes, that was love!  It failed in no sign of the passion.  She set
+herself to study it in Marko, and was moved by many sentiments, numbering
+among them pity, thankfulness, and the shiver of a feeling between
+admiration and pathetic esteem, like that the musician has for a precious
+instrument giving sweet sound when shattered.  He served her faithfully,
+in spite of his distaste for some of his lady's commissions.  She had to
+get her news of Alvan through Marko.  He brought her particulars of the
+old trial of Alvan, and Alvan's oration in defence of himself for a
+lawless act of devotion to the baroness; nothing less than the
+successfully scheming to wrest by force from that lady's enemy a document
+precious to her lawful interests.  It was one of those cases which have a
+really high gallant side as well as a bad; an excellent case for
+rhetoric.  Marko supplied the world's opinion of the affair, bravely
+owning it to be not unfavourable.  Her worthy relatives, the Frau v.
+Crestow and husband, had very properly furnished a report to the family
+of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over it, with the epithets
+applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have been received on a visit
+to demand her in marriage.  There was no chance of her being allowed to
+enter houses where this 'rageing demagogue and popular buffoon' was a
+guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so she was compelled to
+have recourse to Marko.  Unable to take such services without rewarding
+him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer.  Those who toss crumbs
+to their domestic favourites will now and then be moved to toss meat,
+which is not so good for them, but the dumb mendicant's delight in it is
+winning, and a little cannot hurt.  Besides, if any one had a claim on
+her it was the prince; and as he was always adoring, never importunate,
+he restored her to the pedestal she had been really rudely shaken from by
+that other who had caught her up suddenly into the air, and dropped her!
+A hand abandoned to her slave rewarded him immeasurably.  A heightening
+of the reward almost took his life.  In the peacefulness of dealing with
+a submissive love that made her queenly, the royal, which plucked her
+from throne to footstool, seemed predatory and insolent.  Thus, after
+that scene of 'first love,' in which she had been actress, she became
+almost (with an inward thrill or two for the recovering of him)
+reconciled to the not seeing of the noble actor; for nothing could erase
+the scene--it was historic; and Alvan would always be thought of as a
+delicious electricity.  She and Marko were together on the summer
+excursion of her people, and quite sisterly, she could say, in her
+delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions.  True gentlemen are
+imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow of giants; but still
+Clotilde's experience of a giant's manners was favourable to the liberty
+she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this kind, rather warmer than
+her word for it would imply.  She owned that she could better live the
+poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the
+society of Marko.  He was very young, he was little more than an
+adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or
+slacken him.  One could play on him securely, thinking of a distant day
+--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when he might be made
+happy.
+
+Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to
+anatomize him beset her.  The ground of it was, that she found him in her
+likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling,
+now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the
+pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic
+home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked self-
+knowledge, and of her saying: 'That is like me: that is very like me:
+that is terribly like': up to the point where the comparison wooed her no
+longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped her so shrewdly as
+to force her to say: 'That is he, not I': and the vivisected youth
+received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch.  It was
+given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him.  Anatomy is the title
+for the operation, because the probing of herself in another, with the
+liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt
+to feel that she prosecuted her researches in a dead body.  The moment
+her strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank under a stroke of pain,
+she abstained from carving, and simultaneously conscious that he lived,
+she was kind to him.
+
+'This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?'
+
+'I love you.'
+
+'You think me the highest and best?'
+
+'You are.'
+
+'So deep that you could bear anything from me?'
+
+'Try me!'
+
+'Unfaithfulness?'
+
+'You would be you!'
+
+'Do you not say that because you cannot suspect evil of me?'
+
+'Let me only see you!'
+
+'You are sure that happiness would not smother it?'
+
+'Has it done so yet?'
+
+'Though you know I am a serpent to that man's music?'
+
+'Ah, heaven!  Oh!--do not say music.  Yes!  though anything!'
+
+'And if ever you were to witness the power of his just breathing to me?'
+
+'I would .  .  .  .  Ah!'
+
+' What?  If you saw his music working the spell?--even the first notes of
+his prelude!'
+
+'I would wait'
+
+'It might be for long.'
+
+'I would eat my heart.'
+
+'Bitter!  bitter!'
+
+'I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you.'
+
+She had a seizure of the nerves.
+
+The likeness between them was, she felt, too flamingly keen to be looked
+at further.  She reached to the dim idea of some such nauseous devotion,
+and took a shot in her breast as she did so, and abjured it, and softened
+to her victim.  Clotilde opened her arms, charming away her wound, as she
+soothed him, both by the act of soothing and the reflection that she
+could not be so very like one whom she pitied and consoled.
+
+She was charitably tender.  If it be thought that she was cruel to
+excess, plead for her the temptation to simple human nature at sight of a
+youth who could be precipitated into the writhings of dissolution, and
+raised out of it by a smile.  This young man's responsive spirit acted on
+her as the discovery of specifics for restoring soundness to the frame
+excites the brilliant empiric: he would slay us with benevolent soul to
+show the miracle of our revival.  Worship provokes the mortal goddess to
+a manifestation of her powers; and really the devotee is full half to
+blame.
+
+She had latterly been thinking of Alvan's rejection of the part of
+centaur; and his phrase, the quadruped man, breathed meaning.  He was to
+gain her lawfully after dominating her utterly.  That was right, but it
+levelled imagination.  There is in the sentimental kingdom of Love a form
+of reasoning, by which a lady of romantic notions who is dominated
+utterly, will ask herself why she should be gained lawfully: and she is
+moved to do so by the consideration that if the latter, no necessity can
+exist for the former: and the reverse.  In the union of the two
+conditions she sees herself slavishly domesticated.  With her Indian
+Bacchus imagination rose, for he was pliant: she had only to fancy, and
+he was beside her.--Quick to the saddle, away!  The forest of terrors is
+ahead; they are at the verge of it; a last hamlet perches on its borders;
+the dwellers have haunted faces; the timbers of their huts lean to an
+upright in wry splinters; warnings are moaned by men and women with the
+voice of a night-wind; but on and on! the forest cannot be worse than a
+world defied.  They drain a cup of milk apiece and they spur, for this is
+the way to the golden Indian land of the planted vine and the lover's
+godship.--Ludicrous!  There is no getting farther than the cup of milk
+with Marko.  They curvet and caper to be forward unavailingly.  It should
+be Alvan to bring her through the forest to the planted vine in sunland.
+Her splendid prose Alvan could do what the sprig of poetry can but
+suggest.  Never would malicious fairy in old woman's form have offered
+Alvan a cup of milk to paralyze his bride's imagination of him
+confronting perils.  Yet, O shameful contrariety of the fates! he who
+could, will not; he who would, is incapable.  Let it not be supposed that
+the desire of her bosom was to be run away with in person.  Her simple
+human nature wished for the hero to lift her insensibly over the
+difficult opening chapter of the romance--through 'the forest,' or half
+imagined: that done, she felt bold enough to meet the unimagined, which,
+as there was no picture of it to terrify her, seemed an easy gallop into
+sunland.--Yes, but in the grasp of a great prose giant, with the poetic
+departed!  Naturally she turned to caress the poetic while she had it
+beside her.  And it was a wonder to observe the young prince's heavenly
+sensitiveness to every variation of her moods.  He knew without hearing
+when she had next seen Alvan, though it had not been to speak to him.  He
+looked, and he knew.  The liquid darkness of his large eastern eyes cast
+a light that brought her heart out: she confessed it, and she comforted
+him.  The sweetest in the woman caused her double-dealing.
+
+Now she was aware that Alvan moved behind the screen concealing him.
+A common friend of Alvan and her family talked to her of him.  He was an
+eminent professor, a middleaged, grave and honourable man, not ignorant
+that her family entertained views opposed to the pretensions of such a
+man as the demagogue and Jew.  Nevertheless Alvan could persuade him to
+abet the scheme for his meeting Clotilde; nay, to lead to it; ultimately
+to allow his own house to be their place of meeting.  Alvan achieved the
+first of the steps unassisted.  Whether or not his character stood well
+with a man of the world, his force of character, backed by solid
+attainments in addition to brilliant gifts, could win a reputable citizen
+and erudite to support him.  Rhetoric in a worthy cause has good chances
+of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seem excellent to
+the professor when one promising fair to be the political genius of his
+time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could make him believe
+that marriage with this girl would be his clear salvation.  The second
+step was undesignedly Clotilde's.
+
+She was on the professor's arm at one of the great winter balls of her
+conductor's brethren in the law, and he said: 'Alvan is here.'  She
+answered: 'No, he has not yet come.'--How could she tell that he was not
+present in the crowd?
+
+'Has he come now?' said the professor.
+
+'No.'
+
+And no Alvan was discernible.
+
+'Now?'
+
+'Not yet.'
+
+The professor stared about.  She waited.
+
+'Now he has come; he is in the room now,' said Clotilde.
+
+Alvan was perceived.  He stood in the centre of the throng surrounding
+him to buzz about some recent pamphlet.
+
+She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as by
+degrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him,
+it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for the
+physical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late,
+Alvan happened to have arrived.  The touch of his hand, the instant
+naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if
+there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence on
+her, almost to the making it planetary.  And a glance at the professor
+revealed how picturesque it was.  Alvan and he murmured aside.  They
+spoke of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her
+in the dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the
+limbs in his desperate poor lover's little flitting eternity of the
+possession of her--should say, after she had been led back to her
+friends: 'That is he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the
+Hesperides, whom I must brush away.'
+
+'He?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional a
+weight as her tone declared him.  'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does
+not count among the dragons.'
+
+But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark,
+a manful thickness of voice in Alvan's 'That is he!'  The rivals had
+fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the
+wrestlers' first grapple.  In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.
+
+'He does not count?  With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed.  He knew
+something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the
+character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of
+rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and
+made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it that his
+vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception; all, everything;
+all!  I repeat.  But what of it, if I win you?  as I shall--only aid me a
+little.'
+
+She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the import
+of the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to his
+penetrative knowledge.  Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, of excellent
+substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose for themselves--
+the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grand accusation;
+and they have had to drink it, and they have blinked over the tonic
+draught with such power of taking a bracing as their constitutions could
+summon.  At no moment of their quaint mutual history are the sexes to be
+seen standing more acutely divided.  Well may the lady be silent; her
+little sins are magnified to herself to the proportion of the greatness
+of heart forgiving her; and that, with his mysterious penetration and a
+throb of her conscience, holds her tongue-tied.  She does not imagine the
+effect of her silence upon the magnanimous wretch.  Some of these lovers,
+it has to be stated in sadness for the good name of man, have not
+preserved an attitude that said so nobly, 'Child, thou art human--thou
+art woman!' They have undone it and gone to pieces with an injured
+lover's babble of persecuting inquiries for confessions.  Some, on the
+contrary, retaining the attitude, have been unable to digest the tonic;
+they did not prepare their systems as they did their dose, possibly
+thinking the latter a supererogatory heavy thump on a trifle, the which
+was performed by them artfully for a means of swallowing and getting that
+obnoxious trifle well down.  These are ever after love's dyspeptics.
+Very few indeed continue at heart in harmony with their opening note to
+the silent fair, because in truth the general anticipation is of her
+proclaiming, if not angelical innocence, a softly reddened or blush-rose
+of it, where the little guiltiness lies pathetic on its bed of white.
+
+Alvan's robustness of temper, as a conqueror pleased with his capture,
+could inspirit him to feel as he said it:
+
+'I know all; what matters that to me?'  Even her silence, extending the
+'all' beyond limits, as it did to the over-knowing man, who could number
+these indicative characteristics of the young woman: impulsive, without
+will, readily able to lie: her silence worked no discord in him.  He
+would have remarked, that he was not looking out for a saint, but rather
+for a sprightly comrade, perfectly feminine, thoroughly mastered, young,
+graceful, comely, and a lady of station.  Once in his good keeping, her
+lord would answer for her.  And this was a manfully generous view of the
+situation.  It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror's mood.  But
+how of his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse,
+a defeat?  Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as
+a heroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself!  Wise are
+the mothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it
+only to guard them at present, from the gentleman's condescending
+generosity, until he has become something more than robust in his ideas
+of the sex--say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal.
+
+Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, the origin
+of the black thing flung at her in time to come--when the man was
+frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth of
+madness.
+
+After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof of the
+amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxing
+anxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to the
+sister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair through
+a demi-ceremony of betrothal.  It sprang Clotilde astride nearer to
+reality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the change
+at home.  A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan's
+pushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been.  She
+waited for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet to
+take; she feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; the old
+wheel revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait for
+circumstances to bring the change they cannot work for themselves; and
+once more the two fell asunder.  She had thoughts of the cloister.  Her
+venerable relative died joining her hand to Prince Marko's; she was
+induced to think of marriage.  An illness laid her prostrate; she
+contemplated the peace of death.
+
+Shortly before she fell sick the prince was a guest of her father's, and
+had won the household by his perfect amiability as an associate.  The
+grace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an Indian
+Bacchus were native to him.  In her convalescence, she asked herself what
+more she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she in
+return might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness.
+For she had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in the
+Spartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently.  But he was a flower
+in sunshine to happiness, and he looked to her for it.  Why should she
+withhold from him a thing so easily given?  The convalescent is receptive
+and undesiring, or but very faintly desiring: the new blood coming into
+the frame like first dawn of light has not stirred the old passions; it
+is infant nature, with a tinge of superadded knowledge that is not cloud
+across it and lends it only a tender wistfulness.
+
+Her physician sentenced her to the Alps, whither a friend, a daughter of
+our island, whose acquaintance she had made in Italy, was going, and at
+an invitation Clotilde accompanied her, and she breathed Alpine air.
+Marko sank into the category of dreams during sickness.  There came a
+letter from the professor mentioning that Alvan was on one of the kingly
+Alpine heights in view, and the new blood running through her veins
+became a torrent.  He there!  So near!  Could he not be reached?
+
+He had a saying: Two wishes make a will.
+
+The wishes of two lovers, he meant.  A prettier sentence for lovers, and
+one more intoxicating to them, was never devised.  It chirrups of the
+dear silly couple.  Well, this was her wish.  Was it his?  Young health
+on the flow of her leaping blood cried out that it could not be other
+than Alvan's wish; she believed in his wishing it.  Then as he wished and
+she wished, she had the will immediately, and it was all the more her own
+for being his as well.  She hurried her friend and her friend's friends
+on horseback off to the heights where the wounded eagle lodged
+overlooking mountain and lake.  The professor reported him outwearied
+with excess of work.  Alvan lived the lives of three; the sins of thirty
+were laid to his charge.  Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men?  Her
+reckless defence of him, half spoken, half in her mind, helped her to
+comprehend his dealings with her, and how it was that he stormed her and
+consented to be beaten.  He had a thousand occupations, an ambition out
+of the world of love, chains to break, temptations, leanings .  .  .
+tut, tut!  She had not lived in her circle of society, and listened to
+the tales of his friends and enemies, and been the correspondent of
+flattering and flattered men of learning, without understanding how a man
+like Alvan found diversions when forbidden to act in a given direction:
+and now that her healthful new blood inspired the courage to turn two
+wishes to a will, she saw both herself and him very clearly, enough at
+least to pardon the man more than she did herself.  She had perforce of
+her radiant new healthfulness arrived at an exact understanding of him.
+Where she was deluded was in supposing that she would no longer dread his
+impetuous disposition to turn rosy visions into facts.  But she had the
+revived convalescent's ardour to embrace things positive while they were
+not knocking at the door; dreams were abhorrent to her, tasteless and
+innutritious; she cast herself on the flood, relying on his towering
+strength and mastery of men and events to bring her to some safe landing
+--the dream of hearts athirst for facts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Alvan was at his writing-table doing stout gladiator's work on paper in
+a chamber of one of the gaunt hotels of the heights, which are Death's
+Heads there in Winter and have the tongues in Summer, when a Swiss lad
+entered with a round grin to tell him that a lady on horseback below had
+asked for him--Dr. Alvan.  Who could the lady be?  He thought of too
+many.  The thought of Clotilde was dismissed in its dimness.  Issuing and
+beholding her, his face became illuminated as by a stroke of sunlight.
+
+'Clotilde!  by all the holiest!'
+
+She smiled demurely, and they greeted.
+
+She admired the look of rich pleasure shining through surprise in him.
+Her heart thanked him for appearing so handsome before her friends.
+
+'I was writing,' said he.  'Guess to whom?--I had just finished my
+political stuff, and fell on a letter to the professor and another for
+an immediate introduction to your father.'
+
+'True?'
+
+'The truth, as you shall see.  So, you have come, you have found me!
+This time if I let you slip, may I be stamped slack-fingered!'
+
+'"Two wishes make a will," you say.'
+
+He answered her with one of his bursts of brightness.
+
+Her having sought him he read for the frank surrender which he was ready
+to match with a loyal devotion to his captive.  Her coming cleared
+everything.
+
+Clotilde introduced him to her friends, and he was enrolled a member of
+the party.  His appearance was that of a man to whom the sphinx has
+whispered.  They ascended to the topmost of the mountain stages, to
+another caravanserai of tourists, whence the singular people emerge in
+morning darkness night-capped and blanketed, and behold the great orb of
+day at his birth--he them.
+
+Walking slowly beside Clotilde on the mountain way, Alvan said: 'Two
+wishes!  Mine was in your breast.  You wedded yours to it.  At last!--and
+we are one.  Not a word more of time lost.  My wish is almost a will in
+itself--was it not?--and has been wooing yours all this while!--till the
+sleeper awakened, the well-spring leapt up from the earth; and our two
+wishes united dare the world to divide them.  What can?  My wish was your
+destiny, yours is mine.  We are one.'  He poetized on his passion, and
+dramatized it: 'Stood you at the altar, I would pluck you from the man
+holding your hand!  There is no escape for you.  Nay, into the vaults,
+were you to grow pale and need my vital warmth--down to the vaults!
+Speak--or no: look!  That will do.  You hold a Titan in your eyes, like
+metal in the furnace, to turn him to any shape you please, liquid or
+solid.  You make him a god: he is the river Alvan or the rock Alvan: but
+fixed or flowing, he is lord of you.  That is the universal penalty: you
+must, if you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature: if
+you raise him to heaven, you must be his!  Ay, look!  I know the eyes!
+They can melt granite, they can freeze fire.  Pierce me, sweet eyes!  And
+now flutter, for there is that in me to make them.'
+
+'Consider!' Clotilde flutteringly entreated him.
+
+'The world?  you dear heaven of me!  Looking down on me does not
+compromise you, and I am not ashamed of my devotions.  I sat in gloom:
+you came: I saw my goddess and worshipped.  The world, Lutece, the world
+is a variable monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false; but
+those who weld strength with sincerity may practise their rites of
+religion publicly, and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate.  Nay, I
+say that strength in love is the sole sincerity, and the world knows it,
+muffs it in the air about us, and so we two are privileged.  Politically
+also we know that strength is the one reality: the rest is shadow.
+Behind the veil of our human conventions power is constant as ever, and
+to perceive the fact is to have the divining rod-to walk clear of shams.
+He is the teacher who shows where power exists: he is the leader who
+wakens and forms it.  Why have I unfailingly succeeded?--I never doubted!
+The world voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly.  You--
+to your honour?--I won't decide--but you have the longest in my
+experience resisted.  I have a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; I have
+a voice for ears, a net for butterflies, a hook for fish, and desperation
+to plunge into marshes: but the feu follet will not be caught.  One must
+wait--wait till her desire to have a soul bids her come to us.  She has
+come!  A soul is hers: and see how, instantly, the old monster, the
+world, which has no soul--not yet: we are helping it to get one--becomes
+a shadow, powerless to stop or overawe.  For I do give you a soul, think
+as you will of it.  I give you strength to realize, courage to act.  It
+is the soul that does things in this life--the rest is vapour.  How do we
+distinguish love?--as we do music by the pure note won from resolute
+strings.  The tense chord is music, and it is love.  This higher and
+higher mountain air, with you beside me, sweeps me like a harp.'
+
+'Oh!  talk on, talk on!  talk ever!  do not cease talking to me!'
+exclaimed Clotilde.
+
+'You feel the mountain spirit?'
+
+'I feel that you reveal it.'
+
+'Tell me the books you have been reading.'
+
+' Oh, light literature-poor stuff.'
+
+'When we two read together you will not say that.  Light literature is
+the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the
+view within us as well as without.  Our blood runs through it, our
+history in the quick.  The Philistine detests it, because he has no view,
+out or in.  The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled
+and sapless, when they condemn it.  The vulgar demand to have their
+pleasures in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they
+shall not degrade the fame of noble fiction.  We are the choice public,
+which will have good writing for light reading.  Poet, novelist,
+essayist, dramatist, shall be ranked honourable in my Republic.  I am
+neither, but a man of law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on
+the road to government and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as
+much from light literature as from heavy-as much, that is, from the
+pictures of our human blood in motion as from the clever assortment of
+our forefatherly heaps of bones.  Shun those who cry out against fiction
+and have no taste for elegant writing.  For to have no sympathy with the
+playful mind is not to have a mind: it is a test.  But name the books.'
+
+She named one or two.
+
+'And when does Dr. Alvan date the first year of his Republic?'
+
+'Clotilde!' he turned on her.
+
+'My good sir?'
+
+'These worthy good people who are with you: tell me-to-morrow we leave
+them!'
+
+'Leave them?'
+
+'You with me.  No more partings.  The first year, the first day shall be
+dated from to-morrow.  You and I proclaim our Republic on these heights.
+All the ceremonies to follow.  We will have a reaping of them, and make a
+sheaf to present to the world with compliments.  To-morrow!'
+
+'You do not speak seriously?'
+
+'I jest as little as the Talmud.  Decide at once, in the happy flush of
+this moment.'
+
+'I cannot listen to you, dear sir!'
+
+'But your heart beats!'
+
+'I am not mistress of it.'
+
+'Call me master of it.  I make ready for to-morrow.'
+
+' No! no! no!  A thousand times no!  You have been reading too much
+fiction and verse.  Properly I should spurn you.'
+
+'Will you fail me, play feu follet, ward me off again?'
+
+'I must be won by rules, brave knight!'
+
+'Will you be won?'
+
+'And are you he--the Alvan who would not be centaur?'
+
+'I am he who chased a marsh-fire, and encountered a retiarius, and the
+meshes are on my head and arms.  I fancied I dealt with a woman; a woman
+needing protection!  She has me fast--I am netted, centaur or man.  That
+is between us two.  But think of us facing the world, and trust me; take
+my hand, take the leap; I am the best fighter in that fight.  Trust it to
+me, and all your difficulties are at an end.  To fly solves the problem.'
+
+'Indeed, indeed, I have more courage than I had,' said Clotilde.
+
+His eyes dilated, steadied, speculated, weighed her.
+
+'Put it to proof while you can believe in it!'
+
+'How is it every one but you thinks me bold?' she complained.
+
+'Because I carry a touchstone that brings out the truth.  I am your
+reality: all others are phantoms.  You can impose on them, not on me.
+Courage for one inspired plunge you may have, and it will be your
+salvation:--southward, over to Italy, that is the line of flight, and the
+subsequent struggle will be mine: you will not have to face it.  But the
+courage for daily contention at home, standing alone, while I am distant
+and maligned--can you fancy your having that?  No!  be wise of what you
+really are; cast the die for love, and mount away tomorrow.'
+
+'Then,' said Clotilde, with elvish cunning, 'do you doubt your ability to
+win me without a scandal?'
+
+'Back me, and I win you!' he replied in a tone of unwonted humility: a
+sudden droop.
+
+She let her hand fall.  He grasped it.
+
+'Gradations appear to be unknown to you,' she said.
+
+He cried out: 'Count the years of life, span them, think of the work to
+be done, and ask yourself whether time and strength should run to waste
+in retarding the inevitable?  Pottering up steps that can be taken at one
+bound is very well for peasant pilgrims whose shrine is their bourne, and
+their kneecaps the footing stumps.  But for us two life begins up there.
+Onward, and everywhere around, when we two are together, is our shrine.
+I have worked, and wasted life; I have not lived, and I thirst to live.'
+
+She murmured, in a fervour, 'You shall!' and slipped behind her defences.
+'To-morrow morning we shall wander about; I must have a little time; all
+to-morrow morning we can discuss plans.'
+
+'You know you command me,' said he, and gazed at her.
+
+She was really a child compared with him in years, and if it was an
+excuse for taking her destiny into his hands, she consenting,--it was
+also a reason why he dared not press his whole weight to win her to the
+step.
+
+She had the pride of the secret knowledge of her command of this giant at
+the long table of the guests at dinner, where, after some play of knife
+and fork among notable professors, Prussian officers, lively Frenchmen
+and Italians, and the usual over-supply of touring English of both sexes,
+not encouraging to conversation in their look of pallid disgust of the
+art, Alvan started general topics and led them.  The lead came to him
+naturally, because he was a natural speaker, of a mind both stored and
+effervescent; and he was genial, interested in every growth of life.  She
+did not wonder at his popularity among men of all classes and sets, or
+that he should be famed for charming women.  Her friend was enraptured
+with him.  Friendly questions pressed in an evening chatter between the
+ladies, and Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession.
+
+'But you are not engaged?' said the blunt Englishwoman.
+
+According to the explanation, Clotilde was hardly engaged.  It was not an
+easy thing to say how she stood definitely.  She had obeyed her dying
+relative and dearest on earth by joining her hand to Prince Marko's, and
+had pleased her parents by following it up with the kindest attentions to
+the prince.  It had been done, however, for the sake of peace; and
+chiefly for his well-being.  She had reserved her full consent: the
+plighting was incomplete.  Prince Marko knew that there was another, a
+magical person, a genius of the ring, irresistible.  He had been warned,
+that should the other come forth to claim her .  .  .  .  And she was
+about to write to him this very night to tell him .  .  .  tell him fully
+.  .  .  .  In truth, she loved both, but each so differently!  And both
+loved her!  And she had to make her choice of one, and tell the prince
+she did love him, but .  .  .  Dots are the best of symbols for rendering
+cardisophistical subtleties intelligible, and as they are much used in
+dialogue, one should have now and then permission to print them.
+Especially feminine dialogue referring to matters of the uncertain heart
+takes assistance from troops of dots; and not to understand them at least
+as well as words, when words have as it were conducted us to the brink of
+expression, and shown us the precipice, is to be dull, bucolic of the
+marketplace.
+
+Sunless rose the morning.  The blanketed figures went out to salute a
+blanketed sky.  Drizzling they returned, images of woefulness in various
+forms, including laughter's.  Alvan frankly declared himself the
+disappointed showman; he had hoped for his beloved to see the sight long
+loved by him of golden chariot and sun-steeds crossing the peaks and the
+lakes; and his disappointment became consternation on hearing Clotilde's
+English friend (after objection to his pagan clothing of the solemn
+reality of sunrise, which destroyed or minimized by too materially
+defining a grandeur that derived its essence from mystery, she thought)
+announce the hour for her departure.  He promised her a positive sunrise
+if she would delay.  Her child lay recovering from an illness in the town
+below, and she could not stay.  But Clotilde had coughed in the damp
+morning air, and it would, he urged, be dangerous for her to be exposed
+to it.  Had not the lady heard her cough?  She had, but personally she
+was obliged to go; with her child lying ill she could not remain.  'But,
+madam, do you hear that cough again?  Will you drag her out with such a
+cough as that?' The lady repeated 'My child!' Clotilde said it had been
+agreed they should descend this day; her friend must be beside her child.
+Alvan thundered an 'Impossible!' The child was recovering; Clotilde was
+running into danger: he argued with the senseless woman, opposing reason
+to the feminine sentiment of the maternal, and of course he was beaten.
+He was compelled to sit and gnaw his eloquence.  Clotilde likened his
+appearance to a strangled roar.  'Mothers and their children are too much
+for me!' he said, penitent for his betrayal of over-urgency, as he helped
+to wrap her warmly, and counselled her very mode of breathing in the raw
+mountain atmosphere.
+
+'I admire you for knowing when to yield,' said she.
+
+He groaned, with frown and laugh: 'You know what I would beg!'
+
+She implored him to have some faith in her.
+
+The missiles of the impassioned were discharged at the poor English: a
+customary volley in most places where they intrude after quitting their
+shores, if they diverge from the avenue of hotel-keepers and waiters:
+but Clotilde pointed out to him that her English friend was not showing
+coldness in devoting herself to her child.
+
+'No, they attend to their duties,' he assented generally, desperately
+just.
+
+'And you owe it to her that you have seen me.'
+
+'I do,' he said, and forthwith courted the lady to be forgiven.
+
+Clotilde was taken from him in a heavy downpour and trailing of mists.
+
+At the foot of the mountain a boy handed her a letter from Alvan--a
+burning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separated on
+the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrip
+pathfarers.  She entered her hotel across the lake, and met a telegram.
+At night the wires flashed 'Sleep well' to her; on her awakening, 'Good
+morning.'  A lengthened history of the day was telegraphed for her
+amusement.  Again at night there was a 'God guard you!'
+
+'Who can resist him?' sighed Clotilde, excited, nervous, flattered,
+happy, but yearning to repose and be curtained from the buzz of the
+excess of life that he put about her.  This time there was no prospect of
+his courtship relapsing.
+
+'He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!' replied her friend.
+
+'If he were only that!' said Clotilde, musing expressively.  'If, dear
+Englishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood.  But Alvan mounts
+high over such lovers: he is a wonderful and ideal man: so great, so
+generous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be.'
+
+The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult to
+miss--more was expected to be said of him.
+
+'You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan,' she remarked, for she had
+heard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also been
+polite to her under vexation.
+
+Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, and
+disliked the bringing of that island microscope to bear upon a giant.
+She found it repugnant to hear a word of Alvan as a perfect gentleman.
+Justly, however, she took him for a splendid nature, and assuming upon
+good authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed the
+lesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Barriers are for those who cannot fly
+Be good and dull, and please everybody
+Centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies
+Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession
+Comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered
+Compromise is virtual death
+Conservative, whose astounded state paralyzes his wrath
+Creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change
+Dissent rings out finely, and approval is a feeble murmur
+Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men?
+Empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women
+Fantastical
+Finishing touches to the negligence
+Gone to pieces with an injured lover's babble
+Gradations appear to be unknown to you
+He had to go, he must, he has to be always going
+He stormed her and consented to be beaten
+His violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence
+I have learnt as much from light literature as from heavy
+I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you
+If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature
+Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days
+Looking on him was listening
+Love the difficulty better than the woman
+Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise
+Music in Italy?  Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous
+Not much esteem for non-professional actresses
+Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency
+Philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded
+Polished barbarism
+Scorned him for listening to the hesitations (hers)
+She felt in him a maker of facts
+Strength in love is the sole sincerity
+The brainless in Art and in Statecraft
+The way is clear: we have only to take the step
+The worst of omens is delay
+Time and strength run to waste in retarding the inevitable
+Time is due to us, and the minutes are our gold slipping away
+To have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind
+Two wishes make a will
+Venerated by his followers, well hated by his enemies
+Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
+Win you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be
+World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of The Tragic Comedians, v1
+by George Meredith
+
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