CONSORTING: IN WHICH THE MALE READER IS REQUESTED TO BEAR IN MIND
WHAT WILD CREATURE HE WAS IN HIS YOUTH, WHILE THE FEMALE SHOULD MARVEL
CREDULOUSLY.
The young man who fancied he had robed himself in the plain homespun
of a natural philosopher at the age of twenty-three journeyed limping
leisurely in the mountain maid Carinthia’s footsteps, thankful to the
Fates for having seen her; and reproving the remainder of superstition
within him, which would lay him open to smarts of evil fortune if he,
encouraged a senseless gratitude for good; seeing that we are simply
to take what happens to us. The little inn of the village on the perch
furnished him a night’s lodging and a laugh of satisfaction to hear of
a young lady and gentleman, and their guide, who had devoured everything
eatable half a day in advance of him, all save the bread and butter, and
a few scraps of meat, apologetically spread for his repast by the maid
of the inn: not enough for, a bantam cock, she said, promising eggs for
breakfast. He vowed with an honest heart, that it was more than enough,
and he was nourished by sympathy with the appetites of his precursors
and the maid’s description of their deeds. That name, Carinthia, went a
good way to fill him.
Farther on he had plenty, but less contentment. He was compelled to
acknowledge that he had expected to meet Carinthia again at the Baths.
Her absence dealt a violent shock to the aerial structure he dwelt in;
for though his ardour for the life of the solitudes was unfeigned, as
was his calm overlooking of social distinctions, the self-indulgent
dreamer became troubled with an alarming sentience, that for him to
share the passions of the world of men was to risk the falling lower
than most. Women are a cause of dreams, but they are dreaded enemies of
his kind of dream, deadly enemies of the immaterial dreamers; and should
one of them be taken on board a vessel of the vapourish texture young
Woodseer sailed in above the clouds lightly while he was in it alone,
questions of past, future, and present, the three weights upon humanity,
bear it down, and she must go, or the vessel sinks. And cast out of it,
what was he? The asking exposed him to the steadiest wind the civilized
world is known to blow. From merely thinking upon one of the daughters
of earth, he was made to feel his position in that world, though he
refused to understand it, and assisted by two days of hard walking he
reduced Carinthia to an abstract enthusiasm, no very serious burden. His
note-book sustained it easily. He wrote her name in simple fondness
of the name; a verse, and hints for more, and some sentences, which he
thought profound. They were composed as he sat by the roadway, on the
top of hills, and in a boat crossing a dark green lake deep under wooded
mountain walls: things of priceless value.
It happened, that midway on the lake he perceived his boatman about to
prime a pistol to murder the mild-eyed stillness, and he called to the
man in his best German to desist. During the altercation, there passed
a countryman of his in another of the punts, who said gravely: ‘I
thank you for that.’ It was early morning, and they had the lake to
themselves, each deeming the other an intruder; for the courtship of
solitude wanes when we are haunted by a second person in pursuit of it;
he is discolouring matter in our pure crystal cup. Such is the worship
of the picturesque; and it would appear to say, that the spirit of man
finds itself yet in the society of barbarians. The case admits of good
pleading either way, even upon the issue whether the exclusive or the
vulgar be the more barbarous. But in those days the solicitation of the
picturesque had been revived by a poet of some impassioned rhetoric, and
two devotees could hardly meet, as the two met here, and not be mutually
obscurants.
They stepped ashore in turn on the same small shoot of land where a
farm-house near a chapel in the shadow of cliffs did occasional service
for an inn. Each had intended to pass a day and a night in this lonely
dwelling-place by the lake, but a rival was less to be tolerated there
than in love, and each awaited the other’s departure, with an air that
said: ‘You are in my sunlight’; and going deeper, more sternly: ‘Sir,
you are an offence to Nature’s pudency!’
Woodseer was the more placable of the two; he had taken possession of
the bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul
up with it while fish were frying. His countryman had rushed inside
to avoid him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly
caged. Their boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation of provision and
payment.
After eating his fish, Woodseer decided abruptly, that as he could not
have the spot to himself, memorable as it would have been to intermarry
with Nature in so sacred a welldepth of the mountains, he had better be
walking and climbing. Another boat paddling up the lake had been spied:
solitude was not merely shared with a rival, but violated by numbers.
In the first case, we detest the man; in the second, we fly from an
outraged scene. He wrote a line or so in his book, hurriedly paid his
bill, and started, full of the matter he had briefly committed to his
pages.
At noon, sitting beside the beck that runs from the lake, he was
overtaken by the gentleman he had left behind, and accosted in the
informal English style, with all the politeness possible to a nervously
blunt manner: ‘This book is yours,--I have no doubt it is yours; I am
glad to be able to restore it; I should be glad to be the owner-writer
of the contents, I mean. I have to beg your excuse; I found it lying
open; I looked at the page, I looked through the whole; I am quite at
your mercy.’
Woodseer jumped at the sight of his note-book, felt for the emptiness
of his pocket, and replied: ‘Thank you, thank you. It’s of use to me,
though to no one else.’
‘You pardon me?’
‘Certainly. I should have done it myself.’
‘I cannot offer you my apologies as a stranger.’ Lord Fleetwood was the
name given.
Woodseer’s plebeian was exchanged for it, and he stood up.
The young lord had fair, straight, thin features, with large restless
eyes that lighted quickly, and a mouth that was winning in his present
colloquial mood.
‘You could have done the same? I should find it hard to forgive the man
who pried into my secret thoughts,’ he remarked.
‘There they are. If one puts them to paper!...’ Woodseer shrugged.
‘Yes, yes. They never last long enough with me. So far I’m safe.
One page led to another. You can meditate. I noticed some remarks on
Religions. You think deeply.’
Woodseer was of that opinion, but modesty urged him to reply with a
small flourish. ‘Just a few heads of ideas. When the wind puffs down a
sooty chimney the air is filled with little blacks that settle pretty
much like the notes in this book of mine. There they wait for another
puff, or my fingers to stamp them.’
‘I could tell you were the owner of that book,’ said Lord Fleetwood.
He swept his forehead feverishly. ‘What a power it is to relieve one’s
brain by writing! May I ask you, which one of the Universities...?’
The burden of this question had a ring of irony to one whom it taught
to feel rather defiantly, that he carried the blazon of a reeking tramp.
‘My University,’ Woodseer replied, ‘was a merchant’s office in Bremen
for some months. I learnt more Greek and Latin in Bremen than business.
I was invalided home, and then tried a merchant’s office in London. I
put on my hat one day, and walked into the country. My College fellows
were hawkers, tinkers, tramps and ploughmen, choughs and crows. A volume
of our Poets and a History of Philosophy composed my library. I had
scarce any money, so I learnt how to idle inexpensively--a good first
lesson. We’re at the bottom of the world when we take to the road; we
see men as they were in the beginning--not so eager for harness till
they get acquainted with hunger, as I did, and studied in myself the old
animal having his head pushed into the collar to earn a feed of corn.’
Woodseer laughed, adding, that he had been of a serious mind in those
days of the alternation of smooth indifference and sharp necessity, and
he had plucked a flower from them.
His nature prompted him to speak of himself with simple candour, as he
had done spontaneously to Chillon Kirby, yet he was now anxious to let
his companion know at once the common stuff he was made of, together
with the great stuff he contained. He grew conscious of an over-anxiety,
and was uneasy, recollecting how he had just spoken about his
naturalness, dimly if at all apprehending the cause of this disturbance
within. What is a lord to a philosopher! But the world is around us as a
cloak, if not a coat; in his ignorance he supposed it specially due to a
lord seeking acquaintance with him, that he should expose his condition:
doing the which appeared to subject him to parade his intellectual
treasures and capacity for shaping sentences; and the effect upon Lord
Fleetwood was an incentive to the display. Nevertheless he had a fretful
desire to escape from the discomposing society of a lord; he fixed his
knapsack and began to saunter.
The young lord was at his elbow. ‘I can’t part with you. Will you allow
me?’
Woodseer was puzzled and had to say: ‘If you wish it.’
‘I do wish it: an hour’s walk with you. One does not meet a man like
you every day. I have to join a circle of mine in Baden, but there’s no
hurry; I could be disengaged for a week. And I have things to ask you,
owing to my indiscretion--but you have excused it.’
Woodseer turned for a farewell gaze at the great Watzmann, and saluted
him.
‘Splendid,’ said Lord Fleetwood; ‘but don’t clap names on the
mountains.--I saw written in your book: “A text for Dada.” You write:
“A despotism would procure a perfect solitude, but kill the ghost.” That
was my thought at the place where we were at the lake. I had it. Tell
me--though I could not have written it, and “ghost” is just the
word, the exact word--tell me, are you of Welsh blood? “Dad” is good
Welsh--pronounce it hard.’
Woodseer answered: ‘My mother was a Glamorganshire woman. My father, I
know, walked up from Wales, mending boots on his road for a livelihood.
He is not a bad scholar, he knows Greek enough to like it. He is a
Dissenting preacher. When I strike a truism, I ‘ve a habit of scoring it
to give him a peg or tuning-fork for one of his discourses. He’s a man
of talent; he taught himself, and he taught me more than I learnt at
school. He is a thinker in his way. He loves Nature too. I rather
envy him in some respects. He and I are hunters of Wisdom on different
tracks; and he, as he says, “waits for me.” He’s patient!’
Ah, and I wanted to ask you,’ Lord Fleetwood observed, bursting with
it, ‘I was puzzled by a name you write here and there near the end, and
permit me to ask, it: Carinthia! It cannot be the country? You write
after, the name: “A beautiful Gorgon--a haggard Venus.” It seized me.
I have had the face before my eyes ever since. You must mean a woman. I
can’t be deceived in allusions to a woman: they have heart in them. You
met her somewhere about Carinthia, and gave her the name? You write--may
I refer to the book?’
He received the book and flew through the leaves:
‘Here--“A panting look”: you write again: “A look of beaten flame: a
look of one who has run and at last beholds!” But that is a living face:
I see her! Here again: “From minute to minute she is the rock that loses
the sun at night and reddens in the morning.” You could not create an
idea of a woman to move you like that. No one could, I am certain of
it, certain; if so, you ‘re a wizard--I swear you are. But that’s a
face high over beauty. Just to know there is a woman like her, is an
antidote. You compare her to a rock. Who would imagine a comparison of
a woman to a rock! But rock is the very picture of beautiful Gorgon,
haggard Venus. Tell me you met her, you saw her. I want only to hear she
lives, she is in the world. Beautiful women compared to roses may whirl
away with their handsome dragoons! A pang from them is a thing to be
ashamed of. And there are men who trot about whining with it! But
a Carinthia makes pain honourable. You have done what I thought
impossible--fused a woman’s face and grand scenery, to make them
inseparable. She might be wicked for me. I should see a bright rim round
hatred of her!--the rock you describe. I could endure horrors and not
annihilate her! I should think her sacred.’
Woodseer turned about to have a look at the man who was even quicker
than he at realizing a person from a hint of description, and almost
insanely extravagant in the pitch of the things he uttered to a
stranger. For himself, he was open with everybody, his philosophy not
allowing that strangers existed on earth. But the presence of a lord
brought the conventional world to his feelings, though at the same time
the title seemed to sanction the exceptional abruptness and wildness of
this lord. As for suspecting him to be mad, it would have been a common
idea: no stretching of speech or overstepping of social rules could
waken a suspicion so spiritless in Woodseer.
He said: ‘I can tell you I met her and she lives. I could as soon swim
in that torrent or leap the mountain as repeat what she spoke, or sketch
a feature of her. She goes into the blood, she is a new idea of women.
She has the face that would tempt a gypsy to evil tellings. I could
think of it as a history written in a line: Carinthia, Saint and Martyr!
As for comparisons, they are flowers thrown into the fire.’
‘I have had that--I have thought that,’ said Lord Fleetwood. ‘Go on;
talk of her, pray; without comparisons. I detest them. How did you meet
her? What made you part? Where is she now? I have no wish to find her,
but I want thoroughly to believe in her.’
Another than Woodseer would have perceived the young lord’s malady. Here
was one bitten by the serpent of love, and athirst for an image of the
sex to serve for the cooling herb, as youth will be. Woodseer put it
down to a curious imaginative fellowship with himself. He forgot the
lord, and supposed he had found his own likeness, less gifted in speech.
After talking of Carinthia more and more in the abstract, he fell upon
his discovery of the Great Secret of life, against which his hearer
struggled for a time, though that was cooling to him too; but ultimately
there was no resistance, and so deep did they sink into the idea of pure
contemplation, that the idea of woman seemed to have become a part of
it. No stronger proof of their aethereal conversational earnestness
could be offered. A locality was given to the Great Secret, and of
course it was the place where the most powerful recent impression had
been stamped on the mind of the discoverer: the shadowy valley rolling
from the slate-rock. Woodseer was too artistic a dreamer to present the
passing vision of Carinthia with any associates there. She passed: the
solitude accepted her and lost her; and it was the richer for the one
swift gleam: she brought no trouble, she left no regrets; she was the
ghost of the rocky obscurity. But now remembering her mountain carol, he
chanced to speak of her as a girl.
‘She is a girl?’ cried Lord Fleetwood, frowning over an utter revolution
of sentiment at the thought of the beautiful Gorgon being a girl;
for, rapid as he was to imagine, he had raised a solid fabric upon his
conception of Carinthia the woman, necessarily the woman--logically.
Who but the woman could look the Gorgon! He tried to explain it to be
impossible for a girl to wear the look: and his notion evidently was,
that it had come upon a beautiful face in some staring horror of a
world that had bitten the tender woman. She touched him sympathetically
through the pathos.
Woodseer flung out vociferously for the contrary. Who but a girl could
look the beautiful Gorgon! What other could seem an emanation of the
mountain solitude? A woman would instantly breathe the world on it to
destroy it. Hers would be the dramatic and not the poetic face. It would
shriek of man, wake the echoes with the tale of man, slaughter all.
quietude. But a girl’s face has no story of poisonous intrusion. She
indeed may be cast in the terrors of Nature, and yet be sweet with
Nature, beautiful because she is purely of Nature. Woodseer did his best
to present his view irresistibly. Perhaps he was not clear; it was a
piece of skiamachy, difficult to render clear to the defeated.
Lord Fleetwood had nothing to say but ‘Gorgon! a girl a Gorgon!’ and it
struck Woodseer as intensely unreasonable, considering that he had
seen the girl whom, in his effort to portray her, he had likened to
a beautiful Gorgon. He recounted the scene of the meeting with her,
pictured it in effective colours, but his companion gave no response,
nor a nod. They ceased to converse, and when the young lord’s hired
carriage drew up on the road, Woodseer required persuasion to accompany
him. They were both in their different stations young tyrants of the
world, ready to fight the world and one another for not having their
immediate view of it such as they wanted it. They agreed, however, not
to sleep in the city. Beds were to be had near the top of a mountain
on the other side of the Salza, their driver informed them, and vowing
themselves to that particular height, in a mutual disgust of the city,
they waxed friendlier, with a reserve.
Woodseer soon had experience that he was receiving exceptional treatment
from Lord Fleetwood, whose manservant was on the steps of the hotel in
Salzburg on the lookout for his master.
‘Sir Meeson has been getting impatient, my lord,’ said the man.
Sir Meeson Corby appeared; Lord Fleetwood cut him short: ‘You ‘re in a
hurry; go at once, don’t wait for me; I join you in Baden.--Do me the
favour to eat with me,’ he turned to Woodseer. ‘And here, Corby! tell
the countess I have a friend to bear me company, and there is to be an
extra bedroom secured at her hotel. That swinery of a place she insists
on visiting is usually crammed. With you there,’ he turned to Woodseer,
‘I might find it agreeable.--You can take my man, Corby; I shall not
want the fellow.’
‘Positively, my dear Fleetwood, you know,’ Sir Meeson expostulated, ‘I
am under orders; I don’t see how--I really can’t go on without you.’
‘Please yourself. This gentleman is my friend, Mr. Woodseer.’
Sir Meeson Corby was a plump little beau of forty, at war with his fat
and accounting his tight blue tail coat and brass buttons a victory. His
tightness made his fatness elastic; he looked wound up for a dance,
and could hardly hold on a leg; but the presentation of a creature in
a battered hat and soiled garments, carrying a tattered knapsack half
slung, lank and with disorderly locks, as the Earl of Fleetwood’s
friend--the friend of the wealthiest nobleman of Great Britain!--fixed
him in a perked attitude of inquiry that exhausted interrogatives.
Woodseer passed him, slouching a bow. The circular stare of Sir Meeson
seemed unable to contract. He directed it on Lord Fleetwood, and was
then reminded that he dealt with prickles.
‘Where have you been?’ he said, blinking to refresh his eyeballs. ‘I
missed you, I ran round and round the town after you.’
‘I have been to the lake.’
‘Queer fish there!’ Sir Meeson dropped a glance on the capture.
Lord Fleetwood took Woodseer’s arm. ‘Do you eat with us?’ he asked the
baronet, who had stayed his eating for an hour and was famished; so they
strode to the dining-room.
‘Do you wash, sir, before eating?’ Sir Meeson said to Woodseer,
caressing his hands when they had seated themselves at table.
‘Appliances are to be found in this hotel.’
‘Soap?’ said Lord Fleetwood.
‘Soap--at least, in my chamber.’
‘Fetch it, please.’
Sir Meeson, of course, could not hear that. He requested the waiter to
show the gentleman to a room.
Lord Fleetwood ordered the waiter to bring a handbasin and towel. ‘We’re
off directly and must eat at once,’ he said.
‘Soap--soap! my dear Fleetwood,’ Sir Meeson knuckled on the table, to
impress it that his appetite and his gorge demanded a thorough cleansing
of those fingers, if they were to sit at one board.
‘Let the waiter fetch it.’
‘The soap is in my portmanteau.’
‘You spoke of it as a necessity for this gentleman and me. Bring it.’
Woodseer had risen. Lord Fleetwood motioned him down. He kept an eye
dead--as marble on Corby, who muttered: ‘You can’t mean that you ask
me...?’ But the alternative was forced on Sir Meeson by too strong a
power of the implacable eye; there was thunder in it, a continuity of
gaze forcefuller than repetitions of the word. He knew Lord Fleetwood.
Men privileged to attend on him were dogs to the flinty young despot:
they were sure to be called upon to expiate the faintest offence to him.
He had hastily to consider, that he was banished beyond appeal, with the
whole torture of banishment to an adorer of the Countess Livia, or else
the mad behest must be obeyed. He protested, shrugged, sat fast, and
sprang up, remarking, that he went with all the willingness imaginable.
It could not have been the first occasion.
He was affecting the excessively obsequious when he came back bearing
his metal soap-case. The performance was checked by another look solid
as shot, and as quick. Woodseer, who would have done for Sir Meeson
Corby or Lazarus what had been done for him, thought little of the
service, but so intense a peremptoriness in the look of an eye made him
uncomfortable in his own sense of independence. The humblest citizen of
a free nation has that warning at some notable exhibition of tyranny in
a neighbouring State: it acts like a concussion of the air.
Lord Fleetwood led an easy dialogue with him and Sir Meeson, on their
different themes immediately, which was not less impressive to an
observer. He listened to Sir Meeson’s entreaties that he should start
at once for Baden, and appeared to pity the poor gentleman, condemned by
his office to hang about him in terror of his liege lady’s displeasure.
Presently, near the close of the meal, drawing a ring from his finger,
he handed it to the baronet, and said, ‘Give her that. She knows I shall
follow that.’ He added to himself:--I shall have ill-luck till I have
it back! and he asked Woodseer whether he put faith in the virtue of
talismans.
‘I have never possessed one,’ said Woodseer, with his natural frankness.
‘It would have gone long before this for a night’s lodging.’
Sir Meeson heard him, and instantly urged Lord Fleetwood not to think of
dismissing his man Francis. ‘I beg it, Fleetwood! I beg you to take the
man. Her ladyship will receive me badly, ring or no ring, if she hears
of your being left alone. I really can’t present myself. I shall not go,
not go. I say no.’
‘Stay, then,’ said Fleetwood.
He turned to Woodseer with an air of deference, and requested the
privilege of glancing at his notebook again, and scanned it closely
at one of the pages. ‘I believe it true,’ he cried; ‘I had a half
recollection of it--I have had some such thought, but never could put it
in words. You have thought deeply.’
‘That is only a surface thought, or common reflection,’ said Woodseer.
Sir Meeson stared at them in turn. Judging by their talk and the effect
produced on the earl, he took Woodseer for a sort of conjuror.
It was his duty to utter a warning.
He drew Fleetwood aside. A word was whispered, and they broke asunder
with a snap. Francis was called. His master gave him his keys, and
despatched him into the town to purchase a knapsack or bag for the
outfit of a jolly beggar. The prospect delighted Lord Fleetwood. He
sang notes from the deep chest, flaunting like an opera brigand,
and contemplating his wretched satellite’s indecision with brimming
amusement.
‘Remember, we fight for our money. I carry mine,’ he said to Woodseer.
‘Wouldn’t it be expedient, Fleetwood...’ Sir Meeson suggested a
treasurer in the person of himself.
‘Not a florin, Corby! I should find it all gambled away at Baden.’
‘But I am not Abrane, I’m not Abrane! I never play, I have no mania,
none. It would be prudent, Fleetwood.’
‘The slightest bulging of a pocket would show on you, Corby; and they
would be at you, they would fall on you and pluck you to have another
fling. I ‘d rather my money should go to a knight of the road than feed
that dragon’s jaw. A highwayman seems an honest fellow compared with
your honourable corporation of fly-catchers. I could surrender to him
with some satisfaction after a trial of the better man. I ‘ve tried
these tables, and couldn’t stir a pulse. Have you?’
It had to be explained to Woodseer what was meant by trying the tables.
‘Not I,’ said he, in strong contempt of the queer allurement.
Lord Fleetwood studied him half a minute, as if measuring and discarding
a suspicion of the young philosopher’s possible weakness under
temptation.
Sir Meeson Corby accompanied the oddly assorted couple through the town
and a short way along the road to the mountain, for the sake of quieting
his conscience upon the subject of his leaving them together. He could
not have sat down a second time at a table with those hands. He said
it:--he could not have done the thing. So the best he could do was to
let them go. Like many of his class, he had a mind open to the effect
of striking contrasts, and the spectacle of the wealthiest nobleman in
Great Britain tramping the road, pack on back, with a young nobody
for his comrade, a total stranger, who might be a cut-throat, and
was avowedly next to a mendicant, charged him with quantities of
interjectory matter, that he caught himself firing to the foreign people
on the highway. Hundreds of thousands a year, and tramping it like a
pedlar, with a beggar for his friend! He would have given something
to have an English ear near him as he watched them rounding under the
mountain they were about to climb.