CHAPTER IX

After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight of

the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath. He

proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing

his heart's intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path, and

was on a strange and tangled one. The sense of power in him was leonine

enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the path: yet did

that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with searching eyes.

They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not needed to be

acting his part, brilliant though it was. He crammed his energy into his

idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously. Before the world, it

would without question redound to his credit, and he heard the world

acclaiming him:

'Alvan's wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of Law,

from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the old

lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman! Alvan, the republican, is

eminently a citizen. Consider his past life by that test of his

character.'

He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become,

through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactly

slavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happy to

be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower. Lower, of course, the

multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nod they have

in exchange for it is not an independent one. Ceasing to be a social

rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and he passed

under the bondage of that position.

Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she could be

trusted now. She had committed herself, perished as a maiden of society,

and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it and decide by it.

The General would bring her to reason: General von Rudiger was a man of

the world. An honourable son-in-law could not but be acceptable to

him--now, at least. And such a son-in-law would ultimately be the pride

of his house. 'A flower from thy garden, friend, and my wearing it shall

in good time be cause for some parental gratification.'

The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost of

Clotilde. He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another

intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs. These gentlemen brought

no message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed to extract

a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde, and of

course he refused; they hinted that the General might have official

influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them to the

proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of extraordinary

and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of treating his

pretensions to the hand of the lady.

He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of

his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it

yet, being too anxious to sign the peace. He felt as it were a blow

startling him from sleep. His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly

polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect

between man and man. The strange matter was behind their bearing, which

indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one

such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history. He could not

raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied

contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow

both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their

courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him

admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing. The

bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance. The fate of the noble Genoese

conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to

boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the

ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to

lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy's

readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he

was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of

the powers fitting him for battle. A man such as Alvan, arrested on his

career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it! What

was this girl in a life like his? But, oh! the question was no sooner

asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated

the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant,

confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her. Why had

he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely inspired.

She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his armoury, went his

way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese going

under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a minute in the

gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of the night.

He was only calmer when morning came. Night has little mercy for the

self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error,

it has none. The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon

that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force

opposing him. He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was

petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of

the position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would have

revived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was a

stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had

chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. By

shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing

reduced him to hesitation. And the thing had weapons to shoot at him; his

history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole quality

of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of one for a

mark.

These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever

he drew from his Fiesco bed. Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so

uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.

frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting

ourselves like madmen. The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves

will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they

will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting

them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance upon

perceptibly plain matter. The fitful colour is the fever. He must win

her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly! She was

his--she was torn from him! She would come at his bidding--she would

cower to her tyrants! The thought of her was life and death in his frame,

bright heaven and the abyss. At one beat of the heart she swam to his

arms, at another he was straining over darkness. And whose the fault?

He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly

beholding himself. He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies

could not have been handier in using them. From Alvan to Alvan, they

signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters

to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them, lower than

the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him,

became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering idiot!

drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide with that

blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde! Clotilde! Where has one

read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his hand, and

flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble? Fish, fool,

fish! and fish till Doomsday! There's nothing but your fool's face in the

water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool! Fish for the

flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's head! What impious

villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might have it

bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the ceremonies! They

laugh! By Orcus! how they laugh! The laughter of the gods is the

lightning of death's irony over mortals. Can they have a finer subject

than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing. O for

yesterday! He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,

groaned. A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,

having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand

while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his

private dignity in order. He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops

hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck. Dignity was cast off; he

came out naked. Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the friend

nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him, were

dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all the

truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the

woman, was the ground of his anguish. Each antecedent of his career had

been a step of strength and success departed. The woman was but a

fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet

she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself

once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and

she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a

melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.

The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force. The giant in

him loved her warmly. Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her

lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender

eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying

shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water,

swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers distinctly

beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in

his passion than before this tempest. A giant going through a giant's

contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful,

likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was

great-hearted: he could love in his giant's fashion, love and lay down

life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not

heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for

the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites. He was true

man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to

pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in

the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of

timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved,

to his depths.

We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man. Love

and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry

instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them is

indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald

harmonies have been heard. But Love, which purifies and enlarges us, and

sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and

space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance that

the man is a temple fit for the rites. Out of romances, he is not

melodiously composed. And in a giant are various giants to be slain, or

thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader. It is not done

by miracle.

As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant

indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery

stedfastness. His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor

indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome

boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and

she required for her mate a master: she felt it and she sided to him

quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of

a mutual fitness. Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of

his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again,

she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she

was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his

physical influence. Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she

kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through

sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it

was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.

'They are undermining her now--now--now!'

He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already

indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on

his agitation. Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would

have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to

nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart's

faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his

mastery, took her for sand. Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?

The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman. But

how had he come to be guilty of it? he asked himself again; and, without

answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to

complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant

Duplicity. He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their

favour, with another commanding her to break it. He gathered and drilled

a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the

letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.