CHAPTER VIII

OF THE ENCOUNTER OF TWO STRANGE YOUNG MEN AND THEIR 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.