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174 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/174-chapters/chapters_17_to_18.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Picture of Dorian Gray/section_16_part_0.txt | The Picture of Dorian Gray.chapters 17-18 | chapters 17-18 | null | {"name": "Chapters 17-18", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219150422/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-picture-of-dorian-gray/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1718", "summary": "One week has passed, and Dorian has retreated to his country estate, Selby Royal. His guests include the beautiful Duchess of Monmouth ; her older, boring, somewhat jaded husband; Lady Narborough, old and flirtatious but seldom boring; and Lord Henry. The conversation is light and superficial. Lord Henry wants to re-christen some things -- especially, flowers. Beautiful objects should have beautiful names, he says. The duchess asks what new name Lord Henry shall have, and Dorian immediately answers appropriately, \"Prince Paradox.\" The duchess tries to flirt with Dorian, and he excuses himself to fetch her some of his orchids. Lord Henry lightheartedly warns the duchess about loving Dorian. Suddenly the group hears a muted groan and the sound of a heavy fall. Lord Henry rushes to find that Dorian has fainted. When Dorian comes to, he refuses to be alone. Despite his condition, he joins the others at dinner and tries to act jolly. Now and then, however, terror shoots through him as he recalls the cause of his faint: the face of James Vane observing him through a window. Dorian spends most of the next day in his room. Feeling hunted, stalked, and sick with fear of death, he alternates between the certainty of punishment and an equal certainty that the wicked receive no such fate in this world. He concludes that the only morality is the success of the strong and the failure of the weak. On the third day, Dorian finally goes out. He has decided that he imagined James' face in the window. After breakfast, he strolls in the garden with the duchess for an hour. Then he joins her brother, Sir Geoffrey Clouston, and others who are shooting birds. A hare bursts forth, and Sir Geoffrey aims, but Dorian so admires the beauty and grace of the animal that he cries, \"Let it live.\" Lord Geoffrey finds Dorian's plea silly and fires as the hare jumps into a thicket. Two sounds come from the brush: the cry of a hare and the cry of a man. Incredibly, a dead human body is pulled from the brush. Lord Henry recommends calling off the hunt for the day. Dorian would like to cancel the \"hideous and cruel\" hunt for good; he fears that the death is a bad omen. Lord Henry laughs at Dorian's concern, saying that the only thing horrible in life is boredom. There are no omens, he says. In his room, Dorian lies in terror on the sofa. Later, he calls his servant and tells him to pack. Dorian will leave at eight-thirty to catch the night express to London. He writes a note to Lord Henry, asking him to take care of the guests because he is going to London to see his doctor. Thornton, Dorian's chief gamekeeper, enters with startling news. The dead man cannot be identified. He was not one of the beaters, after all. In fact, he seems to be a sailor, armed with a gun. Dorian rushes to where the body lies. Identifying the body as James Vane's, Dorian feels safe at last.", "analysis": "Wilde makes excellent use of contrast in the setting of these chapters. Life at Selby Royal could not be more different from the secret world of Dorian Gray. Wilde writes about bright conversations, bright lights, and bright days. Such idyllic life adds to Dorian's discomfort when terror twice invades his country estate. Early on, he is seeking orchids but finds the face of James Vane. Just as he is recovering from the shock, a man is ominously killed by accident. Dorian decides to flee because, he realizes, \"Death walked there in the sunlight.\" He expects evil in the opium den, not in the fresh air of Selby Royal. Dorian's tragic fate haunts him wherever he goes. Before, Dorian felt that his situation was hopeless; now, he is beginning to learn what hopelessness really feels like. Wilde exposes the egocentricity of class distinction through the death of what seems to be a lowly beater. First, Sir Geoffrey is annoyed that the \"ass\" got out in front of the guns. It ruins his shooting for the whole day. Then Lord Henry comments, \"It is rather awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper beaters. It makes people think that one is a wild shot.\" Incredibly, Lord Henry is more concerned with his shooting partner's reputation than with a man's death. Even Dorian seems to have little more compassion for the man than he has for the hare. He dislikes shooting and killing, but his chief concern, as usual, is himself. He sees the death as a bad omen, a threat to himself. When Thornton comes to Dorian's room, the master immediately pulls his chequebook out of a drawer. It may be kind of him to want to pay the family of the dead man, but Dorian would not think of visiting them or the corpse until he suspects that it might be James Vane. Dorian's ultimate relief is ironic. Even as he feels joy at seeing James Vane dead, he is far from safe. Glossary Tartuffe a hypocrite; the word comes from Moliere's Le Tartuffe, a play in which the lead character -- Tartuffe -- almost destroys a family that has taken him in. riposte French, \"retort\" or reply in a direct manner. Parthian pertaining to a shot fired by one in actual or feigned retreat; after the tactics of the archers from Parthia in Western Asia. beater someone who is hired to flush wild game from cover for hunters; on some hunts, they beat percussion instruments. censure an expression of blame or disapproval. lithe supple; easily bent; flexible. presentiment premonition; a sense that something is about to occur. Artemis in Greek mythology, the goddess of the hunt."} |
A week later Dorian Gray was sitting in the conservatory at Selby
Royal, talking to the pretty Duchess of Monmouth, who with her husband,
a jaded-looking man of sixty, was amongst his guests. It was tea-time,
and the mellow light of the huge, lace-covered lamp that stood on the
table lit up the delicate china and hammered silver of the service at
which the duchess was presiding. Her white hands were moving daintily
among the cups, and her full red lips were smiling at something that
Dorian had whispered to her. Lord Henry was lying back in a
silk-draped wicker chair, looking at them. On a peach-coloured divan
sat Lady Narborough, pretending to listen to the duke's description of
the last Brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection. Three
young men in elaborate smoking-suits were handing tea-cakes to some of
the women. The house-party consisted of twelve people, and there were
more expected to arrive on the next day.
"What are you two talking about?" said Lord Henry, strolling over to
the table and putting his cup down. "I hope Dorian has told you about
my plan for rechristening everything, Gladys. It is a delightful idea."
"But I don't want to be rechristened, Harry," rejoined the duchess,
looking up at him with her wonderful eyes. "I am quite satisfied with
my own name, and I am sure Mr. Gray should be satisfied with his."
"My dear Gladys, I would not alter either name for the world. They are
both perfect. I was thinking chiefly of flowers. Yesterday I cut an
orchid, for my button-hole. It was a marvellous spotted thing, as
effective as the seven deadly sins. In a thoughtless moment I asked
one of the gardeners what it was called. He told me it was a fine
specimen of _Robinsoniana_, or something dreadful of that kind. It is a
sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to
things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one
quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in
literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled
to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for."
"Then what should we call you, Harry?" she asked.
"His name is Prince Paradox," said Dorian.
"I recognize him in a flash," exclaimed the duchess.
"I won't hear of it," laughed Lord Henry, sinking into a chair. "From
a label there is no escape! I refuse the title."
"Royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips.
"You wish me to defend my throne, then?"
"Yes."
"I give the truths of to-morrow."
"I prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered.
"You disarm me, Gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood.
"Of your shield, Harry, not of your spear."
"I never tilt against beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand.
"That is your error, Harry, believe me. You value beauty far too much."
"How can you say that? I admit that I think that it is better to be
beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand, no one is more ready
than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly."
"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the duchess.
"What becomes of your simile about the orchid?"
"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys. You, as a good
Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly
virtues have made our England what she is."
"You don't like your country, then?" she asked.
"I live in it."
"That you may censure it the better."
"Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?" he inquired.
"What do they say of us?"
"That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop."
"Is that yours, Harry?"
"I give it to you."
"I could not use it. It is too true."
"You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a description."
"They are practical."
"They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger,
they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy."
"Still, we have done great things."
"Great things have been thrust on us, Gladys."
"We have carried their burden."
"Only as far as the Stock Exchange."
She shook her head. "I believe in the race," she cried.
"It represents the survival of the pushing."
"It has development."
"Decay fascinates me more."
"What of art?" she asked.
"It is a malady."
"Love?"
"An illusion."
"Religion?"
"The fashionable substitute for belief."
"You are a sceptic."
"Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith."
"What are you?"
"To define is to limit."
"Give me a clue."
"Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth."
"You bewilder me. Let us talk of some one else."
"Our host is a delightful topic. Years ago he was christened Prince
Charming."
"Ah! don't remind me of that," cried Dorian Gray.
"Our host is rather horrid this evening," answered the duchess,
colouring. "I believe he thinks that Monmouth married me on purely
scientific principles as the best specimen he could find of a modern
butterfly."
"Well, I hope he won't stick pins into you, Duchess," laughed Dorian.
"Oh! my maid does that already, Mr. Gray, when she is annoyed with me."
"And what does she get annoyed with you about, Duchess?"
"For the most trivial things, Mr. Gray, I assure you. Usually because
I come in at ten minutes to nine and tell her that I must be dressed by
half-past eight."
"How unreasonable of her! You should give her warning."
"I daren't, Mr. Gray. Why, she invents hats for me. You remember the
one I wore at Lady Hilstone's garden-party? You don't, but it is nice
of you to pretend that you do. Well, she made it out of nothing. All
good hats are made out of nothing."
"Like all good reputations, Gladys," interrupted Lord Henry. "Every
effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be
a mediocrity."
"Not with women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule
the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as some
one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if
you ever love at all."
"It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmured Dorian.
"Ah! then, you never really love, Mr. Gray," answered the duchess with
mock sadness.
"My dear Gladys!" cried Lord Henry. "How can you say that? Romance
lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.
Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely
intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best,
and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as
possible."
"Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?" asked the duchess after
a pause.
"Especially when one has been wounded by it," answered Lord Henry.
The duchess turned and looked at Dorian Gray with a curious expression
in her eyes. "What do you say to that, Mr. Gray?" she inquired.
Dorian hesitated for a moment. Then he threw his head back and
laughed. "I always agree with Harry, Duchess."
"Even when he is wrong?"
"Harry is never wrong, Duchess."
"And does his philosophy make you happy?"
"I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have
searched for pleasure."
"And found it, Mr. Gray?"
"Often. Too often."
The duchess sighed. "I am searching for peace," she said, "and if I
don't go and dress, I shall have none this evening."
"Let me get you some orchids, Duchess," cried Dorian, starting to his
feet and walking down the conservatory.
"You are flirting disgracefully with him," said Lord Henry to his
cousin. "You had better take care. He is very fascinating."
"If he were not, there would be no battle."
"Greek meets Greek, then?"
"I am on the side of the Trojans. They fought for a woman."
"They were defeated."
"There are worse things than capture," she answered.
"You gallop with a loose rein."
"Pace gives life," was the _riposte_.
"I shall write it in my diary to-night."
"What?"
"That a burnt child loves the fire."
"I am not even singed. My wings are untouched."
"You use them for everything, except flight."
"Courage has passed from men to women. It is a new experience for us."
"You have a rival."
"Who?"
He laughed. "Lady Narborough," he whispered. "She perfectly adores
him."
"You fill me with apprehension. The appeal to antiquity is fatal to us
who are romanticists."
"Romanticists! You have all the methods of science."
"Men have educated us."
"But not explained you."
"Describe us as a sex," was her challenge.
"Sphinxes without secrets."
She looked at him, smiling. "How long Mr. Gray is!" she said. "Let us
go and help him. I have not yet told him the colour of my frock."
"Ah! you must suit your frock to his flowers, Gladys."
"That would be a premature surrender."
"Romantic art begins with its climax."
"I must keep an opportunity for retreat."
"In the Parthian manner?"
"They found safety in the desert. I could not do that."
"Women are not always allowed a choice," he answered, but hardly had he
finished the sentence before from the far end of the conservatory came
a stifled groan, followed by the dull sound of a heavy fall. Everybody
started up. The duchess stood motionless in horror. And with fear in
his eyes, Lord Henry rushed through the flapping palms to find Dorian
Gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a deathlike swoon.
He was carried at once into the blue drawing-room and laid upon one of
the sofas. After a short time, he came to himself and looked round
with a dazed expression.
"What has happened?" he asked. "Oh! I remember. Am I safe here,
Harry?" He began to tremble.
"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, "you merely fainted. That was
all. You must have overtired yourself. You had better not come down
to dinner. I will take your place."
"No, I will come down," he said, struggling to his feet. "I would
rather come down. I must not be alone."
He went to his room and dressed. There was a wild recklessness of
gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then a thrill of
terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the
window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the
face of James Vane watching him.
The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the
time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet
indifferent to life itself. The consciousness of being hunted, snared,
tracked down, had begun to dominate him. If the tapestry did but
tremble in the wind, he shook. The dead leaves that were blown against
the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild
regrets. When he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor's face
peering through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once more to
lay its hand upon his heart.
But perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out of
the night and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him. Actual
life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the
imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet
of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen
brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor
the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust
upon the weak. That was all. Besides, had any stranger been prowling
round the house, he would have been seen by the servants or the
keepers. Had any foot-marks been found on the flower-beds, the
gardeners would have reported it. Yes, it had been merely fancy.
Sibyl Vane's brother had not come back to kill him. He had sailed away
in his ship to founder in some winter sea. From him, at any rate, he
was safe. Why, the man did not know who he was, could not know who he
was. The mask of youth had saved him.
And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think
that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them
visible form, and make them move before one! What sort of life would
his be if, day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from
silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear
as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep!
As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror, and
the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder. Oh! in what a
wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere
memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came
back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of time, terrible
and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin. When Lord Henry
came in at six o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will
break.
It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out. There was
something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that
seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life. But
it was not merely the physical conditions of environment that had
caused the change. His own nature had revolted against the excess of
anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm.
With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so. Their
strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man,
or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The
loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
Besides, he had convinced himself that he had been the victim of a
terror-stricken imagination, and looked back now on his fears with
something of pity and not a little of contempt.
After breakfast, he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden
and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party. The crisp
frost lay like salt upon the grass. The sky was an inverted cup of
blue metal. A thin film of ice bordered the flat, reed-grown lake.
At the corner of the pine-wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey
Clouston, the duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of
his gun. He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take
the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered
bracken and rough undergrowth.
"Have you had good sport, Geoffrey?" he asked.
"Not very good, Dorian. I think most of the birds have gone to the
open. I dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new
ground."
Dorian strolled along by his side. The keen aromatic air, the brown
and red lights that glimmered in the wood, the hoarse cries of the
beaters ringing out from time to time, and the sharp snaps of the guns
that followed, fascinated him and filled him with a sense of delightful
freedom. He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the
high indifference of joy.
Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in front
of them, with black-tipped ears erect and long hinder limbs throwing it
forward, started a hare. It bolted for a thicket of alders. Sir
Geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was something in the
animal's grace of movement that strangely charmed Dorian Gray, and he
cried out at once, "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey. Let it live."
"What nonsense, Dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare bounded
into the thicket, he fired. There were two cries heard, the cry of a
hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony, which is
worse.
"Good heavens! I have hit a beater!" exclaimed Sir Geoffrey. "What an
ass the man was to get in front of the guns! Stop shooting there!" he
called out at the top of his voice. "A man is hurt."
The head-keeper came running up with a stick in his hand.
"Where, sir? Where is he?" he shouted. At the same time, the firing
ceased along the line.
"Here," answered Sir Geoffrey angrily, hurrying towards the thicket.
"Why on earth don't you keep your men back? Spoiled my shooting for
the day."
Dorian watched them as they plunged into the alder-clump, brushing the
lithe swinging branches aside. In a few moments they emerged, dragging
a body after them into the sunlight. He turned away in horror. It
seemed to him that misfortune followed wherever he went. He heard Sir
Geoffrey ask if the man was really dead, and the affirmative answer of
the keeper. The wood seemed to him to have become suddenly alive with
faces. There was the trampling of myriad feet and the low buzz of
voices. A great copper-breasted pheasant came beating through the
boughs overhead.
After a few moments--that were to him, in his perturbed state, like
endless hours of pain--he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He started
and looked round.
"Dorian," said Lord Henry, "I had better tell them that the shooting is
stopped for to-day. It would not look well to go on."
"I wish it were stopped for ever, Harry," he answered bitterly. "The
whole thing is hideous and cruel. Is the man ...?"
He could not finish the sentence.
"I am afraid so," rejoined Lord Henry. "He got the whole charge of
shot in his chest. He must have died almost instantaneously. Come;
let us go home."
They walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly
fifty yards without speaking. Then Dorian looked at Lord Henry and
said, with a heavy sigh, "It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen."
"What is?" asked Lord Henry. "Oh! this accident, I suppose. My dear
fellow, it can't be helped. It was the man's own fault. Why did he
get in front of the guns? Besides, it is nothing to us. It is rather
awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper beaters. It
makes people think that one is a wild shot. And Geoffrey is not; he
shoots very straight. But there is no use talking about the matter."
Dorian shook his head. "It is a bad omen, Harry. I feel as if
something horrible were going to happen to some of us. To myself,
perhaps," he added, passing his hand over his eyes, with a gesture of
pain.
The elder man laughed. "The only horrible thing in the world is _ennui_,
Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness. But we
are not likely to suffer from it unless these fellows keep chattering
about this thing at dinner. I must tell them that the subject is to be
tabooed. As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny
does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
Besides, what on earth could happen to you, Dorian? You have
everything in the world that a man can want. There is no one who would
not be delighted to change places with you."
"There is no one with whom I would not change places, Harry. Don't
laugh like that. I am telling you the truth. The wretched peasant who
has just died is better off than I am. I have no terror of death. It
is the coming of death that terrifies me. Its monstrous wings seem to
wheel in the leaden air around me. Good heavens! don't you see a man
moving behind the trees there, watching me, waiting for me?"
Lord Henry looked in the direction in which the trembling gloved hand
was pointing. "Yes," he said, smiling, "I see the gardener waiting for
you. I suppose he wants to ask you what flowers you wish to have on
the table to-night. How absurdly nervous you are, my dear fellow! You
must come and see my doctor, when we get back to town."
Dorian heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the gardener approaching. The
man touched his hat, glanced for a moment at Lord Henry in a hesitating
manner, and then produced a letter, which he handed to his master.
"Her Grace told me to wait for an answer," he murmured.
Dorian put the letter into his pocket. "Tell her Grace that I am
coming in," he said, coldly. The man turned round and went rapidly in
the direction of the house.
"How fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed Lord Henry.
"It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman will
flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on."
"How fond you are of saying dangerous things, Harry! In the present
instance, you are quite astray. I like the duchess very much, but I
don't love her."
"And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you
are excellently matched."
"You are talking scandal, Harry, and there is never any basis for
scandal."
"The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty," said Lord Henry,
lighting a cigarette.
"You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram."
"The world goes to the altar of its own accord," was the answer.
"I wish I could love," cried Dorian Gray with a deep note of pathos in
his voice. "But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the
desire. I am too much concentrated on myself. My own personality has
become a burden to me. I want to escape, to go away, to forget. It
was silly of me to come down here at all. I think I shall send a wire
to Harvey to have the yacht got ready. On a yacht one is safe."
"Safe from what, Dorian? You are in some trouble. Why not tell me
what it is? You know I would help you."
"I can't tell you, Harry," he answered sadly. "And I dare say it is
only a fancy of mine. This unfortunate accident has upset me. I have
a horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen to me."
"What nonsense!"
"I hope it is, but I can't help feeling it. Ah! here is the duchess,
looking like Artemis in a tailor-made gown. You see we have come back,
Duchess."
"I have heard all about it, Mr. Gray," she answered. "Poor Geoffrey is
terribly upset. And it seems that you asked him not to shoot the hare.
How curious!"
"Yes, it was very curious. I don't know what made me say it. Some
whim, I suppose. It looked the loveliest of little live things. But I
am sorry they told you about the man. It is a hideous subject."
"It is an annoying subject," broke in Lord Henry. "It has no
psychological value at all. Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on
purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know some one
who had committed a real murder."
"How horrid of you, Harry!" cried the duchess. "Isn't it, Mr. Gray?
Harry, Mr. Gray is ill again. He is going to faint."
Dorian drew himself up with an effort and smiled. "It is nothing,
Duchess," he murmured; "my nerves are dreadfully out of order. That is
all. I am afraid I walked too far this morning. I didn't hear what
Harry said. Was it very bad? You must tell me some other time. I
think I must go and lie down. You will excuse me, won't you?"
They had reached the great flight of steps that led from the
conservatory on to the terrace. As the glass door closed behind
Dorian, Lord Henry turned and looked at the duchess with his slumberous
eyes. "Are you very much in love with him?" he asked.
She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.
"I wish I knew," she said at last.
He shook his head. "Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty
that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful."
"One may lose one's way."
"All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys."
"What is that?"
"Disillusion."
"It was my _debut_ in life," she sighed.
"It came to you crowned."
"I am tired of strawberry leaves."
"They become you."
"Only in public."
"You would miss them," said Lord Henry.
"I will not part with a petal."
"Monmouth has ears."
"Old age is dull of hearing."
"Has he never been jealous?"
"I wish he had been."
He glanced about as if in search of something. "What are you looking
for?" she inquired.
"The button from your foil," he answered. "You have dropped it."
She laughed. "I have still the mask."
"It makes your eyes lovelier," was his reply.
She laughed again. Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet
fruit.
Upstairs, in his own room, Dorian Gray was lying on a sofa, with terror
in every tingling fibre of his body. Life had suddenly become too
hideous a burden for him to bear. The dreadful death of the unlucky
beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal, had seemed to him to
pre-figure death for himself also. He had nearly swooned at what Lord
Henry had said in a chance mood of cynical jesting.
At five o'clock he rang his bell for his servant and gave him orders to
pack his things for the night-express to town, and to have the brougham
at the door by eight-thirty. He was determined not to sleep another
night at Selby Royal. It was an ill-omened place. Death walked there
in the sunlight. The grass of the forest had been spotted with blood.
Then he wrote a note to Lord Henry, telling him that he was going up to
town to consult his doctor and asking him to entertain his guests in
his absence. As he was putting it into the envelope, a knock came to
the door, and his valet informed him that the head-keeper wished to see
him. He frowned and bit his lip. "Send him in," he muttered, after
some moments' hesitation.
As soon as the man entered, Dorian pulled his chequebook out of a
drawer and spread it out before him.
"I suppose you have come about the unfortunate accident of this
morning, Thornton?" he said, taking up a pen.
"Yes, sir," answered the gamekeeper.
"Was the poor fellow married? Had he any people dependent on him?"
asked Dorian, looking bored. "If so, I should not like them to be left
in want, and will send them any sum of money you may think necessary."
"We don't know who he is, sir. That is what I took the liberty of
coming to you about."
"Don't know who he is?" said Dorian, listlessly. "What do you mean?
Wasn't he one of your men?"
"No, sir. Never saw him before. Seems like a sailor, sir."
The pen dropped from Dorian Gray's hand, and he felt as if his heart
had suddenly stopped beating. "A sailor?" he cried out. "Did you say
a sailor?"
"Yes, sir. He looks as if he had been a sort of sailor; tattooed on
both arms, and that kind of thing."
"Was there anything found on him?" said Dorian, leaning forward and
looking at the man with startled eyes. "Anything that would tell his
name?"
"Some money, sir--not much, and a six-shooter. There was no name of any
kind. A decent-looking man, sir, but rough-like. A sort of sailor we
think."
Dorian started to his feet. A terrible hope fluttered past him. He
clutched at it madly. "Where is the body?" he exclaimed. "Quick! I
must see it at once."
"It is in an empty stable in the Home Farm, sir. The folk don't like
to have that sort of thing in their houses. They say a corpse brings
bad luck."
"The Home Farm! Go there at once and meet me. Tell one of the grooms
to bring my horse round. No. Never mind. I'll go to the stables
myself. It will save time."
In less than a quarter of an hour, Dorian Gray was galloping down the
long avenue as hard as he could go. The trees seemed to sweep past him
in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his
path. Once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly threw him.
He lashed her across the neck with his crop. She cleft the dusky air
like an arrow. The stones flew from her hoofs.
At last he reached the Home Farm. Two men were loitering in the yard.
He leaped from the saddle and threw the reins to one of them. In the
farthest stable a light was glimmering. Something seemed to tell him
that the body was there, and he hurried to the door and put his hand
upon the latch.
There he paused for a moment, feeling that he was on the brink of a
discovery that would either make or mar his life. Then he thrust the
door open and entered.
On a heap of sacking in the far corner was lying the dead body of a man
dressed in a coarse shirt and a pair of blue trousers. A spotted
handkerchief had been placed over the face. A coarse candle, stuck in
a bottle, sputtered beside it.
Dorian Gray shuddered. He felt that his could not be the hand to take
the handkerchief away, and called out to one of the farm-servants to
come to him.
"Take that thing off the face. I wish to see it," he said, clutching
at the door-post for support.
When the farm-servant had done so, he stepped forward. A cry of joy
broke from his lips. The man who had been shot in the thicket was
James Vane.
He stood there for some minutes looking at the dead body. As he rode
home, his eyes were full of tears, for he knew he was safe.
| 4,898 | Chapters 17-18 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219150422/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-picture-of-dorian-gray/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1718 | One week has passed, and Dorian has retreated to his country estate, Selby Royal. His guests include the beautiful Duchess of Monmouth ; her older, boring, somewhat jaded husband; Lady Narborough, old and flirtatious but seldom boring; and Lord Henry. The conversation is light and superficial. Lord Henry wants to re-christen some things -- especially, flowers. Beautiful objects should have beautiful names, he says. The duchess asks what new name Lord Henry shall have, and Dorian immediately answers appropriately, "Prince Paradox." The duchess tries to flirt with Dorian, and he excuses himself to fetch her some of his orchids. Lord Henry lightheartedly warns the duchess about loving Dorian. Suddenly the group hears a muted groan and the sound of a heavy fall. Lord Henry rushes to find that Dorian has fainted. When Dorian comes to, he refuses to be alone. Despite his condition, he joins the others at dinner and tries to act jolly. Now and then, however, terror shoots through him as he recalls the cause of his faint: the face of James Vane observing him through a window. Dorian spends most of the next day in his room. Feeling hunted, stalked, and sick with fear of death, he alternates between the certainty of punishment and an equal certainty that the wicked receive no such fate in this world. He concludes that the only morality is the success of the strong and the failure of the weak. On the third day, Dorian finally goes out. He has decided that he imagined James' face in the window. After breakfast, he strolls in the garden with the duchess for an hour. Then he joins her brother, Sir Geoffrey Clouston, and others who are shooting birds. A hare bursts forth, and Sir Geoffrey aims, but Dorian so admires the beauty and grace of the animal that he cries, "Let it live." Lord Geoffrey finds Dorian's plea silly and fires as the hare jumps into a thicket. Two sounds come from the brush: the cry of a hare and the cry of a man. Incredibly, a dead human body is pulled from the brush. Lord Henry recommends calling off the hunt for the day. Dorian would like to cancel the "hideous and cruel" hunt for good; he fears that the death is a bad omen. Lord Henry laughs at Dorian's concern, saying that the only thing horrible in life is boredom. There are no omens, he says. In his room, Dorian lies in terror on the sofa. Later, he calls his servant and tells him to pack. Dorian will leave at eight-thirty to catch the night express to London. He writes a note to Lord Henry, asking him to take care of the guests because he is going to London to see his doctor. Thornton, Dorian's chief gamekeeper, enters with startling news. The dead man cannot be identified. He was not one of the beaters, after all. In fact, he seems to be a sailor, armed with a gun. Dorian rushes to where the body lies. Identifying the body as James Vane's, Dorian feels safe at last. | Wilde makes excellent use of contrast in the setting of these chapters. Life at Selby Royal could not be more different from the secret world of Dorian Gray. Wilde writes about bright conversations, bright lights, and bright days. Such idyllic life adds to Dorian's discomfort when terror twice invades his country estate. Early on, he is seeking orchids but finds the face of James Vane. Just as he is recovering from the shock, a man is ominously killed by accident. Dorian decides to flee because, he realizes, "Death walked there in the sunlight." He expects evil in the opium den, not in the fresh air of Selby Royal. Dorian's tragic fate haunts him wherever he goes. Before, Dorian felt that his situation was hopeless; now, he is beginning to learn what hopelessness really feels like. Wilde exposes the egocentricity of class distinction through the death of what seems to be a lowly beater. First, Sir Geoffrey is annoyed that the "ass" got out in front of the guns. It ruins his shooting for the whole day. Then Lord Henry comments, "It is rather awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper beaters. It makes people think that one is a wild shot." Incredibly, Lord Henry is more concerned with his shooting partner's reputation than with a man's death. Even Dorian seems to have little more compassion for the man than he has for the hare. He dislikes shooting and killing, but his chief concern, as usual, is himself. He sees the death as a bad omen, a threat to himself. When Thornton comes to Dorian's room, the master immediately pulls his chequebook out of a drawer. It may be kind of him to want to pay the family of the dead man, but Dorian would not think of visiting them or the corpse until he suspects that it might be James Vane. Dorian's ultimate relief is ironic. Even as he feels joy at seeing James Vane dead, he is far from safe. Glossary Tartuffe a hypocrite; the word comes from Moliere's Le Tartuffe, a play in which the lead character -- Tartuffe -- almost destroys a family that has taken him in. riposte French, "retort" or reply in a direct manner. Parthian pertaining to a shot fired by one in actual or feigned retreat; after the tactics of the archers from Parthia in Western Asia. beater someone who is hired to flush wild game from cover for hunters; on some hunts, they beat percussion instruments. censure an expression of blame or disapproval. lithe supple; easily bent; flexible. presentiment premonition; a sense that something is about to occur. Artemis in Greek mythology, the goddess of the hunt. | 514 | 449 | [
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23,046 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/23046-chapters/9.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Comedy of Errors/section_8_part_0.txt | The Comedy of Errors.act iv.scene iii | act iv, scene iii | null | {"name": "Act IV, Scene iii", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219160210/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/comedy-of-errors/summary/act-iv-scene-iii", "summary": "S. Antipholus is still at the marketplace, waiting for S. Dromio to come tell him about whether any ships are leaving. S. Antipholus wonders at his good luck; it seems everyone in the whole city knows him and is kind to him, though he has no idea who they are. He's convinced the place is overrun with sorcery, and his mind is being played with. S. Dromio then arrives with the gold to pay E. Antipholus's debt, and tries to give it to S. Antipholus. S. Dromio then has to explain to the confused S. Antipholus that he was recently arrested, which one would think a person would remember. S. Antipholus, however, just wants to know about the ships he asked S. Dromio to look for. He is certain he already told S. Antipholus about a departing ship a long time ago, only to be told to bring money for bail instead. S. Antipholus, rather than investigate the matter further, simply declares the two of them seem insane as they wander in an illusion. A Courtesan enters, seeming another vision of the devil. Of course she's familiar with E. Antipholus, but S. Antipholus only recognizes in her the usual courtesanly stuff--gaudy but sweet temptation. S. Antipholus and S. Dromio joke happily about light, which they pun on. They call the Courtesan light, as the devil himself was an angel of light, and they also twist the notion that the woman is \"light,\" meaning \"easy.\" Finally, they decide that she is light like fire, which will burn. Anyway, the Courtesan talks about the dinner she just had with E. Antipholus, where he took a ring from her worth forty ducats, and promised her a gold chain in exchange. She notes S. Antipholus wears the chain, but when she asks for it, or her ring back, he runs away. The Courtesan, out a ring and a customer, decides she'll go to his wife, which is a dangerous but useful tactic. The Courtesan is sure Antipholus is mad, and she intends to tell Adriana that Antipholus ran into her house and stole her valuable ring.", "analysis": ""} | SCENE III.
A public place.
_Enter _ANTIPHOLUS of Syracuse_._
_Ant. S._ There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend;
And every one doth call me by my name.
Some tender money to me; some invite me;
Some other give me thanks for kindnesses; 5
Some offer me commodities to buy;--
Even now a tailor call'd me in his shop,
And show'd me silks that he had bought for me,
And therewithal took measure of my body.
Sure, these are but imaginary wiles, 10
And Lapland sorcerers inhabit here.
_Enter _DROMIO of Syracuse_._
_Dro. S._ Master, here's the gold you sent me for.--
What, have you got the picture of old Adam new-apparelled?
_Ant. S._ What gold is this? what Adam dost thou mean?
_Dro. S._ Not that Adam that kept the Paradise, but that 15
Adam that keeps the prison: he that goes in the calf's skin
that was killed for the Prodigal; he that came behind you,
sir, like an evil angel, and bid you forsake your liberty.
_Ant. S._ I understand thee not.
_Dro. S._ No? why, 'tis a plain case: he that went, like a 20
base-viol, in a case of leather; the man, sir, that, when
gentlemen are tired, gives them a sob, and 'rests them; he, sir,
that takes pity on decayed men, and gives them suits of
durance; he that sets up his rest to do more exploits with
his mace than a morris-pike. 25
_Ant. S._ What, thou meanest an officer?
_Dro. S._ Ay, sir, the sergeant of the band; he that
brings any man to answer it that breaks his band; one that
thinks a man always going to bed, and says, 'God give you
good rest!' 30
_Ant. S._ Well, sir, there rest in your foolery. Is there
any ship puts forth to-night? may we be gone?
_Dro. S._ Why, sir, I brought you word an hour since,
that the bark Expedition put forth to-night; and then were
you hindered by the sergeant, to tarry for the hoy Delay. 35
Here are the angels that you sent for to deliver you.
_Ant. S._ The fellow is distract, and so am I;
And here we wander in illusions:
Some blessed power deliver us from hence!
_Enter a _Courtezan_._
_Cour._ Well met, well met, Master Antipholus. 40
I see, sir, you have found the goldsmith now:
Is that the chain you promised me to-day?
_Ant. S._ Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not.
_Dro. S._ Master, is this Mistress Satan?
_Ant. S._ It is the devil. 45
_Dro. S._ Nay, she is worse, she is the devil's dam; and
here she comes in the habit of a light wench: and thereof
comes that the wenches say, 'God damn me;' that's as
much to say, 'God make me a light wench.' It is written,
they appear to men like angels of light: light is an effect of 50
fire, and fire will burn; ergo, light wenches will burn. Come
not near her.
_Cour._ Your man and you are marvellous merry, sir.
Will you go with me? We'll mend our dinner here?
_Dro. S._ Master, if you do, expect spoon-meat; or bespeak 55
a long spoon.
_Ant. S._ Why, Dromio?
_Dro. S._ Marry, he must have a long spoon that must
eat with the devil.
_Ant. S._ Avoid then, fiend! what tell'st thou me of supping? 60
Thou art, as you are all, a sorceress:
I conjure thee to leave me and be gone.
_Cour._ Give me the ring of mine you had at dinner,
Or, for my diamond, the chain you promised,
And I'll be gone, sir, and not trouble you. 65
_Dro. S._ Some devils ask but the parings of one's nail,
A rush, a hair, a drop of blood, a pin,
A nut, a cherry-stone;
But she, more covetous, would have a chain.
Master, be wise: an if you give it her, 70
The devil will shake her chain, and fright us with it.
_Cour._ I pray you, sir, my ring, or else the chain:
I hope you do not mean to cheat me so.
_Ant. S._ Avaunt, thou witch! --Come, Dromio, let us go.
_Dro. S._ 'Fly pride,' says the peacock: mistress, that you know.
[_Exeunt Ant. S. and Dro. S._ 75
_Cour._ Now, out of doubt Antipholus is mad,
Else would he never so demean himself.
A ring he hath of mine worth forty ducats,
And for the same he promised me a chain:
Both one and other he denies me now. 80
The reason that I gather he is mad,--
Besides this present instance of his rage,--
Is a mad tale he told to-day at dinner,
Of his own doors being shut against his entrance.
Belike his wife, acquainted with his fits, 85
On purpose shut the doors against his way.
My way is now to his home to his house,
And tell his wife that, being lunatic,
He rush'd into my house, and took perforce
My ring away. This course I fittest choose; 90
For forty ducats is too much to lose. [_Exit._
NOTES: IV, 3.
SCENE III.] SCENE V. Pope.
13: _What, have_] Pope. _What have_ Ff.
_got_] _got rid of_ Theobald. _not_ Anon. conj.
16: _calf's skin_] _calves-skin_ Ff.
22: _sob_] _fob_ Rowe. _bob_ Hanmer. _sop_ Dyce conj.
_stop_ Grant White.
_'rests_] Warburton. _rests_ Ff.
25: _morris_] _Moris_ Ff. _Maurice_ Hanmer (Warburton).
28: _band_] _bond_ Rowe.
29: _says_] Capell. _saies_ F1. _saieth_ F2. _saith_ F3 F4.
32: _ship_] F2 F3 F4. _ships_ F1.
34: _put_] _puts_ Pope.
40: SCENE VI. Pope.
44-62: Put in the margin as spurious by Pope.
47-49: _and ... wench.'_] Marked as spurious by Capell, MS.
48, 49: _as much_] _as much as_ Pope.
54: _me? ... here?_] _me, ... here?_ Ff. _me? ... here._ Steevens.
55: _if you do, expect_] F2 F3 F4. _if do expect_ F1.
_or_] om. Rowe. _so_ Capell. _either stay away, or_ Malone conj.
_and_ Ritson conj. _Oh!_ Anon. conj.
60: _then_] F1 F2 F3. _thou_ F4. _thee_ Dyce.
61: _are all_] _all are_ Boswell.
66-71: Printed as prose by Ff, as verse by Capell, ending the
third line at _covetous_.
75: Put in the margin as spurious by Pope.
76: SCENE VII. Pope.
84: _doors_] _door_ Johnson.
| 1,433 | Act IV, Scene iii | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219160210/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/comedy-of-errors/summary/act-iv-scene-iii | S. Antipholus is still at the marketplace, waiting for S. Dromio to come tell him about whether any ships are leaving. S. Antipholus wonders at his good luck; it seems everyone in the whole city knows him and is kind to him, though he has no idea who they are. He's convinced the place is overrun with sorcery, and his mind is being played with. S. Dromio then arrives with the gold to pay E. Antipholus's debt, and tries to give it to S. Antipholus. S. Dromio then has to explain to the confused S. Antipholus that he was recently arrested, which one would think a person would remember. S. Antipholus, however, just wants to know about the ships he asked S. Dromio to look for. He is certain he already told S. Antipholus about a departing ship a long time ago, only to be told to bring money for bail instead. S. Antipholus, rather than investigate the matter further, simply declares the two of them seem insane as they wander in an illusion. A Courtesan enters, seeming another vision of the devil. Of course she's familiar with E. Antipholus, but S. Antipholus only recognizes in her the usual courtesanly stuff--gaudy but sweet temptation. S. Antipholus and S. Dromio joke happily about light, which they pun on. They call the Courtesan light, as the devil himself was an angel of light, and they also twist the notion that the woman is "light," meaning "easy." Finally, they decide that she is light like fire, which will burn. Anyway, the Courtesan talks about the dinner she just had with E. Antipholus, where he took a ring from her worth forty ducats, and promised her a gold chain in exchange. She notes S. Antipholus wears the chain, but when she asks for it, or her ring back, he runs away. The Courtesan, out a ring and a customer, decides she'll go to his wife, which is a dangerous but useful tactic. The Courtesan is sure Antipholus is mad, and she intends to tell Adriana that Antipholus ran into her house and stole her valuable ring. | null | 352 | 1 | [
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110 | false | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/26.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_3_part_2.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 26 | chapter 26 | null | {"name": "Chapter 26", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-4-chapters-25-34", "summary": "Angel discusses with his father his plans for attaining a position as a farmer in England or one of the Colonies. Reverend Clare feels that it is his duty to set up a sum of money for Angel, for he did not pay for him to go to university. When Angel mentions marriage, Reverend Clare suggests Mercy Chant, but Angel says that it would be more practical to have a woman who can work as a farmer. Angel mentions that he has found a possible wife, and Mrs. Clare asks if she is from a respectable family. Mrs. Clare insists on Mercy Chant, claiming that she has accomplishments. Angel claims that Tess is full of actualized poetry, and an unimpeachable Christian. Reverend Clare tells Angel a story about a young man with the last name d'Urberville, known for his rakish behavior. Reverend Clare had confronted him when he was preaching at another church, and the two nearly got into a brawl. Angel finds that he cannot accept his parents' narrow dogma, but he reveres his father's practice and recognizes the heroism under the piety.", "analysis": "In this chapter, Hardy continues to develop the established character traits of the Clare family. The discussion between Angel and his parents concerning Tess illustrates how little knowledge Angel actually has concerning Tess Durbeyfield. Angel speaks of Tess in abstract and idealistic terms, claiming that she is full of \"actualized poetry\" but unable to produce any direct evidence of her morality or accomplishments. Angel's exalted claims of Tess are ironic, for he praises Tess for an unblemished morality that contrasts starkly with her actual experience. Hardy includes an additional irony concerning the reappearance of Alec d'Urberville. This mention is not haphazard, but rather serves as a reminder of Alec's presence in the novel and foreshadowing his later return to prominence. This also illustrates the theme of fate that pervades Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Just as Angel met Tess by chance only to return to her life, the chance encounter between Reverend Clare and Alec d'Urberville suggests that Alec's role in the lives of Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare is not yet finished"} |
It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found
opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his
heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind
his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of
their walking boots. When the service was over they went out of the
room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.
The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the
attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale--either
in England or in the Colonies. His father then told him that, as he
had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he
had felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the
purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel
himself unduly slighted.
"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father, "you will no
doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years."
This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel onward to the
other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was
then six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming
business he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all
matters--some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic
labours of his establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be
well, therefore, for him to marry?
His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel
put the question--
"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty
hard-working farmer?"
"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in
your goings-out and your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters
little. Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend
and neighbour, Dr Chant--"
"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good
butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and
rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and
estimate the value of sheep and calves?"
"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable." Mr
Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before.
"I was going to add," he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you
will not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more
to your mother's mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you
used to show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour
Chant's daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the younger
clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table--altar, as I
was shocked to hear her call it one day--with flowers and other stuff
on festival occasions. But her father, who is quite as opposed to
such flummery as I, says that can be cured. It is a mere girlish
outbreak which, I am sure, will not be permanent."
"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father, don't you
think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant,
but one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments,
understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself,
would suit me infinitely better?"
His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer's
wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the
impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to
advance the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious.
He said that fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who
possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist,
and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say
whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church
School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction
on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith;
honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste
as a vestal, and, in personal appearance, exceptionally beautiful.
"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into--a lady, in
short?" asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study
during the conversation.
"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady," said Angel,
unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to
say. But she IS a lady, nevertheless--in feeling and nature."
"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."
"Pooh!--what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel quickly.
"How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I
have, and shall have to do?"
"Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm,"
returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.
"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the
life I am going to lead?--while as to her reading, I can take that
in hand. She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew
her. She's brim full of poetry--actualized poetry, if I may use the
expression. She LIVES what paper-poets only write... And she is an
unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus,
and species you desire to propagate."
"O Angel, you are mocking!"
"Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend Church almost
every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you
will tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality,
and feel that I may do worse than choose her." Angel waxed quite
earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which
(never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had
been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other
milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially
naturalistic.
In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right
whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and
Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that
she at least was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of
the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never
would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said
finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would
not object to see her.
Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now.
He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents
were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as
middle-class people, which it would require some tact to overcome.
For though legally at liberty to do as he chose, and though their
daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical difference
to their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them,
he wished for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the
most important decision of his life.
He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in
Tess's life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that
he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance--not for her skill
in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for
her simple formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air
existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable
to him. He held that education had as yet but little affected the
beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It
was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral
and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably,
elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human
nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see,
might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those
lives which had been brought under its influence. This belief was
confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been
extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community,
had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the
good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman
of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise
and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.
It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left
the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one
was to return to his college, and the other to his curacy. Angel
might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart
at Talbothays. He would have been an awkward member of the
party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal
religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there
was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness
would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him. To
neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.
His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him,
on his own mare, a little way along the road. Having fairly well
advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as
they jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father's
account of his parish difficulties, and the coldness of brother
clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of
the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious
Calvinistic doctrine.
"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to
recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea.
He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been
the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and
well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.
As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young
upstart squire named d'Urberville, living some forty miles off, in
the neighbourhood of Trantridge.
"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?"
asked his son. "That curiously historic worn-out family with its
ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?"
"O no. The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty
or eighty years ago--at least, I believe so. This seems to be a
new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former
knightly line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure. But it is odd
to hear you express interest in old families. I thought you set less
store by them even than I."
"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel with a
little impatience. "Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of
their being old. Some of the wise even among themselves 'exclaim
against their own succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically,
dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly attached to them."
This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too
subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had
been about to relate; which was that after the death of the senior
so-called d'Urberville, the young man developed the most culpable
passions, though he had a blind mother, whose condition should have
made him know better. A knowledge of his career having come to
the ears of Mr Clare, when he was in that part of the country
preaching missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to
the delinquent on his spiritual state. Though he was a stranger,
occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and
took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be required of thee!" The young man much resented this
directness of attack, and in the war of words which followed when
they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr Clare, without
respect for his gray hairs.
Angel flushed with distress.
"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not expose yourself
to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"
"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of
self-abnegation. "The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor,
foolish young man. Do you suppose his incensed words could give
me any pain, or even his blows? 'Being reviled we bless; being
persecuted we suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we are made as the
filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this
day.' Those ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly
true at this present hour."
"Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?"
"No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state
of intoxication."
"No!"
"A dozen times, my boy. What then? I have saved them from the guilt
of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived
to thank me, and praise God."
"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently. "But I fear
otherwise, from what you say."
"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare. "And I continue to pray
for him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never
meet again. But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may
spring up in his heart as a good seed some day."
Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child; and though
the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma, he revered
his practice and recognized the hero under the pietist. Perhaps he
revered his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that,
in the question of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once
thought of inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless.
The same unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting
a living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the
position of poor parsons for the term of their activities; yet Angel
admired it none the less. Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel
often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than
was either of his brethren.
| 2,210 | Chapter 26 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-4-chapters-25-34 | Angel discusses with his father his plans for attaining a position as a farmer in England or one of the Colonies. Reverend Clare feels that it is his duty to set up a sum of money for Angel, for he did not pay for him to go to university. When Angel mentions marriage, Reverend Clare suggests Mercy Chant, but Angel says that it would be more practical to have a woman who can work as a farmer. Angel mentions that he has found a possible wife, and Mrs. Clare asks if she is from a respectable family. Mrs. Clare insists on Mercy Chant, claiming that she has accomplishments. Angel claims that Tess is full of actualized poetry, and an unimpeachable Christian. Reverend Clare tells Angel a story about a young man with the last name d'Urberville, known for his rakish behavior. Reverend Clare had confronted him when he was preaching at another church, and the two nearly got into a brawl. Angel finds that he cannot accept his parents' narrow dogma, but he reveres his father's practice and recognizes the heroism under the piety. | In this chapter, Hardy continues to develop the established character traits of the Clare family. The discussion between Angel and his parents concerning Tess illustrates how little knowledge Angel actually has concerning Tess Durbeyfield. Angel speaks of Tess in abstract and idealistic terms, claiming that she is full of "actualized poetry" but unable to produce any direct evidence of her morality or accomplishments. Angel's exalted claims of Tess are ironic, for he praises Tess for an unblemished morality that contrasts starkly with her actual experience. Hardy includes an additional irony concerning the reappearance of Alec d'Urberville. This mention is not haphazard, but rather serves as a reminder of Alec's presence in the novel and foreshadowing his later return to prominence. This also illustrates the theme of fate that pervades Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Just as Angel met Tess by chance only to return to her life, the chance encounter between Reverend Clare and Alec d'Urberville suggests that Alec's role in the lives of Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare is not yet finished | 184 | 172 | [
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161 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/chapters_11_to_12.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Sense and Sensibility/section_8_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapters 11-12 | chapters 11-12 | null | {"name": "Chapters 11-12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101060302/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/s/sense-and-sensibility/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1112", "summary": "As soon as Marianne's leg healed, the private balls began at Barton Hall. Willoughby and Marianne \"were partners for half the time; and when obliged to separate for a couple of dances, were careful to stand together, and scarcely spoke a word to anyone else.\" Marianne was ecstatically happy, but Elinor was lonely, finding no one congenial in the company. Mrs. Jennings was too voluble, and Lady Middleton insipid: \"In Colonel Brandon alone, of all her new acquaintances, did Elinor find a person who could in any degree claim the respect of abilities, excite the interest of friendship, or give pleasure as a companion.\" One day the colonel asked Elinor about Marianne's dislike for \"second attachments.\" The colonel began to talk about a young lady who greatly resembled Marianne \"in temper and mind.\" However, he broke off suddenly, leaving Elinor under the impression that he was referring to a tragic experience in his past. On the following day, during a walk, Marianne told Elinor that Willoughby was giving her a horse. Elinor, pained at Marianne's impropriety, told her sister they could not afford to keep a horse or a man to look after it. She also doubted the correctness of receiving such a gift from a man whom Marianne scarcely knew. Marianne replied warmly that she knew Willoughby better than \"any other creature in the world\" except her mother and Elinor. However, she finally yielded to Elinor's good judgment and explained to Willoughby that she could not accept the horse. Elinor, overhearing their conversation, inferred that the two were engaged. This feeling was confirmed by Margaret's seeing Marianne give Willoughby a lock of her hair. One evening at Barton Park, when Mrs. Jennings tried to find out \"who was Elinor's particular favorite,\" Margaret tactlessly told the company, \"there was such a man once, and his name begins with an F.\" Elinor, embarrassed, was grateful to Lady Middleton, who changed the subject. That evening a parry was formed for an excursion the next day to an estate belonging to a brother-in-law of Colonel Brandon.", "analysis": "Marianne and Willoughby seem to be overstepping social rules to a dangerous degree. In the eighteenth century, it was not seen as correct for two people to spend so much time together without being engaged. Marianne's acceptance of the horse, as well as her giving away a lock of her hair -- a very intimate item in those times -- would be considered promiscuous behavior unless the couple were actually engaged. Also, in Austen's day, courtesy required that young ladies be addressed as \"Miss,\" followed by their Christian name. Thus even the thirteen-year-old Margaret is addressed as \"Miss Margaret\" by Mrs. Jennings. Elinor, the eldest daughter in the family, is correctly addressed as \"Miss Dashwood.\" Thus when Elinor heard Willoughby address Marianne by her Christian name, she justifiably concluded that they must be engaged."} |
Little had Mrs. Dashwood or her daughters imagined when they first came
into Devonshire, that so many engagements would arise to occupy their
time as shortly presented themselves, or that they should have such
frequent invitations and such constant visitors as to leave them little
leisure for serious employment. Yet such was the case. When Marianne
was recovered, the schemes of amusement at home and abroad, which Sir
John had been previously forming, were put into execution. The private
balls at the park then began; and parties on the water were made and
accomplished as often as a showery October would allow. In every
meeting of the kind Willoughby was included; and the ease and
familiarity which naturally attended these parties were exactly
calculated to give increasing intimacy to his acquaintance with the
Dashwoods, to afford him opportunity of witnessing the excellencies of
Marianne, of marking his animated admiration of her, and of receiving,
in her behaviour to himself, the most pointed assurance of her
affection.
Elinor could not be surprised at their attachment. She only wished
that it were less openly shewn; and once or twice did venture to
suggest the propriety of some self-command to Marianne. But Marianne
abhorred all concealment where no real disgrace could attend unreserve;
and to aim at the restraint of sentiments which were not in themselves
illaudable, appeared to her not merely an unnecessary effort, but a
disgraceful subjection of reason to common-place and mistaken notions.
Willoughby thought the same; and their behaviour at all times, was an
illustration of their opinions.
When he was present she had no eyes for any one else. Every thing he
did, was right. Every thing he said, was clever. If their evenings at
the park were concluded with cards, he cheated himself and all the rest
of the party to get her a good hand. If dancing formed the amusement
of the night, they were partners for half the time; and when obliged to
separate for a couple of dances, were careful to stand together and
scarcely spoke a word to any body else. Such conduct made them of
course most exceedingly laughed at; but ridicule could not shame, and
seemed hardly to provoke them.
Mrs. Dashwood entered into all their feelings with a warmth which left
her no inclination for checking this excessive display of them. To her
it was but the natural consequence of a strong affection in a young and
ardent mind.
This was the season of happiness to Marianne. Her heart was devoted to
Willoughby, and the fond attachment to Norland, which she brought with
her from Sussex, was more likely to be softened than she had thought it
possible before, by the charms which his society bestowed on her
present home.
Elinor's happiness was not so great. Her heart was not so much at
ease, nor her satisfaction in their amusements so pure. They afforded
her no companion that could make amends for what she had left behind,
nor that could teach her to think of Norland with less regret than
ever. Neither Lady Middleton nor Mrs. Jennings could supply to her the
conversation she missed; although the latter was an everlasting talker,
and from the first had regarded her with a kindness which ensured her a
large share of her discourse. She had already repeated her own history
to Elinor three or four times; and had Elinor's memory been equal to
her means of improvement, she might have known very early in their
acquaintance all the particulars of Mr. Jennings's last illness, and
what he said to his wife a few minutes before he died. Lady Middleton
was more agreeable than her mother only in being more silent. Elinor
needed little observation to perceive that her reserve was a mere
calmness of manner with which sense had nothing to do. Towards her
husband and mother she was the same as to them; and intimacy was
therefore neither to be looked for nor desired. She had nothing to say
one day that she had not said the day before. Her insipidity was
invariable, for even her spirits were always the same; and though she
did not oppose the parties arranged by her husband, provided every
thing were conducted in style and her two eldest children attended her,
she never appeared to receive more enjoyment from them than she might
have experienced in sitting at home;--and so little did her presence
add to the pleasure of the others, by any share in their conversation,
that they were sometimes only reminded of her being amongst them by her
solicitude about her troublesome boys.
In Colonel Brandon alone, of all her new acquaintance, did Elinor find
a person who could in any degree claim the respect of abilities, excite
the interest of friendship, or give pleasure as a companion.
Willoughby was out of the question. Her admiration and regard, even
her sisterly regard, was all his own; but he was a lover; his
attentions were wholly Marianne's, and a far less agreeable man might
have been more generally pleasing. Colonel Brandon, unfortunately for
himself, had no such encouragement to think only of Marianne, and in
conversing with Elinor he found the greatest consolation for the
indifference of her sister.
Elinor's compassion for him increased, as she had reason to suspect
that the misery of disappointed love had already been known to him.
This suspicion was given by some words which accidentally dropped from
him one evening at the park, when they were sitting down together by
mutual consent, while the others were dancing. His eyes were fixed on
Marianne, and, after a silence of some minutes, he said, with a faint
smile, "Your sister, I understand, does not approve of second
attachments."
"No," replied Elinor, "her opinions are all romantic."
"Or rather, as I believe, she considers them impossible to exist."
"I believe she does. But how she contrives it without reflecting on
the character of her own father, who had himself two wives, I know not.
A few years however will settle her opinions on the reasonable basis of
common sense and observation; and then they may be more easy to define
and to justify than they now are, by any body but herself."
"This will probably be the case," he replied; "and yet there is
something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is
sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions."
"I cannot agree with you there," said Elinor. "There are
inconveniences attending such feelings as Marianne's, which all the
charms of enthusiasm and ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her
systems have all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at
nought; and a better acquaintance with the world is what I look forward
to as her greatest possible advantage."
After a short pause he resumed the conversation by saying,--
"Does your sister make no distinction in her objections against a
second attachment? or is it equally criminal in every body? Are those
who have been disappointed in their first choice, whether from the
inconstancy of its object, or the perverseness of circumstances, to be
equally indifferent during the rest of their lives?"
"Upon my word, I am not acquainted with the minutiae of her principles.
I only know that I never yet heard her admit any instance of a second
attachment's being pardonable."
"This," said he, "cannot hold; but a change, a total change of
sentiments--No, no, do not desire it; for when the romantic refinements
of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they
succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too dangerous! I
speak from experience. I once knew a lady who in temper and mind
greatly resembled your sister, who thought and judged like her, but who
from an inforced change--from a series of unfortunate circumstances"--
Here he stopt suddenly; appeared to think that he had said too much,
and by his countenance gave rise to conjectures, which might not
otherwise have entered Elinor's head. The lady would probably have
passed without suspicion, had he not convinced Miss Dashwood that what
concerned her ought not to escape his lips. As it was, it required but
a slight effort of fancy to connect his emotion with the tender
recollection of past regard. Elinor attempted no more. But Marianne,
in her place, would not have done so little. The whole story would
have been speedily formed under her active imagination; and every thing
established in the most melancholy order of disastrous love.
As Elinor and Marianne were walking together the next morning the
latter communicated a piece of news to her sister, which in spite of
all that she knew before of Marianne's imprudence and want of thought,
surprised her by its extravagant testimony of both. Marianne told her,
with the greatest delight, that Willoughby had given her a horse, one
that he had bred himself on his estate in Somersetshire, and which was
exactly calculated to carry a woman. Without considering that it was
not in her mother's plan to keep any horse, that if she were to alter
her resolution in favour of this gift, she must buy another for the
servant, and keep a servant to ride it, and after all, build a stable
to receive them, she had accepted the present without hesitation, and
told her sister of it in raptures.
"He intends to send his groom into Somersetshire immediately for it,"
she added, "and when it arrives we will ride every day. You shall
share its use with me. Imagine to yourself, my dear Elinor, the
delight of a gallop on some of these downs."
Most unwilling was she to awaken from such a dream of felicity to
comprehend all the unhappy truths which attended the affair; and for
some time she refused to submit to them. As to an additional servant,
the expense would be a trifle; Mama she was sure would never object to
it; and any horse would do for HIM; he might always get one at the
park; as to a stable, the merest shed would be sufficient. Elinor then
ventured to doubt the propriety of her receiving such a present from a
man so little, or at least so lately known to her. This was too much.
"You are mistaken, Elinor," said she warmly, "in supposing I know very
little of Willoughby. I have not known him long indeed, but I am much
better acquainted with him, than I am with any other creature in the
world, except yourself and mama. It is not time or opportunity that is
to determine intimacy;--it is disposition alone. Seven years would be
insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven
days are more than enough for others. I should hold myself guilty of
greater impropriety in accepting a horse from my brother, than from
Willoughby. Of John I know very little, though we have lived together
for years; but of Willoughby my judgment has long been formed."
Elinor thought it wisest to touch that point no more. She knew her
sister's temper. Opposition on so tender a subject would only attach
her the more to her own opinion. But by an appeal to her affection for
her mother, by representing the inconveniences which that indulgent
mother must draw on herself, if (as would probably be the case) she
consented to this increase of establishment, Marianne was shortly
subdued; and she promised not to tempt her mother to such imprudent
kindness by mentioning the offer, and to tell Willoughby when she saw
him next, that it must be declined.
She was faithful to her word; and when Willoughby called at the
cottage, the same day, Elinor heard her express her disappointment to
him in a low voice, on being obliged to forego the acceptance of his
present. The reasons for this alteration were at the same time
related, and they were such as to make further entreaty on his side
impossible. His concern however was very apparent; and after
expressing it with earnestness, he added, in the same low voice,--"But,
Marianne, the horse is still yours, though you cannot use it now. I
shall keep it only till you can claim it. When you leave Barton to
form your own establishment in a more lasting home, Queen Mab shall
receive you."
This was all overheard by Miss Dashwood; and in the whole of the
sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her
sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so
decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between
them. From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each
other; and the belief of it created no other surprise than that she, or
any of their friends, should be left by tempers so frank, to discover
it by accident.
Margaret related something to her the next day, which placed this
matter in a still clearer light. Willoughby had spent the preceding
evening with them, and Margaret, by being left some time in the parlour
with only him and Marianne, had had opportunity for observations,
which, with a most important face, she communicated to her eldest
sister, when they were next by themselves.
"Oh, Elinor!" she cried, "I have such a secret to tell you about
Marianne. I am sure she will be married to Mr. Willoughby very soon."
"You have said so," replied Elinor, "almost every day since they first
met on High-church Down; and they had not known each other a week, I
believe, before you were certain that Marianne wore his picture round
her neck; but it turned out to be only the miniature of our great
uncle."
"But indeed this is quite another thing. I am sure they will be
married very soon, for he has got a lock of her hair."
"Take care, Margaret. It may be only the hair of some great uncle of
HIS."
"But, indeed, Elinor, it is Marianne's. I am almost sure it is, for I
saw him cut it off. Last night after tea, when you and mama went out
of the room, they were whispering and talking together as fast as could
be, and he seemed to be begging something of her, and presently he took
up her scissors and cut off a long lock of her hair, for it was all
tumbled down her back; and he kissed it, and folded it up in a piece of
white paper; and put it into his pocket-book."
For such particulars, stated on such authority, Elinor could not
withhold her credit; nor was she disposed to it, for the circumstance
was in perfect unison with what she had heard and seen herself.
Margaret's sagacity was not always displayed in a way so satisfactory
to her sister. When Mrs. Jennings attacked her one evening at the
park, to give the name of the young man who was Elinor's particular
favourite, which had been long a matter of great curiosity to her,
Margaret answered by looking at her sister, and saying, "I must not
tell, may I, Elinor?"
This of course made every body laugh; and Elinor tried to laugh too.
But the effort was painful. She was convinced that Margaret had fixed
on a person whose name she could not bear with composure to become a
standing joke with Mrs. Jennings.
Marianne felt for her most sincerely; but she did more harm than good
to the cause, by turning very red and saying in an angry manner to
Margaret,
"Remember that whatever your conjectures may be, you have no right to
repeat them."
"I never had any conjectures about it," replied Margaret; "it was you
who told me of it yourself."
This increased the mirth of the company, and Margaret was eagerly
pressed to say something more.
"Oh! pray, Miss Margaret, let us know all about it," said Mrs.
Jennings. "What is the gentleman's name?"
"I must not tell, ma'am. But I know very well what it is; and I know
where he is too."
"Yes, yes, we can guess where he is; at his own house at Norland to be
sure. He is the curate of the parish I dare say."
"No, THAT he is not. He is of no profession at all."
"Margaret," said Marianne with great warmth, "you know that all this is
an invention of your own, and that there is no such person in
existence."
"Well, then, he is lately dead, Marianne, for I am sure there was such
a man once, and his name begins with an F."
Most grateful did Elinor feel to Lady Middleton for observing, at this
moment, "that it rained very hard," though she believed the
interruption to proceed less from any attention to her, than from her
ladyship's great dislike of all such inelegant subjects of raillery as
delighted her husband and mother. The idea however started by her, was
immediately pursued by Colonel Brandon, who was on every occasion
mindful of the feelings of others; and much was said on the subject of
rain by both of them. Willoughby opened the piano-forte, and asked
Marianne to sit down to it; and thus amidst the various endeavours of
different people to quit the topic, it fell to the ground. But not so
easily did Elinor recover from the alarm into which it had thrown her.
A party was formed this evening for going on the following day to see a
very fine place about twelve miles from Barton, belonging to a
brother-in-law of Colonel Brandon, without whose interest it could not
be seen, as the proprietor, who was then abroad, had left strict orders
on that head. The grounds were declared to be highly beautiful, and
Sir John, who was particularly warm in their praise, might be allowed
to be a tolerable judge, for he had formed parties to visit them, at
least, twice every summer for the last ten years. They contained a
noble piece of water; a sail on which was to a form a great part of the
morning's amusement; cold provisions were to be taken, open carriages
only to be employed, and every thing conducted in the usual style of a
complete party of pleasure.
To some few of the company it appeared rather a bold undertaking,
considering the time of year, and that it had rained every day for the
last fortnight;--and Mrs. Dashwood, who had already a cold, was
persuaded by Elinor to stay at home.
| 2,896 | Chapters 11-12 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201101060302/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/s/sense-and-sensibility/summary-and-analysis/chapters-1112 | As soon as Marianne's leg healed, the private balls began at Barton Hall. Willoughby and Marianne "were partners for half the time; and when obliged to separate for a couple of dances, were careful to stand together, and scarcely spoke a word to anyone else." Marianne was ecstatically happy, but Elinor was lonely, finding no one congenial in the company. Mrs. Jennings was too voluble, and Lady Middleton insipid: "In Colonel Brandon alone, of all her new acquaintances, did Elinor find a person who could in any degree claim the respect of abilities, excite the interest of friendship, or give pleasure as a companion." One day the colonel asked Elinor about Marianne's dislike for "second attachments." The colonel began to talk about a young lady who greatly resembled Marianne "in temper and mind." However, he broke off suddenly, leaving Elinor under the impression that he was referring to a tragic experience in his past. On the following day, during a walk, Marianne told Elinor that Willoughby was giving her a horse. Elinor, pained at Marianne's impropriety, told her sister they could not afford to keep a horse or a man to look after it. She also doubted the correctness of receiving such a gift from a man whom Marianne scarcely knew. Marianne replied warmly that she knew Willoughby better than "any other creature in the world" except her mother and Elinor. However, she finally yielded to Elinor's good judgment and explained to Willoughby that she could not accept the horse. Elinor, overhearing their conversation, inferred that the two were engaged. This feeling was confirmed by Margaret's seeing Marianne give Willoughby a lock of her hair. One evening at Barton Park, when Mrs. Jennings tried to find out "who was Elinor's particular favorite," Margaret tactlessly told the company, "there was such a man once, and his name begins with an F." Elinor, embarrassed, was grateful to Lady Middleton, who changed the subject. That evening a parry was formed for an excursion the next day to an estate belonging to a brother-in-law of Colonel Brandon. | Marianne and Willoughby seem to be overstepping social rules to a dangerous degree. In the eighteenth century, it was not seen as correct for two people to spend so much time together without being engaged. Marianne's acceptance of the horse, as well as her giving away a lock of her hair -- a very intimate item in those times -- would be considered promiscuous behavior unless the couple were actually engaged. Also, in Austen's day, courtesy required that young ladies be addressed as "Miss," followed by their Christian name. Thus even the thirteen-year-old Margaret is addressed as "Miss Margaret" by Mrs. Jennings. Elinor, the eldest daughter in the family, is correctly addressed as "Miss Dashwood." Thus when Elinor heard Willoughby address Marianne by her Christian name, she justifiably concluded that they must be engaged. | 343 | 134 | [
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23,042 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/23042-chapters/2.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Tempest/section_1_part_0.txt | The Tempest.act i.scene ii | act i, scene ii | null | {"name": "Act I, scene ii", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210131162607/https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/tempest/section2/", "summary": "Prospero and Miranda stand on the shore of the island, having just witnessed the shipwreck. Miranda entreats her father to see that no one on-board comes to any harm. Prospero assures her that no one was harmed and tells her that it's time she learned who she is and where she comes from. Miranda seems curious, noting that Prospero has often started to tell her about herself but always stopped. However, once Prospero begins telling his tale, he asks her three times if she is listening to him. He tells her that he was once Duke of Milan and famous for his great intelligence. Prospero explains that he gradually grew uninterested in politics, however, and turned his attention more and more to his studies, neglecting his duties as duke. This gave his brother Antonio an opportunity to act on his ambition. Working in concert with the King of Naples, Antonio usurped Prospero of his dukedom. Antonio arranged for the King of Naples to pay him an annual tribute and do him homage as duke. Later, the King of Naples helped Antonio raise an army to march on Milan, driving Prospero out. Prospero tells how he and Miranda escaped from death at the hands of the army in a barely-seaworthy boat prepared for them by his loyal subjects. Gonzalo, an honest Neapolitan, provided them with food and clothing, as well as books from Prospero's library. Having brought Miranda up to date on how she arrived at their current home, Prospero explains that sheer good luck has brought his former enemies to the island. Miranda suddenly grows very sleepy, perhaps because Prospero charms her with his magic. When she is asleep, Prospero calls forth his spirit, Ariel. In his conversation with Ariel, we learn that Prospero and the spirit were responsible for the storm of Act I, scene i. Flying about the ship, Ariel acted as the wind, the thunder, and the lightning. When everyone except the crew had abandoned the ship, Ariel made sure, as Prospero had requested, that all were brought safely to shore but dispersed around the island. Ariel reports that the king's son is alone. He also tells Prospero that the mariners and Boatswain have been charmed to sleep in the ship, which has been brought safely to harbor. The rest of the fleet that was with the ship, believing it to have been destroyed by the storm, has headed safely back to Naples. Prospero thanks Ariel for his service, and Ariel takes this moment to remind Prospero of his promise to take one year off of his agreed time of servitude if Ariel performs his services without complaint. Prospero does not take well to being reminded of his promises, and he chastises Ariel for his impudence. He reminds Ariel of where he came from and how Prospero rescued him. Ariel had been a servant of Sycorax, a witch banished from Algiers and sent to the island long ago. Ariel was too delicate a spirit to perform her horrible commands, so she imprisoned him in a \"cloven pine\" . She did not free him before she died, and he might have remained imprisoned forever had not Prospero arrived and rescued him. Reminding Ariel of this, Prospero threatens to imprison him for twelve years if he does not stop complaining. Ariel promises to be more polite. Prospero then gives him a new command: he must go make himself like a nymph of the sea and be invisible to all but Prospero. Ariel goes to do so, and Prospero, turning to Miranda's sleeping form, calls upon his daughter to awaken. She opens her eyes and, not realizing that she has been enchanted, says that the \"strangeness\" of Prospero's story caused her to fall asleep.", "analysis": "Analysis Act I, scene ii opens with the revelation that it was Prospero's magic, and not simply a hostile nature, that raised the storm that caused the shipwreck. From there, the scene moves into a long sequence devoted largely to telling the play's background story while introducing the major characters on the island. The first part of the scene is devoted to two long histories, both told by Prospero, one to Miranda and one to Ariel. If The Tempest is a play about power in various forms , then Prospero is the center of power, controlling events throughout the play through magic and manipulation. Prospero's retellings of past events to Miranda and Ariel do more than simply fill the audience in on the story so far. They also illustrate how Prospero maintains his power, exploring the old man's meticulous methods of controlling those around him through magic, charisma, and rhetoric. Prospero's rhetoric is particularly important to observe in this section, especially in his confrontation with Ariel. Of all the characters in the play, Prospero alone seems to understand that controlling history enables one to control the present--that is, that one can control others by controlling how they understand the past. Prospero thus tells his story with a highly rhetorical emphasis on his own good deeds, the bad deeds of others toward him, and the ingratitude of those he has protected from the evils of others. For example, when he speaks to Miranda, he calls his brother \"perfidious,\" then immediately says that he loved his brother better than anyone in the world except Miranda . He repeatedly asks Miranda, \"Dost thou attend me?\" Through his questioning, he commands her attention almost hypnotically as he tells her his one-sided version of the story. Prospero himself does not seem blameless. While his brother did betray him, he also failed in his responsibilities as a ruler by giving up control of the government so that he could study. He contrasts his popularity as a leader--\"the love my people bore me\" --with his brother's \"evil nature\" . When he speaks to Ariel, a magical creature over whom his mastery is less certain than over his doting daughter, Prospero goes to even greater lengths to justify himself. He treats Ariel as a combination of a pet, whom he can praise and blame as he chooses, and a pupil, demanding that the spirit recite answers to questions about the past that Prospero has taught him. Though Ariel must know the story well, Prospero says that he must \"once in a month\" recount Ariel's history with Sycorax, simply to ensure that his servant's fickle nature does not cause him to become disloyal. Every time he retells Ariel's history, we feel, he must increase both the persuasiveness of his own story and his control over Ariel. This is why he now chooses to claim that Ariel is behaving badly--so that he can justify a retelling of the history, even though Ariel is perfectly respectful. He forces Ariel to recall the misery he suffered while trapped in the pine tree . He then positions himself as the good savior who overthrew Sycorax's evil. However, he immediately follows this with a forceful display of his own magical power, threatening to trap Ariel in an oak just as the \"evil\" Sycorax had trapped him in a pine. In this way, Prospero exercises control both intellectually and physically. By controlling the way Ariel and Miranda think about their lives, he makes it difficult for them to imagine that challenging his authority would be a good thing to do, and by threatening Ariel with magical torture, he sets very high stakes for any such rebellion. For his part, Ariel promises to \"do my spiriting gently\" from now on."} | SCENE II.
_The island.
Before PROSPERO'S cell._
_Enter PROSPERO and MIRANDA._
_Mir._ If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffer'd 5
With those that I saw suffer! a brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish'd!
Had I been any god of power, I would 10
Have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere
It should the good ship so have swallow'd and
The fraughting souls within her.
_Pros._ Be collected:
No more amazement: tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done.
_Mir._ O, woe the day!
_Pros._ No harm. 15
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing
Of whence I am, nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell, 20
And thy no greater father.
_Mir._ More to know
Did never meddle with my thoughts.
_Pros._ 'Tis time
I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand,
And pluck my magic garment from me. --So:
[_Lays down his mantle._
Lie there, my art. Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort. 25
The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd
The very virtue of compassion in thee,
I have with such provision in mine art
So safely order'd, that there is no soul,
No, not so much perdition as an hair 30
Betid to any creature in the vessel
Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down;
For thou must now know farther.
_Mir._ You have often
Begun to tell me what I am; but stopp'd,
And left me to a bootless inquisition, 35
Concluding "Stay: not yet."
_Pros._ The hour's now come;
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear;
Obey, and be attentive. Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?
I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not 40
Out three years old.
_Mir._ Certainly, sir, I can.
_Pros._ By what? by any other house or person?
Of any thing the image tell me that
Hath kept with thy remembrance.
_Mir._ 'Tis far off,
And rather like a dream than an assurance 45
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
Four or five women once that tended me?
_Pros._ Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time? 50
If thou remember'st ought ere thou camest here,
How thou camest here thou mayst.
_Mir._ But that I do not.
_Pros._ Twelve year since, Miranda, twelve year since,
Thy father was the Duke of Milan, and
A prince of power.
_Mir._ Sir, are not you my father? 55
_Pros._ Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said thou wast my daughter; and thy father
Was Duke of Milan; and his only heir
And princess, no worse issued.
_Mir._ O the heavens!
What foul play had we, that we came from thence? 60
Or blessed was't we did?
_Pros._ Both, both, my girl:
By foul play, as thou say'st, were we heaved thence;
But blessedly holp hither.
_Mir._ O, my heart bleeds
To think o' the teen that I have turn'd you to.
Which is from my remembrance! Please you, farther. 65
_Pros._ My brother, and thy uncle, call'd Antonio,--
I pray thee, mark me,--that a brother should
Be so perfidious!--he whom, next thyself,
Of all the world I loved, and to him put
The manage of my state; as, at that time, 70
Through all the signories it was the first,
And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, and for the liberal arts
Without a parallel; those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother, 75
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle--
Dost thou attend me?
_Mir._ Sir, most heedfully.
_Pros._ Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them, whom to advance, and whom 80
To trash for over-topping, new created
The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed 'em,
Or else new form'd 'em; having both the key
Of officer and office, set all hearts i' the state
To what tune pleased his ear; that now he was 85
The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,
And suck'd my verdure out on't. Thou attend'st not.
_Mir._ O, good sir, I do.
_Pros._ I pray thee, mark me.
I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind 90
With that which, but by being so retired,
O'er-prized all popular rate, in my false brother
Awaked an evil nature; and my trust,
Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood in its contrary, as great 95
As my trust was; which had indeed no limit,
A confidence sans bound. He being thus lorded,
Not only with what my revenue yielded,
But what my power might else exact, like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it, 100
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie, he did believe
He was indeed the duke; out o' the substitution,
And executing the outward face of royalty,
With all prerogative:--hence his ambition growing,-- 105
Dost thou hear?
_Mir._ Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
_Pros._ To have no screen between this part he play'd
And him he play'd it for, he needs will be
Absolute Milan. Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough: of temporal royalties 110
He thinks me now incapable; confederates,
So dry he was for sway, wi' the King of Naples
To give him annual tribute, do him homage,
Subject his coronet to his crown, and bend
The dukedom, yet unbow'd,--alas, poor Milan!-- 115
To most ignoble stooping.
_Mir._ O the heavens!
_Pros._ Mark his condition, and th' event; then tell me
If this might be a brother.
_Mir._ I should sin
To think but nobly of my grandmother:
Good wombs have borne bad sons.
_Pros._ Now the condition. 120
This King of Naples, being an enemy
To me inveterate, hearkens my brother's suit;
Which was, that he, in lieu o' the premises,
Of homage and I know not how much tribute,
Should presently extirpate me and mine 125
Out of the dukedom, and confer fair Milan,
With all the honours, on my brother: whereon,
A treacherous army levied, one midnight
Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open
The gates of Milan; and, i' the dead of darkness, 130
The ministers for the purpose hurried thence
Me and thy crying self.
_Mir._ Alack, for pity!
I, not remembering how I cried out then,
Will cry it o'er again: it is a hint
That wrings mine eyes to't.
_Pros._ Hear a little further, 135
And then I'll bring thee to the present business
Which now's upon 's; without the which, this story
Were most impertinent.
_Mir._ Wherefore did they not
That hour destroy us?
_Pros._ Well demanded, wench:
My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst not, 140
So dear the love my people bore me; nor set
A mark so bloody on the business; but
With colours fairer painted their foul ends.
In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,
Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared 145
A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively have quit it: there they hoist us,
To cry to the sea that roar'd to us; to sigh
To the winds, whose pity, sighing back again, 150
Did us but loving wrong.
_Mir._ Alack, what trouble
Was I then to you!
_Pros._ O, a cherubin
Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile,
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt, 155
Under my burthen groan'd; which raised in me
An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.
_Mir._ How came we ashore?
_Pros._ By Providence divine.
Some food we had, and some fresh water, that 160
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, who being then appointed
Master of this design, did give us, with
Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness, 165
Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
_Mir._ Would I might
But ever see that man!
_Pros._ Now I arise: [_Resumes his mantle._
Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow. 170
Here in this island we arrived; and here
Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit
Than other princesses can, that have more time
For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful.
_Mir._ Heavens thank you for't! And now, I pray you, sir, 175
For still 'tis beating in my mind, your reason
For raising this sea-storm?
_Pros._ Know thus far forth.
By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune,
Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore; and by my prescience 180
I find my zenith doth depend upon
A most auspicious star, whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
Will ever after droop. Here cease more questions:
Thou art inclined to sleep; 'tis a good dulness, 185
And give it way: I know thou canst not choose.
[_Miranda sleeps._
Come away, servant, come. I am ready now.
Approach, my Ariel, come.
_Enter _ARIEL_._
_Ari._ All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, 190
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.
_Pros._ Hast thou, spirit,
Perform'd to point the tempest that I bade thee?
_Ari._ To every article. 195
I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement: sometime I'ld divide,
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly, 200
Then meet and join. Jove's lightnings, the precursors
O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not: the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble, 205
Yea, his dread trident shake.
_Pros._ My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil
Would not infect his reason?
_Ari._ Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners 210
Plunged in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me: the king's son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring,--then like reeds, not hair,--
Was the first man that leap'd; cried, "Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here."
_Pros._ Why, that's my spirit! 215
But was not this nigh shore?
_Ari._ Close by, my master.
_Pros._ But are they, Ariel, safe?
_Ari._ Not a hair perish'd;
On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before: and, as thou badest me,
In troops I have dispersed them 'bout the isle. 220
The king's son have I landed by himself;
Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs
In an odd angle of the isle, and sitting,
His arms in this sad knot.
_Pros._ Of the king's ship
The mariners, say how thou hast disposed, 225
And all the rest o' the fleet.
_Ari._ Safely in harbour
Is the king's ship; in the deep nook, where once
Thou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still-vex'd Bermoothes, there she's hid:
The mariners all under hatches stow'd; 230
Who, with a charm join'd to their suffer'd labour,
I have left asleep: and for the rest o' the fleet,
Which I dispersed, they all have met again,
And are upon the Mediterranean flote,
Bound sadly home for Naples; 235
Supposing that they saw the king's ship wreck'd,
And his great person perish.
_Pros._ Ariel, thy charge
Exactly is perform'd: but there's more work.
What is the time o' the day?
_Ari._ Past the mid season.
_Pros._ At least two glasses. The time 'twixt six and now 240
Must by us both be spent most preciously.
_Ari._ Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains,
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
Which is not yet perform'd me.
_Pros._ How now? moody?
What is't thou canst demand?
_Ari._ My liberty. 245
_Pros._ Before the time be out? no more!
_Ari._ I prithee,
Remember I have done thee worthy service;
Told thee no lies, made thee no mistakings, served
Without or grudge or grumblings: thou didst promise
To bate me a full year.
_Pros._ Dost thou forget 250
From what a torment I did free thee?
_Ari._ No.
_Pros._ Thou dost; and think'st it much to tread the ooze
Of the salt deep,
To run upon the sharp wind of the north,
To do me business in the veins o' the earth 255
When it is baked with frost.
_Ari._ I do not, sir.
_Pros._ Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot
The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy
Was grown into a hoop? hast thou forgot her?
_Ari._ No, sir.
_Pros._ Thou hast. Where was she born? speak; tell me. 260
_Ari._ Sir, in Argier.
_Pros._ O, was she so? I must
Once in a month recount what thou hast been,
Which thou forget'st. This damn'd witch Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier, 265
Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she did
They would not take her life. Is not this true?
_Ari._ Ay, sir.
_Pros._ This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child,
And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave, 270
As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers, 275
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years; within which space she died,
And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans 280
As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island--
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp hag-born--not honour'd with
A human shape.
_Ari._ Yes, Caliban her son.
_Pros._ Dull thing, I say so; he, that Caliban, 285
Whom now I keep in service. Thou best know'st
What torment I did find thee in; thy groans
Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts
Of ever-angry bears: it was a torment
To lay upon the damn'd, which Sycorax 290
Could not again undo: it was mine art,
When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape
The pine, and let thee out.
_Ari._ I thank thee, master.
_Pros._ If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till 295
Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters.
_Ari._ Pardon, master:
I will be correspondent to command,
And do my spiriting gently.
_Pros._ Do so; and after two days
I will discharge thee.
_Ari._ That's my noble master!
What shall I do? say what; what shall I do? 300
_Pros._ Go make thyself like a nymph o' the sea:
Be subject to no sight but thine and mine; invisible
To every eyeball else. Go take this shape,
And hither come in't: go, hence with diligence!
[_Exit Ariel._
Awake, dear heart, awake! thou hast slept well; 305
Awake!
_Mir._ The strangeness of your story put
Heaviness in me.
_Pros._ Shake it off. Come on;
We'll visit Caliban my slave, who never
Yields us kind answer.
_Mir._ 'Tis a villain, sir,
I do not love to look on.
_Pros._ But, as 'tis, 310
We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us. What, ho! slave! Caliban!
Thou earth, thou! speak.
_Cal._ [_within_] There's wood enough within.
_Pros._ Come forth, I say! there's other business for thee: 315
Come, thou tortoise! when?
_Re-enter ARIEL like a water-nymph._
Fine apparition! My quaint Ariel,
Hark in thine ear.
_Ari._ My lord, it shall be done. [_Exit._
_Pros._ Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Upon thy wicked dam, come forth! 320
_Enter CALIBAN._
_Cal._ As wicked dew as e'er my mother brush'd
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye
And blister you all o'er!
_Pros._ For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps, 325
Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,
All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinch'd
As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
Than bees that made 'em.
_Cal._ I must eat my dinner. 330
This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me, and madest much of me; wouldst give me
Water with berries in't; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less, 335
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee,
And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:
Curs'd be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! 340
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' th' island.
_Pros._ Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee, 345
Filth as thou art, with human care; and lodged thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child.
_Cal._ O ho, O ho! would 't had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else 350
This isle with Calibans.
_Pros._ Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, 355
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou 360
Deservedly confined into this rock,
Who hadst deserved more than a prison.
_Cal._ You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
_Pros._ Hag-seed, hence! 365
Fetch us in fuel; and be quick, thou'rt best,
To answer other business. Shrug'st thou, malice?
If thou neglect'st, or dost unwillingly
What I command, I'll rack thee with old cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar, 370
That beasts shall tremble at thy din.
_Cal._ No, pray thee.
[_Aside_] I must obey: his art is of such power,
It would control my dam's god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.
_Pros._ So, slave; hence! [_Exit Caliban._
_Re-enter ARIEL, invisible, playing and singing; FERDINAND
following._
_ARIEL'S song._
Come unto these yellow sands, 375
And then take hands:
Courtsied when you have and kiss'd
The wild waves whist:
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear. 380
_Burthen_ [_dispersedly_]. Hark, hark!
Bow-wow.
The watch-dogs bark:
Bow-wow.
_Ari._ Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer 385
Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.
_Fer._ Where should this music be? i' th' air or th' earth?
It sounds no more: and, sure, it waits upon
Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck, 390
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it.
Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.
No, it begins again. 395
_ARIEL sings._
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change 400
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
_Burthen:_ Ding-dong.
_Ari._ Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell.
_Fer._ The ditty does remember my drown'd father. 405
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes:--I hear it now above me.
_Pros._ The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,
And say what thou seest yond.
_Mir._ What is't? a spirit?
Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir, 410
It carries a brave form. But 'tis a spirit.
_Pros._ No, wench; it eats and sleeps and hath such senses
As we have, such. This gallant which thou seest
Was in the wreck; and, but he's something stain'd
With grief, that's beauty's canker, thou mightst call him 415
A goodly person: he hath lost his fellows,
And strays about to find 'em.
_Mir._ I might call him
A thing divine; for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble.
_Pros._ [_Aside_] It goes on, I see,
As my soul prompts it. Spirit, fine spirit! I'll free thee 420
Within two days for this.
_Fer._ Most sure, the goddess
On whom these airs attend! Vouchsafe my prayer
May know if you remain upon this island;
And that you will some good instruction give
How I may bear me here: my prime request, 425
Which I do last pronounce, is, O you wonder!
If you be maid or no?
_Mir._ No wonder, sir;
But certainly a maid.
_Fer._ My language! heavens!
I am the best of them that speak this speech,
Were I but where 'tis spoken.
_Pros._ How? the best? 430
What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard thee?
_Fer._ A single thing, as I am now, that wonders
To hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me;
And that he does I weep: myself am Naples,
Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheld 435
The king my father wreck'd.
_Mir._ Alack, for mercy!
_Fer._ Yes, faith, and all his lords; the Duke of Milan
And his brave son being twain.
_Pros._ [_Aside_] The Duke of Milan
And his more braver daughter could control thee,
If now 'twere fit to do't. At the first sight 440
They have changed eyes. Delicate Ariel,
I'll set thee free for this. [_To Fer._] A word, good sir;
I fear you have done yourself some wrong: a word.
_Mir._ Why speaks my father so ungently? This
Is the third man that e'er I saw; the first 445
That e'er I sigh'd for: pity move my father
To be inclined my way!
_Fer._ O, if a virgin,
And your affection not gone forth, I'll make you
The queen of Naples.
_Pros._ Soft, sir! one word more.
[_Aside_] They are both in either's powers:
but this swift business 450
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light. [_To Fer._] One word more; I charge thee
That thou attend me: thou dost here usurp
The name thou owest not; and hast put thyself
Upon this island as a spy, to win it 455
From me, the lord on't.
_Fer._ No, as I am a man.
_Mir._ There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple:
If the ill spirit have so fair a house,
Good things will strive to dwell with't.
_Pros._ Follow me.
Speak not you for him; he's a traitor. Come; 460
I'll manacle thy neck and feet together:
Sea-water shalt thou drink; thy food shall be
The fresh-brook muscles, wither'd roots, and husks
Wherein the acorn cradled. Follow.
_Fer._ No;
I will resist such entertainment till 465
Mine enemy has more power.
[_Draws, and is charmed from moving._
_Mir._ O dear father,
Make not too rash a trial of him, for
He's gentle, and not fearful.
_Pros._ What! I say,
My foot my tutor? Put thy sword up, traitor;
Who makest a show, but darest not strike, thy conscience 470
Is so possess'd with guilt: come from thy ward;
For I can here disarm thee with this stick
And make thy weapon drop.
_Mir._ Beseech you, father.
_Pros._ Hence! hang not on my garments.
_Mir._ Sir, have pity;
I'll be his surety.
_Pros._ Silence! one word more 475
Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee. What!
An advocate for an impostor! hush!
Thou think'st there is no more such shapes as he,
Having seen but him and Caliban: foolish wench!
To the most of men this is a Caliban, 480
And they to him are angels.
_Mir._ My affections
Are, then, most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man.
_Pros._ Come on; obey:
Thy nerves are in their infancy again,
And have no vigour in them.
_Fer._ So they are: 485
My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.
My father's loss, the weakness which I feel,
The wreck of all my friends, nor this man's threats,
To whom I am subdued, are but light to me,
Might I but through my prison once a day 490
Behold this maid: all corners else o' th' earth
Let liberty make use of; space enough
Have I in such a prison.
_Pros._ [_Aside_] It works. [_To Fer._] Come on.
Thou hast done well, fine Ariel! [_To Fer._] Follow me.
[_To Ari._] Hark what thou else shalt do me.
_Mir._ Be of comfort; 495
My father's of a better nature, sir,
Than he appears by speech: this is unwonted
Which now came from him.
_Pros._ Thou shalt be as free
As mountain winds: but then exactly do
All points of my command.
_Ari._ To the syllable. 500
_Pros._ Come, follow. Speak not for him. [_Exeunt._
Notes: I, 2.
3: _stinking_] _flaming_ Singer conj. _kindling_ S. Verges conj.
4: _cheek_] _heat_ Collier MS. _crack_ Staunton conj.
7: _creature_] _creatures_ Theobald.
13: _fraughting_] Ff. _fraighted_ Pope. _fraighting_ Theobald.
_freighting_ Steevens.
15: Mir. _O, woe the day!_ Pros. _No harm._] Mir. _O woe the day!
no harm?_ Johnson conj.
19: _I am more better_] _I'm more or better_ Pope.
24: [Lays ... mantle] Pope.
28: _provision_] F1. _compassion_ F2 F3 F4. _prevision_ Hunter conj.
29: _soul_] _soul lost_ Rowe. _foyle_ Theobald. _soil_ Johnson conj.
_loss_ Capell. _foul_ Wright conj.
31: _betid_] F1. _betide_ F2 F3 F4.
35: _a_] F1. _the_ F2 F3 F4.
38: _thou_] om. Pope.
41: _Out_] _Full_ Pope (after Dryden). _Quite_ Collier MS.
44: _with_] _in_ Pope (after Dryden).
53: _Twelve year ... year_] _Tis twelve years ... years_ Pope.
58, 59: _and his only heir And princess_] _and his only heir
A princess_ Pope. _thou his only heir And princess_ Steevens.
_and though his only heir A princess_] Johnson conj.
63: _holp_] _help'd_ Pope.
_O, my heart_] _My heart_ Pope.
78: _me_] om. F3 F4.
80: _whom ... whom_] F2 F3 F4. _who ... who_ F1.
81: _trash_] _plash_ Hanmer.
82, 83: _'em ... 'em_] _them ... them_ Capell.
84: _i' the state_] _i'th state_ F1. _e'th state_ F2.
_o'th state_ F3 F4. om. Pope.
88: _O, good sir ... mark me._] _Good sir ... mark me then._ Pope.
_O yes, good sir ... mark me._ Capell.
Mir. _O, ... do._ Pros. _I ... me_] _I ... me._ Mir. _O ... do._
Steevens.
89: _dedicated_] _dedicate_ Steevens (Ritson conj.).
91: _so_] F1. om. F2 F3 F4.
97: _lorded_] _loaded_ Collier MS.
99: _exact, like_] _exact. Like_ Ff.
100: _having into truth ... of it_] _loving an untruth, and telling
't oft_ Hanmer. _having unto truth ... oft_ Warburton. _having to
untruth ... of it_ Collier MS. _having sinn'd to truth ... oft_
Musgrave conj.
_telling_] _quelling_ S. Verges conj.
101: _Made ... memory_] _Makes ... memory_ Hanmer. _Makes ...
memory too_ Musgrave conj.
103: _indeed the duke_] _the duke_ Steevens. _indeed duke_ S. Walker
conj.
_out o' the_] _from_ Pope.
105: _his_] _is_ F2.
105, 106: _ambition growing_] _ambition Growing_ Steevens.
106: _hear?_] _hear, child?_ Hanmer.
109: _Milan_] _Millanie_ F1 (Capell's copy).
112: _wi' the_] Capell. _with_ Ff. _wi' th'_ Rowe. _with the_
Steevens.
116: _most_] F1. _much_ F2 F3 F4.
119: _but_] _not_ Pope.
120: _Good ... sons_] Theobald suggested that these words should be
given to Prospero. Hanmer prints them so.
122: _hearkens_] _hears_ Pope. _hearks_ Theobald.
129: _Fated_] _Mated_ Dryden's version.
_purpose_] _practise_ Collier MS.
131: _ministers_] _minister_ Rowe.
133: _out_] _on't_ Steevens conj.
135: _to 't_] om. Steevens (Farmer conj.).
138: _Wherefore_] _Why_ Pope.
141: _me_] om. Pope.
146: _boat_] Rowe (after Dryden). _butt_ F1 F2 F3. _but_ F4.
_busse_ Black conj.
147: _sail_] F1. _nor sail_ F2 F3 F4.
148: _have_] _had_ Rowe (after Dryden).
150: _the winds_] _winds_ Pope.
155: _deck'd_] _brack'd_ Hanmer. _mock'd_ Warburton. _fleck'd_
Johnson conj. _degg'd_ anon. ap. Reed conj.
162: _who_] om. Pope. _he_ Steevens conj.
169: _Now I arise_] Continued to Miranda. Blackstone conj.
[Resumes his mantle] om. Ff. [Put on robe again. Collier MS.
173: _princesses_] _princesse_ F1 F2 F3. _princess_ F4.
_princes_ Rowe. _princess'_ Dyce (S. Walker conj.). See note (III).
186: [M. sleeps] Theobald.
189: SCENE III. Pope.
190: _be't_] F1. _be it_ F2 F3 F4.
193: _quality_] _qualities_ Pope (after Dryden).
198: _sometime_] F1. _sometimes_ F2 F3 F4.
200: _bowsprit_] _bore-sprit_ Ff. _bolt-sprit_ Rowe.
201: _lightnings_] Theobald. _lightning_ Ff.
202: _o' the_] _of_ Pope.
_thunder-claps_] _thunder-clap_ Johnson.
205: _Seem_] _Seem'd_ Theobald.
206: _dread_] F1. _dead_ F2 F3 F4.
_My brave_] _My brave, brave_ Theobald. _That's my brave_ Hanmer.
209: _mad_] _mind_ Pope (after Dryden).
211, 212: _vessel, ... son_] _vessell; Then all a fire with me
the King's sonne_ Ff.
218: _sustaining_] _sea-stained_ Edwards conj. _unstaining_ or
_sea-staining_ Spedding conj.
229: _Bermoothes_] _Bermudas_ Theobald.
231: _Who_] _Whom_ Hanmer.
234: _are_] _all_ Collier MS.
_upon_] _on_ Pope.
239-240: Ari. _Past the mid season._ Pros. _At least two glasses_]
Ari. _Past the mid season at least two glasses._ Warburton.
Pros. _... Past the mid season?_ Ari. _At least two glasses_
Johnson conj.
244: _How now? moody?_] _How now, moody!_ Dyce (so Dryden, ed. 1808).
245: _What_] F1. _Which_ F2 F3 F4.
248: _made thee_] Ff. _made_ Pope.
249: _didst_] F3 F4. _did_ F1 F2.
264: _and sorceries_] _sorceries too_ Hanmer.
267: _Is not this true?_] _Is this not true?_ Pope.
271: _wast then_] Rowe (after Dryden). _was then_ Ff.
273: _earthy_] _earthly_ Pope.
282: _son_] F1. _sunne_ F2. _sun_ F3 F4.
_she_] Rowe (after Dryden). _he_ Ff.
298: See note (IV).
301: _like_] F1. _like to_ F2 F3 F4.
302: _Be subject to_] _be subject To_ Malone.
_but thine and mine_] _but mine_ Pope.
304: _in't_] _in it_ Pope.
_go, hence_] _goe: hence_ Ff. _go hence_ Pope. _hence_ Hanmer.
307: _Heaviness_] _Strange heaviness_ Edd. conj.
312: _serves in offices_] F1. _serves offices_ F2 F3 F4.
_serveth offices_ Collier MS.
316: _Come, thou tortoise! when?_] om. Pope.
_Come_] _Come forth_ Steevens.]
320: _come forth!_] _come forth, thou tortoise!_ Pope.
321: SCENE IV. Pope.
332: _camest_] Rowe. _cam'st_ Ff. _cam'st here_ Ritson conj.
333: _madest_] Rowe (after Dryden). _made_ Ff.
339: _Curs'd be I that_] F1. _Curs'd be I that I_ F2 F3 F4.
_cursed be I that_ Steevens.
342: _Which_] _Who_ Pope, and at line 351.
346: _thee_] om. F4.
349: _would 't_] Ff. _I wou'd it_ Pope.
351: Pros.] Theobald (after Dryden). Mira. Ff.
352: _wilt_] F1. _will_ F2 F3 F4.
355, 356: _didst not ... Know_] _couldst not ... Shew_ Hanmer.
356: _wouldst_] _didst_ Hanmer.
361, 362: _Deservedly ... deserved_] _Justly ... who hadst Deserv'd_
S. Walker conj. _Confin'd ... deserv'd_ id. conj.
362: _Who ... prison_] om. Pope (after Dryden).
366: _thou'rt_] F1 F2 F3. _thou art_ F4. _thou wer't_ Rowe.
375: SCENE V. Pope.
following.] Malone.
378: _The wild waves whist_] Printed as a parenthesis by Steevens.
See note (V).
380: _the burthen bear_] Pope. _bear the burthen_ Ff.
381-383: Steevens gives _Hark, hark! The watch-dogs bark_ to Ariel.
387: _i' th' air or th' earth?_] _in air or earth?_ Pope.
390: _again_] _against_ Rowe (after Dryden).
407: _owes_] _owns_ Pope (after Dryden), but leaves _ow'st_ 454.
408: SCENE VI. Pope.
419: _It goes on, I see,_] _It goes, I see_ Capell. _It goes on_
Steevens.
420: _fine spirit!_] om. Hanmer.
427: _maid_] F3. _mayd_ F1 F2. _made_ F4.
443: See note (VI).
444: _ungently_] F1. _urgently_ F2 F3 F4.
451: _lest_] F4. _least_ F1 F2 F3.
452: _One_] _Sir, one_ Pope.
_I charge thee_] _I charge thee_ [to Ariel. Pope.
460: Pros. prefixed again to this line in Ff.
468: _and_] _tho'_ Hanmer.
469: _foot_] _fool_ S. Walker conj. _child_ Dryden's version.
470: _makest_] _mak'st_ F1. _makes_ F2 F3 F4.
471: _so_] F1. om. F2 F3 F4. _all_ Pope.
478: _is_] _are_ Rowe.
488: _nor_] _and_ Rowe (after Dryden). _or_ Capell.
489: _are_] _were_ Malone conj.
| 9,261 | Act I, scene ii | https://web.archive.org/web/20210131162607/https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/tempest/section2/ | Prospero and Miranda stand on the shore of the island, having just witnessed the shipwreck. Miranda entreats her father to see that no one on-board comes to any harm. Prospero assures her that no one was harmed and tells her that it's time she learned who she is and where she comes from. Miranda seems curious, noting that Prospero has often started to tell her about herself but always stopped. However, once Prospero begins telling his tale, he asks her three times if she is listening to him. He tells her that he was once Duke of Milan and famous for his great intelligence. Prospero explains that he gradually grew uninterested in politics, however, and turned his attention more and more to his studies, neglecting his duties as duke. This gave his brother Antonio an opportunity to act on his ambition. Working in concert with the King of Naples, Antonio usurped Prospero of his dukedom. Antonio arranged for the King of Naples to pay him an annual tribute and do him homage as duke. Later, the King of Naples helped Antonio raise an army to march on Milan, driving Prospero out. Prospero tells how he and Miranda escaped from death at the hands of the army in a barely-seaworthy boat prepared for them by his loyal subjects. Gonzalo, an honest Neapolitan, provided them with food and clothing, as well as books from Prospero's library. Having brought Miranda up to date on how she arrived at their current home, Prospero explains that sheer good luck has brought his former enemies to the island. Miranda suddenly grows very sleepy, perhaps because Prospero charms her with his magic. When she is asleep, Prospero calls forth his spirit, Ariel. In his conversation with Ariel, we learn that Prospero and the spirit were responsible for the storm of Act I, scene i. Flying about the ship, Ariel acted as the wind, the thunder, and the lightning. When everyone except the crew had abandoned the ship, Ariel made sure, as Prospero had requested, that all were brought safely to shore but dispersed around the island. Ariel reports that the king's son is alone. He also tells Prospero that the mariners and Boatswain have been charmed to sleep in the ship, which has been brought safely to harbor. The rest of the fleet that was with the ship, believing it to have been destroyed by the storm, has headed safely back to Naples. Prospero thanks Ariel for his service, and Ariel takes this moment to remind Prospero of his promise to take one year off of his agreed time of servitude if Ariel performs his services without complaint. Prospero does not take well to being reminded of his promises, and he chastises Ariel for his impudence. He reminds Ariel of where he came from and how Prospero rescued him. Ariel had been a servant of Sycorax, a witch banished from Algiers and sent to the island long ago. Ariel was too delicate a spirit to perform her horrible commands, so she imprisoned him in a "cloven pine" . She did not free him before she died, and he might have remained imprisoned forever had not Prospero arrived and rescued him. Reminding Ariel of this, Prospero threatens to imprison him for twelve years if he does not stop complaining. Ariel promises to be more polite. Prospero then gives him a new command: he must go make himself like a nymph of the sea and be invisible to all but Prospero. Ariel goes to do so, and Prospero, turning to Miranda's sleeping form, calls upon his daughter to awaken. She opens her eyes and, not realizing that she has been enchanted, says that the "strangeness" of Prospero's story caused her to fall asleep. | Analysis Act I, scene ii opens with the revelation that it was Prospero's magic, and not simply a hostile nature, that raised the storm that caused the shipwreck. From there, the scene moves into a long sequence devoted largely to telling the play's background story while introducing the major characters on the island. The first part of the scene is devoted to two long histories, both told by Prospero, one to Miranda and one to Ariel. If The Tempest is a play about power in various forms , then Prospero is the center of power, controlling events throughout the play through magic and manipulation. Prospero's retellings of past events to Miranda and Ariel do more than simply fill the audience in on the story so far. They also illustrate how Prospero maintains his power, exploring the old man's meticulous methods of controlling those around him through magic, charisma, and rhetoric. Prospero's rhetoric is particularly important to observe in this section, especially in his confrontation with Ariel. Of all the characters in the play, Prospero alone seems to understand that controlling history enables one to control the present--that is, that one can control others by controlling how they understand the past. Prospero thus tells his story with a highly rhetorical emphasis on his own good deeds, the bad deeds of others toward him, and the ingratitude of those he has protected from the evils of others. For example, when he speaks to Miranda, he calls his brother "perfidious," then immediately says that he loved his brother better than anyone in the world except Miranda . He repeatedly asks Miranda, "Dost thou attend me?" Through his questioning, he commands her attention almost hypnotically as he tells her his one-sided version of the story. Prospero himself does not seem blameless. While his brother did betray him, he also failed in his responsibilities as a ruler by giving up control of the government so that he could study. He contrasts his popularity as a leader--"the love my people bore me" --with his brother's "evil nature" . When he speaks to Ariel, a magical creature over whom his mastery is less certain than over his doting daughter, Prospero goes to even greater lengths to justify himself. He treats Ariel as a combination of a pet, whom he can praise and blame as he chooses, and a pupil, demanding that the spirit recite answers to questions about the past that Prospero has taught him. Though Ariel must know the story well, Prospero says that he must "once in a month" recount Ariel's history with Sycorax, simply to ensure that his servant's fickle nature does not cause him to become disloyal. Every time he retells Ariel's history, we feel, he must increase both the persuasiveness of his own story and his control over Ariel. This is why he now chooses to claim that Ariel is behaving badly--so that he can justify a retelling of the history, even though Ariel is perfectly respectful. He forces Ariel to recall the misery he suffered while trapped in the pine tree . He then positions himself as the good savior who overthrew Sycorax's evil. However, he immediately follows this with a forceful display of his own magical power, threatening to trap Ariel in an oak just as the "evil" Sycorax had trapped him in a pine. In this way, Prospero exercises control both intellectually and physically. By controlling the way Ariel and Miranda think about their lives, he makes it difficult for them to imagine that challenging his authority would be a good thing to do, and by threatening Ariel with magical torture, he sets very high stakes for any such rebellion. For his part, Ariel promises to "do my spiriting gently" from now on. | 625 | 624 | [
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161 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/26.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Sense and Sensibility/section_25_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 26 | chapter 26 | null | {"name": "Chapter 26", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility42.asp", "summary": "It takes three days for the ladies to complete their journey. The house at Portman Square is cozy and comfortable. Elinor and Marianne are given separate quarters. After settling in, Elinor sits down to write a letter to her mother. Marianne, too, writes a letter, but it is addressed to Willoughby. In the following days she waits eagerly for his visit and his letter. However, she is in for much disappointment. Colonel Brandon visits them the next day. Marianne avoids him, while Elinor engages him in a conversation. In the evening Mrs. Palmer pays them a visit. She is in high spirits and expresses pleasure at meeting the girls. Other guests of Mrs. Jennings also arrive, and they are entertained with a game of whist. Elinor is concerned over her sister's behavior. Marianne neither participates in any activity nor shows enthusiasm in entertaining the guests. Elinor decides to write to her mother regarding her sister.", "analysis": "Notes It is the time for waiting and visiting. Marianne's impatience is revealed when she writes a letter to Willoughby immediately after arriving in London. She cannot think of anyone but him. Her restlessness only increases with time. Thus, when Colonel Brandon pays them a visit, she is disappointed and even disgusted. She also shows no desire to talk to Mrs. Palmer or the other guests of Mrs. Jennings. Through her behavior, she hurts the feelings of people like Colonel Brandon. Elinor observes her sister and is naturally concerned. Marianne's callous attitude towards others disturbs her. When Marianne avoids Colonel Brandon, Mrs. Palmer and the others, Elinor tries to make up for her sister's neglect by engaging them in conversation. She plays the part of a responsible hostess by helping Mrs. Jennings to entertain her guests. Her sensitivity to others is well brought out in this episode. CHAPTER 27 Summary Mrs. Jennings waits for the arrival of the Middletons, while Marianne waits for Willoughby's visit. Colonel Brandon visits them everyday. Elinor keeps him company. One day, after returning from a drive, Marianne finds Willoughby's card on the table. She is excited and waits for his visit. In the meantime Mrs. Jennings receives a letter from Lady Middleton informing her about their visit to the city. The Middletons arrive and host a party. All their friends make an appearance except for Willoughby, who was invited but failed to keep his appointment. Marianne is distressed. She writes another letter to Willoughby. Colonel Brandon visits them again and expresses a desire to speak to Elinor. He questions Elinor about Marianne's engagement in order to ascertain whether he stands any chance of winning her favor. Elinor indicates little hope. Brandon takes his leave after wishing Marianne happiness. Notes Marianne displays her feelings for Willoughby openly. When Mrs. Jennings mentions John Middleton's reluctance to leave the countryside when the weather is so good, Marianne responds excitedly, thinking of her lover and his passion for sports. When she finds Willoughby's card on the table, her hopes soar, and she is excited. However, when she is informed at the Middletons' party that Willoughby will not be in attendance, she feels depressed and reveals her displeasure. Elinor feels helpless in offering any advice to her sister. Instead, she decides to write to her mother about this matter. Whenever Marianne is indiscreet, Elinor tries to compensate for her sister. She feels sorry for Colonel Brandon but thinks it reasonable to lay bare the truth about Marianne's feelings for Willoughby. Elinor is honest but discreet and prudent. CHAPTER 28 Summary Willoughby neither visits nor writes Marianne. One evening, both the girls accompany Mrs. Jennings to a party, where they ultimately meet Willoughby. Elinor notices him talking to a fashionable lady. Marianne is agitated after catching a glimpse of him. A short while afterward, Willoughby comes forward to meet them. He is formal in his manners and fails to reciprocate Marianne's passionate entreaties. When he takes leave of them abruptly, Marianne is shocked and feels faint. Elinor seeks the help of Lady Middleton and takes her home. Notes Marianne gets a shattering blow after meeting Willoughby at the party. All along she had been looking forward to meeting him and when she does, she expects him to apologize for his neglect and express his love for her. Instead, he behaves like a stranger and gives her the cold shoulder. He is formal in his manners and curt in his behavior towards the sisters. His callous attitude breaks Marianne's heart. What Elinor had feared all along comes true. Elinor had never been sure of Willoughby's intentions towards Marianne and had expressed her doubts to her mother. She had been worried when Willoughby failed to respond to Marianne's letters. She had felt disturbed by his negligent attitude. When she meets him and receives a cold response from him, she is disgusted. The scene at the party finally severs the relationship between Marianne and Willoughby. Elinor rightly believes that he had treated her sister in a shameful manner and that he deserves nothing but contempt. Jane Austen has constructed an emotional situation in which to present the confrontation between Marianne and Willoughby. The scene is charged with expectation. Marianne is enraptured to meet Willoughby and openly displays her affection for him, but Willoughby acts reserved and shows restraint in his behavior towards her. He appears indifferent to her feelings. His curt reply to her passionate questions is cruel and shattering."} |
Elinor could not find herself in the carriage with Mrs. Jennings, and
beginning a journey to London under her protection, and as her guest,
without wondering at her own situation, so short had their acquaintance
with that lady been, so wholly unsuited were they in age and
disposition, and so many had been her objections against such a measure
only a few days before! But these objections had all, with that happy
ardour of youth which Marianne and her mother equally shared, been
overcome or overlooked; and Elinor, in spite of every occasional doubt
of Willoughby's constancy, could not witness the rapture of delightful
expectation which filled the whole soul and beamed in the eyes of
Marianne, without feeling how blank was her own prospect, how cheerless
her own state of mind in the comparison, and how gladly she would
engage in the solicitude of Marianne's situation to have the same
animating object in view, the same possibility of hope. A short, a
very short time however must now decide what Willoughby's intentions
were; in all probability he was already in town. Marianne's eagerness
to be gone declared her dependence on finding him there; and Elinor was
resolved not only upon gaining every new light as to his character
which her own observation or the intelligence of others could give her,
but likewise upon watching his behaviour to her sister with such
zealous attention, as to ascertain what he was and what he meant,
before many meetings had taken place. Should the result of her
observations be unfavourable, she was determined at all events to open
the eyes of her sister; should it be otherwise, her exertions would be
of a different nature--she must then learn to avoid every selfish
comparison, and banish every regret which might lessen her satisfaction
in the happiness of Marianne.
They were three days on their journey, and Marianne's behaviour as they
travelled was a happy specimen of what future complaisance and
companionableness to Mrs. Jennings might be expected to be. She sat in
silence almost all the way, wrapt in her own meditations, and scarcely
ever voluntarily speaking, except when any object of picturesque beauty
within their view drew from her an exclamation of delight exclusively
addressed to her sister. To atone for this conduct therefore, Elinor
took immediate possession of the post of civility which she had
assigned herself, behaved with the greatest attention to Mrs. Jennings,
talked with her, laughed with her, and listened to her whenever she
could; and Mrs. Jennings on her side treated them both with all
possible kindness, was solicitous on every occasion for their ease and
enjoyment, and only disturbed that she could not make them choose their
own dinners at the inn, nor extort a confession of their preferring
salmon to cod, or boiled fowls to veal cutlets. They reached town by
three o'clock the third day, glad to be released, after such a journey,
from the confinement of a carriage, and ready to enjoy all the luxury
of a good fire.
The house was handsome, and handsomely fitted up, and the young ladies
were immediately put in possession of a very comfortable apartment. It
had formerly been Charlotte's, and over the mantelpiece still hung a
landscape in coloured silks of her performance, in proof of her having
spent seven years at a great school in town to some effect.
As dinner was not to be ready in less than two hours from their
arrival, Elinor determined to employ the interval in writing to her
mother, and sat down for that purpose. In a few moments Marianne did
the same. "I am writing home, Marianne," said Elinor; "had not you
better defer your letter for a day or two?"
"I am NOT going to write to my mother," replied Marianne, hastily, and
as if wishing to avoid any farther inquiry. Elinor said no more; it
immediately struck her that she must then be writing to Willoughby; and
the conclusion which as instantly followed was, that, however
mysteriously they might wish to conduct the affair, they must be
engaged. This conviction, though not entirely satisfactory, gave her
pleasure, and she continued her letter with greater alacrity.
Marianne's was finished in a very few minutes; in length it could be no
more than a note; it was then folded up, sealed, and directed with
eager rapidity. Elinor thought she could distinguish a large W in the
direction; and no sooner was it complete than Marianne, ringing the
bell, requested the footman who answered it to get that letter conveyed
for her to the two-penny post. This decided the matter at once.
Her spirits still continued very high; but there was a flutter in them
which prevented their giving much pleasure to her sister, and this
agitation increased as the evening drew on. She could scarcely eat any
dinner, and when they afterwards returned to the drawing room, seemed
anxiously listening to the sound of every carriage.
It was a great satisfaction to Elinor that Mrs. Jennings, by being much
engaged in her own room, could see little of what was passing. The tea
things were brought in, and already had Marianne been disappointed more
than once by a rap at a neighbouring door, when a loud one was suddenly
heard which could not be mistaken for one at any other house, Elinor
felt secure of its announcing Willoughby's approach, and Marianne,
starting up, moved towards the door. Every thing was silent; this
could not be borne many seconds; she opened the door, advanced a few
steps towards the stairs, and after listening half a minute, returned
into the room in all the agitation which a conviction of having heard
him would naturally produce; in the ecstasy of her feelings at that
instant she could not help exclaiming, "Oh, Elinor, it is Willoughby,
indeed it is!" and seemed almost ready to throw herself into his arms,
when Colonel Brandon appeared.
It was too great a shock to be borne with calmness, and she immediately
left the room. Elinor was disappointed too; but at the same time her
regard for Colonel Brandon ensured his welcome with her; and she felt
particularly hurt that a man so partial to her sister should perceive
that she experienced nothing but grief and disappointment in seeing
him. She instantly saw that it was not unnoticed by him, that he even
observed Marianne as she quitted the room, with such astonishment and
concern, as hardly left him the recollection of what civility demanded
towards herself.
"Is your sister ill?" said he.
Elinor answered in some distress that she was, and then talked of
head-aches, low spirits, and over fatigues; and of every thing to which
she could decently attribute her sister's behaviour.
He heard her with the most earnest attention, but seeming to recollect
himself, said no more on the subject, and began directly to speak of
his pleasure at seeing them in London, making the usual inquiries about
their journey, and the friends they had left behind.
In this calm kind of way, with very little interest on either side,
they continued to talk, both of them out of spirits, and the thoughts
of both engaged elsewhere. Elinor wished very much to ask whether
Willoughby were then in town, but she was afraid of giving him pain by
any enquiry after his rival; and at length, by way of saying something,
she asked if he had been in London ever since she had seen him last.
"Yes," he replied, with some embarrassment, "almost ever since; I have
been once or twice at Delaford for a few days, but it has never been in
my power to return to Barton."
This, and the manner in which it was said, immediately brought back to
her remembrance all the circumstances of his quitting that place, with
the uneasiness and suspicions they had caused to Mrs. Jennings, and she
was fearful that her question had implied much more curiosity on the
subject than she had ever felt.
Mrs. Jennings soon came in. "Oh! Colonel," said she, with her usual
noisy cheerfulness, "I am monstrous glad to see you--sorry I could not
come before--beg your pardon, but I have been forced to look about me a
little, and settle my matters; for it is a long while since I have been
at home, and you know one has always a world of little odd things to do
after one has been away for any time; and then I have had Cartwright to
settle with-- Lord, I have been as busy as a bee ever since dinner!
But pray, Colonel, how came you to conjure out that I should be in town
today?"
"I had the pleasure of hearing it at Mr. Palmer's, where I have been
dining."
"Oh, you did; well, and how do they all do at their house? How does
Charlotte do? I warrant you she is a fine size by this time."
"Mrs. Palmer appeared quite well, and I am commissioned to tell you,
that you will certainly see her to-morrow."
"Ay, to be sure, I thought as much. Well, Colonel, I have brought two
young ladies with me, you see--that is, you see but one of them now,
but there is another somewhere. Your friend, Miss Marianne, too--which
you will not be sorry to hear. I do not know what you and Mr.
Willoughby will do between you about her. Ay, it is a fine thing to be
young and handsome. Well! I was young once, but I never was very
handsome--worse luck for me. However, I got a very good husband, and I
don't know what the greatest beauty can do more. Ah! poor man! he has
been dead these eight years and better. But Colonel, where have you
been to since we parted? And how does your business go on? Come,
come, let's have no secrets among friends."
He replied with his accustomary mildness to all her inquiries, but
without satisfying her in any. Elinor now began to make the tea, and
Marianne was obliged to appear again.
After her entrance, Colonel Brandon became more thoughtful and silent
than he had been before, and Mrs. Jennings could not prevail on him to
stay long. No other visitor appeared that evening, and the ladies were
unanimous in agreeing to go early to bed.
Marianne rose the next morning with recovered spirits and happy looks.
The disappointment of the evening before seemed forgotten in the
expectation of what was to happen that day. They had not long finished
their breakfast before Mrs. Palmer's barouche stopped at the door, and
in a few minutes she came laughing into the room: so delighted to see
them all, that it was hard to say whether she received most pleasure
from meeting her mother or the Miss Dashwoods again. So surprised at
their coming to town, though it was what she had rather expected all
along; so angry at their accepting her mother's invitation after having
declined her own, though at the same time she would never have forgiven
them if they had not come!
"Mr. Palmer will be so happy to see you," said she; "What do you think
he said when he heard of your coming with Mama? I forget what it was
now, but it was something so droll!"
After an hour or two spent in what her mother called comfortable chat,
or in other words, in every variety of inquiry concerning all their
acquaintance on Mrs. Jennings's side, and in laughter without cause on
Mrs. Palmer's, it was proposed by the latter that they should all
accompany her to some shops where she had business that morning, to
which Mrs. Jennings and Elinor readily consented, as having likewise
some purchases to make themselves; and Marianne, though declining it at
first was induced to go likewise.
Wherever they went, she was evidently always on the watch. In Bond
Street especially, where much of their business lay, her eyes were in
constant inquiry; and in whatever shop the party were engaged, her mind
was equally abstracted from every thing actually before them, from all
that interested and occupied the others. Restless and dissatisfied
every where, her sister could never obtain her opinion of any article
of purchase, however it might equally concern them both: she received
no pleasure from anything; was only impatient to be at home again, and
could with difficulty govern her vexation at the tediousness of Mrs.
Palmer, whose eye was caught by every thing pretty, expensive, or new;
who was wild to buy all, could determine on none, and dawdled away her
time in rapture and indecision.
It was late in the morning before they returned home; and no sooner had
they entered the house than Marianne flew eagerly up stairs, and when
Elinor followed, she found her turning from the table with a sorrowful
countenance, which declared that no Willoughby had been there.
"Has no letter been left here for me since we went out?" said she to
the footman who then entered with the parcels. She was answered in the
negative. "Are you quite sure of it?" she replied. "Are you certain
that no servant, no porter has left any letter or note?"
The man replied that none had.
"How very odd!" said she, in a low and disappointed voice, as she
turned away to the window.
"How odd, indeed!" repeated Elinor within herself, regarding her sister
with uneasiness. "If she had not known him to be in town she would not
have written to him, as she did; she would have written to Combe Magna;
and if he is in town, how odd that he should neither come nor write!
Oh! my dear mother, you must be wrong in permitting an engagement
between a daughter so young, a man so little known, to be carried on in
so doubtful, so mysterious a manner! I long to inquire; and how will
MY interference be borne."
She determined, after some consideration, that if appearances continued
many days longer as unpleasant as they now were, she would represent in
the strongest manner to her mother the necessity of some serious
enquiry into the affair.
Mrs. Palmer and two elderly ladies of Mrs. Jennings's intimate
acquaintance, whom she had met and invited in the morning, dined with
them. The former left them soon after tea to fulfill her evening
engagements; and Elinor was obliged to assist in making a whist table
for the others. Marianne was of no use on these occasions, as she
would never learn the game; but though her time was therefore at her
own disposal, the evening was by no means more productive of pleasure
to her than to Elinor, for it was spent in all the anxiety of
expectation and the pain of disappointment. She sometimes endeavoured
for a few minutes to read; but the book was soon thrown aside, and she
returned to the more interesting employment of walking backwards and
forwards across the room, pausing for a moment whenever she came to the
window, in hopes of distinguishing the long-expected rap.
| 2,351 | Chapter 26 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility42.asp | It takes three days for the ladies to complete their journey. The house at Portman Square is cozy and comfortable. Elinor and Marianne are given separate quarters. After settling in, Elinor sits down to write a letter to her mother. Marianne, too, writes a letter, but it is addressed to Willoughby. In the following days she waits eagerly for his visit and his letter. However, she is in for much disappointment. Colonel Brandon visits them the next day. Marianne avoids him, while Elinor engages him in a conversation. In the evening Mrs. Palmer pays them a visit. She is in high spirits and expresses pleasure at meeting the girls. Other guests of Mrs. Jennings also arrive, and they are entertained with a game of whist. Elinor is concerned over her sister's behavior. Marianne neither participates in any activity nor shows enthusiasm in entertaining the guests. Elinor decides to write to her mother regarding her sister. | Notes It is the time for waiting and visiting. Marianne's impatience is revealed when she writes a letter to Willoughby immediately after arriving in London. She cannot think of anyone but him. Her restlessness only increases with time. Thus, when Colonel Brandon pays them a visit, she is disappointed and even disgusted. She also shows no desire to talk to Mrs. Palmer or the other guests of Mrs. Jennings. Through her behavior, she hurts the feelings of people like Colonel Brandon. Elinor observes her sister and is naturally concerned. Marianne's callous attitude towards others disturbs her. When Marianne avoids Colonel Brandon, Mrs. Palmer and the others, Elinor tries to make up for her sister's neglect by engaging them in conversation. She plays the part of a responsible hostess by helping Mrs. Jennings to entertain her guests. Her sensitivity to others is well brought out in this episode. CHAPTER 27 Summary Mrs. Jennings waits for the arrival of the Middletons, while Marianne waits for Willoughby's visit. Colonel Brandon visits them everyday. Elinor keeps him company. One day, after returning from a drive, Marianne finds Willoughby's card on the table. She is excited and waits for his visit. In the meantime Mrs. Jennings receives a letter from Lady Middleton informing her about their visit to the city. The Middletons arrive and host a party. All their friends make an appearance except for Willoughby, who was invited but failed to keep his appointment. Marianne is distressed. She writes another letter to Willoughby. Colonel Brandon visits them again and expresses a desire to speak to Elinor. He questions Elinor about Marianne's engagement in order to ascertain whether he stands any chance of winning her favor. Elinor indicates little hope. Brandon takes his leave after wishing Marianne happiness. Notes Marianne displays her feelings for Willoughby openly. When Mrs. Jennings mentions John Middleton's reluctance to leave the countryside when the weather is so good, Marianne responds excitedly, thinking of her lover and his passion for sports. When she finds Willoughby's card on the table, her hopes soar, and she is excited. However, when she is informed at the Middletons' party that Willoughby will not be in attendance, she feels depressed and reveals her displeasure. Elinor feels helpless in offering any advice to her sister. Instead, she decides to write to her mother about this matter. Whenever Marianne is indiscreet, Elinor tries to compensate for her sister. She feels sorry for Colonel Brandon but thinks it reasonable to lay bare the truth about Marianne's feelings for Willoughby. Elinor is honest but discreet and prudent. CHAPTER 28 Summary Willoughby neither visits nor writes Marianne. One evening, both the girls accompany Mrs. Jennings to a party, where they ultimately meet Willoughby. Elinor notices him talking to a fashionable lady. Marianne is agitated after catching a glimpse of him. A short while afterward, Willoughby comes forward to meet them. He is formal in his manners and fails to reciprocate Marianne's passionate entreaties. When he takes leave of them abruptly, Marianne is shocked and feels faint. Elinor seeks the help of Lady Middleton and takes her home. Notes Marianne gets a shattering blow after meeting Willoughby at the party. All along she had been looking forward to meeting him and when she does, she expects him to apologize for his neglect and express his love for her. Instead, he behaves like a stranger and gives her the cold shoulder. He is formal in his manners and curt in his behavior towards the sisters. His callous attitude breaks Marianne's heart. What Elinor had feared all along comes true. Elinor had never been sure of Willoughby's intentions towards Marianne and had expressed her doubts to her mother. She had been worried when Willoughby failed to respond to Marianne's letters. She had felt disturbed by his negligent attitude. When she meets him and receives a cold response from him, she is disgusted. The scene at the party finally severs the relationship between Marianne and Willoughby. Elinor rightly believes that he had treated her sister in a shameful manner and that he deserves nothing but contempt. Jane Austen has constructed an emotional situation in which to present the confrontation between Marianne and Willoughby. The scene is charged with expectation. Marianne is enraptured to meet Willoughby and openly displays her affection for him, but Willoughby acts reserved and shows restraint in his behavior towards her. He appears indifferent to her feelings. His curt reply to her passionate questions is cruel and shattering. | 155 | 746 | [
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1,232 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/07.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Prince/section_2_part_3.txt | The Prince.chapter vii | chapter vii | null | {"name": "Chapter VII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210303115306/https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/prince/section3/", "summary": "Concerning New Principalities Acquired with the Arms and Fortunes of Others Sometimes private citizens become princes purely by good fortune. Such people buy their way into power, receive favors from someone else in power, or bribe soldiers. Such princes are weak not only because fortune can be capricious and unstable, but also because they do not know how to maintain their position. They do not have loyal troops who are devoted to them. They do not know how to deal with problems, command troops, or keep their power in the face of opposition. Princes who succeed on their own prowess have built a strong foundation for themselves. Princes who succeed due to the sway of fortune or the goodwill of others lack such a foundation from which to rule and will have difficulty building a foundation quickly enough to prevent power from slipping out of their hands. Thus, although princes who rely on fortune reach their position easily, maintaining that position is extremely difficult. Laying a solid foundation is a crucial prerequisite for maintaining power. A prince must eliminate rival leaders and win the favor of their followers. Machiavelli cites the life of Cesare Borgia as an example. The son of Pope Alexander VI, Borgia was a man of great courage and high intentions. He was made duke of Romagna through the good fortune that his father, as Pope Alexander VI, had amassed a great deal of power. However, he was unable to maintain his rule, even though he made competent attempts to consolidate his new power. His efforts included the use of force in the strategic conquest of foreign lands. He tried to make himself loved and feared by his subjects. He wiped out disloyal troops and established a loyal army, and he maintained a friendly yet cautious relationship with other kings and princes. Despite all his efforts, he was unable to complete the consolidation of his power when his father died, and his good fortune was reversed. He did, however, lay a strong foundation for future rule, as only a man of great prowess could.", "analysis": "The coldhearted, calculating logic for which Machiavelli is renowned shines through in Chapter V. His argument that devastating a region is often the most reliable way of securing power does not even attempt to address the moral or ethical objections to his advice. His rationale is strictly pragmatic: the only reason to spare the institutions of newly conquered states is that keeping old institutions alive might help keep citizens happy, subdued, and submissive under the new ruler. Moreover, in Chapter V, Machiavelli sets out his conception of the natural state of a populace. He writes that most subjects are \"used to obeying\" and that they cannot live as free subjects without someone telling them what to do. This argument echoes Machiavelli's assertion in Chapter III that men are naturally disposed to \"old ways of life\" and therefore harbor an inclination to follow tradition. These passages underline the assumption that men are, by nature, followers. Even rulers are followers to some extent: Machiavelli notes at the start of Chapter VI that aspiring princes are always inclined to \"imitate\" the examples of great men. Machiavelli imagines subjects who are self-interested, but not to an extreme degree. They are not concerned with forms of enlightenment or self-improvement, yet they still notice improvements in their overall well-being. Though generally obedient and complacent, they will not hesitate to rise up against their ruler should he offend them. The Prince devotes little space to the concerns of subjects, and Machiavelli's picture of the common people, though detailed, is not complex. Louis XIV's famous statement, \"L'Etat, c'est moi\" , accords with the philosophy espoused in The Prince: The ruler is the state, and the state is ruler. The people hardly matter. This idea does not necessarily contradict Machiavelli's view that the effectiveness of government depends on the firm support of its people. Rather, it implies that Machiavelli is not concerned with understanding what motivates the people to lend support to a ruler. The only important question is whether such support exists. The primary virtue of Machiavelli's prince is self-reliance. A prince who manages to gain power by relying on his own prowess will succeed at maintaining power because his prowess will have built him a firm foundation for ruling. He will have the loyalty of his army and the respect of those he has conquered and the leaders of surrounding principalities. He therefore will be better equipped to deal with problems and difficulties, without relying on the help of others. Thus, the more self-reliant the prince, the more he will prove capable of success"} |
Those who solely by good fortune become princes from being private
citizens have little trouble in rising, but much in keeping atop; they
have not any difficulties on the way up, because they fly, but they have
many when they reach the summit. Such are those to whom some state
is given either for money or by the favour of him who bestows it;
as happened to many in Greece, in the cities of Ionia and of the
Hellespont, where princes were made by Darius, in order that they might
hold the cities both for his security and his glory; as also were those
emperors who, by the corruption of the soldiers, from being citizens
came to empire. Such stand simply elevated upon the goodwill and the
fortune of him who has elevated them--two most inconstant and unstable
things. Neither have they the knowledge requisite for the position;
because, unless they are men of great worth and ability, it is not
reasonable to expect that they should know how to command, having always
lived in a private condition; besides, they cannot hold it because they
have not forces which they can keep friendly and faithful.
States that rise unexpectedly, then, like all other things in nature
which are born and grow rapidly, cannot leave their foundations and
correspondencies(*) fixed in such a way that the first storm will
not overthrow them; unless, as is said, those who unexpectedly become
princes are men of so much ability that they know they have to be
prepared at once to hold that which fortune has thrown into their laps,
and that those foundations, which others have laid BEFORE they became
princes, they must lay AFTERWARDS.
(*) "Le radici e corrispondenze," their roots (i.e.
foundations) and correspondencies or relations with other
states--a common meaning of "correspondence" and
"correspondency" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Concerning these two methods of rising to be a prince by ability or
fortune, I wish to adduce two examples within our own recollection, and
these are Francesco Sforza(*) and Cesare Borgia. Francesco, by proper
means and with great ability, from being a private person rose to be
Duke of Milan, and that which he had acquired with a thousand anxieties
he kept with little trouble. On the other hand, Cesare Borgia, called by
the people Duke Valentino, acquired his state during the ascendancy of
his father, and on its decline he lost it, notwithstanding that he had
taken every measure and done all that ought to be done by a wise and
able man to fix firmly his roots in the states which the arms and
fortunes of others had bestowed on him.
(*) Francesco Sforza, born 1401, died 1466. He married
Bianca Maria Visconti, a natural daughter of Filippo
Visconti, the Duke of Milan, on whose death he procured his
own elevation to the duchy. Machiavelli was the accredited
agent of the Florentine Republic to Cesare Borgia (1478-
1507) during the transactions which led up to the
assassinations of the Orsini and Vitelli at Sinigalia, and
along with his letters to his chiefs in Florence he has left
an account, written ten years before "The Prince," of the
proceedings of the duke in his "Descritione del modo tenuto
dal duca Valentino nello ammazzare Vitellozzo Vitelli,"
etc., a translation of which is appended to the present
work.
Because, as is stated above, he who has not first laid his foundations
may be able with great ability to lay them afterwards, but they will
be laid with trouble to the architect and danger to the building. If,
therefore, all the steps taken by the duke be considered, it will be
seen that he laid solid foundations for his future power, and I do not
consider it superfluous to discuss them, because I do not know what
better precepts to give a new prince than the example of his actions;
and if his dispositions were of no avail, that was not his fault, but
the extraordinary and extreme malignity of fortune.
Alexander the Sixth, in wishing to aggrandize the duke, his son, had
many immediate and prospective difficulties. Firstly, he did not see his
way to make him master of any state that was not a state of the Church;
and if he was willing to rob the Church he knew that the Duke of Milan
and the Venetians would not consent, because Faenza and Rimini were
already under the protection of the Venetians. Besides this, he saw the
arms of Italy, especially those by which he might have been assisted, in
hands that would fear the aggrandizement of the Pope, namely, the Orsini
and the Colonnesi and their following. It behoved him, therefore,
to upset this state of affairs and embroil the powers, so as to make
himself securely master of part of their states. This was easy for him
to do, because he found the Venetians, moved by other reasons, inclined
to bring back the French into Italy; he would not only not oppose this,
but he would render it more easy by dissolving the former marriage of
King Louis. Therefore the king came into Italy with the assistance of
the Venetians and the consent of Alexander. He was no sooner in Milan
than the Pope had soldiers from him for the attempt on the Romagna,
which yielded to him on the reputation of the king. The duke, therefore,
having acquired the Romagna and beaten the Colonnesi, while wishing to
hold that and to advance further, was hindered by two things: the one,
his forces did not appear loyal to him, the other, the goodwill of
France: that is to say, he feared that the forces of the Orsini, which
he was using, would not stand to him, that not only might they hinder
him from winning more, but might themselves seize what he had won, and
that the king might also do the same. Of the Orsini he had a warning
when, after taking Faenza and attacking Bologna, he saw them go very
unwillingly to that attack. And as to the king, he learned his mind when
he himself, after taking the Duchy of Urbino, attacked Tuscany, and the
king made him desist from that undertaking; hence the duke decided to
depend no more upon the arms and the luck of others.
For the first thing he weakened the Orsini and Colonnesi parties in
Rome, by gaining to himself all their adherents who were gentlemen,
making them his gentlemen, giving them good pay, and, according to their
rank, honouring them with office and command in such a way that in a few
months all attachment to the factions was destroyed and turned entirely
to the duke. After this he awaited an opportunity to crush the Orsini,
having scattered the adherents of the Colonna house. This came to him
soon and he used it well; for the Orsini, perceiving at length that the
aggrandizement of the duke and the Church was ruin to them, called a
meeting of the Magione in Perugia. From this sprung the rebellion at
Urbino and the tumults in the Romagna, with endless dangers to the duke,
all of which he overcame with the help of the French. Having restored
his authority, not to leave it at risk by trusting either to the French
or other outside forces, he had recourse to his wiles, and he knew
so well how to conceal his mind that, by the mediation of Signor
Pagolo--whom the duke did not fail to secure with all kinds of
attention, giving him money, apparel, and horses--the Orsini were
reconciled, so that their simplicity brought them into his power
at Sinigalia.(*) Having exterminated the leaders, and turned their
partisans into his friends, the duke laid sufficiently good foundations
to his power, having all the Romagna and the Duchy of Urbino; and the
people now beginning to appreciate their prosperity, he gained them
all over to himself. And as this point is worthy of notice, and to be
imitated by others, I am not willing to leave it out.
(*) Sinigalia, 31st December 1502.
When the duke occupied the Romagna he found it under the rule of weak
masters, who rather plundered their subjects than ruled them, and gave
them more cause for disunion than for union, so that the country was
full of robbery, quarrels, and every kind of violence; and so, wishing
to bring back peace and obedience to authority, he considered it
necessary to give it a good governor. Thereupon he promoted Messer
Ramiro d'Orco,(*) a swift and cruel man, to whom he gave the fullest
power. This man in a short time restored peace and unity with the
greatest success. Afterwards the duke considered that it was not
advisable to confer such excessive authority, for he had no doubt but
that he would become odious, so he set up a court of judgment in the
country, under a most excellent president, wherein all cities had their
advocates. And because he knew that the past severity had caused some
hatred against himself, so, to clear himself in the minds of the people,
and gain them entirely to himself, he desired to show that, if any
cruelty had been practised, it had not originated with him, but in the
natural sternness of the minister. Under this pretence he took Ramiro,
and one morning caused him to be executed and left on the piazza at
Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side. The barbarity of
this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed.
(*) Ramiro d'Orco. Ramiro de Lorqua.
But let us return whence we started. I say that the duke, finding
himself now sufficiently powerful and partly secured from immediate
dangers by having armed himself in his own way, and having in a great
measure crushed those forces in his vicinity that could injure him if he
wished to proceed with his conquest, had next to consider France, for
he knew that the king, who too late was aware of his mistake, would not
support him. And from this time he began to seek new alliances and to
temporize with France in the expedition which she was making towards the
kingdom of Naples against the Spaniards who were besieging Gaeta. It
was his intention to secure himself against them, and this he would have
quickly accomplished had Alexander lived.
Such was his line of action as to present affairs. But as to the future
he had to fear, in the first place, that a new successor to the Church
might not be friendly to him and might seek to take from him that which
Alexander had given him, so he decided to act in four ways. Firstly, by
exterminating the families of those lords whom he had despoiled, so as
to take away that pretext from the Pope. Secondly, by winning to himself
all the gentlemen of Rome, so as to be able to curb the Pope with their
aid, as has been observed. Thirdly, by converting the college more to
himself. Fourthly, by acquiring so much power before the Pope should die
that he could by his own measures resist the first shock. Of these four
things, at the death of Alexander, he had accomplished three. For he had
killed as many of the dispossessed lords as he could lay hands on, and
few had escaped; he had won over the Roman gentlemen, and he had the
most numerous party in the college. And as to any fresh acquisition, he
intended to become master of Tuscany, for he already possessed Perugia
and Piombino, and Pisa was under his protection. And as he had no longer
to study France (for the French were already driven out of the kingdom
of Naples by the Spaniards, and in this way both were compelled to buy
his goodwill), he pounced down upon Pisa. After this, Lucca and Siena
yielded at once, partly through hatred and partly through fear of
the Florentines; and the Florentines would have had no remedy had he
continued to prosper, as he was prospering the year that Alexander died,
for he had acquired so much power and reputation that he would have
stood by himself, and no longer have depended on the luck and the forces
of others, but solely on his own power and ability.
But Alexander died five years after he had first drawn the sword. He
left the duke with the state of Romagna alone consolidated, with the
rest in the air, between two most powerful hostile armies, and sick unto
death. Yet there were in the duke such boldness and ability, and he knew
so well how men are to be won or lost, and so firm were the foundations
which in so short a time he had laid, that if he had not had those
armies on his back, or if he had been in good health, he would have
overcome all difficulties. And it is seen that his foundations were
good, for the Romagna awaited him for more than a month. In Rome,
although but half alive, he remained secure; and whilst the Baglioni,
the Vitelli, and the Orsini might come to Rome, they could not effect
anything against him. If he could not have made Pope him whom he wished,
at least the one whom he did not wish would not have been elected. But
if he had been in sound health at the death of Alexander,(*) everything
would have been different to him. On the day that Julius the Second(+)
was elected, he told me that he had thought of everything that might
occur at the death of his father, and had provided a remedy for all,
except that he had never anticipated that, when the death did happen, he
himself would be on the point to die.
(*) Alexander VI died of fever, 18th August 1503.
(+) Julius II was Giuliano della Rovere, Cardinal of San
Pietro ad Vincula, born 1443, died 1513.
When all the actions of the duke are recalled, I do not know how to
blame him, but rather it appears to be, as I have said, that I ought to
offer him for imitation to all those who, by the fortune or the arms of
others, are raised to government. Because he, having a lofty spirit and
far-reaching aims, could not have regulated his conduct otherwise,
and only the shortness of the life of Alexander and his own sickness
frustrated his designs. Therefore, he who considers it necessary to
secure himself in his new principality, to win friends, to overcome
either by force or fraud, to make himself beloved and feared by the
people, to be followed and revered by the soldiers, to exterminate those
who have power or reason to hurt him, to change the old order of things
for new, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy
a disloyal soldiery and to create new, to maintain friendship with kings
and princes in such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend
with caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this
man.
Only can he be blamed for the election of Julius the Second, in whom he
made a bad choice, because, as is said, not being able to elect a Pope
to his own mind, he could have hindered any other from being elected
Pope; and he ought never to have consented to the election of any
cardinal whom he had injured or who had cause to fear him if they became
pontiffs. For men injure either from fear or hatred. Those whom he
had injured, amongst others, were San Pietro ad Vincula, Colonna, San
Giorgio, and Ascanio.(*) The rest, in becoming Pope, had to fear him,
Rouen and the Spaniards excepted; the latter from their relationship and
obligations, the former from his influence, the kingdom of France having
relations with him. Therefore, above everything, the duke ought to have
created a Spaniard Pope, and, failing him, he ought to have consented to
Rouen and not San Pietro ad Vincula. He who believes that new benefits
will cause great personages to forget old injuries is deceived.
Therefore, the duke erred in his choice, and it was the cause of his
ultimate ruin.
(*) San Giorgio is Raffaello Riario. Ascanio is Ascanio
Sforza.
| 2,626 | Chapter VII | https://web.archive.org/web/20210303115306/https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/prince/section3/ | Concerning New Principalities Acquired with the Arms and Fortunes of Others Sometimes private citizens become princes purely by good fortune. Such people buy their way into power, receive favors from someone else in power, or bribe soldiers. Such princes are weak not only because fortune can be capricious and unstable, but also because they do not know how to maintain their position. They do not have loyal troops who are devoted to them. They do not know how to deal with problems, command troops, or keep their power in the face of opposition. Princes who succeed on their own prowess have built a strong foundation for themselves. Princes who succeed due to the sway of fortune or the goodwill of others lack such a foundation from which to rule and will have difficulty building a foundation quickly enough to prevent power from slipping out of their hands. Thus, although princes who rely on fortune reach their position easily, maintaining that position is extremely difficult. Laying a solid foundation is a crucial prerequisite for maintaining power. A prince must eliminate rival leaders and win the favor of their followers. Machiavelli cites the life of Cesare Borgia as an example. The son of Pope Alexander VI, Borgia was a man of great courage and high intentions. He was made duke of Romagna through the good fortune that his father, as Pope Alexander VI, had amassed a great deal of power. However, he was unable to maintain his rule, even though he made competent attempts to consolidate his new power. His efforts included the use of force in the strategic conquest of foreign lands. He tried to make himself loved and feared by his subjects. He wiped out disloyal troops and established a loyal army, and he maintained a friendly yet cautious relationship with other kings and princes. Despite all his efforts, he was unable to complete the consolidation of his power when his father died, and his good fortune was reversed. He did, however, lay a strong foundation for future rule, as only a man of great prowess could. | The coldhearted, calculating logic for which Machiavelli is renowned shines through in Chapter V. His argument that devastating a region is often the most reliable way of securing power does not even attempt to address the moral or ethical objections to his advice. His rationale is strictly pragmatic: the only reason to spare the institutions of newly conquered states is that keeping old institutions alive might help keep citizens happy, subdued, and submissive under the new ruler. Moreover, in Chapter V, Machiavelli sets out his conception of the natural state of a populace. He writes that most subjects are "used to obeying" and that they cannot live as free subjects without someone telling them what to do. This argument echoes Machiavelli's assertion in Chapter III that men are naturally disposed to "old ways of life" and therefore harbor an inclination to follow tradition. These passages underline the assumption that men are, by nature, followers. Even rulers are followers to some extent: Machiavelli notes at the start of Chapter VI that aspiring princes are always inclined to "imitate" the examples of great men. Machiavelli imagines subjects who are self-interested, but not to an extreme degree. They are not concerned with forms of enlightenment or self-improvement, yet they still notice improvements in their overall well-being. Though generally obedient and complacent, they will not hesitate to rise up against their ruler should he offend them. The Prince devotes little space to the concerns of subjects, and Machiavelli's picture of the common people, though detailed, is not complex. Louis XIV's famous statement, "L'Etat, c'est moi" , accords with the philosophy espoused in The Prince: The ruler is the state, and the state is ruler. The people hardly matter. This idea does not necessarily contradict Machiavelli's view that the effectiveness of government depends on the firm support of its people. Rather, it implies that Machiavelli is not concerned with understanding what motivates the people to lend support to a ruler. The only important question is whether such support exists. The primary virtue of Machiavelli's prince is self-reliance. A prince who manages to gain power by relying on his own prowess will succeed at maintaining power because his prowess will have built him a firm foundation for ruling. He will have the loyalty of his army and the respect of those he has conquered and the leaders of surrounding principalities. He therefore will be better equipped to deal with problems and difficulties, without relying on the help of others. Thus, the more self-reliant the prince, the more he will prove capable of success | 348 | 428 | [
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1,130 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/1130-chapters/42.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra/section_41_part_0.txt | The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra.act v.scene ii | act v, scene ii | null | {"name": "Act V, Scene ii", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210116191009/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/antony-cleopatra/summary/act-v-scene-ii", "summary": "Cleopatra curses Caesar for being a knave of Fortune, and thus no better than anybody else . Just then, Proculeius enters. He asks what she wants from Caesar. She remembers this was the man Antony said she could trust, though she doesn't really care to trust anyone just now. She tells Proculeius that she'd like to have Egypt remain her kingdom for her son to rule. Proculeius promises Caesar will take care of Cleopatra, and as he's leaving, Roman soldiers sneak in behind him to guard her. Cleopatra's women, Iras and Charmian, alert her immediately of the infiltration, and she quickly draws a dagger to kill herself. She is even more quickly stopped by Proculeius. He says she's not being betrayed, but relieved. She resents this with a fury-- she promises to starve or thirst herself to death, rather than be gawked at in Caesar's court, or be a thing for Octavia to look down on. She says she would rather die in a ditch in Egypt, or be laid out naked on the Nile where the water-flies can plant maggots in her that will burst her body at its seams , or even be hanged from chains at the pyramids, than go to Rome. She feels pretty strongly, then. Just as Proculeius is promising that this is all pretty unnecessary, Dolabella arrives to take over the guard. Proculeius bids him to be kind to Cleopatra. Cleopatra tells Dolabella all about this dream she had, where Antony was noble and beautiful, holding the world in his raised hands, all full of natural and supernatural beauty. As the Queen grieves and Dolabella watches, he's moved to tell her the truth about what Caesar really plans to do with her. She guesses Caesar means to lead her in triumph and Dolabella confirms her suspicions. Caesar enters with his men. He is full of words and grace for her, and promises to spare her and her children if she does not choose Antony's course of suicide. Still saucy, she retorts that she'll be as the other signs of his conquest, that he might hang where he pleases. Caesar is then given a scroll that supposedly lists all the goods Cleopatra possesses. Cleopatra calls on her treasurer, Seleucus, to confirm that these are all her worldly possessions. The treasurer denies it, which is the exact opposite of what he was supposed to do. Cleopatra rages against the treasurer for revealing her to be a liar, though Caesar says he doesn't mind, and understands her holding back a little. Cleopatra claims what she's held back are just a few lady's trifles, presents for Octavia and friends. Eventually, she breaks down and says people are misjudged in their lives for the ills of others, and are called to account for the ills of others also. Caesar is \"merciful\" and tells her she doesn't need to worry about it, he won't take any of her things, listed or unlisted, as part of his conquest. He's not a merchant, and he claims he'll treat her as she wants to be treated. Cleopatra, seemingly calmed, calls Caesar her master and her lord. After Caesar leaves, Cleopatra tells her women that she knows Caesar's charming words have something else at the bottom of them. Charmian and Iras, her faithful ladies, encourage her to continue on the course they set. In hushed tones, Cleopatra hears that what she's asked for is being provided. Though we don't know the specifics, we can guess what's up. Dolabella comes in, and since he has so nobly sworn devotion to her, he admits that Caesar will call for her and her children within three days, with the intentions of adding them to the victory march. Then he leaves. Cleopatra says \"thanks\" and then confers with her women. She can't bear the idea of being shown amid all the common people of Rome, with their plain occupations and rank breath surrounding her as she's played the fool. Cleopatra knows there will be mockeries of the Egyptian lifestyle and they'll have some drunk fool acting as Antony and some young boy acting as her, probably making her look like a whore. She won't stand it, and she's figured a way to beat them. She bids Charmian and Iras to go bring her crown and finest garments. A guard comes in, telling of a rural visitor who's brought Cleopatra a gift of figs. The guard leaves, and Cleopatra mysteriously states that this \"poor instrument\" brings her liberty. The rural man enters and is left with the Queen. She asks if he's brought her the worm of Nilus, and he confirms that he has. It brings death to anyone who touches it, he warns, and she asks for stories of people it's killed. Satisfied, she sends him off, and he wishes her \"joy of the worm.\" Iras dresses her in all her fine things, and Cleopatra says she hears Antony calling her, praising the deed she's about to do. She claims she is now fire and air--all else of her she leaves on Earth. She bids her women kiss her lips for their last warmth--in doing so, Iras falls and dies. Cleopatra asks if death comes so easy, as a lover's pinch, and moves quickly to die herself, lest Iras find Antony first in death and steal his kisses. She thus applies an asp to her breast, and as Charmian weeps she bids her maid peace, saying, \"Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, that sucks the nurse asleep.\" She applies another asp to her arm, and dies mid-sentence, saying, \"What should I stay--.\" A guard enters as Charmian finishes her lady's sentence, saying there's no reason to stay in this vile world. Charmian applies an asp to herself. Amid the confusion of the soldiers, Charmian says this was work well done, \"and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings.\" Dolabella, Caesar, and more men trickle in. Caesar wearily announces she must've guessed his intentions, and being royal and such, took her own way rather than suffer humiliation. The men guess at the means by which the women died and, finding a wound on Cleopatra's breast and the figs slimy with the trail of some serpent, realize the ladies had the rural visitor smuggle in snakes to do the deed. Caesar bids Cleopatra be buried next to Antony and states that their love engenders as much pity as Antony's glory, which led them to all of their troubles in the first place. He and the army will attend the funeral and then head back to Rome. He bids Dolabella organize the funeral with great and befitting solemnity. The end.", "analysis": ""} | SCENE II.
Alexandria. The monument
Enter CLEOPATRA, CHARMIAN, IRAS, and MARDIAN
CLEOPATRA. My desolation does begin to make
A better life. 'Tis paltry to be Caesar:
Not being Fortune, he's but Fortune's knave,
A minister of her will; and it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents and bolts up change,
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dug,
The beggar's nurse and Caesar's.
Enter, to the gates of the monument, PROCULEIUS, GALLUS,
and soldiers
PROCULEIUS. Caesar sends greetings to the Queen of Egypt,
And bids thee study on what fair demands
Thou mean'st to have him grant thee.
CLEOPATRA. What's thy name?
PROCULEIUS. My name is Proculeius.
CLEOPATRA. Antony
Did tell me of you, bade me trust you; but
I do not greatly care to be deceiv'd,
That have no use for trusting. If your master
Would have a queen his beggar, you must tell him
That majesty, to keep decorum, must
No less beg than a kingdom. If he please
To give me conquer'd Egypt for my son,
He gives me so much of mine own as I
Will kneel to him with thanks.
PROCULEIUS. Be of good cheer;
Y'are fall'n into a princely hand; fear nothing.
Make your full reference freely to my lord,
Who is so full of grace that it flows over
On all that need. Let me report to him
Your sweet dependency, and you shall find
A conqueror that will pray in aid for kindness
Where he for grace is kneel'd to.
CLEOPATRA. Pray you tell him
I am his fortune's vassal and I send him
The greatness he has got. I hourly learn
A doctrine of obedience, and would gladly
Look him i' th' face.
PROCULEIUS. This I'll report, dear lady.
Have comfort, for I know your plight is pitied
Of him that caus'd it.
GALLUS. You see how easily she may be surpris'd.
Here PROCULEIUS and two of the guard ascend the
monument by a ladder placed against a window,
and come behind CLEOPATRA. Some of the guard
unbar and open the gates
Guard her till Caesar come. Exit
IRAS. Royal Queen!
CHARMIAN. O Cleopatra! thou art taken, Queen!
CLEOPATRA. Quick, quick, good hands. [Drawing a dagger]
PROCULEIUS. Hold, worthy lady, hold, [Disarms her]
Do not yourself such wrong, who are in this
Reliev'd, but not betray'd.
CLEOPATRA. What, of death too,
That rids our dogs of languish?
PROCULEIUS. Cleopatra,
Do not abuse my master's bounty by
Th' undoing of yourself. Let the world see
His nobleness well acted, which your death
Will never let come forth.
CLEOPATRA. Where art thou, death?
Come hither, come! Come, come, and take a queen
Worth many babes and beggars!
PROCULEIUS. O, temperance, lady!
CLEOPATRA. Sir, I will eat no meat; I'll not drink, sir;
If idle talk will once be necessary,
I'll not sleep neither. This mortal house I'll ruin,
Do Caesar what he can. Know, sir, that I
Will not wait pinion'd at your master's court,
Nor once be chastis'd with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up,
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus' mud
Lay me stark-nak'd, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring! Rather make
My country's high pyramides my gibbet,
And hang me up in chains!
PROCULEIUS. You do extend
These thoughts of horror further than you shall
Find cause in Caesar.
Enter DOLABELLA
DOLABELLA. Proculeius,
What thou hast done thy master Caesar knows,
And he hath sent for thee. For the Queen,
I'll take her to my guard.
PROCULEIUS. So, Dolabella,
It shall content me best. Be gentle to her.
[To CLEOPATRA] To Caesar I will speak what you shall please,
If you'll employ me to him.
CLEOPATRA. Say I would die.
Exeunt PROCULEIUS and soldiers
DOLABELLA. Most noble Empress, you have heard of me?
CLEOPATRA. I cannot tell.
DOLABELLA. Assuredly you know me.
CLEOPATRA. No matter, sir, what I have heard or known.
You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams;
Is't not your trick?
DOLABELLA. I understand not, madam.
CLEOPATRA. I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony-
O, such another sleep, that I might see
But such another man!
DOLABELLA. If it might please ye-
CLEOPATRA. His face was as the heav'ns, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
The little O, the earth.
DOLABELLA. Most sovereign creature-
CLEOPATRA. His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear'd arm
Crested the world. His voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in't; an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin-like: they show'd his back above
The element they liv'd in. In his livery
Walk'd crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp'd from his pocket.
DOLABELLA. Cleopatra-
CLEOPATRA. Think you there was or might be such a man
As this I dreamt of?
DOLABELLA. Gentle madam, no.
CLEOPATRA. You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But if there be nor ever were one such,
It's past the size of drearning. Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t' imagine
An Antony were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.
DOLABELLA. Hear me, good madam.
Your loss is, as yourself, great; and you bear it
As answering to the weight. Would I might never
O'ertake pursu'd success, but I do feel,
By the rebound of yours, a grief that smites
My very heart at root.
CLEOPATRA. I thank you, sir.
Know you what Caesar means to do with me?
DOLABELLA. I am loath to tell you what I would you knew.
CLEOPATRA. Nay, pray you, sir.
DOLABELLA. Though he be honourable-
CLEOPATRA. He'll lead me, then, in triumph?
DOLABELLA. Madam, he will. I know't. [Flourish]
[Within: 'Make way there-Caesar!']
Enter CAESAR; GALLUS, PROCULEIUS, MAECENAS, SELEUCUS,
and others of his train
CAESAR. Which is the Queen of Egypt?
DOLABELLA. It is the Emperor, madam. [CLEOPATPA kneels]
CAESAR. Arise, you shall not kneel.
I pray you, rise; rise, Egypt.
CLEOPATRA. Sir, the gods
Will have it thus; my master and my lord
I must obey.
CAESAR. Take to you no hard thoughts.
The record of what injuries you did us,
Though written in our flesh, we shall remember
As things but done by chance.
CLEOPATRA. Sole sir o' th' world,
I cannot project mine own cause so well
To make it clear, but do confess I have
Been laden with like frailties which before
Have often sham'd our sex.
CAESAR. Cleopatra, know
We will extenuate rather than enforce.
If you apply yourself to our intents-
Which towards you are most gentle- you shall find
A benefit in this change; but if you seek
To lay on me a cruelty by taking
Antony's course, you shall bereave yourself
Of my good purposes, and put your children
To that destruction which I'll guard them from,
If thereon you rely. I'll take my leave.
CLEOPATRA. And may, through all the world. 'Tis yours, and we,
Your scutcheons and your signs of conquest, shall
Hang in what place you please. Here, my good lord.
CAESAR. You shall advise me in all for Cleopatra.
CLEOPATRA. This is the brief of money, plate, and jewels,
I am possess'd of. 'Tis exactly valued,
Not petty things admitted. Where's Seleucus?
SELEUCUS. Here, madam.
CLEOPATRA. This is my treasurer; let him speak, my lord,
Upon his peril, that I have reserv'd
To myself nothing. Speak the truth, Seleucus.
SELEUCUS. Madam,
I had rather seal my lips than to my peril
Speak that which is not.
CLEOPATRA. What have I kept back?
SELEUCUS. Enough to purchase what you have made known.
CAESAR. Nay, blush not, Cleopatra; I approve
Your wisdom in the deed.
CLEOPATRA. See, Caesar! O, behold,
How pomp is followed! Mine will now be yours;
And, should we shift estates, yours would be mine.
The ingratitude of this Seleucus does
Even make me wild. O slave, of no more trust
Than love that's hir'd! What, goest thou back? Thou shalt
Go back, I warrant thee; but I'll catch thine eyes
Though they had wings. Slave, soulless villain, dog!
O rarely base!
CAESAR. Good Queen, let us entreat you.
CLEOPATRA. O Caesar, what a wounding shame is this,
That thou vouchsafing here to visit me,
Doing the honour of thy lordliness
To one so meek, that mine own servant should
Parcel the sum of my disgraces by
Addition of his envy! Say, good Caesar,
That I some lady trifles have reserv'd,
Immoment toys, things of such dignity
As we greet modern friends withal; and say
Some nobler token I have kept apart
For Livia and Octavia, to induce
Their mediation- must I be unfolded
With one that I have bred? The gods! It smites me
Beneath the fall I have. [To SELEUCUS] Prithee go hence;
Or I shall show the cinders of my spirits
Through th' ashes of my chance. Wert thou a man,
Thou wouldst have mercy on me.
CAESAR. Forbear, Seleucus. Exit SELEUCUS
CLEOPATRA. Be it known that we, the greatest, are misthought
For things that others do; and when we fall
We answer others' merits in our name,
Are therefore to be pitied.
CAESAR. Cleopatra,
Not what you have reserv'd, nor what acknowledg'd,
Put we i' th' roll of conquest. Still be't yours,
Bestow it at your pleasure; and believe
Caesar's no merchant, to make prize with you
Of things that merchants sold. Therefore be cheer'd;
Make not your thoughts your prisons. No, dear Queen;
For we intend so to dispose you as
Yourself shall give us counsel. Feed and sleep.
Our care and pity is so much upon you
That we remain your friend; and so, adieu.
CLEOPATRA. My master and my lord!
CAESAR. Not so. Adieu.
Flourish. Exeunt CAESAR and his train
CLEOPATRA. He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not
Be noble to myself. But hark thee, Charmian!
[Whispers CHARMIAN]
IRAS. Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark.
CLEOPATRA. Hie thee again.
I have spoke already, and it is provided;
Go put it to the haste.
CHARMIAN. Madam, I will.
Re-enter DOLABELLA
DOLABELLA. Where's the Queen?
CHARMIAN. Behold, sir. Exit
CLEOPATRA. Dolabella!
DOLABELLA. Madam, as thereto sworn by your command,
Which my love makes religion to obey,
I tell you this: Caesar through Syria
Intends his journey, and within three days
You with your children will he send before.
Make your best use of this; I have perform'd
Your pleasure and my promise.
CLEOPATRA. Dolabella,
I shall remain your debtor.
DOLABELLA. I your servant.
Adieu, good Queen; I must attend on Caesar.
CLEOPATRA. Farewell, and thanks. Exit DOLABELLA
Now, Iras, what think'st thou?
Thou an Egyptian puppet shall be shown
In Rome as well as I. Mechanic slaves,
With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shall
Uplift us to the view; in their thick breaths,
Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded,
And forc'd to drink their vapour.
IRAS. The gods forbid!
CLEOPATRA. Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o' tune; the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' th' posture of a whore.
IRAS. O the good gods!
CLEOPATRA. Nay, that's certain.
IRAS. I'll never see't, for I am sure mine nails
Are stronger than mine eyes.
CLEOPATRA. Why, that's the way
To fool their preparation and to conquer
Their most absurd intents.
Enter CHARMIAN
Now, Charmian!
Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch
My best attires. I am again for Cydnus,
To meet Mark Antony. Sirrah, Iras, go.
Now, noble Charmian, we'll dispatch indeed;
And when thou hast done this chare, I'll give thee leave
To play till doomsday. Bring our crown and all.
Exit IRAS. A noise within
Wherefore's this noise?
Enter a GUARDSMAN
GUARDSMAN. Here is a rural fellow
That will not be denied your Highness' presence.
He brings you figs.
CLEOPATRA. Let him come in. Exit GUARDSMAN
What poor an instrument
May do a noble deed! He brings me liberty.
My resolution's plac'd, and I have nothing
Of woman in me. Now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.
Re-enter GUARDSMAN and CLOWN, with a basket
GUARDSMAN. This is the man.
CLEOPATRA. Avoid, and leave him. Exit GUARDSMAN
Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there
That kills and pains not?
CLOWN. Truly, I have him. But I would not be the party that
should
desire you to touch him, for his biting is immortal; those
that
do die of it do seldom or never recover.
CLEOPATRA. Remember'st thou any that have died on't?
CLOWN. Very many, men and women too. I heard of one of them no
longer than yesterday: a very honest woman, but something
given
to lie, as a woman should not do but in the way of honesty;
how
she died of the biting of it, what pain she felt- truly she
makes
a very good report o' th' worm. But he that will believe all
that
they say shall never be saved by half that they do. But this
is
most falliable, the worm's an odd worm.
CLEOPATRA. Get thee hence; farewell.
CLOWN. I wish you all joy of the worm.
[Sets down the basket]
CLEOPATRA. Farewell.
CLOWN. You must think this, look you, that the worm will do his
kind.
CLEOPATRA. Ay, ay; farewell.
CLOWN. Look you, the worm is not to be trusted but in the
keeping
of wise people; for indeed there is no goodness in the worm.
CLEOPATRA. Take thou no care; it shall be heeded.
CLOWN. Very good. Give it nothing, I pray you, for it is not
worth
the feeding.
CLEOPATRA. Will it eat me?
CLOWN. You must not think I am so simple but I know the devil
himself will not eat a woman. I know that a woman is a dish
for
the gods, if the devil dress her not. But truly, these same
whoreson devils do the gods great harm in their women, for in
every ten that they make the devils mar five.
CLEOPATRA. Well, get thee gone; farewell.
CLOWN. Yes, forsooth. I wish you joy o' th' worm. Exit
Re-enter IRAS, with a robe, crown, &c.
CLEOPATRA. Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me. Now no more
The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip.
Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
Antony call. I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act. I hear him mock
The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come.
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life. So, have you done?
Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.
Farewell, kind Charmian. Iras, long farewell.
[Kisses them. IRAS falls and dies]
Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall?
If thus thou and nature can so gently part,
The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch,
Which hurts and is desir'd. Dost thou lie still?
If thou vanishest, thou tell'st the world
It is not worth leave-taking.
CHARMIAN. Dissolve, thick cloud, and rain, that I may say
The gods themselves do weep.
CLEOPATRA. This proves me base.
If she first meet the curled Antony,
He'll make demand of her, and spend that kiss
Which is my heaven to have. Come, thou mortal wretch,
[To an asp, which she applies to her breast]
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool,
Be angry and dispatch. O couldst thou speak,
That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass
Unpolicied!
CHARMIAN. O Eastern star!
CLEOPATRA. Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast
That sucks the nurse asleep?
CHARMIAN. O, break! O, break!
CLEOPATRA. As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle-
O Antony! Nay, I will take thee too:
[Applying another asp to her arm]
What should I stay- [Dies]
CHARMIAN. In this vile world? So, fare thee well.
Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies
A lass unparallel'd. Downy windows, close;
And golden Phoebus never be beheld
Of eyes again so royal! Your crown's awry;
I'll mend it and then play-
Enter the guard, rushing in
FIRST GUARD. Where's the Queen?
CHARMIAN. Speak softly, wake her not.
FIRST GUARD. Caesar hath sent-
CHARMIAN. Too slow a messenger. [Applies an asp]
O, come apace, dispatch. I partly feel thee.
FIRST GUARD. Approach, ho! All's not well: Caesar's beguil'd.
SECOND GUARD. There's Dolabella sent from Caesar; call him.
FIRST GUARD. What work is here! Charmian, is this well done?
CHARMIAN. It is well done, and fitting for a princes
Descended of so many royal kings.
Ah, soldier! [CHARMIAN dies]
Re-enter DOLABELLA
DOLABELLA. How goes it here?
SECOND GUARD. All dead.
DOLABELLA. Caesar, thy thoughts
Touch their effects in this. Thyself art coming
To see perform'd the dreaded act which thou
So sought'st to hinder.
[Within: 'A way there, a way for Caesar!']
Re-enter CAESAR and all his train
DOLABELLA. O sir, you are too sure an augurer:
That you did fear is done.
CAESAR. Bravest at the last,
She levell'd at our purposes, and being royal,
Took her own way. The manner of their deaths?
I do not see them bleed.
DOLABELLA. Who was last with them?
FIRST GUARD. A simple countryman that brought her figs.
This was his basket.
CAESAR. Poison'd then.
FIRST GUARD. O Caesar,
This Charmian liv'd but now; she stood and spake.
I found her trimming up the diadem
On her dead mistress. Tremblingly she stood,
And on the sudden dropp'd.
CAESAR. O noble weakness!
If they had swallow'd poison 'twould appear
By external swelling; but she looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.
DOLABELLA. Here on her breast
There is a vent of blood, and something blown;
The like is on her arm.
FIRST GUARD. This is an aspic's trail; and these fig-leaves
Have slime upon them, such as th' aspic leaves
Upon the caves of Nile.
CAESAR. Most probable
That so she died; for her physician tells me
She hath pursu'd conclusions infinite
Of easy ways to die. Take up her bed,
And bear her women from the monument.
She shall be buried by her Antony;
No grave upon the earth shall clip in it
A pair so famous. High events as these
Strike those that make them; and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented. Our army shall
In solemn show attend this funeral,
And then to Rome. Come, Dolabella, see
High order in this great solemnity. Exeunt
THE END
| 5,047 | Act V, Scene ii | https://web.archive.org/web/20210116191009/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/antony-cleopatra/summary/act-v-scene-ii | Cleopatra curses Caesar for being a knave of Fortune, and thus no better than anybody else . Just then, Proculeius enters. He asks what she wants from Caesar. She remembers this was the man Antony said she could trust, though she doesn't really care to trust anyone just now. She tells Proculeius that she'd like to have Egypt remain her kingdom for her son to rule. Proculeius promises Caesar will take care of Cleopatra, and as he's leaving, Roman soldiers sneak in behind him to guard her. Cleopatra's women, Iras and Charmian, alert her immediately of the infiltration, and she quickly draws a dagger to kill herself. She is even more quickly stopped by Proculeius. He says she's not being betrayed, but relieved. She resents this with a fury-- she promises to starve or thirst herself to death, rather than be gawked at in Caesar's court, or be a thing for Octavia to look down on. She says she would rather die in a ditch in Egypt, or be laid out naked on the Nile where the water-flies can plant maggots in her that will burst her body at its seams , or even be hanged from chains at the pyramids, than go to Rome. She feels pretty strongly, then. Just as Proculeius is promising that this is all pretty unnecessary, Dolabella arrives to take over the guard. Proculeius bids him to be kind to Cleopatra. Cleopatra tells Dolabella all about this dream she had, where Antony was noble and beautiful, holding the world in his raised hands, all full of natural and supernatural beauty. As the Queen grieves and Dolabella watches, he's moved to tell her the truth about what Caesar really plans to do with her. She guesses Caesar means to lead her in triumph and Dolabella confirms her suspicions. Caesar enters with his men. He is full of words and grace for her, and promises to spare her and her children if she does not choose Antony's course of suicide. Still saucy, she retorts that she'll be as the other signs of his conquest, that he might hang where he pleases. Caesar is then given a scroll that supposedly lists all the goods Cleopatra possesses. Cleopatra calls on her treasurer, Seleucus, to confirm that these are all her worldly possessions. The treasurer denies it, which is the exact opposite of what he was supposed to do. Cleopatra rages against the treasurer for revealing her to be a liar, though Caesar says he doesn't mind, and understands her holding back a little. Cleopatra claims what she's held back are just a few lady's trifles, presents for Octavia and friends. Eventually, she breaks down and says people are misjudged in their lives for the ills of others, and are called to account for the ills of others also. Caesar is "merciful" and tells her she doesn't need to worry about it, he won't take any of her things, listed or unlisted, as part of his conquest. He's not a merchant, and he claims he'll treat her as she wants to be treated. Cleopatra, seemingly calmed, calls Caesar her master and her lord. After Caesar leaves, Cleopatra tells her women that she knows Caesar's charming words have something else at the bottom of them. Charmian and Iras, her faithful ladies, encourage her to continue on the course they set. In hushed tones, Cleopatra hears that what she's asked for is being provided. Though we don't know the specifics, we can guess what's up. Dolabella comes in, and since he has so nobly sworn devotion to her, he admits that Caesar will call for her and her children within three days, with the intentions of adding them to the victory march. Then he leaves. Cleopatra says "thanks" and then confers with her women. She can't bear the idea of being shown amid all the common people of Rome, with their plain occupations and rank breath surrounding her as she's played the fool. Cleopatra knows there will be mockeries of the Egyptian lifestyle and they'll have some drunk fool acting as Antony and some young boy acting as her, probably making her look like a whore. She won't stand it, and she's figured a way to beat them. She bids Charmian and Iras to go bring her crown and finest garments. A guard comes in, telling of a rural visitor who's brought Cleopatra a gift of figs. The guard leaves, and Cleopatra mysteriously states that this "poor instrument" brings her liberty. The rural man enters and is left with the Queen. She asks if he's brought her the worm of Nilus, and he confirms that he has. It brings death to anyone who touches it, he warns, and she asks for stories of people it's killed. Satisfied, she sends him off, and he wishes her "joy of the worm." Iras dresses her in all her fine things, and Cleopatra says she hears Antony calling her, praising the deed she's about to do. She claims she is now fire and air--all else of her she leaves on Earth. She bids her women kiss her lips for their last warmth--in doing so, Iras falls and dies. Cleopatra asks if death comes so easy, as a lover's pinch, and moves quickly to die herself, lest Iras find Antony first in death and steal his kisses. She thus applies an asp to her breast, and as Charmian weeps she bids her maid peace, saying, "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, that sucks the nurse asleep." She applies another asp to her arm, and dies mid-sentence, saying, "What should I stay--." A guard enters as Charmian finishes her lady's sentence, saying there's no reason to stay in this vile world. Charmian applies an asp to herself. Amid the confusion of the soldiers, Charmian says this was work well done, "and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings." Dolabella, Caesar, and more men trickle in. Caesar wearily announces she must've guessed his intentions, and being royal and such, took her own way rather than suffer humiliation. The men guess at the means by which the women died and, finding a wound on Cleopatra's breast and the figs slimy with the trail of some serpent, realize the ladies had the rural visitor smuggle in snakes to do the deed. Caesar bids Cleopatra be buried next to Antony and states that their love engenders as much pity as Antony's glory, which led them to all of their troubles in the first place. He and the army will attend the funeral and then head back to Rome. He bids Dolabella organize the funeral with great and befitting solemnity. The end. | null | 1,116 | 1 | [
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107 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/40.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_39_part_0.txt | Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 40 | chapter 40 | null | {"name": "Chapter 40", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-40", "summary": "We stay with Fanny Robin, the raggedy-looking woman who just bumped into Sergeant Troy and Bathsheba. The woman's steps are feeble and she has a lot of trouble walking. She finally collapses and wakes up hours later in the middle of the night. She knows that she still has miles to go until she reaches Casterbridge. Eventually, she can't go any further and falls again. This time, though, a wandering dog comes over and licks her face until she starts moving again. By some miracle of strength, she eventually reaches the Casterbridge shelter. There are people there to greet her, and she collapses in their arms. Before she passes out, she asks about the dog that helped her along the road. The man from the shelter tells her that he threw rocks at the dog until it went away. How's that for thankfulness?", "analysis": ""} |
ON CASTERBRIDGE HIGHWAY
For a considerable time the woman walked on. Her steps became
feebler, and she strained her eyes to look afar upon the naked road,
now indistinct amid the penumbrae of night. At length her onward walk
dwindled to the merest totter, and she opened a gate within which was
a haystack. Underneath this she sat down and presently slept.
When the woman awoke it was to find herself in the depths of a
moonless and starless night. A heavy unbroken crust of cloud
stretched across the sky, shutting out every speck of heaven; and a
distant halo which hung over the town of Casterbridge was visible
against the black concave, the luminosity appearing the brighter by
its great contrast with the circumscribing darkness. Towards this
weak, soft glow the woman turned her eyes.
"If I could only get there!" she said. "Meet him the day after
to-morrow: God help me! Perhaps I shall be in my grave before then."
A manor-house clock from the far depths of shadow struck the hour,
one, in a small, attenuated tone. After midnight the voice of a
clock seems to lose in breadth as much as in length, and to diminish
its sonorousness to a thin falsetto.
Afterwards a light--two lights--arose from the remote shade, and grew
larger. A carriage rolled along the road, and passed the gate. It
probably contained some late diners-out. The beams from one lamp
shone for a moment upon the crouching woman, and threw her face into
vivid relief. The face was young in the groundwork, old in the
finish; the general contours were flexuous and childlike, but the
finer lineaments had begun to be sharp and thin.
The pedestrian stood up, apparently with revived determination, and
looked around. The road appeared to be familiar to her, and she
carefully scanned the fence as she slowly walked along. Presently
there became visible a dim white shape; it was another milestone.
She drew her fingers across its face to feel the marks.
"Two more!" she said.
She leant against the stone as a means of rest for a short interval,
then bestirred herself, and again pursued her way. For a slight
distance she bore up bravely, afterwards flagging as before. This
was beside a lone copsewood, wherein heaps of white chips strewn upon
the leafy ground showed that woodmen had been faggoting and making
hurdles during the day. Now there was not a rustle, not a breeze,
not the faintest clash of twigs to keep her company. The woman
looked over the gate, opened it, and went in. Close to the entrance
stood a row of faggots, bound and un-bound, together with stakes of
all sizes.
For a few seconds the wayfarer stood with that tense stillness which
signifies itself to be not the end, but merely the suspension, of
a previous motion. Her attitude was that of a person who listens,
either to the external world of sound, or to the imagined discourse
of thought. A close criticism might have detected signs proving that
she was intent on the latter alternative. Moreover, as was shown by
what followed, she was oddly exercising the faculty of invention upon
the speciality of the clever Jacquet Droz, the designer of automatic
substitutes for human limbs.
By the aid of the Casterbridge aurora, and by feeling with her hands,
the woman selected two sticks from the heaps. These sticks were
nearly straight to the height of three or four feet, where each
branched into a fork like the letter Y. She sat down, snapped off
the small upper twigs, and carried the remainder with her into the
road. She placed one of these forks under each arm as a crutch,
tested them, timidly threw her whole weight upon them--so little that
it was--and swung herself forward. The girl had made for herself a
material aid.
The crutches answered well. The pat of her feet, and the tap of
her sticks upon the highway, were all the sounds that came from
the traveller now. She had passed the last milestone by a good
long distance, and began to look wistfully towards the bank as if
calculating upon another milestone soon. The crutches, though so
very useful, had their limits of power. Mechanism only transfers
labour, being powerless to supersede it, and the original amount of
exertion was not cleared away; it was thrown into the body and arms.
She was exhausted, and each swing forward became fainter. At last
she swayed sideways, and fell.
Here she lay, a shapeless heap, for ten minutes and more. The
morning wind began to boom dully over the flats, and to move afresh
dead leaves which had lain still since yesterday. The woman
desperately turned round upon her knees, and next rose to her feet.
Steadying herself by the help of one crutch, she essayed a step, then
another, then a third, using the crutches now as walking-sticks only.
Thus she progressed till descending Mellstock Hill another milestone
appeared, and soon the beginning of an iron-railed fence came into
view. She staggered across to the first post, clung to it, and
looked around.
The Casterbridge lights were now individually visible. It was getting
towards morning, and vehicles might be hoped for, if not expected
soon. She listened. There was not a sound of life save that acme
and sublimation of all dismal sounds, the bark of a fox, its three
hollow notes being rendered at intervals of a minute with the
precision of a funeral bell.
"Less than a mile!" the woman murmured. "No; more," she added, after
a pause. "The mile is to the county hall, and my resting-place is on
the other side Casterbridge. A little over a mile, and there I am!"
After an interval she again spoke. "Five or six steps to a yard--six
perhaps. I have to go seventeen hundred yards. A hundred times six,
six hundred. Seventeen times that. O pity me, Lord!"
Holding to the rails, she advanced, thrusting one hand forward upon
the rail, then the other, then leaning over it whilst she dragged her
feet on beneath.
This woman was not given to soliloquy; but extremity of feeling
lessens the individuality of the weak, as it increases that of the
strong. She said again in the same tone, "I'll believe that the end
lies five posts forward, and no further, and so get strength to pass
them."
This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned
and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.
She passed five posts and held on to the fifth.
"I'll pass five more by believing my longed-for spot is at the next
fifth. I can do it."
She passed five more.
"It lies only five further."
She passed five more.
"But it is five further."
She passed them.
"That stone bridge is the end of my journey," she said, when the
bridge over the Froom was in view.
She crawled to the bridge. During the effort each breath of the
woman went into the air as if never to return again.
"Now for the truth of the matter," she said, sitting down. "The
truth is, that I have less than half a mile." Self-beguilement with
what she had known all the time to be false had given her strength to
come over half a mile that she would have been powerless to face in
the lump. The artifice showed that the woman, by some mysterious
intuition, had grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness may
operate more vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effect
more than the far-seeing; that limitation, and not comprehensiveness,
is needed for striking a blow.
The half-mile stood now before the sick and weary woman like a stolid
Juggernaut. It was an impassive King of her world. The road here
ran across Durnover Moor, open to the road on either side. She
surveyed the wide space, the lights, herself, sighed, and lay down
against a guard-stone of the bridge.
Never was ingenuity exercised so sorely as the traveller here
exercised hers. Every conceivable aid, method, stratagem, mechanism,
by which these last desperate eight hundred yards could be overpassed
by a human being unperceived, was revolved in her busy brain,
and dismissed as impracticable. She thought of sticks, wheels,
crawling--she even thought of rolling. But the exertion demanded
by either of these latter two was greater than to walk erect. The
faculty of contrivance was worn out. Hopelessness had come at last.
"No further!" she whispered, and closed her eyes.
From the stripe of shadow on the opposite side of the bridge a
portion of shade seemed to detach itself and move into isolation
upon the pale white of the road. It glided noiselessly towards the
recumbent woman.
She became conscious of something touching her hand; it was softness
and it was warmth. She opened her eyes, and the substance touched
her face. A dog was licking her cheek.
He was a huge, heavy, and quiet creature, standing darkly against the
low horizon, and at least two feet higher than the present position
of her eyes. Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, bloodhound, or what
not, it was impossible to say. He seemed to be of too strange and
mysterious a nature to belong to any variety among those of popular
nomenclature. Being thus assignable to no breed, he was the ideal
embodiment of canine greatness--a generalization from what was common
to all. Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from
its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form. Darkness
endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power,
and even the suffering woman threw her idea into figure.
In her reclining position she looked up to him just as in earlier
times she had, when standing, looked up to a man. The animal, who
was as homeless as she, respectfully withdrew a step or two when the
woman moved, and, seeing that she did not repulse him, he licked her
hand again.
A thought moved within her like lightning. "Perhaps I can make use
of him--I might do it then!"
She pointed in the direction of Casterbridge, and the dog seemed to
misunderstand: he trotted on. Then, finding she could not follow, he
came back and whined.
The ultimate and saddest singularity of woman's effort and invention
was reached when, with a quickened breathing, she rose to a stooping
posture, and, resting her two little arms upon the shoulders of the
dog, leant firmly thereon, and murmured stimulating words. Whilst
she sorrowed in her heart she cheered with her voice, and what was
stranger than that the strong should need encouragement from the weak
was that cheerfulness should be so well stimulated by such utter
dejection. Her friend moved forward slowly, and she with small
mincing steps moved forward beside him, half her weight being thrown
upon the animal. Sometimes she sank as she had sunk from walking
erect, from the crutches, from the rails. The dog, who now
thoroughly understood her desire and her incapacity, was frantic in
his distress on these occasions; he would tug at her dress and run
forward. She always called him back, and it was now to be observed
that the woman listened for human sounds only to avoid them. It was
evident that she had an object in keeping her presence on the road
and her forlorn state unknown.
Their progress was necessarily very slow. They reached the bottom
of the town, and the Casterbridge lamps lay before them like fallen
Pleiads as they turned to the left into the dense shade of a deserted
avenue of chestnuts, and so skirted the borough. Thus the town was
passed, and the goal was reached.
On this much-desired spot outside the town rose a picturesque
building. Originally it had been a mere case to hold people. The
shell had been so thin, so devoid of excrescence, and so closely
drawn over the accommodation granted, that the grim character of what
was beneath showed through it, as the shape of a body is visible
under a winding-sheet.
Then Nature, as if offended, lent a hand. Masses of ivy grew up,
completely covering the walls, till the place looked like an abbey;
and it was discovered that the view from the front, over the
Casterbridge chimneys, was one of the most magnificent in the
county. A neighbouring earl once said that he would give up a year's
rental to have at his own door the view enjoyed by the inmates from
theirs--and very probably the inmates would have given up the view
for his year's rental.
This stone edifice consisted of a central mass and two wings, whereon
stood as sentinels a few slim chimneys, now gurgling sorrowfully to
the slow wind. In the wall was a gate, and by the gate a bellpull
formed of a hanging wire. The woman raised herself as high as
possible upon her knees, and could just reach the handle. She moved
it and fell forwards in a bowed attitude, her face upon her bosom.
It was getting on towards six o'clock, and sounds of movement were
to be heard inside the building which was the haven of rest to this
wearied soul. A little door by the large one was opened, and a man
appeared inside. He discerned the panting heap of clothes, went back
for a light, and came again. He entered a second time, and returned
with two women.
These lifted the prostrate figure and assisted her in through the
doorway. The man then closed the door.
"How did she get here?" said one of the women.
"The Lord knows," said the other.
"There is a dog outside," murmured the overcome traveller. "Where is
he gone? He helped me."
"I stoned him away," said the man.
The little procession then moved forward--the man in front bearing
the light, the two bony women next, supporting between them the small
and supple one. Thus they entered the house and disappeared.
| 2,207 | Chapter 40 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-40 | We stay with Fanny Robin, the raggedy-looking woman who just bumped into Sergeant Troy and Bathsheba. The woman's steps are feeble and she has a lot of trouble walking. She finally collapses and wakes up hours later in the middle of the night. She knows that she still has miles to go until she reaches Casterbridge. Eventually, she can't go any further and falls again. This time, though, a wandering dog comes over and licks her face until she starts moving again. By some miracle of strength, she eventually reaches the Casterbridge shelter. There are people there to greet her, and she collapses in their arms. Before she passes out, she asks about the dog that helped her along the road. The man from the shelter tells her that he threw rocks at the dog until it went away. How's that for thankfulness? | null | 143 | 1 | [
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110 | false | novelguide | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/14.txt | finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_2_part_3.txt | Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter xiv | chapter xiv | null | {"name": "Chapter XIV", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase2-chapter12-15", "summary": "During harvest, a time when field workers are most needed, Tess works harvesting grain. Her younger sister brings her baby boy for Tess to nurse and the workers notice how much she loves the baby. Sadly, however, the baby falls seriously ill and has not been christened. Tess rouses up her brothers and sisters in the middle of the night to witness the baptism she performs herself. She names him Sorrow. After the baby dies, the parson pities her and allows Tess to bury the child in a corner of the churchyard. The \"girl-mother\" buries him at night out of sight of the villagers and places a cross at the top of the grave and a marmalade jar of flowers at the bottom", "analysis": ""} |
It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours,
attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated
fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they
should be dried away to nothing.
The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal
look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression.
His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the
scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could
feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The
luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature,
gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that
was brimming with interest for him.
His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,
throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of
drawers, and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who
were not already astir.
But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad
arms of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield
hard by Marlott village. They, with two others below, formed the
revolving Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been
brought to the field on the previous evening to be ready for
operations this day. The paint with which they were smeared,
intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a look of
having been dipped in liquid fire.
The field had already been "opened"; that is to say, a lane a few
feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole
circumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and
machine.
Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down
the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top
struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were
enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They
disappeared from the lane between the two stone posts which flanked
the nearest field-gate.
Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of
the grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation
of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible
over the gate, a driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses,
and an attendant on the seat of the implement. Along one side of
the field the whole wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper
revolving slowly, till it passed down the hill quite out of sight.
In a minute it came up on the other side of the field at the same
equable pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of the fore
horse first catching the eye as it rose into view over the stubble,
then the bright arms, and then the whole machine.
The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with
each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as
the morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated
inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their
refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when,
their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they
were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of
upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and
they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the
harvesters.
The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,
each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the
active binders in the rear laid their hands--mainly women, but some
of them men in print shirts, and trousers supported round their
waists by leather straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind,
which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each
wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.
But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company
of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when
she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely
an object set down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a
personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had
somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding,
and assimilated herself with it.
The women--or rather girls, for they were mostly young--wore drawn
cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and
gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There
was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured
tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the
reaping-machine; and others, older, in the brown-rough "wropper"
or over-all--the old-established and most appropriate dress of the
field-woman, which the young ones were abandoning. This morning the
eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she
being the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But
her bonnet is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is
disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be guessed from
a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends below the
curtain of her bonnet. Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual
attention is that she never courts it, though the other women often
gaze around them.
Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last
finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her
left palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward,
gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing
her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other
side, holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She
brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while
she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the
breeze. A bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather
of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on
its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.
At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged
apron, or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval
face of a handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy
clinging tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything
they fall against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular,
the red lips thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.
It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat changed--the
same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living
as a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that
she was in. After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to
undertake outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of
the year in the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that
she could do within the house being so remunerative for the time as
harvesting in the fields.
The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's,
the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille
at the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on
end against those of the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as it was
here called, of ten or a dozen was formed.
They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as
before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might
have noticed that every now and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully
to the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing.
On the verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages
ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the
hill.
The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.
The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its
corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first
sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long
clothes. Another brought some lunch. The harvesters ceased working,
took their provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks. Here
they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a
cup.
Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours.
She sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away
from her companions. When she had deposited herself a man in a
rabbit-skin cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt,
held the cup of ale over the top of the shock for her to drink. But
she did not accept his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she
called up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her, who,
glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and
joined the other children playing there. Tess, with a curiously
stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a still rising colour,
unfastened her frock and began suckling the child.
The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with
absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no
longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated
talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.
When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright
in her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a
gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she
fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could
never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which
strangely combined passionateness with contempt.
"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en,
and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,"
observed the woman in the red petticoat.
"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord,
'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"
"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I
reckon. There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in
The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had
come along."
"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that
it should have happened to she, of all others. But 'tis always the
comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches--hey, Jenny?" The
speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined
as plain.
It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy
to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her
flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor
grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises--shade
behind shade--tint beyond tint--around pupils that had no bottom; an
almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.
A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the
fields this week for the first time during many months. After
wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret
that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated
her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again--to taste
anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever
it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences,
time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if
they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.
Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and
the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had
not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.
She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly--the
thought of the world's concern at her situation--was founded on an
illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a
structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind
besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was
no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself
miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to
them--"Ah, she makes herself unhappy." If she tried to be cheerful,
to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers,
the baby, she could only be this idea to them--"Ah, she bears it
very well." Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been
wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could
have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless
mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless
child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would
have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery
had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate
sensations.
Whatever Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress
herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the
fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was
why she had borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly
in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms.
The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their
limbs, and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been
unharnessed and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine.
Tess, having quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest
sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on
the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last
completed sheaf for the tying of the next.
In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were
continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters.
Then they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company
of a broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the
eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some
worm-eaten Tuscan saint. Tess's female companions sang songs, and
showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out
of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing
in a few verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry
green wood and came back a changed state. There are counterpoises
and compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a
social warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting
personage in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still
farther away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and
she became almost gay.
But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached
home it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly
taken ill since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable,
so tender and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock
nevertheless.
The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was
forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that
offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew
clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the
flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which
transcended that of the child's simple loss. Her baby had not been
baptized.
Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,
burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls,
she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully
studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences
to be drawn therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard
to the baby, it had a very different colour. Her darling was about
to die, and no salvation.
It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she
might send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which
her father's sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest,
and his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that
nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly
booze at Rolliver's Inn. No parson should come inside his door, he
declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it
had become more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked the door
and put the key in his pocket.
The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess
retired also. She was continually waking as she lay, and in the
middle of the night found that the baby was still worse. It was
obviously dying--quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.
In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the
solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and
malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of
the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double
doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend
tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for
heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many
other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught the
young in this Christian country. The lurid presentment so powerfully
affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that
her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook
with each throb of her heart.
The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental
tension increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with
kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about
the room.
"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!" she cried.
"Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the
child!"
She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent
supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.
"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just the same!"
She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have
shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit a candle, and went to
a second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young
sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room. Pulling
out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured
some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their
hands together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children,
scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger
and larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her
bed--a child's child--so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient
personality to endow its producer with the maternal title. Tess then
stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next
sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church
held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her
child.
Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her
long white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging
straight down her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak
candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes
which sunlight might have revealed--the stubble scratches upon her
wrists, and the weariness of her eyes--her high enthusiasm having
a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing,
showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity
which was almost regal. The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy
eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended
wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to
become active.
The most impressed of them said:
"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"
The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.
"What's his name going to be?"
She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in
the book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the
baptismal service, and now she pronounced it:
"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost."
She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.
"Say 'Amen,' children."
The tiny voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"
Tess went on:
"We receive this child"--and so forth--"and do sign him with the sign
of the Cross."
Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an
immense cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with
the customary sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin,
the world, and the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant
unto his life's end. She duly went on with the Lord's Prayer, the
children lisping it after her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the
conclusion, raising their voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped
into silence, "Amen!"
Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy
of the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the
thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the
stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in
her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her.
The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a
glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each
cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils
shone like a diamond. The children gazed up at her with more and
more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did
not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and
awful--a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.
Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was
doomed to be of limited brilliancy--luckily perhaps for himself,
considering his beginnings. In the blue of the morning that fragile
soldier and servant breathed his last, and when the other children
awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty
baby.
The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained
with her in the infant's loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her
terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether
well founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that
if Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation
she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the
irregularity--either for herself or for her child.
So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive creature, that
bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law;
a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who
knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom
the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate,
new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human
knowledge.
Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were
doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.
Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a
new-comer, and did not know her. She went to his house after dusk,
and stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in. The
enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met
him coming homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not
mind speaking freely.
"I should like to ask you something, sir."
He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the
baby's illness and the extemporized ordinance. "And now, sir," she
added earnestly, "can you tell me this--will it be just the same for
him as if you had baptized him?"
Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he
should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his
customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no. Yet the
dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined
to affect his nobler impulses--or rather those that he had left in
him after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual
scepticism. The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the
victory fell to the man.
"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."
"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked quickly.
The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he
had conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the
rite, and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess's
father and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity
for its irregular administration.
"Ah--that's another matter," he said.
"Another matter--why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.
"Well--I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I
must not--for certain reasons."
"Just for once, sir!"
"Really I must not."
"O sir!" She seized his hand as she spoke.
He withdrew it, shaking his head.
"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never come to your
church no more!"
"Don't talk so rashly."
"Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't? ... Will it
be just the same? Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but
as you yourself to me myself--poor me!"
How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he
supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman's
power to tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in
this case also--
"It will be just the same."
So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's
shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light,
at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that
shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow,
and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides,
and others of the conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the
untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little cross of
two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers,
she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could
enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also
a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them
alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of
mere observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye of
maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.
| 4,306 | Chapter XIV | https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase2-chapter12-15 | During harvest, a time when field workers are most needed, Tess works harvesting grain. Her younger sister brings her baby boy for Tess to nurse and the workers notice how much she loves the baby. Sadly, however, the baby falls seriously ill and has not been christened. Tess rouses up her brothers and sisters in the middle of the night to witness the baptism she performs herself. She names him Sorrow. After the baby dies, the parson pities her and allows Tess to bury the child in a corner of the churchyard. The "girl-mother" buries him at night out of sight of the villagers and places a cross at the top of the grave and a marmalade jar of flowers at the bottom | null | 123 | 1 | [
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23,046 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/23046-chapters/7.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Comedy of Errors/section_6_part_0.txt | The Comedy of Errors.act iv.scene i | act iv, scene i | null | {"name": "Act IV, Scene i", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219160210/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/comedy-of-errors/summary/act-iv-scene-i", "summary": "At the marketplace in Ephesus, Angelo the goldsmith talks with a merchant. Apparently, Angelo owes him some money, and the Merchant wants to collect it before he sets sail to Persia. Angelo expects to pay off the Merchant with the money he'll get from E. Antipholus, who he thinks owes him for Adriana's necklace...which he would, if Angelo hadn't just given the necklace to S. Antipholus. Just then, E. Antipholus and E. Dromio enter the scene, having just left the Porpentine. E. Antipholus has arrived, expecting to collect the necklace from Angelo , but he's in for a surprise. E. Antipholus sends E. Dromio off to buy some rope and then chides Angelo for not showing up at the Porpentine with the necklace. A squabble ensues, where it becomes clear that neither man has the necklace. Angelo insists he gave it to Antipholus not half an hour ago , but E. Antipholus insists he got no such thing . Are you following this? Payment for the chain is increasingly important, as the Merchant is halting his sails until Angelo pays him, though Angelo needs to get the money from Antipholus first. Ultimately, the Merchant calls for E. Antipholus to be arrested. Though Angelo regrets it, as he isn't getting paid, he corroborates with the Merchant to get E. Antipholus jailed. Justifiably, E. Antipholus is angry and confused. To add to the confusion, S. Dromio arrives, mistakes E. Antipholus for his master, and informs him that he's secured the ship to get out of Ephesus. E. Antipholus curses S. Dromio for talking nonsense , and then gives him instructions to go to Adriana and get money for his bail. As the jailer runs off with E. Antipholus, S. Dromio is left to wonder why he's instructed to go back to the awful place where they had dinner. Still, he follows E. Antipholus's instructions, because he knows his place as a servant.", "analysis": ""} | ACT IV. SCENE I.
A public place.
_Enter _Second Merchant_, ANGELO, and an _Officer_._
_Sec. Mer._ You know since Pentecost the sum is due,
And since I have not much importuned you;
Nor now I had not, but that I am bound
To Persia, and want guilders for my voyage:
Therefore make present satisfaction, 5
Or I'll attach you by this officer.
_Ang._ Even just the sum that I do owe to you
Is growing to me by Antipholus;
And in the instant that I met with you
He had of me a chain: at five o'clock 10
I shall receive the money for the same.
Pleaseth you walk with me down to his house,
I will discharge my bond, and thank you too.
_Enter _ANTIPHOLUS of Ephesus_ and _DROMIO of Ephesus_ from
the courtezan's._
_Off._ That labour may you save: see where he comes.
_Ant. E._ While I go to the goldsmith's house, go thou 15
And buy a rope's end: that will I bestow
Among my wife and her confederates,
For locking me out of my doors by day.--
But, soft! I see the goldsmith. Get thee gone;
Buy thou a rope, and bring it home to me. 20
_Dro. E._ I buy a thousand pound a year: I buy a rope.
[_Exit._
_Ant. E._ A man is well holp up that trusts to you:
I promised your presence and the chain;
But neither chain nor goldsmith came to me.
Belike you thought our love would last too long, 25
If it were chain'd together, and therefore came not.
_Ang._ Saving your merry humour, here's the note
How much your chain weighs to the utmost carat,
The fineness of the gold, and chargeful fashion,
Which doth amount to three odd ducats more 30
Than I stand debted to this gentleman:
I pray you, see him presently discharged,
For he is bound to sea, and stays but for it.
_Ant. E._ I am not furnish'd with the present money;
Besides, I have some business in the town. 35
Good signior, take the stranger to my house,
And with you take the chain, and bid my wife
Disburse the sum on the receipt thereof:
Perchance I will be there as soon as you.
_Ang._ Then you will bring the chain to her yourself? 40
_Ant. E._ No; bear it with you, lest I come not time enough.
_Ang._ Well, sir, I will. Have you the chain about you?
_Ant. E._ An if I have not, sir, I hope you have;
Or else you may return without your money.
_Ang._ Nay, come, I pray you, sir, give me the chain: 45
Both wind and tide stays for this gentleman,
And I, to blame, have held him here too long.
_Ant. E._ Good Lord! you use this dalliance to excuse
Your breach of promise to the Porpentine.
I should have chid you for not bringing it, 50
But, like a shrew, you first begin to brawl.
_Sec. Mer._ The hour steals on; I pray you, sir, dispatch.
_Ang._ You hear how he importunes me;--the chain!
_Ant. E._ Why, give it to my wife, and fetch your money.
_Ang._ Come, come, you know I gave it you even now. 55
Either send the chain, or send me by some token.
_Ant. E._ Fie, now you run this humour out of breath.
Come, where's the chain? I pray you, let me see it.
_Sec. Mer._ My business cannot brook this dalliance.
Good sir, say whether you'll answer me or no: 60
If not, I'll leave him to the officer.
_Ant. E._ I answer you! what should I answer you?
_Ang._ The money that you owe me for the chain.
_Ant. E._ I owe you none till I receive the chain.
_Ang._ You know I gave it you half an hour since. 65
_Ant. E._ You gave me none: you wrong me much to say so.
_Ang._ You wrong me more, sir, in denying it:
Consider how it stands upon my credit.
_Sec. Mer._ Well, officer, arrest him at my suit.
_Off._ I do; and charge you in the duke's name to obey me. 70
_Ang._ This touches me in reputation.
Either consent to pay this sum for me,
Or I attach you by this officer.
_Ant. E._ Consent to pay thee that I never had!
Arrest me, foolish fellow, if thou darest. 75
_Ang._ Here is thy fee; arrest him, officer.
I would not spare my brother in this case,
If he should scorn me so apparently.
_Off._ I do arrest you, sir: you hear the suit.
_Ant. E._ I do obey thee till I give thee bail. 80
But, sirrah, you shall buy this sport as dear
As all the metal in your shop will answer.
_Ang._ Sir, sir, I shall have law in Ephesus,
To your notorious shame; I doubt it not.
_Enter _DROMIO of Syracuse_, from the bay._
_Dro. S._ Master, there is a bark of Epidamnum 85
That stays but till her owner comes aboard,
And then, sir, she bears away. Our fraughtage, sir,
I have convey'd aboard; and I have bought
The oil, the balsamum, and aqua-vitae.
The ship is in her trim; the merry wind 90
Blows fair from land: they stay for nought at all
But for their owner, master, and yourself.
_Ant. E._ How now! a madman! Why, thou peevish sheep,
What ship of Epidamnum stays for me?
_Dro. S._ A ship you sent me to, to hire waftage. 95
_Ant. E._ Thou drunken slave, I sent thee for a rope,
And told thee to what purpose and what end.
_Dro. S._ You sent me for a rope's end as soon:
You sent me to the bay, sir, for a bark.
_Ant. E._ I will debate this matter at more leisure, 100
And teach your ears to list me with more heed.
To Adriana, villain, hie thee straight:
Give her this key, and tell her, in the desk
That's cover'd o'er with Turkish tapestry
There is a purse of ducats; let her send it: 105
Tell her I am arrested in the street,
And that shall bail me: hie thee, slave, be gone!
On, officer, to prison till it come.
[_Exeunt Sec. Merchant, Angelo, Officer, and Ant. E._
_Dro. S._ To Adriana! that is where we dined,
Where Dowsabel did claim me for her husband: 110
She is too big, I hope, for me to compass.
Thither I must, although against my will,
For servants must their masters' minds fulfil. [_Exit._
NOTES: IV, 1.
8: _growing_] _owing_ Pope.
12: _Pleaseth you_] Ff. _Please you but_ Pope. _Please it you_
Anon. conj.
14: _may you_] F1 F2 F3. _you may_ F4.
17: _her_] Rowe. _their_ Ff. _these_ Collier MS.
26: _and_] om. Pope.
28: _carat_] Pope. _charect_ F1. _Raccat_ F2 F3 F4. _caract_ Collier.
29: _chargeful_] _charge for_ Anon. conj.
41: _time enough_] _in time_ Hanmer.
46: _stays_] _stay_ Pope.
_this_] F1. _the_ F2 F3 F4.
47: _to blame_] F3. _too blame_ F1 F2 F4.
53: _the chain!_] Dyce. _the chain,_ Ff. _the chain--_ Johnson.
56: _Either_] _Or_ Pope.
_me by_] _by me_ Heath conj.
60: _whether_] _whe'r_ Ff. _where_ Rowe. _if_ Pope.
62: _what_] F1. _why_ F2 F3 F4.
67: _more_] F1. om. F2 F3 F4.
70: Printed as verse by Capell.
73: _this_] F1. _the_ F2 F3 F4.
74: _thee_] F1. om. F2 F3 F4. _for_ Rowe.
85: SCENE II. Pope.
_there is_] Pope. _there's_ Ff.
87: _And then, sir,_] F1. _Then, sir,_ F2 F3 F4. _And then_ Capell.
_she_] om. Steevens.
88: _bought_] F1. _brought_ F2 F3 F4.
98: _You sent me_] _A rope! You sent me_ Capell.
_You sent me, Sir,_ Steevens.
| 1,668 | Act IV, Scene i | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219160210/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/comedy-of-errors/summary/act-iv-scene-i | At the marketplace in Ephesus, Angelo the goldsmith talks with a merchant. Apparently, Angelo owes him some money, and the Merchant wants to collect it before he sets sail to Persia. Angelo expects to pay off the Merchant with the money he'll get from E. Antipholus, who he thinks owes him for Adriana's necklace...which he would, if Angelo hadn't just given the necklace to S. Antipholus. Just then, E. Antipholus and E. Dromio enter the scene, having just left the Porpentine. E. Antipholus has arrived, expecting to collect the necklace from Angelo , but he's in for a surprise. E. Antipholus sends E. Dromio off to buy some rope and then chides Angelo for not showing up at the Porpentine with the necklace. A squabble ensues, where it becomes clear that neither man has the necklace. Angelo insists he gave it to Antipholus not half an hour ago , but E. Antipholus insists he got no such thing . Are you following this? Payment for the chain is increasingly important, as the Merchant is halting his sails until Angelo pays him, though Angelo needs to get the money from Antipholus first. Ultimately, the Merchant calls for E. Antipholus to be arrested. Though Angelo regrets it, as he isn't getting paid, he corroborates with the Merchant to get E. Antipholus jailed. Justifiably, E. Antipholus is angry and confused. To add to the confusion, S. Dromio arrives, mistakes E. Antipholus for his master, and informs him that he's secured the ship to get out of Ephesus. E. Antipholus curses S. Dromio for talking nonsense , and then gives him instructions to go to Adriana and get money for his bail. As the jailer runs off with E. Antipholus, S. Dromio is left to wonder why he's instructed to go back to the awful place where they had dinner. Still, he follows E. Antipholus's instructions, because he knows his place as a servant. | null | 320 | 1 | [
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44,747 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/44747-chapters/15.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_14_part_0.txt | The Red and the Black.part 1.chapter 15 | part 1, chapter 15 | null | {"name": "Part 1, Chapter 15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-15", "summary": "Tired of playing cat and mouse, Julien leads Madame de Renal into the garden and tells her he'll visit her that night at 2 a.m. He says there's something he needs to tell her. Madame tells him not to be a fool and he spends the rest of the evening avoiding her. True to his word, Julien gets up at two in the morning and sneaks down the hallway into Madame de Renal's room. She sits up in bed and calls him a wretch. He rushes forward and hugs her knees, weeping. A few hours later, Julien leaves the room. The narrator implies that he and Madame have had sex.", "analysis": ""} | CHAPTER XV
THE COCK'S SONG
Amour en latin faict amour;
Or done provient d'amour la mart,
Et, par avant, souley qui moreq,
Deuil, plours, pieges, forfailz, remord.
BLASON D'AMOUR.
If Julien had possessed a little of that adroitness on which he so
gratuitously plumed himself, he could have congratulated himself the
following day on the effect produced by his journey to Verrieres. His
absence had caused his clumsiness to be forgotten. But on that day
also he was rather sulky. He had a ludicrous idea in the evening, and
with singular courage he communicated it to Madame de Renal. They had
scarcely sat down in the garden before Julien brought his mouth near
Madame de Renal's ear without waiting till it was sufficiently dark and
at the risk of compromising her terribly, said to her,
"Madame, to-night, at two o'clock, I shall go into your room, I must
tell you something."
Julien trembled lest his request should be granted. His rakish pose
weighed him down so terribly that if he could have followed his own
inclination he would have returned to his room for several days and
refrained from seeing the ladies any more. He realised that he had
spoiled by his clever conduct of last evening all the bright prospects
of the day that had just passed, and was at his wits' end what to do.
Madame de Renal answered the impertinent declaration which Julien had
dared to make to her with indignation which was real and in no way
exaggerated. He thought he could see contempt in her curt reply. The
expression "for shame," had certainly occurred in that whispered answer.
Julien went to the children's room under the pretext of having
something to say to them, and on his return he placed himself beside
Madame Derville and very far from Madame de Renal. He thus deprived
himself of all possibility of taking her hand. The conversation was
serious, and Julien acquitted himself very well, apart from a few
moments of silence during which he was cudgelling his brains.
"Why can't I invent some pretty manoeuvre," he said to himself which
will force Madame de Renal to vouchsafe to me those unambiguous signs
of tenderness which a few days ago made me think that she was mine.
Julien was extremely disconcerted by the almost desperate plight
to which he had brought his affairs. Nothing, however, would have
embarrassed him more than success.
When they separated at midnight, his pessimism made him think that
he enjoyed Madame Derville's contempt, and that probably he stood no
better with Madame de Renal.
Feeling in a very bad temper and very humiliated, Julien did not sleep.
He was leagues away from the idea of giving up all intriguing and
planning, and of living from day to day with Madame de Renal, and of
being contented like a child with the happiness brought by every day.
He racked his brains inventing clever manoeuvres, which an instant
afterwards he found absurd, and, to put it shortly, was very unhappy
when two o'clock rang from the castle clock.
The noise woke him up like the cock's crow woke up St. Peter. The most
painful episode was now timed to begin--he had not given a thought to
his impertinent proposition, since the moment when he had made it and
it had been so badly received.
"I have told her that I will go to her at two o'clock," he said to
himself as he got up, "I may be inexperienced and coarse, as the son
of a peasant naturally would be. Madame Derville has given me to
understand as much, but at any rate, I will not be weak."
Julien had reason to congratulate himself on his courage, for he had
never put his self-control to so painful a test. As he opened his door,
he was trembling to such an extent that his knees gave way under him,
and he was forced to lean against the wall.
He was without shoes; he went and listened at M. de Renal's door, and
could hear his snoring. He was disconsolate, he had no longer any
excuse for not going to her room. But, Great Heaven! What was he to do
there? He had no plan, and even if he had had one, he felt himself so
nervous that he would have been incapable of carrying it out.
Eventually, suffering a thousand times more than if he had been walking
to his death, he entered the little corridor that led to Madame de
Renal's room. He opened the door with a trembling hand and made a
frightful noise.
There was light; a night light was burning on the mantelpiece. He
had not expected this new misfortune. As she saw him enter, Madame
de Renal got quickly out of bed. "Wretch," she cried. There was a
little confusion. Julien forgot his useless plans, and turned to his
natural role. To fail to please so charming a woman appeared to him the
greatest of misfortunes. His only answer to her reproaches was to throw
himself at her feet while he kissed her knees. As she was speaking to
him with extreme harshness, he burst into tears.
When Julien came out of Madame de Renal's room some hours afterwards,
one could have said, adopting the conventional language of the novel,
that there was nothing left to be desired. In fact, he owed to the love
he had inspired, and to the unexpected impression which her alluring
charms had produced upon him, a victory to which his own clumsy tactics
would never have led him.
But victim that he was of a distorted pride, he pretended even in
the sweetest moments to play the role of a man accustomed to the
subjugation of women: he made incredible but deliberate efforts to
spoil his natural charm. Instead of watching the transports which he
was bringing into existence, and those pangs of remorse which only set
their keenness into fuller relief, the idea of duty was continually
before his eyes. He feared a frightful remorse, and eternal ridicule,
if he departed from the ideal model he proposed to follow. In a word,
the very quality which made Julien into a superior being was precisely
that which prevented him from savouring the happiness which was placed
within his grasp. It's like the case of a young girl of sixteen with a
charming complexion who is mad enough to put on rouge before going to a
ball.
Mortally terrified by the apparition of Julien, Madame de Renal was
soon a prey to the most cruel alarm. The prayers and despair of Julien
troubled her keenly.
Even when there was nothing left for her to refuse him she pushed
Julien away from her with a genuine indignation, and straightway threw
herself into his arms. There was no plan apparent in all this conduct.
She thought herself eternally damned, and tried to hide from herself
the sight of hell by loading Julien with the wildest caresses. In a
word, nothing would have been lacking in our hero's happiness, not even
an ardent sensibility in the woman whom he had just captured, if he had
only known how to enjoy it. Julien's departure did not in any way bring
to an end those ecstacies which thrilled her in spite of herself, and
those troubles of remorse which lacerated her.
"My God! being happy--being loved, is that all it comes to?" This was
Julien's first thought as he entered his room. He was a prey to the
astonishment and nervous anxiety of the man who has just obtained
what he has long desired. He has been accustomed to desire, and has
no longer anything to desire, and nevertheless has no memories. Like
a soldier coming back from parade. Julien was absorbed in rehearsing
the details of his conduct. "Have I failed in nothing which I owe to
myself? Have I played my part well?"
And what a part! the part of a man accustomed to be brilliant with
women.
| 1,272 | Part 1, Chapter 15 | https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-15 | Tired of playing cat and mouse, Julien leads Madame de Renal into the garden and tells her he'll visit her that night at 2 a.m. He says there's something he needs to tell her. Madame tells him not to be a fool and he spends the rest of the evening avoiding her. True to his word, Julien gets up at two in the morning and sneaks down the hallway into Madame de Renal's room. She sits up in bed and calls him a wretch. He rushes forward and hugs her knees, weeping. A few hours later, Julien leaves the room. The narrator implies that he and Madame have had sex. | null | 110 | 1 | [
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28,054 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/67.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Brothers Karamazov/section_66_part_0.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 10.chapter 5 | book 10, chapter 5 | null | {"name": "Book 10, Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-10-chapter-5", "summary": "Ilyusha's room is crowded with kids, along with the rest of his family. Captain Snegiryov has accepted Katerina's charity, and she has even paid for a famous doctor to come in to diagnose Ilyusha that day. Alyosha is also present. When Kolya comes in, Ilyusha is thrilled. He's petting a mastiff puppy that his father brought him, but he's still in mourning over Zhuchka. Kolya tells Ilyusha that he's brought him an even better dog. But when the dog, Perezvon, finally enters, Ilyusha instantly recognizes it as the ever-suffering Zhuchka. It seems that over the past several weeks, Kolya has found Zhuchka and trained it all kinds of tricks. Thrilled by Ilyusha's reaction, Kolya brings out his toy cannon again but hands it over to Ilyusha's mother to play with at Ilyusha's request. Kolya entertains Ilyusha with the story of his recent brush with the law. Walking through the square, he had tricked a peasant into rolling over a goose with a cart. He was taken to court but got off with just a stern lecture. Another child, Kartashov, tries to show up Kolya on his knowledge of history - specifically the founders of Troy - but Kolya is able to silence the child with a few clever questions. The antics are drawn to a close, however, when the famous doctor makes his appearance in the room. Everybody else clears out.", "analysis": ""} | Chapter V. By Ilusha's Bedside
The room inhabited by the family of the retired captain Snegiryov is
already familiar to the reader. It was close and crowded at that moment
with a number of visitors. Several boys were sitting with Ilusha, and
though all of them, like Smurov, were prepared to deny that it was Alyosha
who had brought them and reconciled them with Ilusha, it was really the
fact. All the art he had used had been to take them, one by one, to
Ilusha, without "sheepish sentimentality," appearing to do so casually and
without design. It was a great consolation to Ilusha in his suffering. He
was greatly touched by seeing the almost tender affection and sympathy
shown him by these boys, who had been his enemies. Krassotkin was the only
one missing and his absence was a heavy load on Ilusha's heart. Perhaps
the bitterest of all his bitter memories was his stabbing Krassotkin, who
had been his one friend and protector. Clever little Smurov, who was the
first to make it up with Ilusha, thought it was so. But when Smurov hinted
to Krassotkin that Alyosha wanted to come and see him about something, the
latter cut him short, bidding Smurov tell "Karamazov" at once that he knew
best what to do, that he wanted no one's advice, and that, if he went to
see Ilusha, he would choose his own time for he had "his own reasons."
That was a fortnight before this Sunday. That was why Alyosha had not been
to see him, as he had meant to. But though he waited, he sent Smurov to
him twice again. Both times Krassotkin met him with a curt, impatient
refusal, sending Alyosha a message not to bother him any more, that if he
came himself, he, Krassotkin, would not go to Ilusha at all. Up to the
very last day, Smurov did not know that Kolya meant to go to Ilusha that
morning, and only the evening before, as he parted from Smurov, Kolya
abruptly told him to wait at home for him next morning, for he would go
with him to the Snegiryovs', but warned him on no account to say he was
coming, as he wanted to drop in casually. Smurov obeyed. Smurov's fancy
that Kolya would bring back the lost dog was based on the words Kolya had
dropped that "they must be asses not to find the dog, if it was alive."
When Smurov, waiting for an opportunity, timidly hinted at his guess about
the dog, Krassotkin flew into a violent rage. "I'm not such an ass as to
go hunting about the town for other people's dogs when I've got a dog of
my own! And how can you imagine a dog could be alive after swallowing a
pin? Sheepish sentimentality, that's what it is!"
For the last fortnight Ilusha had not left his little bed under the ikons
in the corner. He had not been to school since the day he met Alyosha and
bit his finger. He was taken ill the same day, though for a month
afterwards he was sometimes able to get up and walk about the room and
passage. But latterly he had become so weak that he could not move without
help from his father. His father was terribly concerned about him. He even
gave up drinking and was almost crazy with terror that his boy would die.
And often, especially after leading him round the room on his arm and
putting him back to bed, he would run to a dark corner in the passage and,
leaning his head against the wall, he would break into paroxysms of
violent weeping, stifling his sobs that they might not be heard by Ilusha.
Returning to the room, he would usually begin doing something to amuse and
comfort his precious boy; he would tell him stories, funny anecdotes, or
would mimic comic people he had happened to meet, even imitate the howls
and cries of animals. But Ilusha could not bear to see his father fooling
and playing the buffoon. Though the boy tried not to show how he disliked
it, he saw with an aching heart that his father was an object of contempt,
and he was continually haunted by the memory of the "wisp of tow" and that
"terrible day."
Nina, Ilusha's gentle, crippled sister, did not like her father's
buffoonery either (Varvara had been gone for some time past to Petersburg
to study at the university). But the half-imbecile mother was greatly
diverted and laughed heartily when her husband began capering about or
performing something. It was the only way she could be amused; all the
rest of the time she was grumbling and complaining that now every one had
forgotten her, that no one treated her with respect, that she was
slighted, and so on. But during the last few days she had completely
changed. She began looking constantly at Ilusha's bed in the corner and
seemed lost in thought. She was more silent, quieter, and, if she cried,
she cried quietly so as not to be heard. The captain noticed the change in
her with mournful perplexity. The boys' visits at first only angered her,
but later on their merry shouts and stories began to divert her, and at
last she liked them so much that, if the boys had given up coming, she
would have felt dreary without them. When the children told some story or
played a game, she laughed and clapped her hands. She called some of them
to her and kissed them. She was particularly fond of Smurov.
As for the captain, the presence in his room of the children, who came to
cheer up Ilusha, filled his heart from the first with ecstatic joy. He
even hoped that Ilusha would now get over his depression, and that that
would hasten his recovery. In spite of his alarm about Ilusha, he had not,
till lately, felt one minute's doubt of his boy's ultimate recovery.
He met his little visitors with homage, waited upon them hand and foot; he
was ready to be their horse and even began letting them ride on his back,
but Ilusha did not like the game and it was given up. He began buying
little things for them, gingerbread and nuts, gave them tea and cut them
sandwiches. It must be noted that all this time he had plenty of money. He
had taken the two hundred roubles from Katerina Ivanovna just as Alyosha
had predicted he would. And afterwards Katerina Ivanovna, learning more
about their circumstances and Ilusha's illness, visited them herself, made
the acquaintance of the family, and succeeded in fascinating the half-
imbecile mother. Since then she had been lavish in helping them, and the
captain, terror-stricken at the thought that his boy might be dying,
forgot his pride and humbly accepted her assistance.
All this time Doctor Herzenstube, who was called in by Katerina Ivanovna,
came punctually every other day, but little was gained by his visits and
he dosed the invalid mercilessly. But on that Sunday morning a new doctor
was expected, who had come from Moscow, where he had a great reputation.
Katerina Ivanovna had sent for him from Moscow at great expense, not
expressly for Ilusha, but for another object of which more will be said in
its place hereafter. But, as he had come, she had asked him to see Ilusha
as well, and the captain had been told to expect him. He hadn't the
slightest idea that Kolya Krassotkin was coming, though he had long wished
for a visit from the boy for whom Ilusha was fretting.
At the moment when Krassotkin opened the door and came into the room, the
captain and all the boys were round Ilusha's bed, looking at a tiny
mastiff pup, which had only been born the day before, though the captain
had bespoken it a week ago to comfort and amuse Ilusha, who was still
fretting over the lost and probably dead Zhutchka. Ilusha, who had heard
three days before that he was to be presented with a puppy, not an
ordinary puppy, but a pedigree mastiff (a very important point, of
course), tried from delicacy of feeling to pretend that he was pleased.
But his father and the boys could not help seeing that the puppy only
served to recall to his little heart the thought of the unhappy dog he had
killed. The puppy lay beside him feebly moving and he, smiling sadly,
stroked it with his thin, pale, wasted hand. Clearly he liked the puppy,
but ... it wasn't Zhutchka; if he could have had Zhutchka and the puppy,
too, then he would have been completely happy.
"Krassotkin!" cried one of the boys suddenly. He was the first to see him
come in.
Krassotkin's entrance made a general sensation; the boys moved away and
stood on each side of the bed, so that he could get a full view of Ilusha.
The captain ran eagerly to meet Kolya.
"Please come in ... you are welcome!" he said hurriedly. "Ilusha, Mr.
Krassotkin has come to see you!"
But Krassotkin, shaking hands with him hurriedly, instantly showed his
complete knowledge of the manners of good society. He turned first to the
captain's wife sitting in her arm-chair, who was very ill-humored at the
moment, and was grumbling that the boys stood between her and Ilusha's bed
and did not let her see the new puppy. With the greatest courtesy he made
her a bow, scraping his foot, and turning to Nina, he made her, as the
only other lady present, a similar bow. This polite behavior made an
extremely favorable impression on the deranged lady.
"There, you can see at once he is a young man that has been well brought
up," she commented aloud, throwing up her hands; "but as for our other
visitors they come in one on the top of another."
"How do you mean, mamma, one on the top of another, how is that?" muttered
the captain affectionately, though a little anxious on her account.
"That's how they ride in. They get on each other's shoulders in the
passage and prance in like that on a respectable family. Strange sort of
visitors!"
"But who's come in like that, mamma?"
"Why, that boy came in riding on that one's back and this one on that
one's."
Kolya was already by Ilusha's bedside. The sick boy turned visibly paler.
He raised himself in the bed and looked intently at Kolya. Kolya had not
seen his little friend for two months, and he was overwhelmed at the sight
of him. He had never imagined that he would see such a wasted, yellow
face, such enormous, feverishly glowing eyes and such thin little hands.
He saw, with grieved surprise, Ilusha's rapid, hard breathing and dry
lips. He stepped close to him, held out his hand, and almost overwhelmed,
he said:
"Well, old man ... how are you?" But his voice failed him, he couldn't
achieve an appearance of ease; his face suddenly twitched and the corners
of his mouth quivered. Ilusha smiled a pitiful little smile, still unable
to utter a word. Something moved Kolya to raise his hand and pass it over
Ilusha's hair.
"Never mind!" he murmured softly to him to cheer him up, or perhaps not
knowing why he said it. For a minute they were silent again.
"Hallo, so you've got a new puppy?" Kolya said suddenly, in a most callous
voice.
"Ye--es," answered Ilusha in a long whisper, gasping for breath.
"A black nose, that means he'll be fierce, a good house-dog," Kolya
observed gravely and stolidly, as if the only thing he cared about was the
puppy and its black nose. But in reality he still had to do his utmost to
control his feelings not to burst out crying like a child, and do what he
would he could not control it. "When it grows up, you'll have to keep it
on the chain, I'm sure."
"He'll be a huge dog!" cried one of the boys.
"Of course he will," "a mastiff," "large," "like this," "as big as a
calf," shouted several voices.
"As big as a calf, as a real calf," chimed in the captain. "I got one like
that on purpose, one of the fiercest breed, and his parents are huge and
very fierce, they stand as high as this from the floor.... Sit down here,
on Ilusha's bed, or here on the bench. You are welcome, we've been hoping
to see you a long time.... You were so kind as to come with Alexey
Fyodorovitch?"
Krassotkin sat on the edge of the bed, at Ilusha's feet. Though he had
perhaps prepared a free-and-easy opening for the conversation on his way,
now he completely lost the thread of it.
"No ... I came with Perezvon. I've got a dog now, called Perezvon. A
Slavonic name. He's out there ... if I whistle, he'll run in. I've brought
a dog, too," he said, addressing Ilusha all at once. "Do you remember
Zhutchka, old man?" he suddenly fired the question at him.
Ilusha's little face quivered. He looked with an agonized expression at
Kolya. Alyosha, standing at the door, frowned and signed to Kolya not to
speak of Zhutchka, but he did not or would not notice.
"Where ... is Zhutchka?" Ilusha asked in a broken voice.
"Oh, well, my boy, your Zhutchka's lost and done for!"
Ilusha did not speak, but he fixed an intent gaze once more on Kolya.
Alyosha, catching Kolya's eye, signed to him vigorously again, but he
turned away his eyes pretending not to have noticed.
"It must have run away and died somewhere. It must have died after a meal
like that," Kolya pronounced pitilessly, though he seemed a little
breathless. "But I've got a dog, Perezvon ... A Slavonic name.... I've
brought him to show you."
"I don't want him!" said Ilusha suddenly.
"No, no, you really must see him ... it will amuse you. I brought him on
purpose.... He's the same sort of shaggy dog.... You allow me to call in
my dog, madam?" He suddenly addressed Madame Snegiryov, with inexplicable
excitement in his manner.
"I don't want him, I don't want him!" cried Ilusha, with a mournful break
in his voice. There was a reproachful light in his eyes.
"You'd better," the captain started up from the chest by the wall on which
he had just sat down, "you'd better ... another time," he muttered, but
Kolya could not be restrained. He hurriedly shouted to Smurov, "Open the
door," and as soon as it was open, he blew his whistle. Perezvon dashed
headlong into the room.
"Jump, Perezvon, beg! Beg!" shouted Kolya, jumping up, and the dog stood
erect on its hind-legs by Ilusha's bedside. What followed was a surprise
to every one: Ilusha started, lurched violently forward, bent over
Perezvon and gazed at him, faint with suspense.
"It's ... Zhutchka!" he cried suddenly, in a voice breaking with joy and
suffering.
"And who did you think it was?" Krassotkin shouted with all his might, in
a ringing, happy voice, and bending down he seized the dog and lifted him
up to Ilusha.
"Look, old man, you see, blind of one eye and the left ear is torn, just
the marks you described to me. It was by that I found him. I found him
directly. He did not belong to any one!" he explained, turning quickly to
the captain, to his wife, to Alyosha and then again to Ilusha. "He used to
live in the Fedotovs' back-yard. Though he made his home there, they did
not feed him. He was a stray dog that had run away from the village ... I
found him.... You see, old man, he couldn't have swallowed what you gave
him. If he had, he must have died, he must have! So he must have spat it
out, since he is alive. You did not see him do it. But the pin pricked his
tongue, that is why he squealed. He ran away squealing and you thought
he'd swallowed it. He might well squeal, because the skin of dogs' mouths
is so tender ... tenderer than in men, much tenderer!" Kolya cried
impetuously, his face glowing and radiant with delight. Ilusha could not
speak. White as a sheet, he gazed open-mouthed at Kolya, with his great
eyes almost starting out of his head. And if Krassotkin, who had no
suspicion of it, had known what a disastrous and fatal effect such a
moment might have on the sick child's health, nothing would have induced
him to play such a trick on him. But Alyosha was perhaps the only person
in the room who realized it. As for the captain he behaved like a small
child.
"Zhutchka! It's Zhutchka!" he cried in a blissful voice, "Ilusha, this is
Zhutchka, your Zhutchka! Mamma, this is Zhutchka!" He was almost weeping.
"And I never guessed!" cried Smurov regretfully. "Bravo, Krassotkin! I
said he'd find the dog and here he's found him."
"Here he's found him!" another boy repeated gleefully.
"Krassotkin's a brick!" cried a third voice.
"He's a brick, he's a brick!" cried the other boys, and they began
clapping.
"Wait, wait," Krassotkin did his utmost to shout above them all. "I'll
tell you how it happened, that's the whole point. I found him, I took him
home and hid him at once. I kept him locked up at home and did not show
him to any one till to-day. Only Smurov has known for the last fortnight,
but I assured him this dog was called Perezvon and he did not guess. And
meanwhile I taught the dog all sorts of tricks. You should only see all
the things he can do! I trained him so as to bring you a well-trained dog,
in good condition, old man, so as to be able to say to you, 'See, old man,
what a fine dog your Zhutchka is now!' Haven't you a bit of meat? He'll
show you a trick that will make you die with laughing. A piece of meat,
haven't you got any?"
The captain ran across the passage to the landlady, where their cooking
was done. Not to lose precious time, Kolya, in desperate haste, shouted to
Perezvon, "Dead!" And the dog immediately turned round and lay on his back
with its four paws in the air. The boys laughed. Ilusha looked on with the
same suffering smile, but the person most delighted with the dog's
performance was "mamma." She laughed at the dog and began snapping her
fingers and calling it, "Perezvon, Perezvon!"
"Nothing will make him get up, nothing!" Kolya cried triumphantly, proud
of his success. "He won't move for all the shouting in the world, but if I
call to him, he'll jump up in a minute. Ici, Perezvon!" The dog leapt up
and bounded about, whining with delight. The captain ran back with a piece
of cooked beef.
"Is it hot?" Kolya inquired hurriedly, with a business-like air, taking
the meat. "Dogs don't like hot things. No, it's all right. Look,
everybody, look, Ilusha, look, old man; why aren't you looking? He does
not look at him, now I've brought him."
The new trick consisted in making the dog stand motionless with his nose
out and putting a tempting morsel of meat just on his nose. The luckless
dog had to stand without moving, with the meat on his nose, as long as his
master chose to keep him, without a movement, perhaps for half an hour.
But he kept Perezvon only for a brief moment.
"Paid for!" cried Kolya, and the meat passed in a flash from the dog's
nose to his mouth. The audience, of course, expressed enthusiasm and
surprise.
"Can you really have put off coming all this time simply to train the
dog?" exclaimed Alyosha, with an involuntary note of reproach in his
voice.
"Simply for that!" answered Kolya, with perfect simplicity. "I wanted to
show him in all his glory."
"Perezvon! Perezvon," called Ilusha suddenly, snapping his thin fingers
and beckoning to the dog.
"What is it? Let him jump up on the bed! _Ici_, Perezvon!" Kolya slapped
the bed and Perezvon darted up by Ilusha. The boy threw both arms round
his head and Perezvon instantly licked his cheek. Ilusha crept close to
him, stretched himself out in bed and hid his face in the dog's shaggy
coat.
"Dear, dear!" kept exclaiming the captain. Kolya sat down again on the
edge of the bed.
"Ilusha, I can show you another trick. I've brought you a little cannon.
You remember, I told you about it before and you said how much you'd like
to see it. Well, here, I've brought it to you."
And Kolya hurriedly pulled out of his satchel the little bronze cannon. He
hurried, because he was happy himself. Another time he would have waited
till the sensation made by Perezvon had passed off, now he hurried on
regardless of all consideration. "You are all happy now," he felt, "so
here's something to make you happier!" He was perfectly enchanted himself.
"I've been coveting this thing for a long while; it's for you, old man,
it's for you. It belonged to Morozov, it was no use to him, he had it from
his brother. I swopped a book from father's book-case for it, _A Kinsman
of Mahomet or Salutary Folly_, a scandalous book published in Moscow a
hundred years ago, before they had any censorship. And Morozov has a taste
for such things. He was grateful to me, too...."
Kolya held the cannon in his hand so that all could see and admire it.
Ilusha raised himself, and, with his right arm still round the dog, he
gazed enchanted at the toy. The sensation was even greater when Kolya
announced that he had gunpowder too, and that it could be fired off at
once "if it won't alarm the ladies." "Mamma" immediately asked to look at
the toy closer and her request was granted. She was much pleased with the
little bronze cannon on wheels and began rolling it to and fro on her lap.
She readily gave permission for the cannon to be fired, without any idea
of what she had been asked. Kolya showed the powder and the shot. The
captain, as a military man, undertook to load it, putting in a minute
quantity of powder. He asked that the shot might be put off till another
time. The cannon was put on the floor, aiming towards an empty part of the
room, three grains of powder were thrust into the touch-hole and a match
was put to it. A magnificent explosion followed. Mamma was startled, but
at once laughed with delight. The boys gazed in speechless triumph. But
the captain, looking at Ilusha, was more enchanted than any of them. Kolya
picked up the cannon and immediately presented it to Ilusha, together with
the powder and the shot.
"I got it for you, for you! I've been keeping it for you a long time," he
repeated once more in his delight.
"Oh, give it to me! No, give me the cannon!" mamma began begging like a
little child. Her face showed a piteous fear that she would not get it.
Kolya was disconcerted. The captain fidgeted uneasily.
"Mamma, mamma," he ran to her, "the cannon's yours, of course, but let
Ilusha have it, because it's a present to him, but it's just as good as
yours. Ilusha will always let you play with it; it shall belong to both of
you, both of you."
"No, I don't want it to belong to both of us, I want it to be mine
altogether, not Ilusha's," persisted mamma, on the point of tears.
"Take it, mother, here, keep it!" Ilusha cried. "Krassotkin, may I give it
to my mother?" he turned to Krassotkin with an imploring face, as though
he were afraid he might be offended at his giving his present to some one
else.
"Of course you may," Krassotkin assented heartily, and, taking the cannon
from Ilusha, he handed it himself to mamma with a polite bow. She was so
touched that she cried.
"Ilusha, darling, he's the one who loves his mamma!" she said tenderly,
and at once began wheeling the cannon to and fro on her lap again.
"Mamma, let me kiss your hand." The captain darted up to her at once and
did so.
"And I never saw such a charming fellow as this nice boy," said the
grateful lady, pointing to Krassotkin.
"And I'll bring you as much powder as you like, Ilusha. We make the powder
ourselves now. Borovikov found out how it's made--twenty-four parts of
saltpeter, ten of sulphur and six of birchwood charcoal. It's all pounded
together, mixed into a paste with water and rubbed through a tammy
sieve--that's how it's done."
"Smurov told me about your powder, only father says it's not real
gunpowder," responded Ilusha.
"Not real?" Kolya flushed. "It burns. I don't know, of course."
"No, I didn't mean that," put in the captain with a guilty face. "I only
said that real powder is not made like that, but that's nothing, it can be
made so."
"I don't know, you know best. We lighted some in a pomatum pot, it burned
splendidly, it all burnt away leaving only a tiny ash. But that was only
the paste, and if you rub it through ... but of course you know best, I
don't know.... And Bulkin's father thrashed him on account of our powder,
did you hear?" he turned to Ilusha.
"Yes," answered Ilusha. He listened to Kolya with immense interest and
enjoyment.
"We had prepared a whole bottle of it and he used to keep it under his
bed. His father saw it. He said it might explode, and thrashed him on the
spot. He was going to make a complaint against me to the masters. He is
not allowed to go about with me now, no one is allowed to go about with me
now. Smurov is not allowed to either, I've got a bad name with every one.
They say I'm a 'desperate character,' " Kolya smiled scornfully. "It all
began from what happened on the railway."
"Ah, we've heard of that exploit of yours, too," cried the captain. "How
could you lie still on the line? Is it possible you weren't the least
afraid, lying there under the train? Weren't you frightened?"
The captain was abject in his flattery of Kolya.
"N--not particularly," answered Kolya carelessly. "What's blasted my
reputation more than anything here was that cursed goose," he said,
turning again to Ilusha. But though he assumed an unconcerned air as he
talked, he still could not control himself and was continually missing the
note he tried to keep up.
"Ah! I heard about the goose!" Ilusha laughed, beaming all over. "They
told me, but I didn't understand. Did they really take you to the court?"
"The most stupid, trivial affair, they made a mountain of a molehill as
they always do," Kolya began carelessly. "I was walking through the
market-place here one day, just when they'd driven in the geese. I stopped
and looked at them. All at once a fellow, who is an errand-boy at
Plotnikov's now, looked at me and said, 'What are you looking at the geese
for?' I looked at him; he was a stupid, moon-faced fellow of twenty. I am
always on the side of the peasantry, you know. I like talking to the
peasants.... We've dropped behind the peasants--that's an axiom. I believe
you are laughing, Karamazov?"
"No, Heaven forbid, I am listening," said Alyosha with a most good-natured
air, and the sensitive Kolya was immediately reassured.
"My theory, Karamazov, is clear and simple," he hurried on again, looking
pleased. "I believe in the people and am always glad to give them their
due, but I am not for spoiling them, that is a _sine qua non_ ... But I
was telling you about the goose. So I turned to the fool and answered, 'I
am wondering what the goose thinks about.' He looked at me quite stupidly,
'And what does the goose think about?' he asked. 'Do you see that cart
full of oats?' I said. 'The oats are dropping out of the sack, and the
goose has put its neck right under the wheel to gobble them up--do you
see?' 'I see that quite well,' he said. 'Well,' said I, 'if that cart were
to move on a little, would it break the goose's neck or not?' 'It'd be
sure to break it,' and he grinned all over his face, highly delighted.
'Come on, then,' said I, 'let's try.' 'Let's,' he said. And it did not
take us long to arrange: he stood at the bridle without being noticed, and
I stood on one side to direct the goose. And the owner wasn't looking, he
was talking to some one, so I had nothing to do, the goose thrust its head
in after the oats of itself, under the cart, just under the wheel. I
winked at the lad, he tugged at the bridle, and crack. The goose's neck
was broken in half. And, as luck would have it, all the peasants saw us at
that moment and they kicked up a shindy at once. 'You did that on
purpose!' 'No, not on purpose.' 'Yes, you did, on purpose!' Well, they
shouted, 'Take him to the justice of the peace!' They took me, too. 'You
were there, too,' they said, 'you helped, you're known all over the
market!' And, for some reason, I really am known all over the market,"
Kolya added conceitedly. "We all went off to the justice's, they brought
the goose, too. The fellow was crying in a great funk, simply blubbering
like a woman. And the farmer kept shouting that you could kill any number
of geese like that. Well, of course, there were witnesses. The justice of
the peace settled it in a minute, that the farmer was to be paid a rouble
for the goose, and the fellow to have the goose. And he was warned not to
play such pranks again. And the fellow kept blubbering like a woman. 'It
wasn't me,' he said, 'it was he egged me on,' and he pointed to me. I
answered with the utmost composure that I hadn't egged him on, that I
simply stated the general proposition, had spoken hypothetically. The
justice of the peace smiled and was vexed with himself at once for having
smiled. 'I'll complain to your masters of you, so that for the future you
mayn't waste your time on such general propositions, instead of sitting at
your books and learning your lessons.' He didn't complain to the masters,
that was a joke, but the matter was noised abroad and came to the ears of
the masters. Their ears are long, you know! The classical master,
Kolbasnikov, was particularly shocked about it, but Dardanelov got me off
again. But Kolbasnikov is savage with every one now like a green ass. Did
you know, Ilusha, he is just married, got a dowry of a thousand roubles,
and his bride's a regular fright of the first rank and the last degree.
The third-class fellows wrote an epigram on it:
Astounding news has reached the class,
Kolbasnikov has been an ass.
And so on, awfully funny, I'll bring it to you later on. I say nothing
against Dardanelov, he is a learned man, there's no doubt about it. I
respect men like that and it's not because he stood up for me."
"But you took him down about the founders of Troy!" Smurov put in
suddenly, unmistakably proud of Krassotkin at such a moment. He was
particularly pleased with the story of the goose.
"Did you really take him down?" the captain inquired, in a flattering way.
"On the question who founded Troy? We heard of it, Ilusha told me about it
at the time."
"He knows everything, father, he knows more than any of us!" put in
Ilusha; "he only pretends to be like that, but really he is top in every
subject...."
Ilusha looked at Kolya with infinite happiness.
"Oh, that's all nonsense about Troy, a trivial matter. I consider this an
unimportant question," said Kolya with haughty humility. He had by now
completely recovered his dignity, though he was still a little uneasy. He
felt that he was greatly excited and that he had talked about the goose,
for instance, with too little reserve, while Alyosha had looked serious
and had not said a word all the time. And the vain boy began by degrees to
have a rankling fear that Alyosha was silent because he despised him, and
thought he was showing off before him. If he dared to think anything like
that Kolya would--
"I regard the question as quite a trivial one," he rapped out again,
proudly.
"And I know who founded Troy," a boy, who had not spoken before, said
suddenly, to the surprise of every one. He was silent and seemed to be
shy. He was a pretty boy of about eleven, called Kartashov. He was sitting
near the door. Kolya looked at him with dignified amazement.
The fact was that the identity of the founders of Troy had become a secret
for the whole school, a secret which could only be discovered by reading
Smaragdov, and no one had Smaragdov but Kolya. One day, when Kolya's back
was turned, Kartashov hastily opened Smaragdov, which lay among Kolya's
books, and immediately lighted on the passage relating to the foundation
of Troy. This was a good time ago, but he felt uneasy and could not bring
himself to announce publicly that he too knew who had founded Troy, afraid
of what might happen and of Krassotkin's somehow putting him to shame over
it. But now he couldn't resist saying it. For weeks he had been longing
to.
"Well, who did found it?" asked Kolya, turning to him with haughty
superciliousness. He saw from his face that he really did know and at once
made up his mind how to take it. There was, so to speak, a discordant note
in the general harmony.
"Troy was founded by Teucer, Dardanus, Ilius and Tros," the boy rapped out
at once, and in the same instant he blushed, blushed so, that it was
painful to look at him. But the boys stared at him, stared at him for a
whole minute, and then all the staring eyes turned at once and were
fastened upon Kolya, who was still scanning the audacious boy with
disdainful composure.
"In what sense did they found it?" he deigned to comment at last. "And
what is meant by founding a city or a state? What do they do? Did they go
and each lay a brick, do you suppose?"
There was laughter. The offending boy turned from pink to crimson. He was
silent and on the point of tears. Kolya held him so for a minute.
"Before you talk of a historical event like the foundation of a
nationality, you must first understand what you mean by it," he admonished
him in stern, incisive tones. "But I attach no consequence to these old
wives' tales and I don't think much of universal history in general," he
added carelessly, addressing the company generally.
"Universal history?" the captain inquired, looking almost scared.
"Yes, universal history! It's the study of the successive follies of
mankind and nothing more. The only subjects I respect are mathematics and
natural science," said Kolya. He was showing off and he stole a glance at
Alyosha; his was the only opinion he was afraid of there. But Alyosha was
still silent and still serious as before. If Alyosha had said a word it
would have stopped him, but Alyosha was silent and "it might be the
silence of contempt," and that finally irritated Kolya.
"The classical languages, too ... they are simply madness, nothing more.
You seem to disagree with me again, Karamazov?"
"I don't agree," said Alyosha, with a faint smile.
"The study of the classics, if you ask my opinion, is simply a police
measure, that's simply why it has been introduced into our schools." By
degrees Kolya began to get breathless again. "Latin and Greek were
introduced because they are a bore and because they stupefy the intellect.
It was dull before, so what could they do to make things duller? It was
senseless enough before, so what could they do to make it more senseless?
So they thought of Greek and Latin. That's my opinion, I hope I shall
never change it," Kolya finished abruptly. His cheeks were flushed.
"That's true," assented Smurov suddenly, in a ringing tone of conviction.
He had listened attentively.
"And yet he is first in Latin himself," cried one of the group of boys
suddenly.
"Yes, father, he says that and yet he is first in Latin," echoed Ilusha.
"What of it?" Kolya thought fit to defend himself, though the praise was
very sweet to him. "I am fagging away at Latin because I have to, because
I promised my mother to pass my examination, and I think that whatever you
do, it's worth doing it well. But in my soul I have a profound contempt
for the classics and all that fraud.... You don't agree, Karamazov?"
"Why 'fraud'?" Alyosha smiled again.
"Well, all the classical authors have been translated into all languages,
so it was not for the sake of studying the classics they introduced Latin,
but solely as a police measure, to stupefy the intelligence. So what can
one call it but a fraud?"
"Why, who taught you all this?" cried Alyosha, surprised at last.
"In the first place I am capable of thinking for myself without being
taught. Besides, what I said just now about the classics being translated
our teacher Kolbasnikov has said to the whole of the third class."
"The doctor has come!" cried Nina, who had been silent till then.
A carriage belonging to Madame Hohlakov drove up to the gate. The captain,
who had been expecting the doctor all the morning, rushed headlong out to
meet him. "Mamma" pulled herself together and assumed a dignified air.
Alyosha went up to Ilusha and began setting his pillows straight. Nina,
from her invalid chair, anxiously watched him putting the bed tidy. The
boys hurriedly took leave. Some of them promised to come again in the
evening. Kolya called Perezvon and the dog jumped off the bed.
"I won't go away, I won't go away," Kolya said hastily to Ilusha. "I'll
wait in the passage and come back when the doctor's gone, I'll come back
with Perezvon."
But by now the doctor had entered, an important-looking person with long,
dark whiskers and a shiny, shaven chin, wearing a bearskin coat. As he
crossed the threshold he stopped, taken aback; he probably fancied he had
come to the wrong place. "How is this? Where am I?" he muttered, not
removing his coat nor his peaked sealskin cap. The crowd, the poverty of
the room, the washing hanging on a line in the corner, puzzled him. The
captain, bent double, was bowing low before him.
"It's here, sir, here, sir," he muttered cringingly; "it's here, you've
come right, you were coming to us..."
"Sne-gi-ryov?" the doctor said loudly and pompously. "Mr. Snegiryov--is
that you?"
"That's me, sir!"
"Ah!"
The doctor looked round the room with a squeamish air once more and threw
off his coat, displaying to all eyes the grand decoration at his neck. The
captain caught the fur coat in the air, and the doctor took off his cap.
"Where is the patient?" he asked emphatically.
| 6,115 | Book 10, Chapter 5 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-10-chapter-5 | Ilyusha's room is crowded with kids, along with the rest of his family. Captain Snegiryov has accepted Katerina's charity, and she has even paid for a famous doctor to come in to diagnose Ilyusha that day. Alyosha is also present. When Kolya comes in, Ilyusha is thrilled. He's petting a mastiff puppy that his father brought him, but he's still in mourning over Zhuchka. Kolya tells Ilyusha that he's brought him an even better dog. But when the dog, Perezvon, finally enters, Ilyusha instantly recognizes it as the ever-suffering Zhuchka. It seems that over the past several weeks, Kolya has found Zhuchka and trained it all kinds of tricks. Thrilled by Ilyusha's reaction, Kolya brings out his toy cannon again but hands it over to Ilyusha's mother to play with at Ilyusha's request. Kolya entertains Ilyusha with the story of his recent brush with the law. Walking through the square, he had tricked a peasant into rolling over a goose with a cart. He was taken to court but got off with just a stern lecture. Another child, Kartashov, tries to show up Kolya on his knowledge of history - specifically the founders of Troy - but Kolya is able to silence the child with a few clever questions. The antics are drawn to a close, however, when the famous doctor makes his appearance in the room. Everybody else clears out. | null | 231 | 1 | [
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107 | true | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/chapters_5_to_8.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_1_part_0.txt | Far from the Madding Crowd.chapters 5-8 | chapters 5-8 | null | {"name": "", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210225000853/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/maddingcrowd/section2/", "summary": "Not long after he proposes, Gabriel Oak hears that Bathsheba Everdene has left the neighborhood and gone to a place called Weatherbury. He finds \"that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in\" and loves her all the more once she is gone. The rest of Chapter Five describes a tragic event that changes Gabriel's fate forever. He has two sheepdogs, a loyal and reliable one named George and George's son, who is still learning to herd sheep and is often too enthusiastic. One night, on one of the rare occasions when Gabriel goes to sleep in his own bed rather than in the fields, he wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of sheep bells clanging wildly. He goes outside and follows their footprints to the edge of a steep chalk-pit: Looking in, he sees hundreds of dying sheep and mangled sheep carcasses; the younger dog has unwittingly chased them over the edge in his zeal. Ruined financially without his sheep, Gabriel can no longer farm. However, he does not immediately dwell upon his own misfortune: His first impulse is to pity the gentle ewes and their unborn lambs; his second impulse is to thank God that Bathsheba did not marry him, for he wishes only prosperity for her. He regretfully shoots the dog, pays his debts, and finds himself with nothing more than his clothes. Chapter Six begins two months later at a hiring fair for farm laborers, including shepherds, bailiffs , carters, waggoners, and thatchers. Hardy describes the 200-300-man group as a whole and then focuses in on one particular man, who turns out to be Gabriel. After unsuccessfully advertising himself as a bailiff, he resignedly offers his shepherding skills for hire; still no one gives him a job. Finally, he earns a little money by playing his flute for the passers-by, and he decides to try another fair the next day. He falls asleep in a wagon and wakes up to find it moving toward Weatherbury, where Bathsheba has settled. He allows it to take him most of the way and then slips out of the wagon unseen. Intending to continue on to Weatherbury on foot, he pauses when he sees a strange light and realizes something large is on fire in the distance. A crowd gathers helplessly around a straw-rick but Gabriel knows just what to do; without regard to his own safety, he coordinates the effort to extinguish the fire, climbing himself to the top of the rick to stamp out the flames with his shepherd's crook. In the meantime, two women watch the proceedings, one of whom is the mistress of the farm. Once Gabriel has put out the fire, she asks him how she can repay him. He approaches her and asks if she has need of a shepherd's services; when she lifts her veil, the two figures stare at each other in astonished recognition. Bathsheba decides to hire him, and she asks him to speak to the bailiff, a bad-tempered man. As Gabriel walks through the forest to an inn called Warren's Malthouse, he comes across a \"slim girl, rather thinly clad\" who asks him not to say that he has seen her. As he reaches to give her a shilling, seeing that she is poor and worrying she may be cold, he touches her arm by mistake: We read, \"Gabriel's fingers alighted on the young woman's wrist. It was beating with a throb of tragic intensity. He had frequently felt the same hard, quick beat in the femoral artery of his lambs when overdriven. It suggested a consumption too great of a vitality which, to judge from her figure and stature, was already too little.\" Gabriel passes her and joins the other farm laborers in the malthouse. Chapter Eight takes place in the malthouse and introduces us to the local laborers and their culture. Hardy attentively records the men's dialect and their ways of life, and he takes care to differentiate one from another, though to some extent the characters fit into types. Gabriel drinks with them, and after he has left, news arrives that Bathsheba has fired her bailiff, Pennyways, having caught him stealing, and her youngest servant, Fanny Robin, has run away. This, we guess, is the slim girl Gabriel met in the forest. Bathsheba asks her workers for help in finding her or information about the lover with whom she may have fled.", "analysis": "Commentary Up until now, most of the narration has been told from the point of view of Gabriel. In these chapters, the reader remains privy to Gabriel's thoughts but also receives information to which he has no access. He does not learn about the bailiff's crime or about Fanny Robin's possible elopement, and we see the whole crowd at the fair before the narrator focuses in on Gabriel. This practice of gradually moving in on a scene from an initial great distance, eventually singling out a familiar character, is a favorite of Hardy's. He analyzes the way we perceive a group of people, noting the fact that they all seem the same until we recognize a prior acquaintance. The scene characterizing the farm laborers is also typical of Hardy's novels. Here, Hardy pauses the plot for an entire chapter, giving a detailed account of how the laborers speak, how they spend their free time, and their opinions about each other. These groups of lower-class, common characters figure in almost all of Hardy's novels; like Shakespeare, he often uses them to effect comic relief, offsetting a tragic scene--here, the deaths of Gabriel's ewes--with one of a more light-hearted tone. With this scene, Hardy also intends to introduce urban or middle-class readers to the many different kinds of people that exist in the lower classes. In a later essay on the Dorsetshire laborer, he complains that people tend to stereotype farm workers and lump them all together. These chapters also serve to test Gabriel by presenting him with a series of difficulties. Yet Gabriel consistently passes the test: Indeed, the way in which he repeatedly overcomes his challenges, honor intact, constitutes part of Gabriel's idealized portrayal in the novel as a whole. While Bathsheba and Sergeant Troy interest us precisely because of the ways in which each character's strengths and faults play against each other, Gabriel is almost utterly noble and reliable. He loses his sheep and reacts by mourning for the sheep rather than for himself; he comes across a fire and knows exactly how to stop it. Gabriel is the idealized hero of the novel. Hardy artfully sets up the meeting between Gabriel and Bathsheba so as to highlight the changes both have undergone in the intervening months. The last time they met their situations were precisely reverse: She was penniless and he was a prosperous young farmer. In two months their relative stations have changed dramatically, and Gabriel finds himself asking for a job rather than for her hand in marriage. The meeting marks a new phase in both characters' lives; the change in setting also heralds this realigned relationship."} |
DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA--A PASTORAL TRAGEDY
The news which one day reached Gabriel, that Bathsheba Everdene
had left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon him which might
have surprised any who never suspected that the more emphatic the
renunciation the less absolute its character.
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting
out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon
marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by
Bathsheba's disappearance, though effectual with people of certain
humours, is apt to idealize the removed object with others--notably
those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep
and long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and
felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a
finer flame now that she was gone--that was all.
His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by the
failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of Bathsheba's
movements was done indirectly. It appeared that she had gone to
a place called Weatherbury, more than twenty miles off, but in
what capacity--whether as a visitor, or permanently, he could not
discover.
Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped
nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked
in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty
grey; but the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched
and washed out of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a
reddish-brown, as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like
the indigo from the same kind of colour in Turner's pictures. In
substance it had originally been hair, but long contact with sheep
seemed to be turning it by degrees into wool of a poor quality and
staple.
This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior morals
and dreadful temper, and the result was that George knew the exact
degrees of condemnation signified by cursing and swearing of all
descriptions better than the wickedest old man in the neighbourhood.
Long experience had so precisely taught the animal the difference
between such exclamations as "Come in!" and "D---- ye, come in!" that
he knew to a hair's breadth the rate of trotting back from the ewes'
tails that each call involved, if a staggerer with the sheep crook
was to be escaped. Though old, he was clever and trustworthy still.
The young dog, George's son, might possibly have been the image
of his mother, for there was not much resemblance between him and
George. He was learning the sheep-keeping business, so as to follow
on at the flock when the other should die, but had got no further
than the rudiments as yet--still finding an insuperable difficulty
in distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too
well. So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had
no name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any
pleasant interjection), that if sent behind the flock to help them
on, he did it so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the
whole county with the greatest pleasure if not called off or reminded
when to stop by the example of old George.
Thus much for the dogs. On the further side of Norcombe Hill was
a chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for generations, and
spread over adjacent farms. Two hedges converged upon it in the form
of a V, but without quite meeting. The narrow opening left, which
was immediately over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough
railing.
One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to his house, believing there
would be no further necessity for his attendance on the down, he
called as usual to the dogs, previously to shutting them up in the
outhouse till next morning. Only one responded--old George; the
other could not be found, either in the house, lane, or garden.
Gabriel then remembered that he had left the two dogs on the hill
eating a dead lamb (a kind of meat he usually kept from them, except
when other food ran short), and concluding that the young one had
not finished his meal, he went indoors to the luxury of a bed, which
latterly he had only enjoyed on Sundays.
It was a still, moist night. Just before dawn he was assisted in
waking by the abnormal reverberation of familiar music. To the
shepherd, the note of the sheep-bell, like the ticking of the clock
to other people, is a chronic sound that only makes itself noticed by
ceasing or altering in some unusual manner from the well-known idle
twinkle which signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that
all is well in the fold. In the solemn calm of the awakening morn
that note was heard by Gabriel, beating with unusual violence and
rapidity. This exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways--by
the rapid feeding of the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock
breaks into new pasture, which gives it an intermittent rapidity,
or by the sheep starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular
palpitation. The experienced ear of Oak knew the sound he now heard
to be caused by the running of the flock with great velocity.
He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a foggy
dawn, and ascended the hill. The forward ewes were kept apart from
those among which the fall of lambs would be later, there being two
hundred of the latter class in Gabriel's flock. These two hundred
seemed to have absolutely vanished from the hill. There were the
fifty with their lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left
them, but the rest, forming the bulk of the flock, were nowhere.
Gabriel called at the top of his voice the shepherd's call:
"Ovey, ovey, ovey!"
Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken
through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep. Rather
surprised to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it
down instantly to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of
which a great deal grew in the plantation, he followed through the
hedge. They were not in the plantation. He called again: the
valleys and farthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the
lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep. He passed through the
trees and along the ridge of the hill. On the extreme summit, where
the ends of the two converging hedges of which we have spoken were
stopped short by meeting the brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the
younger dog standing against the sky--dark and motionless as Napoleon
at St. Helena.
A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation of bodily
faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through,
and there he saw the footprints of his ewes. The dog came up, licked
his hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward
for signal services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The
ewes lay dead and dying at its foot--a heap of two hundred mangled
carcasses, representing in their condition just now at least two
hundred more.
Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in
pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and
carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always
been that his flock ended in mutton--that a day came and found every
shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep. His first
feeling now was one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle
ewes and their unborn lambs.
It was a second to remember another phase of the matter. The
sheep were not insured. All the savings of a frugal life had been
dispersed at a blow; his hopes of being an independent farmer were
laid low--possibly for ever. Gabriel's energies, patience, and
industry had been so severely taxed during the years of his life
between eighteen and eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of
progress that no more seemed to be left in him. He leant down upon a
rail, and covered his face with his hands.
Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak recovered from
his. It was as remarkable as it was characteristic that the one
sentence he uttered was in thankfulness:--
"Thank God I am not married: what would SHE have done in the poverty
now coming upon me!"
Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do, listlessly
surveyed the scene. By the outer margin of the Pit was an oval pond,
and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon
which had only a few days to last--the morning star dogging her on
the left hand. The pool glittered like a dead man's eye, and as the
world awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of
the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a
phosphoric streak upon the water. All this Oak saw and remembered.
As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still
under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep,
the more he ran after them the better, had at the end of his meal
off the dead lamb, which may have given him additional energy and
spirits, collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid
creatures through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main
force of worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a
portion of the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.
George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered
too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically
shot at twelve o'clock that same day--another instance of the
untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers
who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and
attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely
of compromise.
Gabriel's farm had been stocked by a dealer--on the strength of Oak's
promising look and character--who was receiving a percentage from the
farmer till such time as the advance should be cleared off. Oak found
that the value of stock, plant, and implements which were really his
own would be about sufficient to pay his debts, leaving himself a
free man with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more.
THE FAIR--THE JOURNEY--THE FIRE
Two months passed away. We are brought on to a day in February, on
which was held the yearly statute or hiring fair in the county-town
of Casterbridge.
At one end of the street stood from two to three hundred blithe and
hearty labourers waiting upon Chance--all men of the stamp to whom
labour suggests nothing worse than a wrestle with gravitation, and
pleasure nothing better than a renunciation of the same. Among
these, carters and waggoners were distinguished by having a piece
of whip-cord twisted round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of
woven straw; shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands; and
thus the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance.
In the crowd was an athletic young fellow of somewhat superior
appearance to the rest--in fact, his superiority was marked enough to
lead several ruddy peasants standing by to speak to him inquiringly,
as to a farmer, and to use "Sir" as a finishing word. His answer
always was,--
"I am looking for a place myself--a bailiff's. Do ye know of anybody
who wants one?"
Gabriel was paler now. His eyes were more meditative, and his
expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of
wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He
had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very
slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he
had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though
it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when
it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the
loss gain.
In the morning a regiment of cavalry had left the town, and a
sergeant and his party had been beating up for recruits through the
four streets. As the end of the day drew on, and he found himself
not hired, Gabriel almost wished that he had joined them, and gone
off to serve his country. Weary of standing in the market-place, and
not much minding the kind of work he turned his hand to, he decided
to offer himself in some other capacity than that of bailiff.
All the farmers seemed to be wanting shepherds. Sheep-tending was
Gabriel's speciality. Turning down an obscure street and entering
an obscurer lane, he went up to a smith's shop.
"How long would it take you to make a shepherd's crook?"
"Twenty minutes."
"How much?"
"Two shillings."
He sat on a bench and the crook was made, a stem being given him into
the bargain.
He then went to a ready-made clothes' shop, the owner of which had a
large rural connection. As the crook had absorbed most of Gabriel's
money, he attempted, and carried out, an exchange of his overcoat for
a shepherd's regulation smock-frock.
This transaction having been completed, he again hurried off to the
centre of the town, and stood on the kerb of the pavement, as a
shepherd, crook in hand.
Now that Oak had turned himself into a shepherd, it seemed that
bailiffs were most in demand. However, two or three farmers noticed
him and drew near. Dialogues followed, more or less in the subjoined
form:--
"Where do you come from?"
"Norcombe."
"That's a long way.
"Fifteen miles."
"Who's farm were you upon last?"
"My own."
This reply invariably operated like a rumour of cholera. The
inquiring farmer would edge away and shake his head dubiously.
Gabriel, like his dog, was too good to be trustworthy, and he never
made advance beyond this point.
It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize
a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for
a chance of using it. Gabriel wished he had not nailed up his
colours as a shepherd, but had laid himself out for anything in the
whole cycle of labour that was required in the fair. It grew dusk.
Some merry men were whistling and singing by the corn-exchange.
Gabriel's hand, which had lain for some time idle in his smock-frock
pocket, touched his flute which he carried there. Here was an
opportunity for putting his dearly bought wisdom into practice.
He drew out his flute and began to play "Jockey to the Fair" in the
style of a man who had never known moment's sorrow. Oak could pipe
with Arcadian sweetness, and the sound of the well-known notes
cheered his own heart as well as those of the loungers. He played on
with spirit, and in half an hour had earned in pence what was a small
fortune to a destitute man.
By making inquiries he learnt that there was another fair at
Shottsford the next day.
"How far is Shottsford?"
"Ten miles t'other side of Weatherbury."
Weatherbury! It was where Bathsheba had gone two months before.
This information was like coming from night into noon.
"How far is it to Weatherbury?"
"Five or six miles."
Bathsheba had probably left Weatherbury long before this time, but
the place had enough interest attaching to it to lead Oak to choose
Shottsford fair as his next field of inquiry, because it lay in the
Weatherbury quarter. Moreover, the Weatherbury folk were by no means
uninteresting intrinsically. If report spoke truly they were as
hardy, merry, thriving, wicked a set as any in the whole county. Oak
resolved to sleep at Weatherbury that night on his way to Shottsford,
and struck out at once into the high road which had been recommended
as the direct route to the village in question.
The road stretched through water-meadows traversed by little brooks,
whose quivering surfaces were braided along their centres, and
folded into creases at the sides; or, where the flow was more
rapid, the stream was pied with spots of white froth, which rode
on in undisturbed serenity. On the higher levels the dead and
dry carcasses of leaves tapped the ground as they bowled along
helter-skelter upon the shoulders of the wind, and little birds in
the hedges were rustling their feathers and tucking themselves in
comfortably for the night, retaining their places if Oak kept moving,
but flying away if he stopped to look at them. He passed by Yalbury
Wood where the game-birds were rising to their roosts, and heard the
crack-voiced cock-pheasants "cu-uck, cuck," and the wheezy whistle of
the hens.
By the time he had walked three or four miles every shape in the
landscape had assumed a uniform hue of blackness. He descended
Yalbury Hill and could just discern ahead of him a waggon, drawn up
under a great over-hanging tree by the roadside.
On coming close, he found there were no horses attached to it, the
spot being apparently quite deserted. The waggon, from its position,
seemed to have been left there for the night, for beyond about half
a truss of hay which was heaped in the bottom, it was quite empty.
Gabriel sat down on the shafts of the vehicle and considered his
position. He calculated that he had walked a very fair proportion of
the journey; and having been on foot since daybreak, he felt tempted
to lie down upon the hay in the waggon instead of pushing on to the
village of Weatherbury, and having to pay for a lodging.
Eating his last slices of bread and ham, and drinking from the bottle
of cider he had taken the precaution to bring with him, he got into
the lonely waggon. Here he spread half of the hay as a bed, and,
as well as he could in the darkness, pulled the other half over
him by way of bed-clothes, covering himself entirely, and feeling,
physically, as comfortable as ever he had been in his life. Inward
melancholy it was impossible for a man like Oak, introspective far
beyond his neighbours, to banish quite, whilst conning the present
untoward page of his history. So, thinking of his misfortunes,
amorous and pastoral, he fell asleep, shepherds enjoying, in common
with sailors, the privilege of being able to summon the god instead
of having to wait for him.
On somewhat suddenly awaking, after a sleep of whose length he had no
idea, Oak found that the waggon was in motion. He was being carried
along the road at a rate rather considerable for a vehicle without
springs, and under circumstances of physical uneasiness, his
head being dandled up and down on the bed of the waggon like a
kettledrum-stick. He then distinguished voices in conversation,
coming from the forpart of the waggon. His concern at this dilemma
(which would have been alarm, had he been a thriving man; but
misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror) led him to peer
cautiously from the hay, and the first sight he beheld was the stars
above him. Charles's Wain was getting towards a right angle with
the Pole star, and Gabriel concluded that it must be about nine
o'clock--in other words, that he had slept two hours. This small
astronomical calculation was made without any positive effort, and
whilst he was stealthily turning to discover, if possible, into whose
hands he had fallen.
Two figures were dimly visible in front, sitting with their legs
outside the waggon, one of whom was driving. Gabriel soon found that
this was the waggoner, and it appeared they had come from
Casterbridge fair, like himself.
A conversation was in progress, which continued thus:--
"Be as 'twill, she's a fine handsome body as far's looks be
concerned. But that's only the skin of the woman, and these dandy
cattle be as proud as a lucifer in their insides."
"Ay--so 'a do seem, Billy Smallbury--so 'a do seem." This utterance
was very shaky by nature, and more so by circumstance, the jolting of
the waggon not being without its effect upon the speaker's larynx.
It came from the man who held the reins.
"She's a very vain feymell--so 'tis said here and there."
"Ah, now. If so be 'tis like that, I can't look her in the face.
Lord, no: not I--heh-heh-heh! Such a shy man as I be!"
"Yes--she's very vain. 'Tis said that every night at going to bed
she looks in the glass to put on her night-cap properly."
"And not a married woman. Oh, the world!"
"And 'a can play the peanner, so 'tis said. Can play so clever that
'a can make a psalm tune sound as well as the merriest loose song a
man can wish for."
"D'ye tell o't! A happy time for us, and I feel quite a new man!
And how do she pay?"
"That I don't know, Master Poorgrass."
On hearing these and other similar remarks, a wild thought flashed
into Gabriel's mind that they might be speaking of Bathsheba. There
were, however, no grounds for retaining such a supposition, for the
waggon, though going in the direction of Weatherbury, might be going
beyond it, and the woman alluded to seemed to be the mistress of some
estate. They were now apparently close upon Weatherbury and not to
alarm the speakers unnecessarily, Gabriel slipped out of the waggon
unseen.
He turned to an opening in the hedge, which he found to be a gate,
and mounting thereon, he sat meditating whether to seek a cheap
lodging in the village, or to ensure a cheaper one by lying under
some hay or corn-stack. The crunching jangle of the waggon died upon
his ear. He was about to walk on, when he noticed on his left hand
an unusual light--appearing about half a mile distant. Oak watched
it, and the glow increased. Something was on fire.
Gabriel again mounted the gate, and, leaping down on the other side
upon what he found to be ploughed soil, made across the field in the
exact direction of the fire. The blaze, enlarging in a double ratio
by his approach and its own increase, showed him as he drew nearer
the outlines of ricks beside it, lighted up to great distinctness. A
rick-yard was the source of the fire. His weary face now began to
be painted over with a rich orange glow, and the whole front of his
smock-frock and gaiters was covered with a dancing shadow pattern of
thorn-twigs--the light reaching him through a leafless intervening
hedge--and the metallic curve of his sheep-crook shone silver-bright
in the same abounding rays. He came up to the boundary fence, and
stood to regain breath. It seemed as if the spot was unoccupied by
a living soul.
The fire was issuing from a long straw-stack, which was so far gone
as to preclude a possibility of saving it. A rick burns differently
from a house. As the wind blows the fire inwards, the portion in
flames completely disappears like melting sugar, and the outline is
lost to the eye. However, a hay or a wheat-rick, well put together,
will resist combustion for a length of time, if it begins on the
outside.
This before Gabriel's eyes was a rick of straw, loosely put together,
and the flames darted into it with lightning swiftness. It glowed on
the windward side, rising and falling in intensity, like the coal of
a cigar. Then a superincumbent bundle rolled down, with a whisking
noise; flames elongated, and bent themselves about with a quiet
roar, but no crackle. Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the
back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres,
illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow
uniformity. Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a
creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms,
and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips,
glaring eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks
flew in clusters like birds from a nest.
Oak suddenly ceased from being a mere spectator by discovering the
case to be more serious than he had at first imagined. A scroll
of smoke blew aside and revealed to him a wheat-rick in startling
juxtaposition with the decaying one, and behind this a series of
others, composing the main corn produce of the farm; so that instead
of the straw-stack standing, as he had imagined comparatively
isolated, there was a regular connection between it and the remaining
stacks of the group.
Gabriel leapt over the hedge, and saw that he was not alone. The
first man he came to was running about in a great hurry, as if his
thoughts were several yards in advance of his body, which they could
never drag on fast enough.
"O, man--fire, fire! A good master and a bad servant is fire,
fire!--I mane a bad servant and a good master. Oh, Mark Clark--come!
And you, Billy Smallbury--and you, Maryann Money--and you, Jan
Coggan, and Matthew there!" Other figures now appeared behind this
shouting man and among the smoke, and Gabriel found that, far from
being alone he was in a great company--whose shadows danced merrily
up and down, timed by the jigging of the flames, and not at all by
their owners' movements. The assemblage--belonging to that class of
society which casts its thoughts into the form of feeling, and its
feelings into the form of commotion--set to work with a remarkable
confusion of purpose.
"Stop the draught under the wheat-rick!" cried Gabriel to those
nearest to him. The corn stood on stone staddles, and between these,
tongues of yellow hue from the burning straw licked and darted
playfully. If the fire once got UNDER this stack, all would be lost.
"Get a tarpaulin--quick!" said Gabriel.
A rick-cloth was brought, and they hung it like a curtain across the
channel. The flames immediately ceased to go under the bottom of the
corn-stack, and stood up vertical.
"Stand here with a bucket of water and keep the cloth wet." said
Gabriel again.
The flames, now driven upwards, began to attack the angles of the
huge roof covering the wheat-stack.
"A ladder," cried Gabriel.
"The ladder was against the straw-rick and is burnt to a cinder,"
said a spectre-like form in the smoke.
Oak seized the cut ends of the sheaves, as if he were going to engage
in the operation of "reed-drawing," and digging in his feet, and
occasionally sticking in the stem of his sheep-crook, he clambered up
the beetling face. He at once sat astride the very apex, and began
with his crook to beat off the fiery fragments which had lodged
thereon, shouting to the others to get him a bough and a ladder, and
some water.
Billy Smallbury--one of the men who had been on the waggon--by this
time had found a ladder, which Mark Clark ascended, holding on beside
Oak upon the thatch. The smoke at this corner was stifling, and
Clark, a nimble fellow, having been handed a bucket of water, bathed
Oak's face and sprinkled him generally, whilst Gabriel, now with a
long beech-bough in one hand, in addition to his crook in the other,
kept sweeping the stack and dislodging all fiery particles.
On the ground the groups of villagers were still occupied in doing
all they could to keep down the conflagration, which was not much.
They were all tinged orange, and backed up by shadows of varying
pattern. Round the corner of the largest stack, out of the direct
rays of the fire, stood a pony, bearing a young woman on its back.
By her side was another woman, on foot. These two seemed to keep at
a distance from the fire, that the horse might not become restive.
"He's a shepherd," said the woman on foot. "Yes--he is. See how his
crook shines as he beats the rick with it. And his smock-frock is
burnt in two holes, I declare! A fine young shepherd he is too,
ma'am."
"Whose shepherd is he?" said the equestrian in a clear voice.
"Don't know, ma'am."
"Don't any of the others know?"
"Nobody at all--I've asked 'em. Quite a stranger, they say."
The young woman on the pony rode out from the shade and looked
anxiously around.
"Do you think the barn is safe?" she said.
"D'ye think the barn is safe, Jan Coggan?" said the second woman,
passing on the question to the nearest man in that direction.
"Safe-now--leastwise I think so. If this rick had gone the barn
would have followed. 'Tis that bold shepherd up there that have done
the most good--he sitting on the top o' rick, whizzing his great
long-arms about like a windmill."
"He does work hard," said the young woman on horseback, looking up at
Gabriel through her thick woollen veil. "I wish he was shepherd
here. Don't any of you know his name."
"Never heard the man's name in my life, or seed his form afore."
The fire began to get worsted, and Gabriel's elevated position being
no longer required of him, he made as if to descend.
"Maryann," said the girl on horseback, "go to him as he comes down,
and say that the farmer wishes to thank him for the great service he
has done."
Maryann stalked off towards the rick and met Oak at the foot of the
ladder. She delivered her message.
"Where is your master the farmer?" asked Gabriel, kindling with the
idea of getting employment that seemed to strike him now.
"'Tisn't a master; 'tis a mistress, shepherd."
"A woman farmer?"
"Ay, 'a b'lieve, and a rich one too!" said a bystander. "Lately
'a came here from a distance. Took on her uncle's farm, who died
suddenly. Used to measure his money in half-pint cups. They say
now that she've business in every bank in Casterbridge, and thinks
no more of playing pitch-and-toss sovereign than you and I, do
pitch-halfpenny--not a bit in the world, shepherd."
"That's she, back there upon the pony," said Maryann; "wi' her face
a-covered up in that black cloth with holes in it."
Oak, his features smudged, grimy, and undiscoverable from the smoke
and heat, his smock-frock burnt into holes and dripping with water,
the ash stem of his sheep-crook charred six inches shorter, advanced
with the humility stern adversity had thrust upon him up to the
slight female form in the saddle. He lifted his hat with respect,
and not without gallantry: stepping close to her hanging feet he said
in a hesitating voice,--
"Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma'am?"
She lifted the wool veil tied round her face, and looked all
astonishment. Gabriel and his cold-hearted darling, Bathsheba
Everdene, were face to face.
Bathsheba did not speak, and he mechanically repeated in an abashed
and sad voice,--
"Do you want a shepherd, ma'am?"
RECOGNITION--A TIMID GIRL
Bathsheba withdrew into the shade. She scarcely knew whether most to
be amused at the singularity of the meeting, or to be concerned at
its awkwardness. There was room for a little pity, also for a very
little exultation: the former at his position, the latter at her own.
Embarrassed she was not, and she remembered Gabriel's declaration of
love to her at Norcombe only to think she had nearly forgotten it.
"Yes," she murmured, putting on an air of dignity, and turning again
to him with a little warmth of cheek; "I do want a shepherd. But--"
"He's the very man, ma'am," said one of the villagers, quietly.
Conviction breeds conviction. "Ay, that 'a is," said a second,
decisively.
"The man, truly!" said a third, with heartiness.
"He's all there!" said number four, fervidly.
"Then will you tell him to speak to the bailiff," said Bathsheba.
All was practical again now. A summer eve and loneliness would have
been necessary to give the meeting its proper fulness of romance.
The bailiff was pointed out to Gabriel, who, checking the palpitation
within his breast at discovering that this Ashtoreth of strange
report was only a modification of Venus the well-known and admired,
retired with him to talk over the necessary preliminaries of hiring.
The fire before them wasted away. "Men," said Bathsheba, "you shall
take a little refreshment after this extra work. Will you come to
the house?"
"We could knock in a bit and a drop a good deal freer, Miss, if so be
ye'd send it to Warren's Malthouse," replied the spokesman.
Bathsheba then rode off into the darkness, and the men straggled on
to the village in twos and threes--Oak and the bailiff being left by
the rick alone.
"And now," said the bailiff, finally, "all is settled, I think, about
your coming, and I am going home-along. Good-night to ye, shepherd."
"Can you get me a lodging?" inquired Gabriel.
"That I can't, indeed," he said, moving past Oak as a Christian edges
past an offertory-plate when he does not mean to contribute. "If you
follow on the road till you come to Warren's Malthouse, where they
are all gone to have their snap of victuals, I daresay some of 'em
will tell you of a place. Good-night to ye, shepherd."
The bailiff who showed this nervous dread of loving his neighbour as
himself, went up the hill, and Oak walked on to the village, still
astonished at the reencounter with Bathsheba, glad of his nearness to
her, and perplexed at the rapidity with which the unpractised girl of
Norcombe had developed into the supervising and cool woman here. But
some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.
Obliged, to some extent, to forgo dreaming in order to find the way,
he reached the churchyard, and passed round it under the wall where
several ancient trees grew. There was a wide margin of grass along
here, and Gabriel's footsteps were deadened by its softness, even at
this indurating period of the year. When abreast of a trunk which
appeared to be the oldest of the old, he became aware that a figure
was standing behind it. Gabriel did not pause in his walk, and in
another moment he accidentally kicked a loose stone. The noise was
enough to disturb the motionless stranger, who started and assumed
a careless position.
It was a slim girl, rather thinly clad.
"Good-night to you," said Gabriel, heartily.
"Good-night," said the girl to Gabriel.
The voice was unexpectedly attractive; it was the low and dulcet note
suggestive of romance; common in descriptions, rare in experience.
"I'll thank you to tell me if I'm in the way for Warren's Malthouse?"
Gabriel resumed, primarily to gain the information, indirectly to get
more of the music.
"Quite right. It's at the bottom of the hill. And do you know--"
The girl hesitated and then went on again. "Do you know how late
they keep open the Buck's Head Inn?" She seemed to be won by
Gabriel's heartiness, as Gabriel had been won by her modulations.
"I don't know where the Buck's Head is, or anything about it. Do you
think of going there to-night?"
"Yes--" The woman again paused. There was no necessity for any
continuance of speech, and the fact that she did add more seemed to
proceed from an unconscious desire to show unconcern by making a
remark, which is noticeable in the ingenuous when they are acting by
stealth. "You are not a Weatherbury man?" she said, timorously.
"I am not. I am the new shepherd--just arrived."
"Only a shepherd--and you seem almost a farmer by your ways."
"Only a shepherd," Gabriel repeated, in a dull cadence of finality.
His thoughts were directed to the past, his eyes to the feet of the
girl; and for the first time he saw lying there a bundle of some
sort. She may have perceived the direction of his face, for she said
coaxingly,--
"You won't say anything in the parish about having seen me here, will
you--at least, not for a day or two?"
"I won't if you wish me not to," said Oak.
"Thank you, indeed," the other replied. "I am rather poor, and I
don't want people to know anything about me." Then she was silent
and shivered.
"You ought to have a cloak on such a cold night," Gabriel observed.
"I would advise 'ee to get indoors."
"O no! Would you mind going on and leaving me? I thank you much for
what you have told me."
"I will go on," he said; adding hesitatingly,--"Since you are not
very well off, perhaps you would accept this trifle from me. It is
only a shilling, but it is all I have to spare."
"Yes, I will take it," said the stranger gratefully.
She extended her hand; Gabriel his. In feeling for each other's palm
in the gloom before the money could be passed, a minute incident
occurred which told much. Gabriel's fingers alighted on the young
woman's wrist. It was beating with a throb of tragic intensity. He
had frequently felt the same quick, hard beat in the femoral artery
of his lambs when overdriven. It suggested a consumption too great
of a vitality which, to judge from her figure and stature, was
already too little.
"What is the matter?"
"Nothing."
"But there is?"
"No, no, no! Let your having seen me be a secret!"
"Very well; I will. Good-night, again."
"Good-night."
The young girl remained motionless by the tree, and Gabriel descended
into the village of Weatherbury, or Lower Longpuddle as it was
sometimes called. He fancied that he had felt himself in the
penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching that slight and fragile
creature. But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions, and
Gabriel endeavoured to think little of this.
THE MALTHOUSE--THE CHAT--NEWS
Warren's Malthouse was enclosed by an old wall inwrapped with ivy,
and though not much of the exterior was visible at this hour, the
character and purposes of the building were clearly enough shown by
its outline upon the sky. From the walls an overhanging thatched
roof sloped up to a point in the centre, upon which rose a small
wooden lantern, fitted with louvre-boards on all the four sides,
and from these openings a mist was dimly perceived to be escaping
into the night air. There was no window in front; but a square
hole in the door was glazed with a single pane, through which red,
comfortable rays now stretched out upon the ivied wall in front.
Voices were to be heard inside.
Oak's hand skimmed the surface of the door with fingers extended to
an Elymas-the-Sorcerer pattern, till he found a leathern strap, which
he pulled. This lifted a wooden latch, and the door swung open.
The room inside was lighted only by the ruddy glow from the kiln
mouth, which shone over the floor with the streaming horizontality
of the setting sun, and threw upwards the shadows of all facial
irregularities in those assembled around. The stone-flag floor was
worn into a path from the doorway to the kiln, and into undulations
everywhere. A curved settle of unplaned oak stretched along one
side, and in a remote corner was a small bed and bedstead, the owner
and frequent occupier of which was the maltster.
This aged man was now sitting opposite the fire, his frosty white
hair and beard overgrowing his gnarled figure like the grey moss and
lichen upon a leafless apple-tree. He wore breeches and the laced-up
shoes called ankle-jacks; he kept his eyes fixed upon the fire.
Gabriel's nose was greeted by an atmosphere laden with the sweet
smell of new malt. The conversation (which seemed to have been
concerning the origin of the fire) immediately ceased, and every one
ocularly criticised him to the degree expressed by contracting the
flesh of their foreheads and looking at him with narrowed eyelids, as
if he had been a light too strong for their sight. Several exclaimed
meditatively, after this operation had been completed:--
"Oh, 'tis the new shepherd, 'a b'lieve."
"We thought we heard a hand pawing about the door for the bobbin, but
weren't sure 'twere not a dead leaf blowed across," said another.
"Come in, shepherd; sure ye be welcome, though we don't know yer
name."
"Gabriel Oak, that's my name, neighbours."
The ancient maltster sitting in the midst turned at this--his turning
being as the turning of a rusty crane.
"That's never Gable Oak's grandson over at Norcombe--never!" he said,
as a formula expressive of surprise, which nobody was supposed for a
moment to take literally.
"My father and my grandfather were old men of the name of Gabriel,"
said the shepherd, placidly.
"Thought I knowed the man's face as I seed him on the rick!--thought
I did! And where be ye trading o't to now, shepherd?"
"I'm thinking of biding here," said Mr. Oak.
"Knowed yer grandfather for years and years!" continued the maltster,
the words coming forth of their own accord as if the momentum
previously imparted had been sufficient.
"Ah--and did you!"
"Knowed yer grandmother."
"And her too!"
"Likewise knowed yer father when he was a child. Why, my boy
Jacob there and your father were sworn brothers--that they were
sure--weren't ye, Jacob?"
"Ay, sure," said his son, a young man about sixty-five, with a
semi-bald head and one tooth in the left centre of his upper jaw,
which made much of itself by standing prominent, like a milestone in
a bank. "But 'twas Joe had most to do with him. However, my son
William must have knowed the very man afore us--didn't ye, Billy,
afore ye left Norcombe?"
"No, 'twas Andrew," said Jacob's son Billy, a child of forty, or
thereabouts, who manifested the peculiarity of possessing a cheerful
soul in a gloomy body, and whose whiskers were assuming a chinchilla
shade here and there.
"I can mind Andrew," said Oak, "as being a man in the place when I
was quite a child."
"Ay--the other day I and my youngest daughter, Liddy, were over at
my grandson's christening," continued Billy. "We were talking about
this very family, and 'twas only last Purification Day in this very
world, when the use-money is gied away to the second-best poor folk,
you know, shepherd, and I can mind the day because they all had to
traypse up to the vestry--yes, this very man's family."
"Come, shepherd, and drink. 'Tis gape and swaller with us--a drap of
sommit, but not of much account," said the maltster, removing from
the fire his eyes, which were vermilion-red and bleared by gazing
into it for so many years. "Take up the God-forgive-me, Jacob. See
if 'tis warm, Jacob."
Jacob stooped to the God-forgive-me, which was a two-handled tall mug
standing in the ashes, cracked and charred with heat: it was rather
furred with extraneous matter about the outside, especially in the
crevices of the handles, the innermost curves of which may not have
seen daylight for several years by reason of this encrustation
thereon--formed of ashes accidentally wetted with cider and baked
hard; but to the mind of any sensible drinker the cup was no
worse for that, being incontestably clean on the inside and about
the rim. It may be observed that such a class of mug is called a
God-forgive-me in Weatherbury and its vicinity for uncertain reasons;
probably because its size makes any given toper feel ashamed of
himself when he sees its bottom in drinking it empty.
Jacob, on receiving the order to see if the liquor was warm enough,
placidly dipped his forefinger into it by way of thermometer, and
having pronounced it nearly of the proper degree, raised the cup and
very civilly attempted to dust some of the ashes from the bottom with
the skirt of his smock-frock, because Shepherd Oak was a stranger.
"A clane cup for the shepherd," said the maltster commandingly.
"No--not at all," said Gabriel, in a reproving tone of
considerateness. "I never fuss about dirt in its pure state, and
when I know what sort it is." Taking the mug he drank an inch or
more from the depth of its contents, and duly passed it to the
next man. "I wouldn't think of giving such trouble to neighbours
in washing up when there's so much work to be done in the world
already." continued Oak in a moister tone, after recovering from the
stoppage of breath which is occasioned by pulls at large mugs.
"A right sensible man," said Jacob.
"True, true; it can't be gainsaid!" observed a brisk young man--Mark
Clark by name, a genial and pleasant gentleman, whom to meet anywhere
in your travels was to know, to know was to drink with, and to drink
with was, unfortunately, to pay for.
"And here's a mouthful of bread and bacon that mis'ess have sent,
shepherd. The cider will go down better with a bit of victuals.
Don't ye chaw quite close, shepherd, for I let the bacon fall in
the road outside as I was bringing it along, and may be 'tis rather
gritty. There, 'tis clane dirt; and we all know what that is, as you
say, and you bain't a particular man we see, shepherd."
"True, true--not at all," said the friendly Oak.
"Don't let your teeth quite meet, and you won't feel the sandiness at
all. Ah! 'tis wonderful what can be done by contrivance!"
"My own mind exactly, neighbour."
"Ah, he's his grandfer's own grandson!--his grandfer were just such a
nice unparticular man!" said the maltster.
"Drink, Henry Fray--drink," magnanimously said Jan Coggan, a person
who held Saint-Simonian notions of share and share alike where liquor
was concerned, as the vessel showed signs of approaching him in its
gradual revolution among them.
Having at this moment reached the end of a wistful gaze into mid-air,
Henry did not refuse. He was a man of more than middle age, with
eyebrows high up in his forehead, who laid it down that the law of
the world was bad, with a long-suffering look through his listeners
at the world alluded to, as it presented itself to his imagination.
He always signed his name "Henery"--strenuously insisting upon that
spelling, and if any passing schoolmaster ventured to remark that the
second "e" was superfluous and old-fashioned, he received the reply
that "H-e-n-e-r-y" was the name he was christened and the name he
would stick to--in the tone of one to whom orthographical differences
were matters which had a great deal to do with personal character.
Mr. Jan Coggan, who had passed the cup to Henery, was a crimson man
with a spacious countenance and private glimmer in his eye, whose
name had appeared on the marriage register of Weatherbury and
neighbouring parishes as best man and chief witness in countless
unions of the previous twenty years; he also very frequently filled
the post of head godfather in baptisms of the subtly-jovial kind.
"Come, Mark Clark--come. Ther's plenty more in the barrel," said
Jan.
"Ay--that I will, 'tis my only doctor," replied Mr. Clark, who,
twenty years younger than Jan Coggan, revolved in the same orbit. He
secreted mirth on all occasions for special discharge at popular
parties.
"Why, Joseph Poorgrass, ye han't had a drop!" said Mr. Coggan to a
self-conscious man in the background, thrusting the cup towards him.
"Such a modest man as he is!" said Jacob Smallbury. "Why, ye've
hardly had strength of eye enough to look in our young mis'ess's
face, so I hear, Joseph?"
All looked at Joseph Poorgrass with pitying reproach.
"No--I've hardly looked at her at all," simpered Joseph, reducing his
body smaller whilst talking, apparently from a meek sense of undue
prominence. "And when I seed her, 'twas nothing but blushes with
me!"
"Poor feller," said Mr. Clark.
"'Tis a curious nature for a man," said Jan Coggan.
"Yes," continued Joseph Poorgrass--his shyness, which was so painful
as a defect, filling him with a mild complacency now that it was
regarded as an interesting study. "'Twere blush, blush, blush with
me every minute of the time, when she was speaking to me."
"I believe ye, Joseph Poorgrass, for we all know ye to be a very
bashful man."
"'Tis a' awkward gift for a man, poor soul," said the maltster. "And
how long have ye have suffered from it, Joseph?" [a]
[Transcriber's note a: Alternate text, appears in all three
editions on hand: "'Tis a' awkward gift for a man, poor soul,"
said the maltster. "And ye have suffered from it a long time, we
know."
"Ay, ever since..."]
"Oh, ever since I was a boy. Yes--mother was concerned to her heart
about it--yes. But 'twas all nought."
"Did ye ever go into the world to try and stop it, Joseph Poorgrass?"
"Oh ay, tried all sorts o' company. They took me to Greenhill
Fair, and into a great gay jerry-go-nimble show, where there were
women-folk riding round--standing upon horses, with hardly anything
on but their smocks; but it didn't cure me a morsel. And then I
was put errand-man at the Women's Skittle Alley at the back of the
Tailor's Arms in Casterbridge. 'Twas a horrible sinful situation,
and a very curious place for a good man. I had to stand and look
ba'dy people in the face from morning till night; but 'twas no use--I
was just as bad as ever after all. Blushes hev been in the family
for generations. There, 'tis a happy providence that I be no worse."
"True," said Jacob Smallbury, deepening his thoughts to a profounder
view of the subject. "'Tis a thought to look at, that ye might have
been worse; but even as you be, 'tis a very bad affliction for 'ee,
Joseph. For ye see, shepherd, though 'tis very well for a woman,
dang it all, 'tis awkward for a man like him, poor feller?"
"'Tis--'tis," said Gabriel, recovering from a meditation. "Yes, very
awkward for the man."
"Ay, and he's very timid, too," observed Jan Coggan. "Once he had
been working late at Yalbury Bottom, and had had a drap of drink, and
lost his way as he was coming home-along through Yalbury Wood, didn't
ye, Master Poorgrass?"
"No, no, no; not that story!" expostulated the modest man, forcing a
laugh to bury his concern.
"--And so 'a lost himself quite," continued Mr. Coggan, with an
impassive face, implying that a true narrative, like time and tide,
must run its course and would respect no man. "And as he was coming
along in the middle of the night, much afeared, and not able to
find his way out of the trees nohow, 'a cried out, 'Man-a-lost!
man-a-lost!' A owl in a tree happened to be crying 'Whoo-whoo-whoo!'
as owls do, you know, shepherd" (Gabriel nodded), "and Joseph, all in
a tremble, said, 'Joseph Poorgrass, of Weatherbury, sir!'"
"No, no, now--that's too much!" said the timid man, becoming a man
of brazen courage all of a sudden. "I didn't say SIR. I'll take my
oath I didn't say 'Joseph Poorgrass o' Weatherbury, sir.' No, no;
what's right is right, and I never said sir to the bird, knowing very
well that no man of a gentleman's rank would be hollering there at
that time o' night. 'Joseph Poorgrass of Weatherbury,'--that's every
word I said, and I shouldn't ha' said that if 't hadn't been for
Keeper Day's metheglin.... There, 'twas a merciful thing it ended
where it did."
The question of which was right being tacitly waived by the company,
Jan went on meditatively:--
"And he's the fearfullest man, bain't ye, Joseph? Ay, another time
ye were lost by Lambing-Down Gate, weren't ye, Joseph?"
"I was," replied Poorgrass, as if there were some conditions too
serious even for modesty to remember itself under, this being one.
"Yes; that were the middle of the night, too. The gate would not
open, try how he would, and knowing there was the Devil's hand in it,
he kneeled down."
"Ay," said Joseph, acquiring confidence from the warmth of the fire,
the cider, and a perception of the narrative capabilities of the
experience alluded to. "My heart died within me, that time; but I
kneeled down and said the Lord's Prayer, and then the Belief right
through, and then the Ten Commandments, in earnest prayer. But
no, the gate wouldn't open; and then I went on with Dearly Beloved
Brethren, and, thinks I, this makes four, and 'tis all I know out
of book, and if this don't do it nothing will, and I'm a lost man.
Well, when I got to Saying After Me, I rose from my knees and found
the gate would open--yes, neighbours, the gate opened the same as
ever."
A meditation on the obvious inference was indulged in by all, and
during its continuance each directed his vision into the ashpit,
which glowed like a desert in the tropics under a vertical sun,
shaping their eyes long and liny, partly because of the light, partly
from the depth of the subject discussed.
Gabriel broke the silence. "What sort of a place is this to live at,
and what sort of a mis'ess is she to work under?" Gabriel's bosom
thrilled gently as he thus slipped under the notice of the assembly
the inner-most subject of his heart.
"We d' know little of her--nothing. She only showed herself a few
days ago. Her uncle was took bad, and the doctor was called with his
world-wide skill; but he couldn't save the man. As I take it, she's
going to keep on the farm.
"That's about the shape o't, 'a b'lieve," said Jan Coggan. "Ay, 'tis
a very good family. I'd as soon be under 'em as under one here and
there. Her uncle was a very fair sort of man. Did ye know en,
shepherd--a bachelor-man?"
"Not at all."
"I used to go to his house a-courting my first wife, Charlotte,
who was his dairymaid. Well, a very good-hearted man were Farmer
Everdene, and I being a respectable young fellow was allowed to call
and see her and drink as much ale as I liked, but not to carry away
any--outside my skin I mane of course."
"Ay, ay, Jan Coggan; we know yer maning."
"And so you see 'twas beautiful ale, and I wished to value his
kindness as much as I could, and not to be so ill-mannered as to
drink only a thimbleful, which would have been insulting the man's
generosity--"
"True, Master Coggan, 'twould so," corroborated Mark Clark.
"--And so I used to eat a lot of salt fish afore going, and then by
the time I got there I were as dry as a lime-basket--so thorough dry
that that ale would slip down--ah, 'twould slip down sweet! Happy
times! Heavenly times! Such lovely drunks as I used to have at that
house! You can mind, Jacob? You used to go wi' me sometimes."
"I can--I can," said Jacob. "That one, too, that we had at Buck's
Head on a White Monday was a pretty tipple."
"'Twas. But for a wet of the better class, that brought you no
nearer to the horned man than you were afore you begun, there was
none like those in Farmer Everdene's kitchen. Not a single damn
allowed; no, not a bare poor one, even at the most cheerful moment
when all were blindest, though the good old word of sin thrown in
here and there at such times is a great relief to a merry soul."
"True," said the maltster. "Nater requires her swearing at the
regular times, or she's not herself; and unholy exclamations is a
necessity of life."
"But Charlotte," continued Coggan--"not a word of the sort would
Charlotte allow, nor the smallest item of taking in vain.... Ay,
poor Charlotte, I wonder if she had the good fortune to get into
Heaven when 'a died! But 'a was never much in luck's way, and
perhaps 'a went downwards after all, poor soul."
"And did any of you know Miss Everdene's father and mother?" inquired
the shepherd, who found some difficulty in keeping the conversation
in the desired channel.
"I knew them a little," said Jacob Smallbury; "but they were
townsfolk, and didn't live here. They've been dead for years.
Father, what sort of people were mis'ess' father and mother?"
"Well," said the maltster, "he wasn't much to look at; but she was a
lovely woman. He was fond enough of her as his sweetheart."
"Used to kiss her scores and long-hundreds o' times, so 'twas said,"
observed Coggan.
"He was very proud of her, too, when they were married, as I've been
told," said the maltster.
"Ay," said Coggan. "He admired her so much that he used to light the
candle three times a night to look at her."
"Boundless love; I shouldn't have supposed it in the universe!"
murmured Joseph Poorgrass, who habitually spoke on a large scale in
his moral reflections.
"Well, to be sure," said Gabriel.
"Oh, 'tis true enough. I knowed the man and woman both well. Levi
Everdene--that was the man's name, sure. 'Man,' saith I in my
hurry, but he were of a higher circle of life than that--'a was a
gentleman-tailor really, worth scores of pounds. And he became a
very celebrated bankrupt two or three times."
"Oh, I thought he was quite a common man!" said Joseph.
"Oh no, no! That man failed for heaps of money; hundreds in gold and
silver."
The maltster being rather short of breath, Mr. Coggan, after absently
scrutinising a coal which had fallen among the ashes, took up the
narrative, with a private twirl of his eye:--
"Well, now, you'd hardly believe it, but that man--our Miss
Everdene's father--was one of the ficklest husbands alive, after a
while. Understand? 'a didn't want to be fickle, but he couldn't help
it. The pore feller were faithful and true enough to her in his
wish, but his heart would rove, do what he would. He spoke to me in
real tribulation about it once. 'Coggan,' he said, 'I could never
wish for a handsomer woman than I've got, but feeling she's ticketed
as my lawful wife, I can't help my wicked heart wandering, do what I
will.' But at last I believe he cured it by making her take off her
wedding-ring and calling her by her maiden name as they sat together
after the shop was shut, and so 'a would get to fancy she was only
his sweetheart, and not married to him at all. And as soon as he
could thoroughly fancy he was doing wrong and committing the seventh,
'a got to like her as well as ever, and they lived on a perfect
picture of mutel love."
"Well, 'twas a most ungodly remedy," murmured Joseph Poorgrass; "but
we ought to feel deep cheerfulness that a happy Providence kept it
from being any worse. You see, he might have gone the bad road and
given his eyes to unlawfulness entirely--yes, gross unlawfulness, so
to say it."
"You see," said Billy Smallbury, "The man's will was to do right,
sure enough, but his heart didn't chime in."
"He got so much better, that he was quite godly in his later years,
wasn't he, Jan?" said Joseph Poorgrass. "He got himself confirmed
over again in a more serious way, and took to saying 'Amen' almost as
loud as the clerk, and he liked to copy comforting verses from the
tombstones. He used, too, to hold the money-plate at Let Your Light
so Shine, and stand godfather to poor little come-by-chance children;
and he kept a missionary box upon his table to nab folks unawares
when they called; yes, and he would box the charity-boys' ears, if
they laughed in church, till they could hardly stand upright, and do
other deeds of piety natural to the saintly inclined."
"Ay, at that time he thought of nothing but high things," added Billy
Smallbury. "One day Parson Thirdly met him and said, 'Good-Morning,
Mister Everdene; 'tis a fine day!' 'Amen' said Everdene, quite
absent-like, thinking only of religion when he seed a parson. Yes,
he was a very Christian man."
"Their daughter was not at all a pretty chiel at that time," said
Henery Fray. "Never should have thought she'd have growed up such a
handsome body as she is."
"'Tis to be hoped her temper is as good as her face."
"Well, yes; but the baily will have most to do with the business and
ourselves. Ah!" Henery gazed into the ashpit, and smiled volumes of
ironical knowledge.
"A queer Christian, like the Devil's head in a cowl, [1] as the
saying is," volunteered Mark Clark.
[Footnote 1: This phrase is a conjectural emendation of the
unintelligible expression, "as the Devil said to the Owl,"
used by the natives.]
"He is," said Henery, implying that irony must cease at a certain
point. "Between we two, man and man, I believe that man would as
soon tell a lie Sundays as working-days--that I do so."
"Good faith, you do talk!" said Gabriel.
"True enough," said the man of bitter moods, looking round upon
the company with the antithetic laughter that comes from a keener
appreciation of the miseries of life than ordinary men are capable
of. "Ah, there's people of one sort, and people of another, but
that man--bless your souls!"
Gabriel thought fit to change the subject. "You must be a very aged
man, malter, to have sons growed mild and ancient," he remarked.
"Father's so old that 'a can't mind his age, can ye, father?"
interposed Jacob. "And he's growed terrible crooked too, lately,"
Jacob continued, surveying his father's figure, which was rather
more bowed than his own. "Really one may say that father there is
three-double."
"Crooked folk will last a long while," said the maltster, grimly, and
not in the best humour.
"Shepherd would like to hear the pedigree of yer life, father--
wouldn't ye, shepherd?"
"Ay that I should," said Gabriel with the heartiness of a man who had
longed to hear it for several months. "What may your age be,
malter?"
The maltster cleared his throat in an exaggerated form for emphasis,
and elongating his gaze to the remotest point of the ashpit, said, in
the slow speech justifiable when the importance of a subject is so
generally felt that any mannerism must be tolerated in getting at it,
"Well, I don't mind the year I were born in, but perhaps I can reckon
up the places I've lived at, and so get it that way. I bode at
Upper Longpuddle across there" (nodding to the north) "till I were
eleven. I bode seven at Kingsbere" (nodding to the east) "where
I took to malting. I went therefrom to Norcombe, and malted
there two-and-twenty years, and-two-and-twenty years I was there
turnip-hoeing and harvesting. Ah, I knowed that old place, Norcombe,
years afore you were thought of, Master Oak" (Oak smiled sincere
belief in the fact). "Then I malted at Durnover four year, and
four year turnip-hoeing; and I was fourteen times eleven months at
Millpond St. Jude's" (nodding north-west-by-north). "Old Twills
wouldn't hire me for more than eleven months at a time, to keep me
from being chargeable to the parish if so be I was disabled. Then I
was three year at Mellstock, and I've been here one-and-thirty year
come Candlemas. How much is that?"
"Hundred and seventeen," chuckled another old gentleman, given to
mental arithmetic and little conversation, who had hitherto sat
unobserved in a corner.
"Well, then, that's my age," said the maltster, emphatically.
"O no, father!" said Jacob. "Your turnip-hoeing were in the summer
and your malting in the winter of the same years, and ye don't ought
to count-both halves, father."
"Chok' it all! I lived through the summers, didn't I? That's my
question. I suppose ye'll say next I be no age at all to speak of?"
"Sure we shan't," said Gabriel, soothingly.
"Ye be a very old aged person, malter," attested Jan Coggan, also
soothingly. "We all know that, and ye must have a wonderful talented
constitution to be able to live so long, mustn't he, neighbours?"
"True, true; ye must, malter, wonderful," said the meeting
unanimously.
The maltster, being now pacified, was even generous enough to
voluntarily disparage in a slight degree the virtue of having lived a
great many years, by mentioning that the cup they were drinking out
of was three years older than he.
While the cup was being examined, the end of Gabriel Oak's flute
became visible over his smock-frock pocket, and Henery Fray
exclaimed, "Surely, shepherd, I seed you blowing into a great flute
by now at Casterbridge?"
"You did," said Gabriel, blushing faintly. "I've been in great
trouble, neighbours, and was driven to it. I used not to be so poor
as I be now."
"Never mind, heart!" said Mark Clark. "You should take it
careless-like, shepherd, and your time will come. But we could thank
ye for a tune, if ye bain't too tired?"
"Neither drum nor trumpet have I heard since Christmas," said Jan
Coggan. "Come, raise a tune, Master Oak!"
"Ay, that I will," said Gabriel, pulling out his flute and putting it
together. "A poor tool, neighbours; but such as I can do ye shall
have and welcome."
Oak then struck up "Jockey to the Fair," and played that sparkling
melody three times through, accenting the notes in the third round in
a most artistic and lively manner by bending his body in small jerks
and tapping with his foot to beat time.
"He can blow the flute very well--that 'a can," said a young married
man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as "Susan
Tall's husband." He continued, "I'd as lief as not be able to blow
into a flute as well as that."
"He's a clever man, and 'tis a true comfort for us to have such a
shepherd," murmured Joseph Poorgrass, in a soft cadence. "We ought
to feel full o' thanksgiving that he's not a player of ba'dy songs
instead of these merry tunes; for 'twould have been just as easy for
God to have made the shepherd a loose low man--a man of iniquity, so
to speak it--as what he is. Yes, for our wives' and daughters' sakes
we should feel real thanksgiving."
"True, true,--real thanksgiving!" dashed in Mark Clark conclusively,
not feeling it to be of any consequence to his opinion that he had
only heard about a word and three-quarters of what Joseph had said.
"Yes," added Joseph, beginning to feel like a man in the Bible; "for
evil do thrive so in these times that ye may be as much deceived in
the cleanest shaved and whitest shirted man as in the raggedest tramp
upon the turnpike, if I may term it so."
"Ay, I can mind yer face now, shepherd," said Henery Fray,
criticising Gabriel with misty eyes as he entered upon his second
tune. "Yes--now I see 'ee blowing into the flute I know 'ee to be
the same man I see play at Casterbridge, for yer mouth were scrimped
up and yer eyes a-staring out like a strangled man's--just as they be
now."
"'Tis a pity that playing the flute should make a man look such a
scarecrow," observed Mr. Mark Clark, with additional criticism of
Gabriel's countenance, the latter person jerking out, with the
ghastly grimace required by the instrument, the chorus of "Dame
Durden:"--
'Twas Moll' and Bet', and Doll' and Kate',
And Dor'-othy Drag'-gle Tail'.
"I hope you don't mind that young man's bad manners in naming your
features?" whispered Joseph to Gabriel.
"Not at all," said Mr. Oak.
"For by nature ye be a very handsome man, shepherd," continued Joseph
Poorgrass, with winning sauvity.
"Ay, that ye be, shepard," said the company.
"Thank you very much," said Oak, in the modest tone good manners
demanded, thinking, however, that he would never let Bathsheba see
him playing the flute; in this resolve showing a discretion equal to
that related to its sagacious inventress, the divine Minerva herself.
"Ah, when I and my wife were married at Norcombe Church," said the
old maltster, not pleased at finding himself left out of the subject,
"we were called the handsomest couple in the neighbourhood--everybody
said so."
"Danged if ye bain't altered now, malter," said a voice with the
vigour natural to the enunciation of a remarkably evident truism.
It came from the old man in the background, whose offensiveness and
spiteful ways were barely atoned for by the occasional chuckle he
contributed to general laughs.
"O no, no," said Gabriel.
"Don't ye play no more shepherd" said Susan Tall's husband, the young
married man who had spoken once before. "I must be moving and when
there's tunes going on I seem as if hung in wires. If I thought
after I'd left that music was still playing, and I not there, I
should be quite melancholy-like."
"What's yer hurry then, Laban?" inquired Coggan. "You used to bide
as late as the latest."
"Well, ye see, neighbours, I was lately married to a woman, and she's
my vocation now, and so ye see--" The young man halted lamely.
"New Lords new laws, as the saying is, I suppose," remarked Coggan.
"Ay, 'a b'lieve--ha, ha!" said Susan Tall's husband, in a tone
intended to imply his habitual reception of jokes without minding
them at all. The young man then wished them good-night and withdrew.
Henery Fray was the first to follow. Then Gabriel arose and went off
with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging. A few minutes later,
when the remaining ones were on their legs and about to depart, Fray
came back again in a hurry. Flourishing his finger ominously he
threw a gaze teeming with tidings just where his eye alighted by
accident, which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass's face.
"O--what's the matter, what's the matter, Henery?" said Joseph,
starting back.
"What's a-brewing, Henrey?" asked Jacob and Mark Clark.
"Baily Pennyways--Baily Pennyways--I said so; yes, I said so!"
"What, found out stealing anything?"
"Stealing it is. The news is, that after Miss Everdene got home she
went out again to see all was safe, as she usually do, and coming in
found Baily Pennyways creeping down the granary steps with half a a
bushel of barley. She fleed at him like a cat--never such a tomboy
as she is--of course I speak with closed doors?"
"You do--you do, Henery."
"She fleed at him, and, to cut a long story short, he owned to having
carried off five sack altogether, upon her promising not to persecute
him. Well, he's turned out neck and crop, and my question is, who's
going to be baily now?"
The question was such a profound one that Henery was obliged to drink
there and then from the large cup till the bottom was distinctly
visible inside. Before he had replaced it on the table, in came the
young man, Susan Tall's husband, in a still greater hurry.
"Have ye heard the news that's all over parish?"
"About Baily Pennyways?"
"But besides that?"
"No--not a morsel of it!" they replied, looking into the very midst
of Laban Tall as if to meet his words half-way down his throat.
"What a night of horrors!" murmured Joseph Poorgrass, waving his
hands spasmodically. "I've had the news-bell ringing in my left ear
quite bad enough for a murder, and I've seen a magpie all alone!"
"Fanny Robin--Miss Everdene's youngest servant--can't be found.
They've been wanting to lock up the door these two hours, but she
isn't come in. And they don't know what to do about going to bed for
fear of locking her out. They wouldn't be so concerned if she hadn't
been noticed in such low spirits these last few days, and Maryann d'
think the beginning of a crowner's inquest has happened to the poor
girl."
"Oh--'tis burned--'tis burned!" came from Joseph Poorgrass's dry
lips.
"No--'tis drowned!" said Tall.
"Or 'tis her father's razor!" suggested Billy Smallbury, with a vivid
sense of detail.
"Well--Miss Everdene wants to speak to one or two of us before we go
to bed. What with this trouble about the baily, and now about the
girl, mis'ess is almost wild."
They all hastened up the lane to the farmhouse, excepting the old
maltster, whom neither news, fire, rain, nor thunder could draw from
his hole. There, as the others' footsteps died away he sat down
again and continued gazing as usual into the furnace with his red,
bleared eyes.
From the bedroom window above their heads Bathsheba's head and
shoulders, robed in mystic white, were dimly seen extended into the
air.
"Are any of my men among you?" she said anxiously.
"Yes, ma'am, several," said Susan Tall's husband.
"To-morrow morning I wish two or three of you to make inquiries in
the villages round if they have seen such a person as Fanny Robin.
Do it quietly; there is no reason for alarm as yet. She must have
left whilst we were all at the fire."
"I beg yer pardon, but had she any young man courting her in the
parish, ma'am?" asked Jacob Smallbury.
"I don't know," said Bathsheba.
"I've never heard of any such thing, ma'am," said two or three.
"It is hardly likely, either," continued Bathsheba. "For any lover
of hers might have come to the house if he had been a respectable
lad. The most mysterious matter connected with her absence--indeed,
the only thing which gives me serious alarm--is that she was seen
to go out of the house by Maryann with only her indoor working gown
on--not even a bonnet."
"And you mean, ma'am, excusing my words, that a young woman would
hardly go to see her young man without dressing up," said Jacob,
turning his mental vision upon past experiences. "That's true--she
would not, ma'am."
"She had, I think, a bundle, though I couldn't see very well," said a
female voice from another window, which seemed that of Maryann. "But
she had no young man about here. Hers lives in Casterbridge, and I
believe he's a soldier."
"Do you know his name?" Bathsheba said.
"No, mistress; she was very close about it."
"Perhaps I might be able to find out if I went to Casterbridge
barracks," said William Smallbury.
"Very well; if she doesn't return to-morrow, mind you go there and try
to discover which man it is, and see him. I feel more responsible
than I should if she had had any friends or relations alive. I do
hope she has come to no harm through a man of that kind.... And then
there's this disgraceful affair of the bailiff--but I can't speak of
him now."
Bathsheba had so many reasons for uneasiness that it seemed she did
not think it worth while to dwell upon any particular one. "Do as I
told you, then," she said in conclusion, closing the casement.
"Ay, ay, mistress; we will," they replied, and moved away.
That night at Coggan's, Gabriel Oak, beneath the screen of closed
eyelids, was busy with fancies, and full of movement, like a river
flowing rapidly under its ice. Night had always been the time at
which he saw Bathsheba most vividly, and through the slow hours
of shadow he tenderly regarded her image now. It is rarely that
the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of
sleeplessness, but they possibly did with Oak to-night, for the
delight of merely seeing her effaced for the time his perception
of the great difference between seeing and possessing.
He also thought of plans for fetching his few utensils and books from
Norcombe. _The Young Man's Best Companion_, _The Farrier's Sure
Guide_, _The Veterinary Surgeon_, _Paradise Lost_, _The Pilgrim's
Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_, Ash's _Dictionary_, and Walkingame's
_Arithmetic_, constituted his library; and though a limited series,
it was one from which he had acquired more sound information by
diligent perusal than many a man of opportunities has done from a
furlong of laden shelves.
| 11,910 | null | https://web.archive.org/web/20210225000853/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/maddingcrowd/section2/ | Not long after he proposes, Gabriel Oak hears that Bathsheba Everdene has left the neighborhood and gone to a place called Weatherbury. He finds "that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in" and loves her all the more once she is gone. The rest of Chapter Five describes a tragic event that changes Gabriel's fate forever. He has two sheepdogs, a loyal and reliable one named George and George's son, who is still learning to herd sheep and is often too enthusiastic. One night, on one of the rare occasions when Gabriel goes to sleep in his own bed rather than in the fields, he wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of sheep bells clanging wildly. He goes outside and follows their footprints to the edge of a steep chalk-pit: Looking in, he sees hundreds of dying sheep and mangled sheep carcasses; the younger dog has unwittingly chased them over the edge in his zeal. Ruined financially without his sheep, Gabriel can no longer farm. However, he does not immediately dwell upon his own misfortune: His first impulse is to pity the gentle ewes and their unborn lambs; his second impulse is to thank God that Bathsheba did not marry him, for he wishes only prosperity for her. He regretfully shoots the dog, pays his debts, and finds himself with nothing more than his clothes. Chapter Six begins two months later at a hiring fair for farm laborers, including shepherds, bailiffs , carters, waggoners, and thatchers. Hardy describes the 200-300-man group as a whole and then focuses in on one particular man, who turns out to be Gabriel. After unsuccessfully advertising himself as a bailiff, he resignedly offers his shepherding skills for hire; still no one gives him a job. Finally, he earns a little money by playing his flute for the passers-by, and he decides to try another fair the next day. He falls asleep in a wagon and wakes up to find it moving toward Weatherbury, where Bathsheba has settled. He allows it to take him most of the way and then slips out of the wagon unseen. Intending to continue on to Weatherbury on foot, he pauses when he sees a strange light and realizes something large is on fire in the distance. A crowd gathers helplessly around a straw-rick but Gabriel knows just what to do; without regard to his own safety, he coordinates the effort to extinguish the fire, climbing himself to the top of the rick to stamp out the flames with his shepherd's crook. In the meantime, two women watch the proceedings, one of whom is the mistress of the farm. Once Gabriel has put out the fire, she asks him how she can repay him. He approaches her and asks if she has need of a shepherd's services; when she lifts her veil, the two figures stare at each other in astonished recognition. Bathsheba decides to hire him, and she asks him to speak to the bailiff, a bad-tempered man. As Gabriel walks through the forest to an inn called Warren's Malthouse, he comes across a "slim girl, rather thinly clad" who asks him not to say that he has seen her. As he reaches to give her a shilling, seeing that she is poor and worrying she may be cold, he touches her arm by mistake: We read, "Gabriel's fingers alighted on the young woman's wrist. It was beating with a throb of tragic intensity. He had frequently felt the same hard, quick beat in the femoral artery of his lambs when overdriven. It suggested a consumption too great of a vitality which, to judge from her figure and stature, was already too little." Gabriel passes her and joins the other farm laborers in the malthouse. Chapter Eight takes place in the malthouse and introduces us to the local laborers and their culture. Hardy attentively records the men's dialect and their ways of life, and he takes care to differentiate one from another, though to some extent the characters fit into types. Gabriel drinks with them, and after he has left, news arrives that Bathsheba has fired her bailiff, Pennyways, having caught him stealing, and her youngest servant, Fanny Robin, has run away. This, we guess, is the slim girl Gabriel met in the forest. Bathsheba asks her workers for help in finding her or information about the lover with whom she may have fled. | Commentary Up until now, most of the narration has been told from the point of view of Gabriel. In these chapters, the reader remains privy to Gabriel's thoughts but also receives information to which he has no access. He does not learn about the bailiff's crime or about Fanny Robin's possible elopement, and we see the whole crowd at the fair before the narrator focuses in on Gabriel. This practice of gradually moving in on a scene from an initial great distance, eventually singling out a familiar character, is a favorite of Hardy's. He analyzes the way we perceive a group of people, noting the fact that they all seem the same until we recognize a prior acquaintance. The scene characterizing the farm laborers is also typical of Hardy's novels. Here, Hardy pauses the plot for an entire chapter, giving a detailed account of how the laborers speak, how they spend their free time, and their opinions about each other. These groups of lower-class, common characters figure in almost all of Hardy's novels; like Shakespeare, he often uses them to effect comic relief, offsetting a tragic scene--here, the deaths of Gabriel's ewes--with one of a more light-hearted tone. With this scene, Hardy also intends to introduce urban or middle-class readers to the many different kinds of people that exist in the lower classes. In a later essay on the Dorsetshire laborer, he complains that people tend to stereotype farm workers and lump them all together. These chapters also serve to test Gabriel by presenting him with a series of difficulties. Yet Gabriel consistently passes the test: Indeed, the way in which he repeatedly overcomes his challenges, honor intact, constitutes part of Gabriel's idealized portrayal in the novel as a whole. While Bathsheba and Sergeant Troy interest us precisely because of the ways in which each character's strengths and faults play against each other, Gabriel is almost utterly noble and reliable. He loses his sheep and reacts by mourning for the sheep rather than for himself; he comes across a fire and knows exactly how to stop it. Gabriel is the idealized hero of the novel. Hardy artfully sets up the meeting between Gabriel and Bathsheba so as to highlight the changes both have undergone in the intervening months. The last time they met their situations were precisely reverse: She was penniless and he was a prosperous young farmer. In two months their relative stations have changed dramatically, and Gabriel finds himself asking for a job rather than for her hand in marriage. The meeting marks a new phase in both characters' lives; the change in setting also heralds this realigned relationship. | 748 | 441 | [
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44,747 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/44747-chapters/part_2_chapters_36_to_39.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Red and the Black/section_19_part_0.txt | The Red and the Black.part 2.chapters 36-39 | chapters 36-39 | null | {"name": "Chapters 36-39", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201128052739/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/the-red-and-the-black/summary-and-analysis/part-2-chapters-3639", "summary": "Julien is imprisoned in Verrieres, unaware that Mme. de Renal has miraculously escaped death and that the kind treatment he receives in prison is due to her intervention. He writes his farewell to Mathilde, requesting that she never attempt to see him again. Julien is overjoyed to learn that Mme. de Renal is not dead. He has confessed numerous times to the public prosecutor who visits him, and he hopes, by this means, to simplify the procedure and to be left alone. He is moved to another prison in a gothic tower in Besancon. He begins to relive his past with Mme. de Renal and finds that there was happiness. He contemplates suicide, then rejects the idea. Julien receives the visits of Chelan and Fouque. Chelan disheartens him, weakening his courage. Fouque cheers him. The interrogations continue in spite of Julien's frank avowal of guilt. Fouque attempts to intervene by means of a visit to Frilair. The latter is increasingly intrigued by the mystery of the Sorel affair, and he will attempt to benefit from it. Julien hopes not to have to endure a visit from his father, and Fouque is horrified at this lack of filial love. Mathilde visits Julien disguised as Madame Michelet. She has made overtures everywhere to gain Julien's release. Of these attempts she tells him nothing. Julien finds her extremely attractive, and, out of respect and admiration, he abandons himself with ecstasy to her love. Mathilde has visited Frilair, leader of the Besancon Congregation, erstwhile enemy of her father. She discloses to Frilair enough information to arrive at a sort of bargain: She will exercise her influence in Paris to Frilair's advantage in exchange for Frilair's assurance that he will work for the acquittal of Julien. Mathilde has requested that Mme. de Fervaques use her influence with a bishop to negotiate with Frilair. Mathilde has bribed the guards to gain constant access to Julien. The latter reproaches himself for not appreciating Mathilde's superhuman efforts to save him or her passionate ecstasies. He proposes that she turn over their child to Mme. de Renal. Mathilde, offended at this suggestion, finds that she is increasingly obliged to fight against Julien's growing inclination for solitude and against an awakening of affection for Mme. de Renal. He returns to the subject of his child's future but approaches it more diplomatically.", "analysis": "From this point on, Julien's life will be lived in the jail cell. Although his physical life will be severely limited, his mental and psychological life will be very active, and he will ultimately know the happiness he has sought, once the voice of ambition stills itself, out of necessity. Julien will arrive at a sort of self-knowledge. Here begin to unfurl the various preoccupations of Julien that will be fully developed in later chapters: his decreasing interest in Mathilde and the ever-increasing thought of Mme. de Renal; his meditations on death, courage, and happiness. Let us analyze one of Julien's states of mind. Finally emerging from his hypnotic state, Julien's first comment is that it is over; there is only death awaiting him, either by the guillotine or by suicide. Then he falls asleep. It is as if he realizes the necessity of steeling himself, of adopting an attitude, in order to avoid falling into the anguish of fear. His defiant confession to the judge is simply a refusal to submit to the humiliation of being judged, reserving this right for himself. Next he feels the tiresome duty of reporting to Mathilde, to inform her of his act of vengeance, to request that she forget him. It is not only an accounting to his partner in heroism to prove that he is worthy, but also the expression of an unconscious wish to be rid of her. Then comes the first awesome realization of the death that awaits him. At the hint of the appearance of fear, Julien rallies his courage and rejects the idea of remorse by rationalization: He has been wronged; he has wronged; he must be punished. He rounds out this reasoning by scorning society, which might see some glory in his execution only if he were to scatter gold among the people on his way to the scaffold. Stendhal's presentation of Julien as the victim of society, condemned not for the crime of attempted murder but for not accepting his place in that society, no doubt inspired Camus in his portrayal of Meursault in L'Etranger. Meursault killed an Arab, but he is found guilty because he did not weep at his mother's funeral. Meursault's acceptance of the verdict echoes many of Julien's thoughts of these final chapters. Julien's carefully constructed mask is completely destroyed when he learns that Mme. de Renal is not dead at all. At this news, Julien is reduced instantaneously to a simple, defenseless child in tears, and he sees the will of God in his act. Only now does Julien permit himself to feel repentance for his crime, and it is his own renewed love for Mme. de Renal that prompts his joyous cry that she will live, then, to love him still. Momentarily, he thinks now of escape but dismisses the idea since it would depend upon bribing the ignoble jailor. Julien's prison tower cell affords him a beautiful view. It is another of the symbols of the elevated isolation of the superior soul. Stendhal puts Fabrice in a similar situation in The Charterhouse. Moreover, Fabrice comes to prefer the prison to freedom since he has fallen in love with the jailor's daughter. It will be only in such solitude, safely shut off from the world, that Julien will find happiness. Note that in Stendhal's view, the hero is less excluded from society by his imprisonment than is society denied access to the hero. Julien resigns himself again, however, to the justice of the death penalty. Life is not boring for him since he begins to see it from a new slant. Julien is amazed at what is happening to him inwardly. Stendhal's heroes watch themselves, discover themselves. There is nothing predetermined about them in the sense that characters are often \"flat\" and never surprise us. Balzac tends to create flat characters; Stendhal's are round, using the terminology of E. M. Forster . It is this aspect of Stendhal's character portrayal that has found much favor with contemporary existentialistic critics. The Stendhalian hero is forced to be free, is condemned to the eternal state of becoming. He discovers himself daily in order to remake himself. What are these perceptions of his glorious future in prison? Julien's rediscovery of the happiness he had with Mme. de Renal and of the fact that he still loves her. Stendhal's analysis of Julien operates by the associational method: Remorse makes Julien think of Mme. de Renal and of his past happiness; at other times, thinking that he might have killed her, Julien swears that, in that event, he would have committed suicide; suicide, an imagined consequence of that past possibility, then looms as a possibility in the present. Still measuring himself against Napoleon, Julien rejects suicide since Napoleon went on living. The end of Chapter 36 finds Julien temporarily happy with his present surroundings. Julien's imprisonment will be punctuated by intermittent visitors. Even here he cannot escape the outside world. Note the contrasting effects that his visitors have on him: The aged Chelan presents to Julien only the images of death and decay in spite of his reasoning that his own death in the prime of life ought to dispel such a vision; the antidote is the vision of the sublime afforded by the simplicity, sincerity, and artless friendship of Fouque. Part of Stendhal's uniqueness for his age as a psychological novelist is obscured to us by the developments in the novel posterior to Stendhal, and to which we are very much accustomed. Stendhal was one of the first novelists to portray how the individual is altered by the influence exerted upon him from surrounding reality. In this respect, he antedates naturalism. Such alternations have, in fact, been carefully noted throughout the novel be Stendhal, but they are particularly noticeable during the episode relating Julien's imprisonment. Here, any intrusion on Julien's isolation produces dramatic reactions in his soul. Julien hits upon the idea of the thermometer to measure his courage, and this gives rise to his resolution to be courageous when it will be required of him. We have already witnessed Julien's tendency to bolster his courage in the present by assuring himself of his future self-control. Although he is safely imprisoned, Julien is still the victim of society and of its intrigues. This theme is taken up again by Stendhal and will be amplified in what follows. Julien plays almost no role in Chapter 38. More hints are given that he is losing interest in Mathilde. The time has come for Mathilde to play out in reality her ideal dream of heroic self-sacrifice for her own version of Boniface de La Mole. The Julien-Mathilde continues to be Cornelian: Julien now really merits her love since Mathilde may assume that what prompted his crime was love for her. This incarnation in Julien of her ideal plus his increasing indifference toward her will intensify Mathilde's love. She seems, in fact, to love Julien desperately even though Stendhal will tell us that this love needs the third party to witness it. That is, Mathilde's heroic efforts to save Julien at the risk of loss of her own reputation are partially inspired by her need to impress the world, to be admired by others. She aspires to see herself loving Julien as others would see her. Hers is still an intellectual love. Mathilde's visit to Frilair is reminiscent of Julien's entrance into the seminary. Both must screw up their courage as they approach the lion in his den. The confrontation between Mathilde and Frilair might be considered a battle in ruse in which Mathilde will not have the upper hand. Nevertheless, Frilair and Mathilde are fairly evenly matched as adversaries, and, in the end, both will be duped. The action in Chapter 39 takes place wholly in Julien's cell. At first there is not one specific incident narrated; rather, several visits, all similar, are fused to comprise a typical one in which the attitude of Mathilde and Julien are contrasted. The final conversation closing the short chapter becomes the result of what precedes and stands for one specific visit. Here is represented one of Stendhal's typical methods of narration. Julien is tired of heroism. He is more virtuous now than at any time in his life since ambition no longer goads him. Therefore, he reproaches himself for what he has done to the marquis and Mathilde de la Mole. It is here that Stendhal advises us that Julien, unwittingly, is hopelessly in love with Mme. de Renal. Julien's awareness of this fact is dim, expressing itself only in his desire to give his offspring to Mme. de Renal. Rebuffed by Mathilde, Julien artfully returns to the same subject, expressed in terms that would appeal to Mathilde's turn of mind. Note that Stendhal does not comment on Julien's stratagem. His conduct toward Mathilde is reminiscent of that which he adopted in his \"seduction\" of Mme. de Fervaques. This is the first manifestation of Julien's new attitude toward Mathilde. He relies on duplicity to convince her. Later, as he becomes increasingly irked by her presence, he will punish her somewhat sadistically. Note, in Julien's presentation, Stendhal's own preoccupation with the future. Stendhal was convinced that his real public would be that of the twentieth century. The appearance of the idea of abolishment of capital punishment, a contemporary issue, would bear out Stendhal's conviction that he was writing for the future."} | CHAPTER LXVI
SAD DETAILS
Do not expect any weakness on my part. I have avenged
myself. I have deserved death, and here I am. Pray for
my soul.--_Schiller_
Julien remained motionless. He saw nothing more. When he recovered
himself a little he noticed all the faithful rushing from the church.
The priest had left the altar. Julien started fairly slowly to follow
some women who were going away with loud screams. A woman who was
trying to get away more quickly than the others, pushed him roughly. He
fell. His feet got entangled with a chair, knocked over by the crowd;
when he got up, he felt his neck gripped. A gendarme, in full uniform,
was arresting him. Julien tried mechanically to have recourse to his
little pistol; but a second gendarme pinioned his arms.
He was taken to the prison. They went into a room where irons were put
on his hands. He was left alone. The door was doubly locked on him. All
this was done very quickly, and he scarcely appreciated it at all.
"Yes, upon my word, all is over," he said aloud as he recovered
himself. "Yes, the guillotine in a fortnight ... or killing myself
here."
His reasoning did not go any further. His head felt as though it had
been seized in some violent grip. He looked round to see if anyone was
holding him. After some moments he fell into a deep sleep.
Madame de Renal was not mortally wounded. The first bullet had pierced
her hat. The second had been fired as she was turning round. The
bullet had struck her on the shoulder, and, astonishing to relate,
had ricocheted from off the shoulder bone (which it had, however,
broken) against a gothic pillar, from which it had loosened an enormous
splinter of stone.
When, after a long and painful bandaging, the solemn surgeon said to
madame de Renal, "I answer for your life as I would for my own," she
was profoundly grieved.
She had been sincerely desirous of death for a long time. The letter
which she had written to M. de la Mole in accordance with the
injunctions of her present confessor, had proved the final blow to a
creature already weakened by an only too permanent unhappiness. This
unhappiness was caused by Julien's absence; but she, for her own part,
called it remorse. Her director, a young ecclesiastic, who was both
virtuous and enthusiastic, and had recently come to Dijon, made no
mistake as to its nature.
"Dying in this way, though not by my own hand, is very far from being
a sin," thought madame de Renal. "God will perhaps forgive me for
rejoicing over my death." She did not dare to add, "and dying by
Julien's hand puts the last touch on my happiness."
She had scarcely been rid of the presence of the surgeon and of all the
crowd of friends that had rushed to see her, than she called her maid,
Elisa. "The gaoler," she said to her with a violent blush, "is a cruel
man. He will doubtless ill-treat him, thinking to please me by doing
so.... I cannot bear that idea. Could you not go, as though on your own
account, and give the gaoler this little packet which contains some
louis. You will tell him that religion forbids him to treat him badly,
above all, he must not go and speak about the sending of this money."
It was this circumstance, which we have just mentioned, that Julien had
to thank for the humanity of the gaoler of Verrieres. It was still the
same M. Noiraud, that ideal official, whom he remembered as being so
finely alarmed by M. Appert's presence.
A judge appeared in the prison. "I occasioned death by premeditation,"
said Julien to him. "I bought the pistols and had them loaded at
so-and-so's, a gunsmith. Article 1342 of the penal code is clear. I
deserve death, and I expect it." Astonished at this kind of answer, the
judge started to multiply his questions, with a view of the accused
contradicting himself in his answers.
"Don't you see," said Julien to him with a smile, "that I am making
myself out as guilty as you can possibly desire? Go away, monsieur, you
will not fail to catch the quarry you are pursuing. You will have the
pleasure to condemn me. Spare me your presence."
"I have an irksome duty to perform," thought Julien. "I must write to
mademoiselle de la Mole:--"
"I have avenged myself," he said to her. "Unfortunately,
my name will appear in the papers, and I shall not be
able to escape from the world incognito. I shall die
in two months' time. My revenge was ghastly, like the
pain of being separated from you. From this moment I
forbid myself to write or pronounce your name. Never
speak of me even to my son; silence is the only way of
honouring me. To the ordinary commonplace man, I shall
represent a common assassin. Allow me the luxury of the
truth at this supreme moment; you will forget me. This
great catastrophe of which I advise you not to say a
single word to a single living person, will exhaust,
for several years to come, all that romantic and unduly
adventurous element which I have detected in your
character. You were intended by nature to live among the
heroes of the middle ages; exhibit their firm character.
Let what has to happen take place in secret and without
your being compromised. You will assume a false name,
and you will confide in no one. If you absolutely need a
friend's help, I bequeath the abbe Pirard to you.
"Do not talk to anyone else, particularly to the people
of your own class--the de Luz's, the Caylus's.
"A year after my death, marry M. de Croisenois; I
command you as your husband. Do not write to me at all,
I shall not answer. Though in my view, much less wicked
than Iago, I am going to say, like him: 'From this time
forth, I never will speack word.'[1]
"I shall never be seen to speak or write again. You will
have received my final words and my final expressions of
adoration.
"J. S."
It was only after he had despatched this letter and had recovered
himself a little, that Julien felt for the first time extremely
unhappy. Those momentous words, I shall die, meant the successive
tearing out of his heart of each individual hope and ambition.
Death, in itself, was not horrible in his eyes. His whole life had
been nothing but a long preparation for unhappiness, and he had
made a point of not losing sight of what is considered the greatest
unhappiness of all.
"Come then," he said to himself; "if I had to fight a duel in a couple
of months, with an expert duellist, should I be weak enough to think
about it incessantly with panic in my soul?"
He passed more than an hour in trying to analyze himself thoroughly on
this score.
When he saw clear in his own soul, and the truth appeared before his
eyes with as much definiteness as one of the pillars of his prison, he
thought about remorse.
"Why should I have any? I have been atrociously injured; I have
killed--I deserve death, but that is all. I die after having squared my
account with humanity. I do not leave any obligation unfulfilled. I owe
nothing to anybody; there is nothing shameful about my death, except
the instrument of it; that alone, it is true, is simply sufficient to
disgrace me in the eyes of the bourgeois of Verrieres; but from the
intellectual standpoint, what could be more contemptible than they? I
have one means of winning their consideration; by flinging pieces of
gold to the people as I go to the scaffold. If my memory is linked with
the idea of gold, they will always look upon it as resplendent."
After this chain of reasoning, which after a minute's reflection seemed
to him self-evident, Julien said to himself, "I have nothing left to do
in the world," and fell into a deep sleep.
About 9 o'clock in the evening the gaoler woke him up as he brought in
his supper.
"What are they saying in Verrieres?"
"M. Julien, the oath which I took before the crucifix in the 'Royal
Courtyard,' on the day when I was installed in my place, obliges me to
silence."
He was silent, but remained. Julien was amused by the sight of this
vulgar hypocrisy. I must make him, he thought, wait a long time for the
five francs which he wants to sell his conscience for.
When the gaoler saw him finish his meal without making any attempt to
corrupt him, he said in a soft and perfidious voice:
"The affection which I have for you, M. Julien, compels me to speak.
Although they say that it is contrary to the interests of justice,
because it may assist you in preparing your defence. M. Julien you are
a good fellow at heart, and you will be very glad to learn that madame
de Renal is better."
"What! she is not dead?" exclaimed Julien, beside himself.
"What, you know nothing?" said the gaoler, with a stupid air which soon
turned into exultant cupidity. "It would be very proper, monsieur, for
you to give something to the surgeon, who, so far as law and justice
go, ought not to have spoken. But in order to please you, monsieur, I
went to him, and he told me everything."
"Anyway, the wound is not mortal," said Julien to him impatiently, "you
answer for it on your life?"
The gaoler, who was a giant six feet tall, was frightened and retired
towards the door. Julien saw that he was adopting bad tactics for
getting at the truth. He sat down again and flung a napoleon to M.
Noiraud.
As the man's story proved to Julien more and more conclusively that
madame de Renal's wound was not mortal, he felt himself overcome by
tears. "Leave me," he said brusquely.
The gaoler obeyed. Scarcely had the door shut, than Julien exclaimed:
"Great God, she is not dead," and he fell on his knees, shedding hot
tears.
In this supreme moment he was a believer. What mattered the hypocrisies
of the priests? Could they abate one whit of the truth and sublimity of
the idea of God?
It was only then that Julien began to repent of the crime that he had
committed. By a coincidence, which prevented him falling into despair,
it was only at the present moment that the condition of physical
irritation and semi-madness, in which he had been plunged since his
departure from Paris for Verrieres came to an end.
His tears had a generous source. He had no doubt about the condemnation
which awaited him.
"So she will live," he said to himself. "She will live to forgive me
and love me."
Very late the next morning the gaoler woke him up and said, "You must
have a famous spirit, M. Julien. I have come in twice, but I did not
want to wake you up. Here are two bottles of excellent wine which our
cure, M. Maslon, has sent you."
"What, is that scoundrel still here?" said Julien.
"Yes, monsieur," said the gaoler, lowering his voice. "But do not talk
so loud, it may do you harm."
Julien laughed heartily.
"At the stage I have reached, my friend, you alone can do me harm in
the event of your ceasing to be kind and tender. You will be well
paid," said Julien, changing his tone and reverting to his imperious
manner. This manner was immediately justified by the gift of a piece of
money.
M. Noiraud related again, with the greatest detail, everything he
had learnt about madame de Renal, but he did not make any mention of
mademoiselle Elisa's visit.
The man was as base and servile as it was possible to be. An idea
crossed Julien's mind. "This kind of misshapen giant cannot earn more
than three or four hundred francs, for his prison is not at all full.
I can guarantee him ten thousand francs, if he will escape with me
to Switzerland. The difficulty will be in persuading him of my good
faith." The idea of the long conversation he would need to have with so
vile a person filled Julien with disgust. He thought of something else.
In the evening the time had passed. A post-chaise had come to pick him
up at midnight. He was very pleased with his travelling companions, the
gendarmes. When he arrived at the prison of Besancon in the morning
they were kind enough to place him in the upper storey of a Gothic
turret. He judged the architecture to be of the beginning of the
fourteenth century. He admired its fascinating grace and lightness.
Through a narrow space between two walls, beyond the deep court, there
opened a superb vista.
On the following day there was an interrogation, after which he was
left in peace for several days. His soul was calm. He found his affair
a perfectly simple one. "I meant to kill. I deserve to be killed."
His thoughts did not linger any further over this line of reasoning.
As for the sentence, the disagreeableness of appearing in public,
the defence, he considered all this as slight embarrassment, irksome
formalities, which it would be time enough to consider on the actual
day. The actual moment of death did not seize hold of his mind either.
"I will think about it after the sentence." Life was no longer boring,
he was envisaging everything from a new point of view, he had no longer
any ambition. He rarely thought about mademoiselle de la Mole. His
passion of remorse engrossed him a great deal, and often conjured up
the image of madame de Renal, particularly during the silence of the
night, which in this high turret was only disturbed by the song of the
osprey.
He thanked heaven that he had not inflicted a mortal wound.
"Astonishing," he said to himself, "I thought that she had destroyed my
future happiness for ever by her letter to M. de la Mole, and here am
I, less than a fortnight after the date of that letter, not giving a
single thought to all the things that engrossed me then. An income of
two or three thousand francs, on which to live quietly in a mountain
district, like Vergy.... I was happy then.... I did not realise my
happiness."
At other moments he would jump up from his chair. "If I had mortally
wounded madame de Renal, I would have killed myself.... I need to feel
certain of that so as not to horrify myself."
"Kill myself? That's the great question," he said to himself. "Oh,
those judges, those fiends of red tape, who would hang their best
citizen in order to win the cross.... At any rate, I should escape from
their control and from the bad French of their insults, which the local
paper will call eloquence."
"I still have five or six weeks, more or less to live.... Kill myself.
No, not for a minute," he said to himself after some days, "Napoleon
went on living."
"Besides, I find life pleasant, this place is quiet, I am not troubled
with bores," he added with a smile, and he began to make out a list of
the books which he wanted to order from Paris.
[1] Stendhal's bad spelling is here reproduced.
CHAPTER LXVII
A TURRET
The tomb of a friend.--_Sterne_.
He heard a loud noise in the corridor. It was not the time when the
gaoler usually came up to his prison. The osprey flew away with a
shriek. The door opened, and the venerable cure Chelan threw himself
into his arms. He was trembling all over and had his stick in his hands.
"Great God! Is it possible, my child--I ought to say monster?"
The good old man could not add a single word. Julien was afraid he
would fall down. He was obliged to lead him to a chair. The hand of
time lay heavy on this man who had once been so active. He seemed to
Julien the mere shadow of his former self.
When he had regained his breath, he said, "It was only the day before
yesterday that I received your letter from Strasbourg with your five
hundred francs for the poor of Verrieres. They brought it to me in
the mountains at Liveru where I am living in retirement with my
nephew Jean. Yesterday I learnt of the catastrophe.... Heavens, is it
possible?" And the old man left off weeping. He did not seem to have
any ideas left, but added mechanically, "You will have need of your
five hundred francs, I will bring them back to you."
"I need to see you, my father," exclaimed Julien, really touched. "I
have money, anyway."
But he could not obtain any coherent answer. From time to time, M.
Chelan shed some tears which coursed silently down his cheeks. He then
looked at Julien, and was quite dazed when he saw him kiss his hands
and carry them to his lips. That face which had once been so vivid,
and which had once portrayed with such vigour the most noble emotions
was now sunk in a perpetual apathy. A kind of peasant came soon to
fetch the old man. "You must not fatigue him," he said to Julien, who
understood that he was the nephew. This visit left Julien plunged in a
cruel unhappiness which found no vent in tears. Everything seemed to
him gloomy and disconsolate. He felt his heart frozen in his bosom.
This moment was the cruellest which he had experienced since the
crime. He had just seen death and seen it in all its ugliness. All his
illusions about greatness of soul and nobility of character had been
dissipated like a cloud before the hurricane.
This awful plight lasted several hours. After moral poisoning, physical
remedies and champagne are necessary. Julien would have considered
himself a coward to have resorted to them. "What a fool I am," he
exclaimed, towards the end of the horrible day that he had spent
entirely in walking up and down his narrow turret. "It's only, if I
had been going to die like anybody else, that the sight of that poor
old man would have had any right to have thrown me into this awful fit
of sadness: but a rapid death in the flower of my age simply puts me
beyond the reach of such awful senility."
In spite of all his argumentation, Julien felt as touched as any
weak-minded person would have been, and consequently felt unhappy
as the result of the visit. He no longer had any element of rugged
greatness, or any Roman virtue. Death appeared to him at a great height
and seemed a less easy proposition.
"This is what I shall take for my thermometer," he said to himself.
"To-night I am ten degrees below the courage requisite for
guillotine-point level. I had that courage this morning. Anyway, what
does it matter so long as it comes back to me at the necessary moment?"
This thermometer idea amused him and finally managed to distract him.
When he woke up the next day he was ashamed of the previous day. "My
happiness and peace of mind are at stake." He almost made up his mind
to write to the Procureur-General to request that no one should be
admitted to see him. "And how about Fouque," he thought? "If he takes
it upon himself to come to Besancon, his grief will be immense."
It had perhaps been two months since he had given Fouque a thought.
"I was a great fool at Strasbourg. My thoughts did not go beyond my
coat-collar. He was much engrossed by the memory of Fouque, which
left him more and more touched. He walked nervously about. Here I
am, clearly twenty degrees below death point.... If this weakness
increases, it will be better for me to kill myself. What joy for the
abbe Maslon, and the Valenods, if I die like an usher."
Fouque arrived. The good, simple man, was distracted by grief. His one
idea, so far as he had any at all, was to sell all he possessed in
order to bribe the gaoler and secure Julien's escape. He talked to him
at length of M. de Lavalette's escape.
"You pain me," Julien said to him. "M. de Lavalette was innocent--I
am guilty. Though you did not mean to, you made me think of the
difference...."
"But is it true? What? were you going to sell all you possessed?" said
Julien, suddenly becoming mistrustful and observant.
Fouque was delighted at seeing his friend answer his obsessing idea,
and detailed at length, and within a hundred francs, what he would get
for each of his properties.
"What a sublime effort for a small country land-owner," thought Julien.
"He is ready to sacrifice for me the fruits of all the economies, and
all the little semi-swindling tricks which I used to be ashamed of when
I saw him practice them."
"None of the handsome young people whom I saw in the Hotel de la Mole,
and who read Rene, would have any of his ridiculous weaknesses: but,
except those who are very young and who have also inherited riches
and are ignorant of the value of money, which of all those handsome
Parisians would be capable of such a sacrifice?"
All Fouque's mistakes in French and all his common gestures seemed to
disappear. He threw himself into his arms. Never have the provinces
in comparison with Paris received so fine a tribute. Fouque was so
delighted with the momentary enthusiasm which he read in his friend's
eyes that he took it for consent to the flight.
This view of the sublime recalled to Julien all the strength that the
apparition of M. Chelan had made him lose. He was still very young;
but in my view he was a fine specimen. Instead of his character passing
from tenderness to cunning, as is the case with the majority of men,
age would have given him that kindness of heart which is easily melted
... but what avail these vain prophecies.
The interrogations became more frequent in spite of all the efforts
of Julien, who always endeavoured by his answers to shorten the whole
matter.
"I killed, or at any rate, I wished to occasion death, and I did so
with premeditation," he would repeat every day. But the judge was
a pedant above everything. Julien's confessions had no effect in
curtailing the interrogations. The judge's conceit was wounded. Julien
did not know that they had wanted to transfer him into an awful cell,
and that it was only, thanks to Fouque's efforts, that he was allowed
to keep his pretty room at the top of a hundred and eighty steps.
M. the abbe de Frilair was one of the important customers who entrusted
Fouque with the purveying of their firewood. The good tradesmen managed
to reach the all powerful grand vicar. M. de Frilair informed him,
to his unspeakable delight, that he was so touched by Julien's good
qualities, and by the services which he had formerly rendered to the
seminary, that he intended to recommend him to the judges. Fouque
thought he saw a hope of saving his friend, and as he went out, bowing
down to the ground, requested M. the grand vicar, to distribute a sum
of ten louis in masses to entreat the acquittal of the accused.
Fouque was making a strange mistake. M. de Frilair was very far from
being a Valenod. He refused, and even tried to make the good peasant
understand that he would do better to keep his money. Seeing that it
was impossible to be clear without being indiscreet, he advised him to
give that sum as alms for the use of the poor prisoners, who, in point
of fact, were destitute of everything.
"This Julien is a singular person, his action is unintelligible,"
thought M. de Frilair, "and I ought to find nothing unintelligible.
Perhaps it will be possible to make a martyr of him.... In any case,
I shall get to the bottom of the matter, and shall perhaps find an
opportunity of putting fear into the heart of that madame de Renal
who has no respect for us, and at the bottom detests me.... Perhaps
I might be able to utilise all this as a means of a brilliant
reconciliation with M. de la Mole, who has a weakness for the little
seminarist."
The settlement of the lawsuit had been signed some weeks previously,
and the abbe Pirard had left Besancon after having duly mentioned
Julien's mysterious birth, on the very day when the unhappy man tried
to assassinate madame de Renal in the church of Verrieres.
There was only one disagreeable event between himself and his death
which Julien anticipated. He consulted Fouque concerning his idea
of writing to M. the Procureur-General asking to be exempt from all
visits. This horror at the sight of a father, above all at a moment
like this, deeply shocked the honest middle-class heart of the wood
merchant.
He thought he understood why so many people had a passionate hatred for
his friend. He concealed his feelings out of respect for misfortune.
"In any case," he answered coldly, "such an order for privacy would not
be applied to your father."
CHAPTER LXVIII
A POWERFUL MAN
But her proceedings are so mysterious and her figure is
so elegant! Who can she be?--_Schiller_.
The doors of the turret opened very early on the following day.
"Oh! good God," he thought, "here's my father! What an unpleasant
scene!"
At the same time a woman dressed like a peasant rushed into his arms.
He had difficulty in recognising her. It was mademoiselle de la Mole.
"You wicked man! Your letter only told me where you were. As for what
you call your crime, but which is really nothing more or less than a
noble vengeance, which shews me all the loftiness of the heart which
beats within your bosom, I only got to know of it at Verrieres."
In spite of all his prejudices against mademoiselle de la Mole,
prejudices moreover which he had not owned to himself quite frankly,
Julien found her extremely pretty. It was impossible not to recognise
both in what she had done and what she had said, a noble disinterested
feeling far above the level of anything that a petty vulgar soul would
have dared to do? He thought that he still loved a queen, and after a
few moments said to her with a remarkable nobility both of thought and
of elocution,
"I sketched out the future very clearly. After my death I intended to
remarry you to M. de Croisenois, who will officially of course then
marry a widow. The noble but slightly romantic soul of this charming
widow, who will have been brought back to the cult of vulgar prudence
by an astonishing and singular event which played in her life a part
as great as it was tragic, will deign to appreciate the very real
merit of the young marquis. You will resign yourself to be happy with
ordinary worldly happiness, prestige, riches, high rank. But, dear
Mathilde, if your arrival at Besancon is suspected, it will be a mortal
blow for M. de la Mole, and that is what I shall never forgive myself.
I have already caused him so much sorrow. The academician will say that
he has nursed a serpent in his bosom.
"I must confess that I little expected so much cold reason and so much
solicitude for the future," said mademoiselle de la Mole, slightly
annoyed. "My maid who is almost as prudent as you are, took a passport
for herself, and I posted here under the name of madam Michelet."
"And did madame Michelet find it so easy to get to see me?"
"Ah! you are still the same superior man whom I chose to favour. I
started by offering a hundred francs to one of the judge's secretaries,
who alleged at first that my admission into this turret was impossible.
But once he had got the money the worthy man kept me waiting, raised
objections, and I thought that he meant to rob me--" She stopped.
"Well?" said Julien.
"Do not be angry, my little Julien," she said, kissing him. "I was
obliged to tell my name to the secretary, who took me for a young
working girl from Paris in love with handsome Julien. As a matter of
fact those are his actual expressions. I swore to him, my dear, that I
was your wife, and I shall have a permit to see you every day."
"Nothing could be madder," thought Julien, "but I could not help it.
After all, M. de la Mole is so great a nobleman that public opinion
will manage to find an excuse for the young colonel who will marry
such a charming widow. My death will atone for everything;" and he
abandoned himself with delight to Mathilde's love. It was madness, it
was greatness of soul, it was the most remarkable thing possible. She
seriously suggested that she should kill herself with him.
After these first transports, when she had had her fill of the
happiness of seeing Julien, a keen curiosity suddenly invaded her soul.
She began to scrutinize her lover, and found him considerably above
the plane which she had anticipated. Boniface de La Mole seemed to be
brought to life again, but on a more heroic scale.
Mathilde saw the first advocates of the locality, and offended them by
offering gold too crudely, but they finished by accepting.
She promptly came to the conclusion that so far as dubious and far
reaching intrigues were concerned, everything depended at Besancon on
M. the abbe de Frilair.
She found at first overwhelming difficulties in obtaining an interview
with the all-powerful leader of the congregation under the obscure name
of madame Michelet. But the rumour of the beauty of a young dressmaker,
who was madly in love, and had come from Paris to Besancon to console
the young abbe Julien Sorel, spread over the town.
Mathilde walked about the Besancon streets alone: she hoped not to be
recognised. In any case, she thought it would be of some use to her
cause if she produced a great impression on the people. She thought, in
her madness, of making them rebel in order to save Julien as he walked
to his death. Mademoiselle de la Mole thought she was dressed simply
and in a way suitable to a woman in mourning, she was dressed in fact
in such a way as to attract every one's attention.
She was the object of everyone's notice at Besancon when she obtained
an audience of M. de Frilair after a week spent in soliciting it.
In spite of all her courage, the idea of an influential leader of the
congregation, and the idea of deep and calculating criminality, were so
associated with each other in her mind, that she trembled as she rang
the bell at the door of the bishop's palace. She could scarcely walk
when she had to go up the staircase, which led to the apartment of the
first grand Vicar. The solitude of the episcopal palace chilled her. "I
might sit down in an armchair, and the armchair might grip my arms: I
should then disappear. Whom could my maid ask for? The captain of the
gendarmerie will take care to do nothing. I am isolated in this great
town."
After her first look at the apartment, mademoiselle de la Mole felt
reassured. In the first place, the lackey who had opened the door to
her had on a very elegant livery. The salon in which she was asked to
wait displayed that refined and delicate luxury which differs so much
from crude magnificence, and which is only found in the best houses in
Paris. As soon as she noticed M. de Frilair coming towards her with
quite a paternal air, all her ideas of his criminality disappeared. She
did not even find on his handsome face the impress of that drastic and
somewhat savage courage which is so anti-pathetic to Paris society.
The half-smile which animated the features of the priest, who was
all-powerful at Besancon, betokened the well-bred man, the learned
prelate, the clever administrator. Mathilde felt herself at Paris.
It was the work of a few minutes for M. de Frilair to induce Mathilde
to confess to him that she was the daughter of his powerful opponent,
the marquis de la Mole.
"As a matter of fact, I am not Madame Michelet," she said, reassuming
all the haughtiness of her natural demeanour, "and this confession
costs me but little since I have come to consult you, monsieur, on the
possibility of procuring the escape of M. de la Vernaye. Moreover, he
is only guilty of a piece of folly; the woman whom he shot at is well;
and, in the second place, I can put down fifty-thousand francs straight
away for the purpose of bribing the officials, and pledge myself for
twice that sum. Finally, my gratitude and the gratitude of my family
will be ready to do absolutely anything for the man who has saved M. de
la Vernaye."
M. de Frilair seemed astonished at the name. Mathilde shewed him
several letters from the Minister of War, addressed to M. Julien Sorel
de la Vernaye.
"You see, monsieur, that my father took upon himself the responsibility
of his career. I married him secretly, my father was desirous that he
should be a superior officer before the notification of this marriage,
which, after all, is somewhat singular for a de la Mole."
Mathilde noticed that M. de Frilair's expression of goodwill and mild
cheerfulness was rapidly vanishing in proportion as he made certain
important discoveries. His face exhibited a subtlety tinged with deep
perfidiousness, the abbe had doubts, he was slowly re-reading the
official documents.
"What can I get out of these strange confidences?" he said to himself.
"Here I am suddenly thrown into intimate relations with a friend of
the celebrated marechale de Fervaques, who is the all-powerful niece
of my lord, bishop of ---- who can make one a bishop of France. What
I looked upon as an extremely distant possibility presents itself
unexpectedly. This may lead me to the goal of all my hopes."
Mathilde was at first alarmed by the sudden change in the expression
of this powerful man, with whom she was alone in a secluded room. "But
come," she said to herself soon afterwards. "Would it not have been
more unfortunate if I had made no impression at all on the cold egoism
of a priest who was already sated with power and enjoyment?"
Dazzled at the sight of this rapid and unexpected path of reaching the
episcopate which now disclosed itself to him, and astonished as he was
by Mathilde's genius, M. de Frilair ceased for a moment to be on his
guard. Mademoiselle de la Mole saw him almost at her feet, tingling
with ambition, and trembling nervously.
"Everything is cleared up," she thought. "Madame de Fervaques' friend
will find nothing impossible in this town." In spite of a sentiment
of still painful jealousy she had sufficient courage to explain that
Julien was the intimate friend of the marechale, and met my lord the
bishop of ---- nearly every day.
"If you were to draw by ballot four or five times in succession a
list of thirty-six jurymen from out the principal inhabitants of this
department," said the grand Vicar, emphasizing his words, and with a
hard, ambitious expression in his eyes, "I should not feel inclined to
congratulate myself, if I could not reckon on eight or ten friends who
would be the most intelligent of the lot in each list. I can always
manage in nearly every case to get more than a sufficient majority to
secure a condemnation, so you see, mademoiselle, how easy it is for me
to secure a conviction." The abbe stopped short as though astonished
by the sound of his own words; he was admitting things which are never
said to the profane. But he in his turn dumbfounded Mathilde when he
informed her that the special feature in Julien's strange adventure
which astonished and interested Besancon society, was that he had
formerly inspired Madame de Renal with a grand passion and reciprocated
it for a long time. M. de Frilair had no difficulty in perceiving the
extreme trouble which his story produced.
"I have my revenge," he thought. "After all it's a way of managing
this decided young person. I was afraid that I should not succeed." Her
distinguished and intractable appearance intensified in his eyes the
charm of the rare beauty whom he now saw practically entreating him. He
regained all his self-possession--and he did not hesitate to move the
dagger about in her heart.
"I should not be at all surprised," he said to her lightly, "if we
were to learn that it was owing to jealousy that M. Sorel fired two
pistol shots at the woman he once loved so much. Of course she must
have consoled herself and for some time she has been seeing extremely
frequently a certain abbe Marquinot of Dijon, a kind of Jansenist, and
as immoral as all Jansenists are."
M. de Frilair experienced the voluptuous pleasure of torturing at
his leisure the heart of this beautiful girl whose weakness he had
surprised.
"Why," he added, as he fixed his ardent eyes upon Mathilde, "should
M. Sorel have chosen the church, if it were not for the reason that
his rival was celebrating mass in it at that very moment? Everyone
attributes an infinite amount of intelligence and an even greater
amount of prudence to the fortunate man who is the object of your
interest. What would have been simpler than to hide himself in the
garden of M. de Renal which he knows so well. Once there he could put
the woman of whom he was jealous to death with the practical certainty
of being neither seen, caught, nor suspected."
This apparently sound train of reasoning eventually made Mathilde
loose all self-possession. Her haughty soul steeped in all that arid
prudence, which passes in high society for the true psychology of the
human heart, was not of the type to be at all quick in appreciating
that joy of scorning all prudence, which an ardent soul can find so
keen. In the high classes of Paris society in which Mathilde had lived,
it is only rarely that passion can divest itself of prudence, and
people always make a point of throwing themselves out of windows from
the fifth storey.
At last the abbe de Frilair was sure of his power over her. He gave
Mathilde to understand (and he was doubtless lying) that he could do
what he liked with the public official who was entrusted with the
conduct of Julien's prosecution. After the thirty-six jurymen for the
sessions had been chosen by ballot, he would approach at least thirty
jurymen directly and personally.
If M. de Frilair had not thought Mathilde so pretty, he would not have
spoken so clearly before the fifth or sixth interview.
CHAPTER LXIX
THE INTRIGUE
Castres 1676--A brother has just murdered his sister
in the house next to mine. This gentleman had already
been guilty of one murder. His father saved his life by
causing five-hundred crowns to be distributed among the
councillors.--_Locke: Journey in France_.
When she left the bishop's palace, Mathilde did not hesitate to
despatch a courier to madame de Fervaques. The fear of compromising
herself did not stop her for a moment. She entreated her rival to
obtain for M. de Frilair an autograph letter from the bishop of ----.
She went as far as to entreat her to come herself to Besancon with all
speed. This was an heroic act on the part of a proud and jealous soul.
Acting on Fouque's advice, she had had the discretion to refrain from
mentioning the steps she had taken for Julien. Her presence troubled
him enough without that. A better man when face to face with death than
he had ever been during his life, he had remorse not only towards M. de
la Mole, but also towards Mathilde.
"Come," he said to himself, "there are times when I feel absent-minded
and even bored by her society. She is ruining herself on my account,
and this is how I reward her. Am I really a scoundrel?" This question
would have bothered him but little in the days when he was ambitious.
In those days he looked upon failure as the only disgrace.
His moral discomfort when with Mathilde was proportionately emphasized
by the fact that he inspired her at this time with the maddest and most
extraordinary passion. She talked of nothing but the strange sacrifices
that she was ready to make in order to save him.
Exalted as she was by a sentiment on which she plumed herself, to the
complete subordination of her pride, she would have liked not to have
let a single minute of her life go by without filling it with some
extraordinary act. The strangest projects, and ones involving her in
the utmost danger, supplied the topics of her long interviews with
Julien. The well-paid gaolers allowed her to reign over the prison.
Mathilde's ideas were not limited by the sacrifice of her reputation.
She would have thought nothing of making her condition known to society
at large. Throwing herself on her knees before the king's carriage
as it galloped along, in order to ask for Julien's pardon, and thus
attracting the attention of the prince, at the risk of being crushed
a thousand times over, was one of the least fantastic dreams in which
this exalted and courageous imagination chose to indulge. She was
certain of being admitted into the reserved portion of the park of St.
Cloud, through those friends of hers who were employed at the king's
court.
Julien thought himself somewhat unworthy of so much devotion. As a
matter of fact, he was tired of heroism. A simple, naive, and almost
timid tenderness was what would have appealed to him, while Mathilde's
haughty soul, on the other hand, always required the idea of a public
and an audience.
In the midst of all her anguish and all her fears for the life of
that lover whom she was unwilling to survive, she felt a secret need
of astonishing the public by the extravagance of her love and the
sublimity of her actions.
Julien felt irritated at not finding himself touched by all this
heroism. What would he have felt if he had known of all the mad ideas
with which Mathilde overwhelmed the devoted but eminently logical and
limited spirit of the good Fouque?
He did not know what to find fault with in Mathilde's devotion. For
he, too, would have sacrificed all his fortune, and have exposed his
life to the greatest risks in order to save Julien. He was dumbfounded
by the quantity of gold which Mathilde flung away. During the first
days Fouque, who had all the provincial's respect for money, was much
impressed by the sums she spent in this way.
He at last discovered that mademoiselle de la Mole's projects
frequently varied, and he was greatly relieved at finding a word with
which to express his blame for a character whom he found so exhausting.
She was changeable. There is only a step from this epithet to that of
wrong-headed, the greatest term of opprobrium known to the provinces.
"It is singular," said Julien to himself, as Mathilde was going out
of his prison one day, "that I should be so insensible at being the
object of so keen a passion! And two months ago I adored her! I have,
of course, read that the approach of death makes one lose interest
in everything, but it is awful to feel oneself ungrateful, and not
to be able to change. Am I an egoist, then?" He addressed the most
humiliating reproaches to himself on this score.
Ambition was dead in his heart; another passion had arisen from its
ashes. He called it remorse at having assassinated madame de Renal.
As a matter of fact, he loved her to the point of distraction. He
experienced a singular happiness on these occasions when, being left
absolutely alone, and without being afraid of being interrupted, he
could surrender himself completely to the memory of the happy days
which he had once passed at Verrieres, or at Vergy. The slightest
incidents of these days, which had fleeted away only too rapidly,
possessed an irresistible freshness and charm. He never gave a thought
to his Paris successes; they bored him.
These moods, which became intensified with every succeeding day, were
partly guessed by the jealous Mathilde. She realised very clearly that
she had to struggle against his love of solitude. Sometimes, with
terror in her heart, she uttered madame de Renal's name.
She saw Julien quiver. Henceforth her passion had neither bounds nor
limit.
"If he dies, I will die after him," she said to herself in all good
faith. "What will the Paris salons say when they see a girl of my own
rank carry her adoration for a lover who is condemned to death to such
a pitch as this? For sentiments like these you must go back to the age
of the heroes. It was loves of this kind which thrilled the hearts of
the century of Charles IX. and Henri III."
In the midst of her keenest transports, when she was clasping Julien's
head against her heart, she would say to herself with horror, "What!
is this charming head doomed to fall? Well," she added, inflamed by
a not unhappy heroism, "these lips of mine, which are now pressing
against this pretty hair, will be icy cold less than twenty-four hours
afterwards."
Thoughts of the awful voluptuousness of such heroic moments gripped
her in a compelling embrace. The idea of suicide, absorbing enough
in itself, entered that haughty soul (to which, up to the present it
had been so utterly alien), and soon reigned over it with an absolute
dominion.
"No, the blood of my ancestors has not grown tepid in descending to
me," said Mathilde proudly to herself.
"I have a favour to ask of you," said her lover to her one day. "Put
your child out to nurse at Verrieres. Madame de Renal will look after
the nurse."
"Those words of yours are very harsh." And Mathilde paled.
"It is true, and I ask your pardon a thousand times," exclaimed Julien,
emerging from his reverie, and clasping her in his arms.
After having dried his tears, he reverted to his original idea, but
with greater tact. He had given a twist of melancholy philosophy to the
conversation. He talked of that future of his which was so soon going
to close. "One must admit, dear one, that passions are an accident in
life, but such accidents only occur in superior souls.... My son's
death would be in reality a happiness for your own proud family, and
all the servants will realize as much. Neglect will be the lot of that
child of shame and unhappiness. I hope that, at a time which I do not
wish to fix, but which nevertheless I am courageous enough to imagine,
you will obey my last advice: you will marry the marquis de Croisenois."
"What? Dishonoured?"
"Dishonour cannot attach to a name such as yours. You will be a widow,
and the widow of a madman--that is all. I will go further--my crime
will confer no dishonour, since it had no money motive. Perhaps when
the time comes for your marriage, some philosophic legislator will have
so far prevailed on the prejudice of his contemporaries as to have
secured the suppression of the death penalty. Then some friendly voice
will say, by way of giving an instance: 'Why, madame de la Mole's first
husband was a madman, but not a wicked man or a criminal. It was absurd
to have his head cut off.' So my memory will not be infamous in any
way--at least, after a certain time.... Your position in society, your
fortune, and, if you will allow me to say so, your genius, will make M.
de Croisenois, once he is your husband, play a part which he would have
never managed to secure unaided. He only possesses birth and bravery,
and those qualities alone, though they constituted an accomplished man
in 1729, are an anachronism a century later on, and only give rise to
unwarranted pretensions. You need other things if you are to place
yourself at the head of the youth of France."
"You will take all the help of your firm and enterprising character
to the political party which you will make your husband join. You may
be able to be a successor to the Chevreuses and the Longuevilles of
the Fronde--but then, dear one, the divine fire which animates you
at present will have grown a little tepid. Allow me to tell you," he
added, "after many other preparatory phrases, that in fifteen years'
time you will look upon the love you once had for me as a madness,
which though excusable, was a piece of madness all the same."
He stopped suddenly and became meditative. He found himself again
confronted with the idea which shocked Mathilde so much: "In fifteen
years, madame de Renal will adore my son and you will have forgotten
him."
| 7,994 | Chapters 36-39 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201128052739/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/the-red-and-the-black/summary-and-analysis/part-2-chapters-3639 | Julien is imprisoned in Verrieres, unaware that Mme. de Renal has miraculously escaped death and that the kind treatment he receives in prison is due to her intervention. He writes his farewell to Mathilde, requesting that she never attempt to see him again. Julien is overjoyed to learn that Mme. de Renal is not dead. He has confessed numerous times to the public prosecutor who visits him, and he hopes, by this means, to simplify the procedure and to be left alone. He is moved to another prison in a gothic tower in Besancon. He begins to relive his past with Mme. de Renal and finds that there was happiness. He contemplates suicide, then rejects the idea. Julien receives the visits of Chelan and Fouque. Chelan disheartens him, weakening his courage. Fouque cheers him. The interrogations continue in spite of Julien's frank avowal of guilt. Fouque attempts to intervene by means of a visit to Frilair. The latter is increasingly intrigued by the mystery of the Sorel affair, and he will attempt to benefit from it. Julien hopes not to have to endure a visit from his father, and Fouque is horrified at this lack of filial love. Mathilde visits Julien disguised as Madame Michelet. She has made overtures everywhere to gain Julien's release. Of these attempts she tells him nothing. Julien finds her extremely attractive, and, out of respect and admiration, he abandons himself with ecstasy to her love. Mathilde has visited Frilair, leader of the Besancon Congregation, erstwhile enemy of her father. She discloses to Frilair enough information to arrive at a sort of bargain: She will exercise her influence in Paris to Frilair's advantage in exchange for Frilair's assurance that he will work for the acquittal of Julien. Mathilde has requested that Mme. de Fervaques use her influence with a bishop to negotiate with Frilair. Mathilde has bribed the guards to gain constant access to Julien. The latter reproaches himself for not appreciating Mathilde's superhuman efforts to save him or her passionate ecstasies. He proposes that she turn over their child to Mme. de Renal. Mathilde, offended at this suggestion, finds that she is increasingly obliged to fight against Julien's growing inclination for solitude and against an awakening of affection for Mme. de Renal. He returns to the subject of his child's future but approaches it more diplomatically. | From this point on, Julien's life will be lived in the jail cell. Although his physical life will be severely limited, his mental and psychological life will be very active, and he will ultimately know the happiness he has sought, once the voice of ambition stills itself, out of necessity. Julien will arrive at a sort of self-knowledge. Here begin to unfurl the various preoccupations of Julien that will be fully developed in later chapters: his decreasing interest in Mathilde and the ever-increasing thought of Mme. de Renal; his meditations on death, courage, and happiness. Let us analyze one of Julien's states of mind. Finally emerging from his hypnotic state, Julien's first comment is that it is over; there is only death awaiting him, either by the guillotine or by suicide. Then he falls asleep. It is as if he realizes the necessity of steeling himself, of adopting an attitude, in order to avoid falling into the anguish of fear. His defiant confession to the judge is simply a refusal to submit to the humiliation of being judged, reserving this right for himself. Next he feels the tiresome duty of reporting to Mathilde, to inform her of his act of vengeance, to request that she forget him. It is not only an accounting to his partner in heroism to prove that he is worthy, but also the expression of an unconscious wish to be rid of her. Then comes the first awesome realization of the death that awaits him. At the hint of the appearance of fear, Julien rallies his courage and rejects the idea of remorse by rationalization: He has been wronged; he has wronged; he must be punished. He rounds out this reasoning by scorning society, which might see some glory in his execution only if he were to scatter gold among the people on his way to the scaffold. Stendhal's presentation of Julien as the victim of society, condemned not for the crime of attempted murder but for not accepting his place in that society, no doubt inspired Camus in his portrayal of Meursault in L'Etranger. Meursault killed an Arab, but he is found guilty because he did not weep at his mother's funeral. Meursault's acceptance of the verdict echoes many of Julien's thoughts of these final chapters. Julien's carefully constructed mask is completely destroyed when he learns that Mme. de Renal is not dead at all. At this news, Julien is reduced instantaneously to a simple, defenseless child in tears, and he sees the will of God in his act. Only now does Julien permit himself to feel repentance for his crime, and it is his own renewed love for Mme. de Renal that prompts his joyous cry that she will live, then, to love him still. Momentarily, he thinks now of escape but dismisses the idea since it would depend upon bribing the ignoble jailor. Julien's prison tower cell affords him a beautiful view. It is another of the symbols of the elevated isolation of the superior soul. Stendhal puts Fabrice in a similar situation in The Charterhouse. Moreover, Fabrice comes to prefer the prison to freedom since he has fallen in love with the jailor's daughter. It will be only in such solitude, safely shut off from the world, that Julien will find happiness. Note that in Stendhal's view, the hero is less excluded from society by his imprisonment than is society denied access to the hero. Julien resigns himself again, however, to the justice of the death penalty. Life is not boring for him since he begins to see it from a new slant. Julien is amazed at what is happening to him inwardly. Stendhal's heroes watch themselves, discover themselves. There is nothing predetermined about them in the sense that characters are often "flat" and never surprise us. Balzac tends to create flat characters; Stendhal's are round, using the terminology of E. M. Forster . It is this aspect of Stendhal's character portrayal that has found much favor with contemporary existentialistic critics. The Stendhalian hero is forced to be free, is condemned to the eternal state of becoming. He discovers himself daily in order to remake himself. What are these perceptions of his glorious future in prison? Julien's rediscovery of the happiness he had with Mme. de Renal and of the fact that he still loves her. Stendhal's analysis of Julien operates by the associational method: Remorse makes Julien think of Mme. de Renal and of his past happiness; at other times, thinking that he might have killed her, Julien swears that, in that event, he would have committed suicide; suicide, an imagined consequence of that past possibility, then looms as a possibility in the present. Still measuring himself against Napoleon, Julien rejects suicide since Napoleon went on living. The end of Chapter 36 finds Julien temporarily happy with his present surroundings. Julien's imprisonment will be punctuated by intermittent visitors. Even here he cannot escape the outside world. Note the contrasting effects that his visitors have on him: The aged Chelan presents to Julien only the images of death and decay in spite of his reasoning that his own death in the prime of life ought to dispel such a vision; the antidote is the vision of the sublime afforded by the simplicity, sincerity, and artless friendship of Fouque. Part of Stendhal's uniqueness for his age as a psychological novelist is obscured to us by the developments in the novel posterior to Stendhal, and to which we are very much accustomed. Stendhal was one of the first novelists to portray how the individual is altered by the influence exerted upon him from surrounding reality. In this respect, he antedates naturalism. Such alternations have, in fact, been carefully noted throughout the novel be Stendhal, but they are particularly noticeable during the episode relating Julien's imprisonment. Here, any intrusion on Julien's isolation produces dramatic reactions in his soul. Julien hits upon the idea of the thermometer to measure his courage, and this gives rise to his resolution to be courageous when it will be required of him. We have already witnessed Julien's tendency to bolster his courage in the present by assuring himself of his future self-control. Although he is safely imprisoned, Julien is still the victim of society and of its intrigues. This theme is taken up again by Stendhal and will be amplified in what follows. Julien plays almost no role in Chapter 38. More hints are given that he is losing interest in Mathilde. The time has come for Mathilde to play out in reality her ideal dream of heroic self-sacrifice for her own version of Boniface de La Mole. The Julien-Mathilde continues to be Cornelian: Julien now really merits her love since Mathilde may assume that what prompted his crime was love for her. This incarnation in Julien of her ideal plus his increasing indifference toward her will intensify Mathilde's love. She seems, in fact, to love Julien desperately even though Stendhal will tell us that this love needs the third party to witness it. That is, Mathilde's heroic efforts to save Julien at the risk of loss of her own reputation are partially inspired by her need to impress the world, to be admired by others. She aspires to see herself loving Julien as others would see her. Hers is still an intellectual love. Mathilde's visit to Frilair is reminiscent of Julien's entrance into the seminary. Both must screw up their courage as they approach the lion in his den. The confrontation between Mathilde and Frilair might be considered a battle in ruse in which Mathilde will not have the upper hand. Nevertheless, Frilair and Mathilde are fairly evenly matched as adversaries, and, in the end, both will be duped. The action in Chapter 39 takes place wholly in Julien's cell. At first there is not one specific incident narrated; rather, several visits, all similar, are fused to comprise a typical one in which the attitude of Mathilde and Julien are contrasted. The final conversation closing the short chapter becomes the result of what precedes and stands for one specific visit. Here is represented one of Stendhal's typical methods of narration. Julien is tired of heroism. He is more virtuous now than at any time in his life since ambition no longer goads him. Therefore, he reproaches himself for what he has done to the marquis and Mathilde de la Mole. It is here that Stendhal advises us that Julien, unwittingly, is hopelessly in love with Mme. de Renal. Julien's awareness of this fact is dim, expressing itself only in his desire to give his offspring to Mme. de Renal. Rebuffed by Mathilde, Julien artfully returns to the same subject, expressed in terms that would appeal to Mathilde's turn of mind. Note that Stendhal does not comment on Julien's stratagem. His conduct toward Mathilde is reminiscent of that which he adopted in his "seduction" of Mme. de Fervaques. This is the first manifestation of Julien's new attitude toward Mathilde. He relies on duplicity to convince her. Later, as he becomes increasingly irked by her presence, he will punish her somewhat sadistically. Note, in Julien's presentation, Stendhal's own preoccupation with the future. Stendhal was convinced that his real public would be that of the twentieth century. The appearance of the idea of abolishment of capital punishment, a contemporary issue, would bear out Stendhal's conviction that he was writing for the future. | 391 | 1,570 | [
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28,054 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/68.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Brothers Karamazov/section_12_part_6.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 10.chapter 6 | book 10, chapter 6 | null | {"name": "book 10, Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section13/", "summary": "Precocity Outside the house, Alyosha and Kolya talk, and Kolya tells Alyosha his views on life, which he is certain are both profound and final despite the fact that he is only thirteen years old. Alyosha sees at once that Kolya's \"philosophy\" is merely a batch of phrases and modern ideas he has heard from Rakitin. But he listens respectfully, and when he disagrees with what Kolya says, he says so, and says why. Even though Alyosha says Kolya's sweet nature has been perverted by Rakitin, Kolya is still so drawn to Alyosha that he feels they have become close friends. Alyosha agrees and inwardly hopes that Rakitin's influence will not have a permanent effect on this young self-proclaimed socialist", "analysis": ""} | Chapter VI. Precocity
"What do you think the doctor will say to him?" Kolya asked quickly. "What
a repulsive mug, though, hasn't he? I can't endure medicine!"
"Ilusha is dying. I think that's certain," answered Alyosha, mournfully.
"They are rogues! Medicine's a fraud! I am glad to have made your
acquaintance, though, Karamazov. I wanted to know you for a long time. I
am only sorry we meet in such sad circumstances."
Kolya had a great inclination to say something even warmer and more
demonstrative, but he felt ill at ease. Alyosha noticed this, smiled, and
pressed his hand.
"I've long learned to respect you as a rare person," Kolya muttered again,
faltering and uncertain. "I have heard you are a mystic and have been in
the monastery. I know you are a mystic, but ... that hasn't put me off.
Contact with real life will cure you.... It's always so with characters
like yours."
"What do you mean by mystic? Cure me of what?" Alyosha was rather
astonished.
"Oh, God and all the rest of it."
"What, don't you believe in God?"
"Oh, I've nothing against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis, but
... I admit that He is needed ... for the order of the universe and all
that ... and that if there were no God He would have to be invented,"
added Kolya, beginning to blush. He suddenly fancied that Alyosha might
think he was trying to show off his knowledge and to prove that he was
"grown up." "I haven't the slightest desire to show off my knowledge to
him," Kolya thought indignantly. And all of a sudden he felt horribly
annoyed.
"I must confess I can't endure entering on such discussions," he said with
a final air. "It's possible for one who doesn't believe in God to love
mankind, don't you think so? Voltaire didn't believe in God and loved
mankind?" ("I am at it again," he thought to himself.)
"Voltaire believed in God, though not very much, I think, and I don't
think he loved mankind very much either," said Alyosha quietly, gently,
and quite naturally, as though he were talking to some one of his own age,
or even older. Kolya was particularly struck by Alyosha's apparent
diffidence about his opinion of Voltaire. He seemed to be leaving the
question for him, little Kolya, to settle.
"Have you read Voltaire?" Alyosha finished.
"No, not to say read.... But I've read _Candide_ in the Russian
translation ... in an absurd, grotesque, old translation ... (At it again!
again!)"
"And did you understand it?"
"Oh, yes, everything.... That is ... Why do you suppose I shouldn't
understand it? There's a lot of nastiness in it, of course.... Of course I
can understand that it's a philosophical novel and written to advocate an
idea...." Kolya was getting mixed by now. "I am a Socialist, Karamazov, I
am an incurable Socialist," he announced suddenly, apropos of nothing.
"A Socialist?" laughed Alyosha. "But when have you had time to become one?
Why, I thought you were only thirteen?"
Kolya winced.
"In the first place I am not thirteen, but fourteen, fourteen in a
fortnight," he flushed angrily, "and in the second place I am at a
complete loss to understand what my age has to do with it? The question is
what are my convictions, not what is my age, isn't it?"
"When you are older, you'll understand for yourself the influence of age
on convictions. I fancied, too, that you were not expressing your own
ideas," Alyosha answered serenely and modestly, but Kolya interrupted him
hotly:
"Come, you want obedience and mysticism. You must admit that the Christian
religion, for instance, has only been of use to the rich and the powerful
to keep the lower classes in slavery. That's so, isn't it?"
"Ah, I know where you read that, and I am sure some one told you so!"
cried Alyosha.
"I say, what makes you think I read it? And certainly no one told me so. I
can think for myself.... I am not opposed to Christ, if you like. He was a
most humane person, and if He were alive to-day, He would be found in the
ranks of the revolutionists, and would perhaps play a conspicuous part....
There's no doubt about that."
"Oh, where, where did you get that from? What fool have you made friends
with?" exclaimed Alyosha.
"Come, the truth will out! It has so chanced that I have often talked to
Mr. Rakitin, of course, but ... old Byelinsky said that, too, so they
say."
"Byelinsky? I don't remember. He hasn't written that anywhere."
"If he didn't write it, they say he said it. I heard that from a ... but
never mind."
"And have you read Byelinsky?"
"Well, no ... I haven't read all of him, but ... I read the passage about
Tatyana, why she didn't go off with Onyegin."
"Didn't go off with Onyegin? Surely you don't ... understand that
already?"
"Why, you seem to take me for little Smurov," said Kolya, with a grin of
irritation. "But please don't suppose I am such a revolutionist. I often
disagree with Mr. Rakitin. Though I mention Tatyana, I am not at all for
the emancipation of women. I acknowledge that women are a subject race and
must obey. _Les femmes tricottent_, as Napoleon said." Kolya, for some
reason, smiled, "And on that question at least I am quite of one mind with
that pseudo-great man. I think, too, that to leave one's own country and
fly to America is mean, worse than mean--silly. Why go to America when one
may be of great service to humanity here? Now especially. There's a
perfect mass of fruitful activity open to us. That's what I answered."
"What do you mean? Answered whom? Has some one suggested your going to
America already?"
"I must own, they've been at me to go, but I declined. That's between
ourselves, of course, Karamazov; do you hear, not a word to any one. I say
this only to you. I am not at all anxious to fall into the clutches of the
secret police and take lessons at the Chain bridge.
_Long will you remember_
_The house at the Chain bridge._
Do you remember? It's splendid. Why are you laughing? You don't suppose I
am fibbing, do you?" ("What if he should find out that I've only that one
number of _The Bell_ in father's bookcase, and haven't read any more of
it?" Kolya thought with a shudder.)
"Oh, no, I am not laughing and don't suppose for a moment that you are
lying. No, indeed, I can't suppose so, for all this, alas! is perfectly
true. But tell me, have you read Pushkin--_Onyegin_, for instance?... You
spoke just now of Tatyana."
"No, I haven't read it yet, but I want to read it. I have no prejudices,
Karamazov; I want to hear both sides. What makes you ask?"
"Oh, nothing."
"Tell me, Karamazov, have you an awful contempt for me?" Kolya rapped out
suddenly and drew himself up before Alyosha, as though he were on drill.
"Be so kind as to tell me, without beating about the bush."
"I have a contempt for you?" Alyosha looked at him wondering. "What for? I
am only sad that a charming nature such as yours should be perverted by
all this crude nonsense before you have begun life."
"Don't be anxious about my nature," Kolya interrupted, not without
complacency. "But it's true that I am stupidly sensitive, crudely
sensitive. You smiled just now, and I fancied you seemed to--"
"Oh, my smile meant something quite different. I'll tell you why I smiled.
Not long ago I read the criticism made by a German who had lived in
Russia, on our students and schoolboys of to-day. 'Show a Russian
schoolboy,' he writes, 'a map of the stars, which he knows nothing about,
and he will give you back the map next day with corrections on it.' No
knowledge and unbounded conceit--that's what the German meant to say about
the Russian schoolboy."
"Yes, that's perfectly right," Kolya laughed suddenly, "exactly so! Bravo
the German! But he did not see the good side, what do you think? Conceit
may be, that comes from youth, that will be corrected if need be, but, on
the other hand, there is an independent spirit almost from childhood,
boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of these sausage
makers, groveling before authority.... But the German was right all the
same. Bravo the German! But Germans want strangling all the same. Though
they are so good at science and learning they must be strangled."
"Strangled, what for?" smiled Alyosha.
"Well, perhaps I am talking nonsense, I agree. I am awfully childish
sometimes, and when I am pleased about anything I can't restrain myself
and am ready to talk any stuff. But, I say, we are chattering away here
about nothing, and that doctor has been a long time in there. But perhaps
he's examining the mamma and that poor crippled Nina. I liked that Nina,
you know. She whispered to me suddenly as I was coming away, 'Why didn't
you come before?' And in such a voice, so reproachfully! I think she is
awfully nice and pathetic."
"Yes, yes! Well, you'll be coming often, you will see what she is like. It
would do you a great deal of good to know people like that, to learn to
value a great deal which you will find out from knowing these people,"
Alyosha observed warmly. "That would have more effect on you than
anything."
"Oh, how I regret and blame myself for not having come sooner!" Kolya
exclaimed, with bitter feeling.
"Yes, it's a great pity. You saw for yourself how delighted the poor child
was to see you. And how he fretted for you to come!"
"Don't tell me! You make it worse! But it serves me right. What kept me
from coming was my conceit, my egoistic vanity, and the beastly
wilfullness, which I never can get rid of, though I've been struggling
with it all my life. I see that now. I am a beast in lots of ways,
Karamazov!"
"No, you have a charming nature, though it's been distorted, and I quite
understand why you have had such an influence on this generous, morbidly
sensitive boy," Alyosha answered warmly.
"And you say that to me!" cried Kolya; "and would you believe it, I
thought--I've thought several times since I've been here--that you despised
me! If only you knew how I prize your opinion!"
"But are you really so sensitive? At your age! Would you believe it, just
now, when you were telling your story, I thought, as I watched you, that
you must be very sensitive!"
"You thought so? What an eye you've got, I say! I bet that was when I was
talking about the goose. That was just when I was fancying you had a great
contempt for me for being in such a hurry to show off, and for a moment I
quite hated you for it, and began talking like a fool. Then I fancied--just
now, here--when I said that if there were no God He would have to be
invented, that I was in too great a hurry to display my knowledge,
especially as I got that phrase out of a book. But I swear I wasn't
showing off out of vanity, though I really don't know why. Because I was
so pleased? Yes, I believe it was because I was so pleased ... though it's
perfectly disgraceful for any one to be gushing directly they are pleased,
I know that. But I am convinced now that you don't despise me; it was all
my imagination. Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy
all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world,
and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things."
"And you worry every one about you," smiled Alyosha.
"Yes, I worry every one about me, especially my mother. Karamazov, tell
me, am I very ridiculous now?"
"Don't think about that, don't think of it at all!" cried Alyosha. "And
what does ridiculous mean? Isn't every one constantly being or seeming
ridiculous? Besides, nearly all clever people now are fearfully afraid of
being ridiculous, and that makes them unhappy. All I am surprised at is
that you should be feeling that so early, though I've observed it for some
time past, and not only in you. Nowadays the very children have begun to
suffer from it. It's almost a sort of insanity. The devil has taken the
form of that vanity and entered into the whole generation; it's simply the
devil," added Alyosha, without a trace of the smile that Kolya, staring at
him, expected to see. "You are like every one else," said Alyosha, in
conclusion, "that is, like very many others. Only you must not be like
everybody else, that's all."
"Even if every one is like that?"
"Yes, even if every one is like that. You be the only one not like it. You
really are not like every one else, here you are not ashamed to confess to
something bad and even ridiculous. And who will admit so much in these
days? No one. And people have even ceased to feel the impulse to self-
criticism. Don't be like every one else, even if you are the only one."
"Splendid! I was not mistaken in you. You know how to console one. Oh, how
I have longed to know you, Karamazov! I've long been eager for this
meeting. Can you really have thought about me, too? You said just now that
you thought of me, too?"
"Yes, I'd heard of you and had thought of you, too ... and if it's partly
vanity that makes you ask, it doesn't matter."
"Do you know, Karamazov, our talk has been like a declaration of love,"
said Kolya, in a bashful and melting voice. "That's not ridiculous, is
it?"
"Not at all ridiculous, and if it were, it wouldn't matter, because it's
been a good thing." Alyosha smiled brightly.
"But do you know, Karamazov, you must admit that you are a little ashamed
yourself, now.... I see it by your eyes." Kolya smiled with a sort of sly
happiness.
"Why ashamed?"
"Well, why are you blushing?"
"It was you made me blush," laughed Alyosha, and he really did blush. "Oh,
well, I am a little, goodness knows why, I don't know..." he muttered,
almost embarrassed.
"Oh, how I love you and admire you at this moment just because you are
rather ashamed! Because you are just like me," cried Kolya, in positive
ecstasy. His cheeks glowed, his eyes beamed.
"You know, Kolya, you will be very unhappy in your life," something made
Alyosha say suddenly.
"I know, I know. How you know it all beforehand!" Kolya agreed at once.
"But you will bless life on the whole, all the same."
"Just so, hurrah! You are a prophet. Oh, we shall get on together,
Karamazov! Do you know, what delights me most, is that you treat me quite
like an equal. But we are not equals, no, we are not, you are better! But
we shall get on. Do you know, all this last month, I've been saying to
myself, 'Either we shall be friends at once, for ever, or we shall part
enemies to the grave!' "
"And saying that, of course, you loved me," Alyosha laughed gayly.
"I did. I loved you awfully. I've been loving and dreaming of you. And how
do you know it all beforehand? Ah, here's the doctor. Goodness! What will
he tell us? Look at his face!"
| 2,413 | book 10, Chapter 6 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section13/ | Precocity Outside the house, Alyosha and Kolya talk, and Kolya tells Alyosha his views on life, which he is certain are both profound and final despite the fact that he is only thirteen years old. Alyosha sees at once that Kolya's "philosophy" is merely a batch of phrases and modern ideas he has heard from Rakitin. But he listens respectfully, and when he disagrees with what Kolya says, he says so, and says why. Even though Alyosha says Kolya's sweet nature has been perverted by Rakitin, Kolya is still so drawn to Alyosha that he feels they have become close friends. Alyosha agrees and inwardly hopes that Rakitin's influence will not have a permanent effect on this young self-proclaimed socialist | null | 120 | 1 | [
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107 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/17.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_16_part_0.txt | Far from the Madding Crowd.chapter 17 | chapter 17 | null | {"name": "Chapter 17", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-17", "summary": "On Saturday at the market, Boldwood saw Bathsheba. \"Adam had awakened from his deep sleep, and behold! there was Eve. . . . and for the first time he really looked at her.\" He found her beautiful, but, unaccustomed to judging women, \"he furtively said to a neighbor, 'Is Miss Everdene considered handsome?'\" The neighbor assured him that she was. Boldwood was overcome by jealousy as he watched her talking with a young farmer. Bathsheba was aware of having made an impression and regretted her capriciousness. \"She that day nearly formed the intention of begging his pardon. . . . The worst features of this arrangement were that, if he thought she ridiculed him, an apology would increase the offense by being disbelieved; and if he thought she wanted him to woo her, it would read like additional evidence of her forwardness.\"", "analysis": "Hardy briefly shows the new awareness of Bathsheba and Boldwood for each other, and thus gives a new twist to the plot. We begin to realize that Boldwood is extraordinarily naive about women and probably would be impervious to most pursuit simply because he would not know it for what it was. But Bathsheba's bold \"Marry me\" is, if nothing else, direct. The frivolity of her gesture is lost on Boldwood, just as the possibility that a careless act might have tragic consequences was lost on Bathsheba."} |
IN THE MARKET-PLACE
On Saturday Boldwood was in Casterbridge market house as usual, when
the disturber of his dreams entered and became visible to him. Adam
had awakened from his deep sleep, and behold! there was Eve. The
farmer took courage, and for the first time really looked at her.
Material causes and emotional effects are not to be arranged in
regular equation. The result from capital employed in the production
of any movement of a mental nature is sometimes as tremendous as the
cause itself is absurdly minute. When women are in a freakish mood,
their usual intuition, either from carelessness or inherent defect,
seemingly fails to teach them this, and hence it was that Bathsheba
was fated to be astonished to-day.
Boldwood looked at her--not slily, critically, or understandingly,
but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing
train--as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood.
To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary
complements--comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and
permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical,
unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely
erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty
to consider.
He saw her black hair, her correct facial curves and profile, and
the roundness of her chin and throat. He saw then the side of her
eyelids, eyes, and lashes, and the shape of her ear. Next he noticed
her figure, her skirt, and the very soles of her shoes.
Boldwood thought her beautiful, but wondered whether he was right in
his thought, for it seemed impossible that this romance in the flesh,
if so sweet as he imagined, could have been going on long without
creating a commotion of delight among men, and provoking more inquiry
than Bathsheba had done, even though that was not a little. To the
best of his judgement neither nature nor art could improve this
perfect one of an imperfect many. His heart began to move within
him. Boldwood, it must be remembered, though forty years of age, had
never before inspected a woman with the very centre and force of his
glance; they had struck upon all his senses at wide angles.
Was she really beautiful? He could not assure himself that his
opinion was true even now. He furtively said to a neighbour, "Is
Miss Everdene considered handsome?"
"Oh yes; she was a good deal noticed the first time she came, if you
remember. A very handsome girl indeed."
A man is never more credulous than in receiving favourable opinions
on the beauty of a woman he is half, or quite, in love with; a mere
child's word on the point has the weight of an R.A.'s. Boldwood was
satisfied now.
And this charming woman had in effect said to him, "Marry me." Why
should she have done that strange thing? Boldwood's blindness to
the difference between approving of what circumstances suggest, and
originating what they do not suggest, was well matched by Bathsheba's
insensibility to the possibly great issues of little beginnings.
She was at this moment coolly dealing with a dashing young farmer,
adding up accounts with him as indifferently as if his face had been
the pages of a ledger. It was evident that such a nature as his had
no attraction for a woman of Bathsheba's taste. But Boldwood grew
hot down to his hands with an incipient jealousy; he trod for the
first time the threshold of "the injured lover's hell." His first
impulse was to go and thrust himself between them. This could be
done, but only in one way--by asking to see a sample of her corn.
Boldwood renounced the idea. He could not make the request; it was
debasing loveliness to ask it to buy and sell, and jarred with his
conceptions of her.
All this time Bathsheba was conscious of having broken into that
dignified stronghold at last. His eyes, she knew, were following her
everywhere. This was a triumph; and had it come naturally, such a
triumph would have been the sweeter to her for this piquing delay.
But it had been brought about by misdirected ingenuity, and she
valued it only as she valued an artificial flower or a wax fruit.
Being a woman with some good sense in reasoning on subjects wherein
her heart was not involved, Bathsheba genuinely repented that a freak
which had owed its existence as much to Liddy as to herself, should
ever have been undertaken, to disturb the placidity of a man she
respected too highly to deliberately tease.
She that day nearly formed the intention of begging his pardon on
the very next occasion of their meeting. The worst features of this
arrangement were that, if he thought she ridiculed him, an apology
would increase the offence by being disbelieved; and if he thought
she wanted him to woo her, it would read like additional evidence of
her forwardness.
| 778 | Chapter 17 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-17 | On Saturday at the market, Boldwood saw Bathsheba. "Adam had awakened from his deep sleep, and behold! there was Eve. . . . and for the first time he really looked at her." He found her beautiful, but, unaccustomed to judging women, "he furtively said to a neighbor, 'Is Miss Everdene considered handsome?'" The neighbor assured him that she was. Boldwood was overcome by jealousy as he watched her talking with a young farmer. Bathsheba was aware of having made an impression and regretted her capriciousness. "She that day nearly formed the intention of begging his pardon. . . . The worst features of this arrangement were that, if he thought she ridiculed him, an apology would increase the offense by being disbelieved; and if he thought she wanted him to woo her, it would read like additional evidence of her forwardness." | Hardy briefly shows the new awareness of Bathsheba and Boldwood for each other, and thus gives a new twist to the plot. We begin to realize that Boldwood is extraordinarily naive about women and probably would be impervious to most pursuit simply because he would not know it for what it was. But Bathsheba's bold "Marry me" is, if nothing else, direct. The frivolity of her gesture is lost on Boldwood, just as the possibility that a careless act might have tragic consequences was lost on Bathsheba. | 142 | 87 | [
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28,054 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/82.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Brothers Karamazov/section_81_part_0.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 12.chapter 3 | book 12, chapter 3 | null | {"name": "Book 12, Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-12-chapter-3", "summary": "Next three medical experts are called in to weigh in on Dmitri's state of mind: Dr. Herzenstube, the unnamed famous doctor from Moscow, and the young Dr. Varvinsky. Herzenstube goes first. He testifies that he finds Dmitri to be of an \"abnormal\" state of mind. As confirmation, he oddly states that when Dmitri walked into the courtroom, he should have looked to the left where the women were sitting, since he has a thing for the ladies. Instead he looked straight ahead. That's a convincing argument . Next up is the famous doctor. He agrees with Dr. Herzenstube that Dmitri is \"abnormal,\" but he adds that Dmitri has \"mania\" and is prone to act in a \"fit of passion.\" As if to one-up Herzenstube, the famous doctor claims that Dmitri should have looked to the right when he walked into the courtroom, because that's where his defense attorney was sitting. Finally comes Dr. Varvinsky. He testifies that he believes Dmitri to be completely sane and that it was quite natural for him to look straight ahead as he walked, because that's where the judges were sitting. Dmitri loudly agrees with Dr. Varvinsky. Then Dr. Herzenstube is called up again by the defense and surprises everyone with a sympathetic story about Dmitri. Herzenstube remembers coming across Dmitri as a young child, neglected by his father. He had bought Dmitri a pound of nuts out of charity. Years later, when Dmitri returned to town as a young man, he visited Herzenstube and reminded him of his kindness. Dmitri loudly insists again on his gratitude, and everyone in the court seems impressed.", "analysis": ""} | Chapter III. The Medical Experts And A Pound Of Nuts
The evidence of the medical experts, too, was of little use to the
prisoner. And it appeared later that Fetyukovitch had not reckoned much
upon it. The medical line of defense had only been taken up through the
insistence of Katerina Ivanovna, who had sent for a celebrated doctor from
Moscow on purpose. The case for the defense could, of course, lose nothing
by it and might, with luck, gain something from it. There was, however, an
element of comedy about it, through the difference of opinion of the
doctors. The medical experts were the famous doctor from Moscow, our
doctor, Herzenstube, and the young doctor, Varvinsky. The two latter
appeared also as witnesses for the prosecution.
The first to be called in the capacity of expert was Doctor Herzenstube.
He was a gray and bald old man of seventy, of middle height and sturdy
build. He was much esteemed and respected by every one in the town. He was
a conscientious doctor and an excellent and pious man, a Hernguter or
Moravian brother, I am not quite sure which. He had been living amongst us
for many years and behaved with wonderful dignity. He was a kind-hearted
and humane man. He treated the sick poor and peasants for nothing, visited
them in their slums and huts, and left money for medicine, but he was as
obstinate as a mule. If once he had taken an idea into his head, there was
no shaking it. Almost every one in the town was aware, by the way, that
the famous doctor had, within the first two or three days of his presence
among us, uttered some extremely offensive allusions to Doctor
Herzenstube's qualifications. Though the Moscow doctor asked twenty-five
roubles for a visit, several people in the town were glad to take
advantage of his arrival, and rushed to consult him regardless of expense.
All these had, of course, been previously patients of Doctor Herzenstube,
and the celebrated doctor had criticized his treatment with extreme
harshness. Finally, he had asked the patients as soon as he saw them,
"Well, who has been cramming you with nostrums? Herzenstube? He, he!"
Doctor Herzenstube, of course, heard all this, and now all the three
doctors made their appearance, one after another, to be examined.
Doctor Herzenstube roundly declared that the abnormality of the prisoner's
mental faculties was self-evident. Then giving his grounds for this
opinion, which I omit here, he added that the abnormality was not only
evident in many of the prisoner's actions in the past, but was apparent
even now at this very moment. When he was asked to explain how it was
apparent now at this moment, the old doctor, with simple-hearted
directness, pointed out that the prisoner on entering the court had "an
extraordinary air, remarkable in the circumstances"; that he had "marched
in like a soldier, looking straight before him, though it would have been
more natural for him to look to the left where, among the public, the
ladies were sitting, seeing that he was a great admirer of the fair sex
and must be thinking much of what the ladies are saying of him now," the
old man concluded in his peculiar language.
I must add that he spoke Russian readily, but every phrase was formed in
German style, which did not, however, trouble him, for it had always been
a weakness of his to believe that he spoke Russian perfectly, better
indeed than Russians. And he was very fond of using Russian proverbs,
always declaring that the Russian proverbs were the best and most
expressive sayings in the whole world. I may remark, too, that in
conversation, through absent-mindedness he often forgot the most ordinary
words, which sometimes went out of his head, though he knew them
perfectly. The same thing happened, though, when he spoke German, and at
such times he always waved his hand before his face as though trying to
catch the lost word, and no one could induce him to go on speaking till he
had found the missing word. His remark that the prisoner ought to have
looked at the ladies on entering roused a whisper of amusement in the
audience. All our ladies were very fond of our old doctor; they knew, too,
that having been all his life a bachelor and a religious man of exemplary
conduct, he looked upon women as lofty creatures. And so his unexpected
observation struck every one as very queer.
The Moscow doctor, being questioned in his turn, definitely and
emphatically repeated that he considered the prisoner's mental condition
abnormal in the highest degree. He talked at length and with erudition of
"aberration" and "mania," and argued that, from all the facts collected,
the prisoner had undoubtedly been in a condition of aberration for several
days before his arrest, and, if the crime had been committed by him, it
must, even if he were conscious of it, have been almost involuntary, as he
had not the power to control the morbid impulse that possessed him.
But apart from temporary aberration, the doctor diagnosed mania, which
premised, in his words, to lead to complete insanity in the future. (It
must be noted that I report this in my own words, the doctor made use of
very learned and professional language.) "All his actions are in
contravention of common sense and logic," he continued. "Not to refer to
what I have not seen, that is, the crime itself and the whole catastrophe,
the day before yesterday, while he was talking to me, he had an
unaccountably fixed look in his eye. He laughed unexpectedly when there
was nothing to laugh at. He showed continual and inexplicable
irritability, using strange words, 'Bernard!' 'Ethics!' and others equally
inappropriate." But the doctor detected mania, above all, in the fact that
the prisoner could not even speak of the three thousand roubles, of which
he considered himself to have been cheated, without extraordinary
irritation, though he could speak comparatively lightly of other
misfortunes and grievances. According to all accounts, he had even in the
past, whenever the subject of the three thousand roubles was touched on,
flown into a perfect frenzy, and yet he was reported to be a disinterested
and not grasping man.
"As to the opinion of my learned colleague," the Moscow doctor added
ironically in conclusion, "that the prisoner would, on entering the court,
have naturally looked at the ladies and not straight before him, I will
only say that, apart from the playfulness of this theory, it is radically
unsound. For though I fully agree that the prisoner, on entering the court
where his fate will be decided, would not naturally look straight before
him in that fixed way, and that that may really be a sign of his abnormal
mental condition, at the same time I maintain that he would naturally not
look to the left at the ladies, but, on the contrary, to the right to find
his legal adviser, on whose help all his hopes rest and on whose defense
all his future depends." The doctor expressed his opinion positively and
emphatically.
But the unexpected pronouncement of Doctor Varvinsky gave the last touch
of comedy to the difference of opinion between the experts. In his opinion
the prisoner was now, and had been all along, in a perfectly normal
condition, and, although he certainly must have been in a nervous and
exceedingly excited state before his arrest, this might have been due to
several perfectly obvious causes, jealousy, anger, continual drunkenness,
and so on. But this nervous condition would not involve the mental
aberration of which mention had just been made. As to the question whether
the prisoner should have looked to the left or to the right on entering
the court, "in his modest opinion," the prisoner would naturally look
straight before him on entering the court, as he had in fact done, as that
was where the judges, on whom his fate depended, were sitting. So that it
was just by looking straight before him that he showed his perfectly
normal state of mind at the present. The young doctor concluded his
"modest" testimony with some heat.
"Bravo, doctor!" cried Mitya, from his seat, "just so!"
Mitya, of course, was checked, but the young doctor's opinion had a
decisive influence on the judges and on the public, and, as appeared
afterwards, every one agreed with him. But Doctor Herzenstube, when called
as a witness, was quite unexpectedly of use to Mitya. As an old resident
in the town who had known the Karamazov family for years, he furnished
some facts of great value for the prosecution, and suddenly, as though
recalling something, he added:
"But the poor young man might have had a very different life, for he had a
good heart both in childhood and after childhood, that I know. But the
Russian proverb says, 'If a man has one head, it's good, but if another
clever man comes to visit him, it would be better still, for then there
will be two heads and not only one.' "
"One head is good, but two are better," the prosecutor put in impatiently.
He knew the old man's habit of talking slowly and deliberately, regardless
of the impression he was making and of the delay he was causing, and
highly prizing his flat, dull and always gleefully complacent German wit.
The old man was fond of making jokes.
"Oh, yes, that's what I say," he went on stubbornly. "One head is good,
but two are much better, but he did not meet another head with wits, and
his wits went. Where did they go? I've forgotten the word." He went on,
passing his hand before his eyes, "Oh, yes, _spazieren_."
"Wandering?"
"Oh, yes, wandering, that's what I say. Well, his wits went wandering and
fell in such a deep hole that he lost himself. And yet he was a grateful
and sensitive boy. Oh, I remember him very well, a little chap so high,
left neglected by his father in the back yard, when he ran about without
boots on his feet, and his little breeches hanging by one button."
A note of feeling and tenderness suddenly came into the honest old man's
voice. Fetyukovitch positively started, as though scenting something, and
caught at it instantly.
"Oh, yes, I was a young man then.... I was ... well, I was forty-five
then, and had only just come here. And I was so sorry for the boy then; I
asked myself why shouldn't I buy him a pound of ... a pound of what? I've
forgotten what it's called. A pound of what children are very fond of,
what is it, what is it?" The doctor began waving his hands again. "It
grows on a tree and is gathered and given to every one...."
"Apples?"
"Oh, no, no. You have a dozen of apples, not a pound.... No, there are a
lot of them, and all little. You put them in the mouth and crack."
"Nuts?"
"Quite so, nuts, I say so." The doctor repeated in the calmest way as
though he had been at no loss for a word. "And I bought him a pound of
nuts, for no one had ever bought the boy a pound of nuts before. And I
lifted my finger and said to him, 'Boy, _Gott der Vater_.' He laughed and
said, '_Gott der Vater_.'... '_Gott der Sohn_.' He laughed again and
lisped, '_Gott der Sohn_.' '_Gott der heilige Geist_.' Then he laughed and
said as best he could, '_Gott der heilige Geist_.' I went away, and two
days after I happened to be passing, and he shouted to me of himself,
'Uncle, _Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn_,' and he had only forgotten '_Gott
der heilige Geist_.' But I reminded him of it and I felt very sorry for
him again. But he was taken away, and I did not see him again. Twenty-
three years passed. I am sitting one morning in my study, a white-haired
old man, when there walks into the room a blooming young man, whom I
should never have recognized, but he held up his finger and said,
laughing, '_Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn_, and _Gott der heilige Geist_.
I have just arrived and have come to thank you for that pound of nuts, for
no one else ever bought me a pound of nuts; you are the only one that ever
did.' And then I remembered my happy youth and the poor child in the yard,
without boots on his feet, and my heart was touched and I said, 'You are a
grateful young man, for you have remembered all your life the pound of
nuts I bought you in your childhood.' And I embraced him and blessed him.
And I shed tears. He laughed, but he shed tears, too ... for the Russian
often laughs when he ought to be weeping. But he did weep; I saw it. And
now, alas!..."
"And I am weeping now, German, I am weeping now, too, you saintly man,"
Mitya cried suddenly.
In any case the anecdote made a certain favorable impression on the
public. But the chief sensation in Mitya's favor was created by the
evidence of Katerina Ivanovna, which I will describe directly. Indeed,
when the witnesses _a decharge_, that is, called by the defense, began
giving evidence, fortune seemed all at once markedly more favorable to
Mitya, and what was particularly striking, this was a surprise even to the
counsel for the defense. But before Katerina Ivanovna was called, Alyosha
was examined, and he recalled a fact which seemed to furnish positive
evidence against one important point made by the prosecution.
| 2,113 | Book 12, Chapter 3 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-12-chapter-3 | Next three medical experts are called in to weigh in on Dmitri's state of mind: Dr. Herzenstube, the unnamed famous doctor from Moscow, and the young Dr. Varvinsky. Herzenstube goes first. He testifies that he finds Dmitri to be of an "abnormal" state of mind. As confirmation, he oddly states that when Dmitri walked into the courtroom, he should have looked to the left where the women were sitting, since he has a thing for the ladies. Instead he looked straight ahead. That's a convincing argument . Next up is the famous doctor. He agrees with Dr. Herzenstube that Dmitri is "abnormal," but he adds that Dmitri has "mania" and is prone to act in a "fit of passion." As if to one-up Herzenstube, the famous doctor claims that Dmitri should have looked to the right when he walked into the courtroom, because that's where his defense attorney was sitting. Finally comes Dr. Varvinsky. He testifies that he believes Dmitri to be completely sane and that it was quite natural for him to look straight ahead as he walked, because that's where the judges were sitting. Dmitri loudly agrees with Dr. Varvinsky. Then Dr. Herzenstube is called up again by the defense and surprises everyone with a sympathetic story about Dmitri. Herzenstube remembers coming across Dmitri as a young child, neglected by his father. He had bought Dmitri a pound of nuts out of charity. Years later, when Dmitri returned to town as a young man, he visited Herzenstube and reminded him of his kindness. Dmitri loudly insists again on his gratitude, and everyone in the court seems impressed. | null | 269 | 1 | [
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110 | false | novelguide | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/55.txt | finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_7_part_2.txt | Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter liv | chapter liv | null | {"name": "Chapter LIV", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase7-chapter53-59", "summary": "Angel follows Tess to Marlott, learns that Sir John Durbeyfield has died and that the family is living at Trantridge. He pays for the headstone. After first withholding the information of Tess's whereabouts, her now well-cared for mother informs Angel, and he leaves to go to Sandbourne", "analysis": ""} |
In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house, whence his
mother watched his thin figure as it disappeared into the street.
He had declined to borrow his father's old mare, well knowing of
its necessity to the household. He went to the inn, where he hired
a trap, and could hardly wait during the harnessing. In a very few
minutes after, he was driving up the hill out of the town which,
three or four months earlier in the year, Tess had descended with
such hopes and ascended with such shattered purposes.
Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and trees purple
with buds; but he was looking at other things, and only recalled
himself to the scene sufficiently to enable him to keep the way. In
something less than an hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of
the King's Hintock estates and ascended to the untoward solitude of
Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone whereon Tess had been compelled by
Alec d'Urberville, in his whim of reformation, to swear the strange
oath that she would never wilfully tempt him again. The pale and
blasted nettle-stems of the preceding year even now lingered nakedly
in the banks, young green nettles of the present spring growing from
their roots.
Thence he went along the verge of the upland overhanging the other
Hintocks, and, turning to the right, plunged into the bracing
calcareous region of Flintcomb-Ash, the address from which she had
written to him in one of the letters, and which he supposed to be
the place of sojourn referred to by her mother. Here, of course, he
did not find her; and what added to his depression was the discovery
that no "Mrs Clare" had ever been heard of by the cottagers or by
the farmer himself, though Tess was remembered well enough by her
Christian name. His name she had obviously never used during their
separation, and her dignified sense of their total severance was
shown not much less by this abstention than by the hardships she had
chosen to undergo (of which he now learnt for the first time) rather
than apply to his father for more funds.
From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had gone, without due
notice, to the home of her parents on the other side of Blackmoor,
and it therefore became necessary to find Mrs Durbeyfield. She had
told him she was not now at Marlott, but had been curiously reticent
as to her actual address, and the only course was to go to Marlott
and inquire for it. The farmer who had been so churlish with Tess
was quite smooth-tongued to Clare, and lent him a horse and man to
drive him towards Marlott, the gig he had arrived in being sent back
to Emminster; for the limit of a day's journey with that horse was
reached.
Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer's vehicle for a further
distance than to the outskirts of the Vale, and, sending it back with
the man who had driven him, he put up at an inn, and next day entered
on foot the region wherein was the spot of his dear Tess's birth.
It was as yet too early in the year for much colour to appear in the
gardens and foliage; the so-called spring was but winter overlaid
with a thin coat of greenness, and it was of a parcel with his
expectations.
The house in which Tess had passed the years of her childhood was
now inhabited by another family who had never known her. The new
residents were in the garden, taking as much interest in their own
doings as if the homestead had never passed its primal time in
conjunction with the histories of others, beside which the histories
of these were but as a tale told by an idiot. They walked about the
garden paths with thoughts of their own concerns entirely uppermost,
bringing their actions at every moment in jarring collision with the
dim ghosts behind them, talking as though the time when Tess lived
there were not one whit intenser in story than now. Even the spring
birds sang over their heads as if they thought there was nobody
missing in particular.
On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even the name of
their predecessors was a failing memory, Clare learned that John
Durbeyfield was dead; that his widow and children had left Marlott,
declaring that they were going to live at Kingsbere, but instead of
doing so had gone on to another place they mentioned. By this time
Clare abhorred the house for ceasing to contain Tess, and hastened
away from its hated presence without once looking back.
His way was by the field in which he had first beheld her at the
dance. It was as bad as the house--even worse. He passed on through
the churchyard, where, amongst the new headstones, he saw one of a
somewhat superior design to the rest. The inscription ran thus:
In memory of John Durbeyfield, rightly d'Urberville, of
the once powerful family of that Name, and Direct
Descendant through an illustrious Line from Sir Pagan
d'Urberville, one of the Knights of the Conqueror. Died
March 10th, 18--
HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN.
Some man, apparently the sexton, had observed Clare standing there,
and drew nigh. "Ah, sir, now that's a man who didn't want to lie
here, but wished to be carried to Kingsbere, where his ancestors be."
"And why didn't they respect his wish?"
"Oh--no money. Bless your soul, sir, why--there, I wouldn't wish to
say it everywhere, but--even this headstone, for all the flourish
wrote upon en, is not paid for."
"Ah, who put it up?"
The man told the name of a mason in the village, and, on leaving the
churchyard, Clare called at the mason's house. He found that the
statement was true, and paid the bill. This done, he turned in the
direction of the migrants.
The distance was too long for a walk, but Clare felt such a strong
desire for isolation that at first he would neither hire a conveyance
nor go to a circuitous line of railway by which he might eventually
reach the place. At Shaston, however, he found he must hire; but
the way was such that he did not enter Joan's place till about seven
o'clock in the evening, having traversed a distance of over twenty
miles since leaving Marlott.
The village being small he had little difficulty in finding Mrs
Durbeyfield's tenement, which was a house in a walled garden,
remote from the main road, where she had stowed away her clumsy old
furniture as best she could. It was plain that for some reason or
other she had not wished him to visit her, and he felt his call to
be somewhat of an intrusion. She came to the door herself, and the
light from the evening sky fell upon her face.
This was the first time that Clare had ever met her, but he was too
preoccupied to observe more than that she was still a handsome woman,
in the garb of a respectable widow. He was obliged to explain that
he was Tess's husband, and his object in coming there, and he did it
awkwardly enough. "I want to see her at once," he added. "You said
you would write to me again, but you have not done so."
"Because she've not come home," said Joan.
"Do you know if she is well?"
"I don't. But you ought to, sir," said she.
"I admit it. Where is she staying?"
From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed her
embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of her cheek.
"I--don't know exactly where she is staying," she answered. "She
was--but--"
"Where was she?"
"Well, she is not there now."
In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger children had by
this time crept to the door, where, pulling at his mother's skirts,
the youngest murmured--
"Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?"
"He has married her," Joan whispered. "Go inside."
Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked--
"Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her? If not, of
course--"
"I don't think she would."
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure she wouldn't."
He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess's tender letter.
"I am sure she would!" he retorted passionately. "I know her better
than you do."
"That's very likely, sir; for I have never really known her."
"Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in kindness to a lonely
wretched man!" Tess's mother again restlessly swept her cheek with
her vertical hand, and seeing that he suffered, she at last said, is
a low voice--
"She is at Sandbourne."
"Ah--where there? Sandbourne has become a large place, they say."
"I don't know more particularly than I have said--Sandbourne. For
myself, I was never there."
It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and he pressed her
no further.
"Are you in want of anything?" he said gently.
"No, sir," she replied. "We are fairly well provided for."
Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a station
three miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he walked thither.
The last train to Sandbourne left shortly after, and it bore Clare
on its wheels.
| 1,482 | Chapter LIV | https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase7-chapter53-59 | Angel follows Tess to Marlott, learns that Sir John Durbeyfield has died and that the family is living at Trantridge. He pays for the headstone. After first withholding the information of Tess's whereabouts, her now well-cared for mother informs Angel, and he leaves to go to Sandbourne | null | 47 | 1 | [
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1,929 | false | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/1929-chapters/8.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/The School for Scandal/section_2_part_2.txt | The School for Scandal.act iii.scene ii | act iii, scene ii | null | {"name": "act iii, Scene II", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180409073536/http://www.gradesaver.com/the-school-for-scandal/study-guide/summary-act-iii", "summary": "Scene II opens with Sir Oliver, Mr. Moses, and one of Charles's servants at Charles's house. The servant wants to do business with Mr. Moses himself, which Sir Oliver thinks is strange. Trip tells them a bit about how lavishly Charles has been living. Trip leads them to where Charles and his friends are relaxing", "analysis": "Sheridan makes many allusions in the play during characters' dialogues with one another. This both shows Sheridan's own learnedness and underscores the education and high social status of the characters that make these references. One allusion of note comes early in Act III, made by Rowley. In conversation with Sir Oliver and Sir Peter about the young Surface boys, Joseph and Charles, he says, \"as our immortal bard expresses it, -- 'a heart to pity, and a hand open as day for melting charity'\" . This quote comes from Shakespeare's Henry VI. Rowley says this to the men to support Charles's remaining moral character. However, Sir Peter quips back, both as a response to Rowley and perhaps to Shakespeare himself, that having an open hand means nothing when one has spent all he had. It is important to read this section with historical context in mind, specifically as applies to anti-Semitism and the role of Jews and Judaism in society. In Sheridan's time and before, many Jews were involved in money-lending, the Jewish faith, unlike Christianity, did not forbid this job. Nevertheless, the play presents a stereotyped character, a Jewish money-lender who is willing to be involved in deceit, and who likely was dressed and made up to comply with a stereotypical Jewish appearance. Productions since Sheridan's time, especially contemporary productions, have had to decide whether to edit out these references to Judaism entirely or perform the play as it was written but provide relevant historical context to the audience. Sheridan uses a humorous scene to show Sir Oliver's transformation into the money-lender Mr. Premium. This humor is mostly created through repetition. For example, part of the interaction with Mr. Moses as he teaches the man how to play the role of Mr. Premium is as follows: \"MOSESThen, you know, you haven't the moneys yourself, but are forcedto borrow them for him of a friend. SIR OLIVEROh! I borrow it of a friend, do I? MOSESAnd your friend is an unconscionable dog: but you can't helpthat. SIR OLIVERMy friend an unconscionable dog, is he?\" The fact that Sir Oliver is not particularly good at acting his role, along with the fact that while acting his role he gives many asides to himself or the audience, increases the humor and dramatic irony in those scenes. Of the motivations to convince Maria to marry Joseph, Sir Peter's seem the most conscionable. While Lady Sneerwell wants to see Maria with Joseph because she loves Charles, Sir Peter seems to simply want what he sees as best for the ward for whom he has recently assumed responsibility. Sir Peter and Maria discuss the role of a father, with her saying that she has respected his wishes in not corresponding with Charles, but that she cannot regard him as a father if he forces her to marry Joseph, \"compel to be miserable\" . Though Lady Teazle told Sir Peter earlier in the play that he should have adopted her, not married her, if he wanted to control her, Maria shows still another example of a strong female character who will protest the dynamics of gender and power within families."} | SCENE II.
--At CHARLES's House
Enter TRIP, MOSES, and SIR OLIVER
TRIP. Here Master Moses--if you'll stay a moment--I'll try whether
Mr.----what's the Gentleman's Name?
SIR OLIVER. Mr.----Moses--what IS my name----
MOSES. Mr. Premium----
TRIP. Premium--very well.
[Exit TRIP--taking snuff.]
SIR OLIVER. To judge by the Servants--one wouldn't believe the master
was ruin'd--but what--sure this was my Brother's House----
MOSES. Yes Sir Mr. Charles bought it of Mr. Joseph with the Furniture,
Pictures, &c.--just as the old Gentleman left it--Sir Peter thought it a
great piece of extravagance in him.
SIR OLIVER. In my mind the other's economy in selling it to him was more
reprehensible by half.----
Enter TRIP
TRIP. My Master[,] Gentlemen[,] says you must wait, he has company, and
can't speak with you yet.
SIR OLIVER. If he knew who it was wanted to see him, perhaps he wouldn't
have sent such a Message.
TRIP. Yes--yes--Sir--He knows you are here--I didn't forget little
Premium--no--no----
SIR OLIVER. Very well--and pray Sir what may be your Name?
TRIP. Trip Sir--my Name is Trip, at your Service.
SIR OLIVER. Well then Mr. Trip--I presume your master is seldom without
company----
TRIP. Very seldom Sir--the world says ill-natured things of him but 'tis
all malice--no man was ever better beloved--Sir he seldom sits down to
dinner without a dozen particular Friends----
SIR OLIVER. He's very happy indeed--you have a pleasant sort of Place
here I guess?
TRIP. Why yes--here are three or four of us pass our time agreeably
enough--but then our wages are sometimes a little in arrear--and not
very great either--but fifty Pounds a year and find our own Bags and
Bouquets----
SIR OLIVER. Bags and Bouquets!--Halters and Bastinadoes! [Aside.]
TRIP. But a propos Moses--have you been able to get me that little Bill
discounted?
SIR OLIVER. Wants to raise money too!--mercy on me! has his distresses,
I warrant[,] like a Lord--and affects Creditors and Duns! [Aside.]
MOSES. 'Twas not be done, indeed----
TRIP. Good lack--you surprise me--My Friend Brush has indorsed it and
I thought when he put his name at the Back of a Bill 'twas as good as
cash.
MOSES. No 'twouldn't do.
TRIP. A small sum--but twenty Pound--harkee, Moses do you think you
could get it me by way of annuity?
SIR OLIVER. An annuity! ha! ha! a Footman raise money by annuity--Well
done Luxury egad! [Aside.]
MOSES. Who would you get to join with you?
TRIP. You know my Lord Applice--you have seen him however----
MOSES. Yes----
TRIP. You must have observed what an appearance he makes--nobody dresses
better, nobody throws off faster--very well this Gentleman will stand my
security.
MOSES. Well--but you must insure your Place.
TRIP. O with all my Heart--I'll insure my Place, and my Life too, if you
please.
SIR OLIVER. It's more than I would your neck----
MOSES. But is there nothing you could deposit?
TRIP. Why nothing capital of my master's wardrobe has drop'd lately--but
I could give you a mortgage on some of his winter Cloaths with equity
of redemption before November or--you shall have the reversion--of the
French velvet, or a post obit on the Blue and Silver--these I
should think Moses--with a few Pair of Point Ruffles as a collateral
security--hey, my little Fellow?
MOSES. Well well--we'll talk presently--we detain the Gentlemen----
SIR OLIVER. O pray don't let me interrupt Mr. Trip's Negotiation.
TRIP. Harkee--I heard the Bell--I believe, Gentlemen I can now introduce
you--don't forget the annuity little Moses.
SIR OLIVER. If the man be a shadow of his Master this is the Temple of
Dissipation indeed!
[Exeunt.]
| 541 | act iii, Scene II | https://web.archive.org/web/20180409073536/http://www.gradesaver.com/the-school-for-scandal/study-guide/summary-act-iii | Scene II opens with Sir Oliver, Mr. Moses, and one of Charles's servants at Charles's house. The servant wants to do business with Mr. Moses himself, which Sir Oliver thinks is strange. Trip tells them a bit about how lavishly Charles has been living. Trip leads them to where Charles and his friends are relaxing | Sheridan makes many allusions in the play during characters' dialogues with one another. This both shows Sheridan's own learnedness and underscores the education and high social status of the characters that make these references. One allusion of note comes early in Act III, made by Rowley. In conversation with Sir Oliver and Sir Peter about the young Surface boys, Joseph and Charles, he says, "as our immortal bard expresses it, -- 'a heart to pity, and a hand open as day for melting charity'" . This quote comes from Shakespeare's Henry VI. Rowley says this to the men to support Charles's remaining moral character. However, Sir Peter quips back, both as a response to Rowley and perhaps to Shakespeare himself, that having an open hand means nothing when one has spent all he had. It is important to read this section with historical context in mind, specifically as applies to anti-Semitism and the role of Jews and Judaism in society. In Sheridan's time and before, many Jews were involved in money-lending, the Jewish faith, unlike Christianity, did not forbid this job. Nevertheless, the play presents a stereotyped character, a Jewish money-lender who is willing to be involved in deceit, and who likely was dressed and made up to comply with a stereotypical Jewish appearance. Productions since Sheridan's time, especially contemporary productions, have had to decide whether to edit out these references to Judaism entirely or perform the play as it was written but provide relevant historical context to the audience. Sheridan uses a humorous scene to show Sir Oliver's transformation into the money-lender Mr. Premium. This humor is mostly created through repetition. For example, part of the interaction with Mr. Moses as he teaches the man how to play the role of Mr. Premium is as follows: "MOSESThen, you know, you haven't the moneys yourself, but are forcedto borrow them for him of a friend. SIR OLIVEROh! I borrow it of a friend, do I? MOSESAnd your friend is an unconscionable dog: but you can't helpthat. SIR OLIVERMy friend an unconscionable dog, is he?" The fact that Sir Oliver is not particularly good at acting his role, along with the fact that while acting his role he gives many asides to himself or the audience, increases the humor and dramatic irony in those scenes. Of the motivations to convince Maria to marry Joseph, Sir Peter's seem the most conscionable. While Lady Sneerwell wants to see Maria with Joseph because she loves Charles, Sir Peter seems to simply want what he sees as best for the ward for whom he has recently assumed responsibility. Sir Peter and Maria discuss the role of a father, with her saying that she has respected his wishes in not corresponding with Charles, but that she cannot regard him as a father if he forces her to marry Joseph, "compel to be miserable" . Though Lady Teazle told Sir Peter earlier in the play that he should have adopted her, not married her, if he wanted to control her, Maria shows still another example of a strong female character who will protest the dynamics of gender and power within families. | 55 | 524 | [
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44,747 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/44747-chapters/part_1_chapters_25_to_27.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Red and the Black/section_6_part_0.txt | The Red and the Black.part 1.chapters 25-27 | chapters 25-27 | null | {"name": "Chapters 25-27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201128052739/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/the-red-and-the-black/summary-and-analysis/part-1-chapters-2527", "summary": "Julien is admitted to the presence of the rector, Father Pirard, by an extremely ugly porter. This impression of ugliness and the fright given by the sternness of Pirard cause Julien to faint. Pirard agrees to give him a full scholarship in recognition of the recommendation from his dear friend Chelan. Julien obviously impresses Pirard favorably by his knowledge of scripture and Latin and by the clarity and insight of his answers. Julien is taken to his cell, where he falls into a deep sleep. His first meeting with Pirard has given him to believe that the seminary is taken seriously by the students. Julien fails miserably in his attempt to succeed by brilliant achievement. He also has erred by requesting Pirard as his confessor instead of the rector's Jesuit enemy. Julien learns that to distinguish himself and gain acceptance among his fellows, he must appear stupid, materialistic, and docile. The Jesuit Castanede has found Armanda's address in Julien's luggage and has denounced him to Pirard. Confronted by the rector, Julien lies successfully and exonerates himself. It is the baseness, vulgarity, and ugliness of his adversaries -- his fellow seminarians -- that cause him to flinch and become discouraged in his struggle. His attempts to win them are without success. The description of the ideal awaiting the young priests as preached by Father Castanede revolts Julien: It consists of being well-fed, of vegetating in a parish surrounded by all the physical comforts. His eloquence proves to be another reason for alienation from his fellows, and he must often defend himself against physical attacks.", "analysis": "Verrieres was protected by walls, figuratively speaking, that Julien succeeded in climbing; now he enters another \"prison,\" the seminary, which he must also conquer. In direct contrast to his imagined conquest of Armanda in the cafe, Julien's interview with Pirard is a confrontation that overwhelms and terrifies him. His sensitive nature shuts out ugliness by rendering him unconscious. Again Stendhal omits Julien's brilliant, concise answers to Pirard's interrogation, although we learn that Julien's answers evoke Pirard's admiration for him. The keenness of Stendhal's psychological observation is noted in the brief statement occurring at the end of the interview, which casts light on Julien's frame of mind in retrospect: \"Julien looked down and saw his trunk directly in front of him; he had been looking at it for three hours without recognizing it.\" Moments of intense emotional strain prevent us from evaluating objectively a situation except in retrospect. The prison-like nature of the seminary is emphasized by fleeting views of the outside world, caught by Julien through a window, both during the grueling interview with Pirard and later in his cell. This glimpse of \"high places\" -- mountains, in this instance -- serves to reassure Julien and is inspirational to him in this crisis. Just as Julien blundered in his attempt to seduce Mme. de Renal, he will blunder in his attempt to succeed in the seminary. The cafe scene served to mark his progress as a seducer, evidence that he had gained experience and wisdom from the experiences in Verrieres. Here, however, is a new field of experience, and his evaluation of the interview with Pirard gives him a false sense of security, causing him to fail miserably in his first few weeks in the seminary. He thought that his usual hypocritical mask was the one to assume, but he soon discovers that he has assumed the wrong mask. It is not excellence that is required of the young, would-be priests but rather submission, obedience, and docility. Even in the seminary, Julien is an outsider, a pariah, because of his superior nature. He has great difficulty trying to perfect a mask of stupidity. Note, however, his progress in the second interview with Pirard. Stendhal admits the reader into a complicity with Julien in the following way: Julien cleverly utilizes the two incidents that had occurred during his first day in Besancon, taking from each what he needs to substantiate his lie to Pirard. Stendhal does not make any comment on this operation. Julien utilizes, then, the potential of Stendhal's logic. Julien's self-imposed campaign of austerity has borne fruits, however, since in not leaving the seminary, he has avoided a worse fate. He has succeeded, again, in spite of himself."} | CHAPTER XXV
THE SEMINARY
Three hundred and thirty-six dinners at eighty-five
centimes. Three hundred and thirty-six suppers at fifty
centimes. Chocolate to those who are entitled to it. How
much profit can be made on the contract?--_Valenod of
Besancon_.
He saw in the distance the iron gilt cross on the door. He approached
slowly. His legs seemed to give way beneath him. "So here is this hell
upon earth which I shall be unable to leave."
Finally he made up his mind to ring. The noise of the bell reverberated
as though through a solitude. At the end of ten minutes a pale man,
clothed in black, came and opened the door. Julien looked at him, and
immediately lowered his eyes. This porter had a singular physiognomy.
The green projecting pupils of his eyes were as round as those of a
cat. The straight lines of his eyebrows betokened the impossibility of
any sympathy. His thin lips came round in a semicircle over projecting
teeth. None the less, his physiognomy did not so much betoken crime
as rather that perfect callousness which is so much more terrifying
to the young. The one sentiment which Julien's rapid gaze surmised in
this long and devout face was a profound contempt for every topic of
conversation which did not deal with things celestial. Julien raised
his eyes with an effort, and in a voice rendered quavering by the
beating of his heart explained that he desired to speak to M. Pirard,
the director of the Seminary. Without saying a word the man in black
signed to him to follow. They ascended two stories by a large staircase
with a wooden rail, whose warped stairs inclined to the side opposite
the wall, and seemed on the point of falling. A little door with a
big cemetery cross of white wood painted black at the top was opened
with difficulty, and the porter made him enter a dark low room, whose
whitewashed walls were decorated with two big pictures blackened by
age. In this room Julien was left alone. He was overwhelmed. His heart
was beating violently. He would have been happy to have ventured to
cry. A silence of death reigned over the whole house.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, which seemed a whole day to him,
the sinister looking porter reappeared on the threshold of a door at
the other end of the room, and without vouchsafing a word, signed to
him to advance. He entered into a room even larger than the first,
and very badly lighted. The walls also were whitened, but there was
no furniture. Only in a corner near the door Julien saw as he passed
a white wooden bed, two straw chairs, and a little pinewood armchair
without any cushions. He perceived at the other end of the room, near a
small window with yellow panes decorated with badly kept flower vases,
a man seated at a table, and covered with a dilapidated cassock. He
appeared to be in a temper, and took one after the other a number of
little squares of paper, which he arranged on his table after he had
written some words on them. He did not notice Julien's presence. The
latter did not move, but kept standing near the centre of the room in
the place where the porter, who had gone out and shut the door, had
left him.
Ten minutes passed in this way: the badly dressed man kept on writing
all the time. Julien's emotion and terror were so great that he thought
he was on the point of falling. A philosopher would have said, possibly
wrongly, "It is a violent impression made by ugliness on a soul
intended by nature to love the beautiful."
The man who was writing lifted up his head. Julien only perceived it
after a moment had passed, and even after seeing it, he still remained
motionless, as though struck dead by the terrible look of which he
was the victim. Julien's troubled eyes just managed to make out a
long face, all covered with red blotches except the forehead, which
manifested a mortal pallor. Two little black eyes, calculated to
terrify the most courageous, shone between these red cheeks and that
white forehead. The vast area of his forehead was bounded by thick,
flat, jet black hair.
"Will you come near, yes or no?" said the man at last, impatiently.
Julien advanced with an uneasy step, and at last, paler than he had
ever been in his life and on the point of falling, stopped three paces
from the little white wooden table which was covered with the squares
of paper.
"Nearer," said the man.
Julien advanced still further, holding out his hand, as though trying
to lean on something.
"Your name?"
"Julien Sorel."
"You are certainly very late," said the man to him, as he rivetted
again on him that terrible gaze.
Julien could not endure this look. Holding out his hand as though to
support himself, he fell all his length along the floor.
The man rang. Julien had only lost the use of his eyes and the power of
movement. He heard steps approaching.
He was lifted up and placed on the little armchair of white wood. He
heard the terrible man saying to the porter,
"He has had an epileptic fit apparently, and this is the finishing
touch."
When Julien was able to open his eyes, the man with the red face was
going on with his writing. The porter had disappeared. "I must have
courage," said our hero to himself, "and above all, hide what I feel."
He felt violently sick. "If anything happens to me, God knows what they
will think of me."
Finally the man stopped writing and looked sideways at Julien.
"Are you in a fit state to answer me?"
"Yes, sir," said Julien in an enfeebled voice.
"Ah, that's fortunate."
The man in black had half got up, and was looking impatiently for a
letter in the drawer of his pinewood table, which opened with a grind.
He found it, sat down slowly, and looking again at Julien in a manner
calculated to suck out of him the little life which he still possessed,
said,
"You have been recommended to me by M. Chelan. He was the best cure in
the diocese; he was an upright man if there ever was one, and my friend
for thirty years."
"Oh. It's to M. Pirard then that I have the honour of speaking?" said
Julien in a dying voice.
"Apparently," replied the director of the seminary, as he looked at him
disagreeably.
The glitter of his little eyes doubled and was followed by an
involuntary movement of the muscles of the corner of the mouth. It
was the physiognomy of the tiger savouring in advance the pleasure of
devouring its prey.
"Chelan's letter is short," he said, as though speaking to himself.
"_Intelligenti pauca_. In the present time it is impossible to write
too little." He read aloud:--
"I recommend to you Julien Sorel of this parish, whom
I baptized nearly twenty years ago, the son of a rich
carpenter who gives him nothing. Julien will be a
remarkable worker in the vineyard of the Lord. He lacks
neither memory nor intelligence; he has some faculty
for reflection. Will he persevere in his calling? Is he
sincere?"
"Sincere," repeated the abbe Pirard with an astonished air, looking at
Julien. But the abbe's look was already less devoid of all humanity.
"Sincere," he repeated, lowering his voice, and resuming his reading:--
"I ask you for a stipend for Julien Sorel. He will earn
it by passing the necessary examinations. I have taught
him a little theology, that old and good theology of the
Bossuets, the Arnaults, and the Fleury's. If the person
does not suit you, send him back to me. The director
of the workhouse, whom you know well, offers him eight
hundred to be tutor to his children. My inner self is
tranquil, thanks to God. I am accustoming myself to the
terrible blow, 'Vale et me ama.'"
The abbe Pirard, speaking more slowly as he read the signature,
pronounced with a sigh the word, "Chelan."
"He is tranquil," he said, "in fact his righteousness deserves such a
recompense. May God grant it to me in such a case." He looked up to
heaven and made the sign of the cross. At the sight of that sacred sign
Julien felt an alleviation of the profound horror which had frozen him
since his entry into the house.
"I have here three hundred and twenty-one aspirants for the most holy
state," said the abbe Pirard at last, in a tone, which though severe,
was not malicious; "only seven or eight have been recommended to me by
such men as the abbe Chelan; so you will be the ninth of these among
the three hundred and twenty-one. But my protection means neither
favour nor weakness, it means doubled care, and doubled severity
against vice. Go and lock that door."
Julian made an effort to walk, and managed not to fall. He noticed that
a little window near the entrance door looked out on to the country.
He saw the trees; that sight did him as much good as the sight of old
friends.
"'Loquerisne linquam latinam?'" (Do you speak Latin?) said the abbe
Pirard to him as he came back.
"'Ita, pater optime,'" (Yes, excellent Father) answered Julien,
recovering himself a little. But it was certain that nobody in the
world had ever appeared to him less excellent than had M. Pirard for
the last half hour.
The conversation continued in Latin. The expression in the abbe's eyes
softened. Julien regained some self-possession. "How weak I am," he
thought, "to let myself be imposed on by these appearances of virtue.
The man is probably nothing more than a rascal, like M. Maslon," and
Julien congratulated himself on having hidden nearly all his money in
his boots.
The abbe Pirard examined Julien in theology; he was surprised at
the extent of his knowledge, but his astonishment increased when he
questioned him in particular on sacred scriptures. But when it came to
questions of the doctrines of the Fathers, he perceived that Julien
scarcely even knew the names of Saint Jerome, Saint Augustin, Saint
Bonaventure, Saint Basile, etc., etc.
"As a matter of fact," thought the abbe Pirard, "this is simply that
fatal tendency to Protestantism for which I have always reproached
Chelan. A profound, and only too profound knowledge of the Holy
Scriptures."
(Julien had just started speaking to him, without being questioned on
the point, about the real time when Genesis, the Pentateuch, etc., has
been written).
"To what does this never-ending reasoning over the Holy Scriptures lead
to?" thought the abbe Pirard, "if not to self-examination, that is to
say, the most awful Protestantism. And by the side of this imprudent
knowledge, nothing about the Fathers to compensate for that tendency."
But the astonishment of the director of the seminary was quite
unbounded when having questioned Julien about the authority of the
Pope, and expecting to hear the maxims of the ancient Gallican Church,
the young man recited to him the whole book of M. de Maistre "Strange
man, that Chelan," thought the abbe Pirard. "Did he show him the book
simply to teach him to make fun of it?"
It was in vain that he questioned Julien and endeavoured to guess if
he seriously believed in the doctrine of M. de Maistre. The young man
only answered what he had learnt by heart. From this moment Julien was
really happy. He felt that he was master of himself. After a very long
examination, it seemed to him that M. Pirard's severity towards him was
only affected. Indeed, the director of the seminary would have embraced
Julien in the name of logic, for he found so much clearness, precision
and lucidity in his answers, had it not been for the principles of
austere gravity towards his theology pupils which he had inculcated in
himself for the last fifteen years.
"Here we have a bold and healthy mind," he said to himself, "but corpus
debile" (the body is weak).
"Do you often fall like that?" he said to Julien in French, pointing
with his finger to the floor.
"It's the first time in my life. The porter's face unnerved me," added
Julien, blushing like a child. The abbe Pirard almost smiled.
"That's the result of vain worldly pomp. You are apparently accustomed
to smiling faces, those veritable theatres of falsehood. Truth is
austere, Monsieur, but is not our task down here also austere? You must
be careful that your conscience guards against that weakness of yours,
too much sensibility to vain external graces."
"If you had not been recommended to me," said the abbe Pirard, resuming
the Latin language with an obvious pleasure, "If you had not been
recommended by a man, by the abbe Chelan, I would talk to you the vain
language of that world, to which it would appear you are only too well
accustomed. I would tell you that the full stipend which you solicit
is the most difficult thing in the world to obtain. But the fifty-six
years which the abbe Chelan has spent in apostolic work have stood him
in poor stead if he cannot dispose of a stipend at the seminary."
After these words, the abbe Pirard recommended Julien not to enter any
secret society or congregation without his consent.
"I give you my word of honour," said Julien, with all an honest man's
expansion of heart. The director of the seminary smiled for the first
time.
"That expression is not used here," he said to him. "It is too
reminiscent of that vain honour of worldly people, which leads them to
so many errors and often to so many crimes. You owe me obedience by
virtue of paragraph seventeen of the bull Unam Eccesiam of St. Pius the
Fifth. I am your ecclesiastical superior. To hear in this house, my
dear son, is to obey. How much money, have you?"
("So here we are," said Julien to himself, "that was the reason of the
'my very dear son')."
"Thirty-five francs, my father."
"Write out carefully how you use that money. You will have to give me
an account of it."
This painful audience had lasted three hours. Julien summoned the
porter.
"Go and install Julien Sorel in cell No. 103," said the abbe Pirard to
the man.
As a great favour he let Julien have a place all to himself. "Carry his
box there," he added.
Julien lowered his eyes, and recognised his box just in front of him.
He had been looking at it for three hours and had not recognised it.
As he arrived at No. 103, which was a little room eight feet square on
the top story of the house, Julien noticed that it looked out on to the
ramparts, and he perceived beyond them the pretty plain which the Doubs
divides from the town.
"What a charming view!" exclaimed Julien. In speaking like this he did
not feel what the words actually expressed. The violent sensations
which he had experienced during the short time that he had been at
Besancon had absolutely exhausted his strength. He sat down near the
window on the one wooden chair in the cell, and fell at once into a
profound sleep. He did not hear either the supper bell or the bell for
benediction. They had forgotten him. When the first rays of the sun
woke him up the following morning, he found himself lying on the floor.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE WORLD, OR WHAT THE RICH LACK
I am alone in the world. No one deigns to spare me
a thought. All those whom I see make their fortune,
have an insolence and hardness of heart which I do not
feel in myself. They hate me by reason of kindness
and good-humour. Oh, I shall die soon, either from
starvation or the unhappiness of seeing men so hard of
heart.--_Young_.
He hastened to brush his clothes and run down. He was late. Instead of
trying to justify himself Julien crossed his arms over his breast.
"Peccavi pater optime (I have sinned, I confess my fault, oh, my
father)," he said with a contrite air.
This first speech was a great success. The clever ones among the
seminarists saw that they had to deal with a man who knew something
about the elements of the profession. The recreation hour arrived, and
Julien saw that he was the object of general curiosity, but he only
manifested reserved silence. Following the maxims he had laid down for
himself, he considered his three hundred and twenty-one comrades as
enemies. The most dangerous of all in his eyes was the abbe Pirard. A
few days afterwards Julien had to choose a confessor, and was given a
list.
"Great heavens! what do they take me for?" he said to himself. "Do they
think I don't understand what's what?" Then he chose the abbe Pirard.
This step proved decisive without his suspecting it.
A little seminarist, who was quite young and a native of Verrieres, and
who had declared himself his friend since the first day, informed him
that he would probably have acted more prudently if he had chosen M.
Castanede, the sub-director of the seminary.
"The abbe Castanede is the enemy of Pirard, who is suspected of
Jansenism," added the little seminarist in a whisper. All the first
steps of our hero were, in spite of the prudence on which he plumed
himself, as much mistakes as his choice of a confessor. Misled as he
was by all the self-confidence of a man of imagination, he took his
projects for facts, and believed that he was a consummate hypocrite.
His folly went so far as to reproach himself for his success in this
kind of weakness.
"Alas, it is my only weapon," he said to himself. "At another period I
should have earned my livelihood by eloquent deeds in the face of the
enemy."
Satisfied as he was with his own conduct, Julien looked around him. He
found everywhere the appearance of the purest virtue.
Eight or ten seminarists lived in the odour of sanctity, and had
visions like Saint Theresa, and Saint Francis, when he received his
stigmata on Mount _Vernia_ in the Appenines. But it was a great secret
and their friends concealed it. These poor young people who had
visions were always in the infirmary. A hundred others combined an
indefatigable application to a robust faith. They worked till they fell
ill, but without learning much. Two or three were distinguished by a
real talent, amongst others a student of the name of Chazel, but both
they and Julien felt mutually unsympathetic.
The rest of these three hundred and twenty-one seminarists consisted
exclusively of coarse persons, who were by no means sure of
understanding the Latin words which they kept on repeating the livelong
day. Nearly all were the sons of peasants, and they preferred to gain
their livelihood by reciting some Latin words than by ploughing the
earth. It was after this examination of his colleagues that Julien,
during the first few days, promised himself a speedy success.
"Intelligent people are needed in every service," he said to himself,
"for, after all, there is work to be done. I should have been a
sergeant under Napoleon. I shall be a grand vicar among these future
cures."
"All these poor devils," he added, "manual labourers as they have been
since their childhood, have lived on curded milk and black bread up
till they arrived here. They would only eat meat five or six times a
year in their hovels. Like the Roman soldiers who used to find war the
time of rest, these poor peasants are enchanted with the delights of
the seminary."
Julien could never read anything in their gloomy eyes but the
satisfaction of physical craving after dinner, and the expectation
of sensual pleasure before the meal. Such were the people among whom
Julien had to distinguish himself; but the fact which he did not know,
and which they refrained from telling him, was that coming out first
in the different courses of dogma, ecclesiastical history, etc., etc.,
which are taken at the seminary, constituted in their eyes, neither
more nor less than a splendid sin.
Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at
bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the
popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France
seems to have realised that books are its real enemies. It is the
submissive heart which counts for everything in its eyes. It suspects,
and rightly so, any success in studies, even sacred ones. What is to
prevent a superior man from crossing over to the opposite side like
Sieyes or Gregory. The trembling Church clings on to the Pope as its
one chance of safety. The Pope alone is in a position to attempt to
paralyse all personal self-examination, and to make an impression by
means of the pompous piety of his court ceremonial on the bored and
morbid spirit of fashionable society.
Julien, as he began to get some glimpse of these various truths,
which are none the less in total contradiction to all the official
pronouncements of any seminary, fell into a profound melancholy. He
worked a great deal and rapidly succeeded in learning things which were
extremely useful to a priest, extremely false in his own eyes, and
devoid of the slightest interest for him. He felt there was nothing
else to do.
"Am I then forgotten by the whole world," he thought. He did not know
that M. Pirard had received and thrown into the fire several letters
with the Dijon stamp in which the most lively passion would pierce
through the most formal conventionalism of style. "This love seems to
be fought by great attacks of remorse. All the better," thought the
abbe Pirard. "At any rate this lad has not loved an infidel woman."
One day the abbe Pirard opened a letter which seemed half-blotted out
by tears. It was an adieu for ever. "At last," said the writer to
Julien, "Heaven has granted me the grace of hating, not the author of
my fall, but my fall itself. The sacrifice has been made, dear one, not
without tears as you see. The safety of those to whom I must devote
my life, and whom you love so much, is the decisive factor. A just
but terrible God will no longer see His way to avenge on them their
mother's crimes. Adieu, Julien. Be just towards all men." The end of
the letter was nearly entirely illegible. The writer gave an address at
Dijon, but at the same time expressed the hope that Julien would not
answer, or at any rate would employ language which a reformed woman
could read without blushing. Julien's melancholy, aggravated by the
mediocre nourishment which the contractor who gave dinners at thirteen
centimes per head supplied to the seminary, began to affect his health,
when Fouque suddenly appeared in his room one morning.
"I have been able to get in at last. I have duly been five times to
Besancon in order to see you. Could never get in. I put someone by the
door to watch. Why the devil don't you ever go out?"
"It is a test which I have imposed on myself."
"I find you greatly changed, but here you are again. I have just
learned from a couple of good five franc pieces that I was only a fool
not to have offered them on my first journey."
The conversation of the two friends went on for ever. Julien changed
colour when Fouque said to him,
"Do you know, by the by, that your pupils' mother has become positively
devout."
And he began to talk in that off-hand manner which makes so singular an
impression on the passionate soul, whose dearest interests are being
destroyed without the speaker having the faintest suspicion of it.
"Yes, my friend, the most exalted devoutness. She is said to make
pilgrimages. But to the eternal shame of the abbe Maslon, who has
played the spy so long on that poor M. Chelan, Madame de Renal would
have nothing to do with him. She goes to confession to Dijon or
Besancon."
"She goes to Besancon," said Julien, flushing all over his forehead.
"Pretty often," said Fouque in a questioning manner.
"Have you got any _Constitutionnels_ on you?"
"What do you say?" replied Fouque.
"I'm asking if you've got any _Constitutionnels_?" went on Julien
in the quietest tone imaginable. "They cost thirty sous a number here."
"What!" exclaimed Fouque. "Liberals even in the seminary! Poor France,"
he added, assuming the abbe Maslon's hypocritical voice and sugary tone.
This visit would have made a deep impression on our hero, if he had not
been put on the track of an important discovery by some words addressed
to him the following day by the little seminarist from Verrieres.
Julien's conduct since he had been at the seminary had been nothing but
a series of false steps. He began to make bitter fun of himself.
In point of fact the important actions in his life had been cleverly
managed, but he was careless about details, and cleverness in a
seminary consists in attention to details. Consequently, he had already
the reputation among his comrades of being a _strong-minded person._ He
had been betrayed by a number of little actions.
He had been convicted in their eyes of this enormity, _he thought and
judged for himself_ instead of blindly following authority and example.
The abbe Pirard had been no help to him. He had not spoken to him
on a single occasion apart from the confessional, and even there he
listened more than he spoke. Matters would have been very different if
he had chosen the abbe Castanede. The moment that Julien realised his
folly, he ceased to be bored. He wished to know the whole extent of the
evil, and to effect this emerged a little from that haughty obstinate
silence with which he had scrupulously rebuffed his comrades. It was
now that they took their revenge on him. His advances were welcomed by
a contempt verging on derision. He realised that there had not been one
single hour from the time of his entry into the seminary, particularly
during recreation time, which had not resulted in affecting him one
way or another, which had not increased the number of his enemies, or
won for him the goodwill of some seminarist who was either sincerely
virtuous or of a fibre slightly less coarse than that of the others.
The evil to repair was infinite, and the task very difficult.
Henceforth, Julien's attention was always on guard. The problem before
him was to map out a new character for himself.
The moving of his eyes for example, occasioned him a great deal of
trouble. It is with good reason that they are carried lowered in these
places.
"How presumptuous I was at Verrieres," said Julien to himself. "I
thought I lived; I was only preparing for life, and here I am at last
in the world such as I shall find it, until my part comes to an end,
surrounded by real enemies. What immense difficulties," he added,
"are involved in keeping up this hypocrisy every single minute. It is
enough to put the labours of Hercules into the shade. The Hercules of
modern times is the Pope Sixtus Quintus, who deceived by his modesty
fifteen years on end forty Cardinals who had seen the liveliness and
haughtiness of his whole youth.
"So knowledge is nothing here," he said to himself with disgust.
"Progress in doctrine, in sacred history, etc., only seem to count.
Everything said on those subjects is only intended to entrap fools like
me. Alas my only merit consists in my rapid progress, and in the way in
which I grasp all their nonsense. Do they really value those things at
their true worth? Do they judge them like I do. And I had the stupidity
to be proud of my quickness. The only result of my coming out top has
been to give me inveterate enemies. Chazel, who really knows more than
I do, always throws some blunder in his compositions which gets him put
back to the fiftieth place. If he comes out first, it is only because
he is absent-minded. O how useful would one word, just one word, of M.
Pirard, have been to me."
As soon as Julien was disillusioned, the long exercises in ascetic
piety, such as the attendances in the chapel five times a week, the
intonation of hymns at the chapel of the Sacre Coeur, etc., etc.,
which had previously seemed to him so deadly boring, became his most
interesting opportunities for action. Thanks to a severe introspection,
and above all, by trying not to overdo his methods, Julien did not
attempt at the outset to perform significant actions (that is to say,
actions which are proof of a certain Christian perfection) like those
seminarists who served as a model to the rest.
Seminarists have a special way, even of eating a poached egg, which
betokens progress in the devout life.
The reader who smiles at this will perhaps be good enough to remember
all the mistakes which the abbe Delille made over the eating of an egg
when he was invited to breakfast with a lady of the Court of Louis XVI.
Julien first tried to arrive at the state of _non culpa_, that is
to say the state of the young seminarist whose demeanour and manner
of moving his arms, eyes, etc. while in fact without any trace of
worldliness, do not yet indicate that the person is entirely absorbed
by the conception of the other world, and the idea of the pure
nothingness of this one.
Julien incessantly found such phrases as these charcoaled on the walls
of the corridors. "What are sixty years of ordeals balanced against
an eternity of delights or any eternity of boiling oil in hell?" He
despised them no longer. He realised that it was necessary to have them
incessantly before his eyes. "What am I going to do all my life," he
said to himself. "I shall sell to the faithful a place in heaven. How
am I going to make that place visible to their eyes? By the difference
between my appearance and that of a layman."
After several months of absolutely unremitting application, Julien
still had the appearance of thinking. The way in which he would move
his eyes and hold his mouth did not betoken that implicit faith which
is ready to believe everything and undergo everything, even at the cost
of martyrdom. Julien saw with anger that he was surpassed in this by
the coarsest peasants. There was good reason for their not appearing
full of thought.
What pains did he not take to acquire that facial expression of blindly
fervent faith which is found so frequently in the Italian convents,
and of which Le Guerchin has left such perfect models in his Church
pictures for the benefit of us laymen.
On feast-days, the seminarists were regaled with sausages and cabbage.
Julien's table neighbours observed that he did not appreciate this
happiness. That was looked upon as one of his paramount crimes.
His comrades saw in this a most odious trait, and the most foolish
hypocrisy. Nothing made him more enemies.
"Look at this bourgeois, look at this stuck-up person," they would
say, "who pretends to despise the best rations there are, sausages and
cabbage, shame on the villain! The haughty wretch, he is damned for
ever."
"Alas, these young peasants, who are my comrades, find their ignorance
an immense advantage," Julien would exclaim in his moments of
discouragement. "The professor has not got to deliver them on their
arrival at the seminary from that awful number of worldly ideas which I
brought into it, and which they read on my face whatever I do."
Julien watched with an attention bordering on envy the coarsest of the
little peasants who arrived at the seminary. From the moment when they
were made to doff their shabby jackets to don the black robe, their
education consisted of an immense and limitless respect for _hard
liquid cash_ as they say in Franche-Comte.
That is the consecrated and heroic way of expressing the sublime idea
of current money.
These seminarists, like the heroes in Voltaire's novels, found their
happiness in dining well. Julien discovered in nearly all of them
an innate respect for the man who wears a suit of good cloth. This
sentiment appreciates the distributive justice, which is given us at
our courts, at its value or even above its true value. "What can one
gain," they would often repeat among themselves, "by having a law suit
with 'a big man?'"
That is the expression current in the valleys of the Jura to express
a rich man. One can judge of their respect for the richest entity
of all--the government. Failure to smile deferentially at the mere
name of M. the Prefect is regarded as an imprudence in the eyes of
the Franche-Comte peasant, and imprudence in poor people is quickly
punished by lack of bread.
After having been almost suffocated at first by his feeling of
contempt, Julien eventually experienced a feeling of pity; it often
happened that the fathers of most of his comrades would enter their
hovel in winter evenings and fail to find there either bread, chestnuts
or potatoes.
"What is there astonishing then?" Julien would say to himself, "if in
their eyes the happy man is in the first place the one who has just had
a good dinner, and in the second place the one who possesses a good
suit? My comrades have a lasting vocation, that is to say, they see
in the ecclesiastical calling a long continuance of the happiness of
dining well and having a warm suit."
Julien happened to hear a young imaginative seminarist say to his
companion.
"Why shouldn't I become Pope like Sixtus Quintus who kept pigs?"
"They only make Italians Popes," answered his friend. "But they will
certainly draw lots amongst us for the great vicarships, canonries and
perhaps bishoprics. M. P---- Bishop of Chalons, is the son of a cooper.
That's what my father is."
One day, in the middle of a theology lesson, the Abbe Pirard summoned
Julien to him. The young fellow was delighted to leave the dark, moral
atmosphere in which he had been plunged. Julien received from the
director the same welcome which had frightened him so much on the first
day of his entry.
"Explain to me what is written on this playing card?" he said, looking
at him in a way calculated to make him sink into the earth.
Julien read:
"Amanda Binet of the Giraffe Cafe before eight o'clock. Say you're from
Genlis, and my mother's cousin."
Julien realised the immense danger. The spies of the abbe Castanede had
stolen the address.
"I was trembling with fear the day I came here," he answered, looking
at the abbe Pirard's forehead, for he could not endure that terrible
gaze. "M. Chelan told me that this is a place of informers and
mischief-makers of all kinds, and that spying and tale-bearing by one
comrade on another was encouraged by the authorities. Heaven wishes it
to be so, so as to show life such as it is to the young priests, and
fill them with disgust for the world and all its pomps."
"And it's to me that you make these fine speeches," said the abbe
Pirard furiously. "You young villain."
"My brothers used to beat me at Verrieres," answered Julien coldly,
"When they had occasion to be jealous of me."
"Indeed, indeed," exclaimed M. Pirard, almost beside himself.
Julien went on with his story without being in the least intimidated:--
"The day of my arrival at Besancon I was hungry, and I entered a
cafe. My spirit was full of revulsion for so profane a place, but I
thought that my breakfast would cost me less than at an inn. A lady,
who seemed to be the mistress of the establishment, took pity on my
inexperience. 'Besancon is full of bad characters,' she said to me. 'I
fear something will happen to you, sir. If some mishap should occur to
you, have recourse to me and send to my house before eight o'clock. If
the porters of the seminary refuse to execute your errand, say you are
my cousin and a native of Genlis.'"
"I will have all this chatter verified," exclaimed the abbe Pirard,
unable to stand still, and walking about the room.
"Back to the cell."
The abbe followed Julien and locked him in. The latter immediately
began to examine his trunk, at the bottom of which the fatal cards had
been so carefully hidden. Nothing was missing in the trunk, but several
things had been disarranged. Nevertheless, he had never been without
the key. What luck that, during the whole time of my blindness, said
Julien to himself, I never availed myself of the permission to go out
that Monsieur Castanede would offer me so frequently, with a kindness
which I now understand. Perhaps I should have had the weakness to have
changed my clothes and gone to see the fair Amanda, and then I should
have been ruined. When they gave up hope of exploiting that piece of
information for the accomplishment of his ruin, they had used it to
inform against him. Two hours afterwards the director summoned him.
"You did not lie," he said to him, with a less severe look, "but
keeping an address like that is an indiscretion of a gravity which you
are unable to realise. Unhappy child! It may perhaps do you harm in ten
years' time."
CHAPTER XXVII
FIRST EXPERIENCE OF LIFE
The present time, Great God! is the ark of the Lord;
cursed be he who touches it.--_Diderot_.
The reader will kindly excuse us if we give very few clear and definite
facts concerning this period of Julien's life. It is not that we
lack facts; quite the contrary. But it may be that what he saw in
the seminary is too black for the medium colour which the author
has endeavoured to preserve throughout these pages. Those of our
contemporaries who have suffered from certain things cannot remember
them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that
of reading a tale.
Julien achieved scant success in his essays at hypocritical gestures.
He experienced moments of disgust, and even of complete discouragement.
He was not a success, even in a a vile career. The slightest help
from outside would have sufficed to have given him heart again, for
the difficulty to overcome was not very great, but he was alone, like
a derelict ship in the middle of the ocean. "And when I do succeed,"
he would say to himself, "think of having to pass a whole lifetime in
such awful company, gluttons who have no thought but for the large
omelette which they will guzzle at dinner-time, or persons like the
abbe Castanede, who finds no crime too black! They will attain power,
but, great heavens! at what cost.
"The will of man is powerful, I read it everywhere, but is it enough to
overcome so great a disgust? The task of all the great men was easy by
comparison. However terrible was the danger, they found it fine, and
who can realise, except myself, the ugliness of my surroundings?"
This moment was the most trying in his whole life. It would have been
so easy for him to have enlisted in one of the fine regiments at the
garrison of Besancon. He could have become a Latin master. He needed so
little for his subsistence, but in that case no more career, no more
future for his imagination. It was equivalent to death. Here is one of
his sad days in detail:
"I have so often presumed to congratulate myself on being different
from the other young peasants! Well, I have lived enough to realise
that _difference engenders hate_," he said to himself one morning.
This great truth had just been borne in upon him by one of his most
irritating failures. He had been working for eight days at teaching a
pupil who lived in an odour of sanctity. He used to go out with him
into the courtyard and listen submissively to pieces of fatuity enough
to send one to sleep standing. Suddenly the weather turned stormy. The
thunder growled, and the holy pupil exclaimed as he roughly pushed him
away.
"Listen! Everyone for himself in this world. I don't want to be burned
by the thunder. God may strike you with lightning like a blasphemer,
like a Voltaire."
"I deserve to be drowned if I go to sleep during the storm," exclaimed
Julien, with his teeth clenched with rage, and with his eyes opened
towards the sky now furrowed by the lightning. "Let us try the conquest
of some other rogue."
The bell rang for the abbe Castanede's course of sacred history. That
day the abbe Castanede was teaching those young peasants already
so frightened by their father's hardships and poverty, that the
Government, that entity so terrible in their eyes, possessed no real
and legitimate power except by virtue of the delegation of God's vicar
on earth.
"Render yourselves worthy, by the holiness of your life and by your
obedience, of the benevolence of the Pope. Be _like a stick in his
hands_," he added, "and you will obtain a superb position, where you
will be far from all control, and enjoy the King's commands, a position
from which you cannot be removed, and where one-third of the salary
is paid by the Government, while the faithful who are moulded by your
preaching pay the other two-thirds."
Castanede stopped in the courtyard after he left the lesson-room. "It
is particularly appropriate to say of a cure," he said to the pupils
who formed a ring round him, "that the place is worth as much as the
man is worth. I myself have known parishes in the mountains where the
surplice fees were worth more than that of many town livings. There was
quite as much money, without counting the fat capons, the eggs, fresh
butter, and a thousand and one pleasant details, and there the cure is
indisputably the first man. There is not a good meal to which he is not
invited, feted, etc."
Castanede had scarcely gone back to his room before the pupils split up
into knots. Julien did not form part of any of them; he was left out
like a black sheep. He saw in every knot a pupil tossing a coin in the
air, and if he managed to guess right in this game of heads or tails,
his comrades would decide that he would soon have one of those fat
livings.
Anecdotes ensued. A certain young priest, who had scarcely been
ordained a year, had given a tame rabbit to the maidservant of an old
cure, and had succeeded in being asked to be his curate. In a few
months afterwards, for the cure had quickly died, he had replaced him
in that excellent living. Another had succeeded in getting himself
designated as a successor to a very rich town living, by being present
at all the meals of an old, paralytic cure, and by dexterously carving
his poultry. The seminarists, like all young people, exaggerated the
effect of those little devices, which have an element of originality,
and which strike the imagination.
"I must take part in these conversations," said Julien to himself. When
they did not talk about sausages and good livings, the conversation ran
on the worldly aspect of ecclesiastical doctrine, on the differences of
bishops and prefects, of mayors and cures. Julien caught sight of the
conception of a second god, but of a god who was much more formidable
and much more powerful than the other one. That second god was the
Pope. They said among themselves, in a low voice, however, and when
they were quite sure that they would not be heard by Pirard, that
the reason for the Pope not taking the trouble of nominating all the
prefects and mayors of France, was that he had entrusted that duty to
the King of France by entitling him a senior son of the Church.
It was about this time that Julien thought he could exploit, for the
benefit of his own reputation, his knowledge of De Maistre's book
on the Pope. In point of fact, he did astonish his comrades, but it
was only another misfortune. He displeased them by expounding their
own opinions better than they could themselves. Chelan had acted as
imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the
habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words,
but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the
person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is
offensive.
Julien's command of language added consequently a new crime to his
score. By dint of thinking about him, his colleagues succeeded in
expressing the horror with which he would inspire them by a single
expression; they nicknamed him Martin Luther, "particularly," they
said, "because of that infernal logic which makes him so proud."
Several young seminarists had a fresher complexion than Julien, and
could pass as better-looking, but he had white hands, and was unable to
conceal certain refined habits of personal cleanliness. This advantage
proved a disadvantage in the gloomy house in which chance had cast
him. The dirty peasants among whom he lived asserted that he had very
abandoned morals. We fear that we may weary our reader by a narration
of the thousand and one misfortunes of our hero. The most vigorous of
his comrades, for example, wanted to start the custom of beating him.
He was obliged to arm himself with an iron compass, and to indicate,
though by signs, that he would make use of it. Signs cannot figure in a
spy's report to such good advantage as words.
| 7,300 | Chapters 25-27 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201128052739/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/the-red-and-the-black/summary-and-analysis/part-1-chapters-2527 | Julien is admitted to the presence of the rector, Father Pirard, by an extremely ugly porter. This impression of ugliness and the fright given by the sternness of Pirard cause Julien to faint. Pirard agrees to give him a full scholarship in recognition of the recommendation from his dear friend Chelan. Julien obviously impresses Pirard favorably by his knowledge of scripture and Latin and by the clarity and insight of his answers. Julien is taken to his cell, where he falls into a deep sleep. His first meeting with Pirard has given him to believe that the seminary is taken seriously by the students. Julien fails miserably in his attempt to succeed by brilliant achievement. He also has erred by requesting Pirard as his confessor instead of the rector's Jesuit enemy. Julien learns that to distinguish himself and gain acceptance among his fellows, he must appear stupid, materialistic, and docile. The Jesuit Castanede has found Armanda's address in Julien's luggage and has denounced him to Pirard. Confronted by the rector, Julien lies successfully and exonerates himself. It is the baseness, vulgarity, and ugliness of his adversaries -- his fellow seminarians -- that cause him to flinch and become discouraged in his struggle. His attempts to win them are without success. The description of the ideal awaiting the young priests as preached by Father Castanede revolts Julien: It consists of being well-fed, of vegetating in a parish surrounded by all the physical comforts. His eloquence proves to be another reason for alienation from his fellows, and he must often defend himself against physical attacks. | Verrieres was protected by walls, figuratively speaking, that Julien succeeded in climbing; now he enters another "prison," the seminary, which he must also conquer. In direct contrast to his imagined conquest of Armanda in the cafe, Julien's interview with Pirard is a confrontation that overwhelms and terrifies him. His sensitive nature shuts out ugliness by rendering him unconscious. Again Stendhal omits Julien's brilliant, concise answers to Pirard's interrogation, although we learn that Julien's answers evoke Pirard's admiration for him. The keenness of Stendhal's psychological observation is noted in the brief statement occurring at the end of the interview, which casts light on Julien's frame of mind in retrospect: "Julien looked down and saw his trunk directly in front of him; he had been looking at it for three hours without recognizing it." Moments of intense emotional strain prevent us from evaluating objectively a situation except in retrospect. The prison-like nature of the seminary is emphasized by fleeting views of the outside world, caught by Julien through a window, both during the grueling interview with Pirard and later in his cell. This glimpse of "high places" -- mountains, in this instance -- serves to reassure Julien and is inspirational to him in this crisis. Just as Julien blundered in his attempt to seduce Mme. de Renal, he will blunder in his attempt to succeed in the seminary. The cafe scene served to mark his progress as a seducer, evidence that he had gained experience and wisdom from the experiences in Verrieres. Here, however, is a new field of experience, and his evaluation of the interview with Pirard gives him a false sense of security, causing him to fail miserably in his first few weeks in the seminary. He thought that his usual hypocritical mask was the one to assume, but he soon discovers that he has assumed the wrong mask. It is not excellence that is required of the young, would-be priests but rather submission, obedience, and docility. Even in the seminary, Julien is an outsider, a pariah, because of his superior nature. He has great difficulty trying to perfect a mask of stupidity. Note, however, his progress in the second interview with Pirard. Stendhal admits the reader into a complicity with Julien in the following way: Julien cleverly utilizes the two incidents that had occurred during his first day in Besancon, taking from each what he needs to substantiate his lie to Pirard. Stendhal does not make any comment on this operation. Julien utilizes, then, the potential of Stendhal's logic. Julien's self-imposed campaign of austerity has borne fruits, however, since in not leaving the seminary, he has avoided a worse fate. He has succeeded, again, in spite of himself. | 263 | 449 | [
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161 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/35.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Sense and Sensibility/section_34_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 35 | chapter 35 | null | {"name": "Chapter 35", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210421140324/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sense-and-sensibility/summary/chapter-35", "summary": "Elinor is kind of glad that Mrs. Ferrars was so awful - it convinces her that marrying Edward would have come with its share of troubles, in the form of an evil mother-in-law. However, she still can't say that she's exactly happy that Edward is engaged to Lucy. Lucy herself stops by to gloat. She's exceedingly pleased at how nice Fanny and Mrs. Ferrars were to her. Elinor tries to remind her that they were only that nice because they didn't know about the engagement, but Lucy won't hear any of it. Lucy goes on and on about how wonderful the Ferrars are, and how wonderful life is. It's sickening, both to Elinor and to us. She even goes on about how Elinor is practically her best friend, other than Edward. She hopes that Elinor will tell Fanny just how much she, Lucy, was impressed by her. Lucy makes a rather pointed comment about how she would have known if Mrs. Ferrars disliked her, since she makes her dislike so apparent . At this unfortunate moment, things become even more awkward - Edward arrives. Wow. Hmm. This is really not a comfortable situation. Elinor welcomes him politely, which puts him slightly at ease. Lucy doesn't say a word, and so Elinor has to take care of the whole conversation. She then leaves Edward and Lucy on their own so that she can go fetch Marianne. Marianne, not knowing what's going on with the weird love triangle, is overjoyed by Edward's appearance. He's alarmed by her unwell appearance, but she shakes him off, saying that Elinor is well enough for both of them. Marianne suggests that Edward should escort the two of them home to Barton in a couple of weeks - but he mutters a lame excuse. This makes no difference to the excited Marianne. She goes on to tell him about the last night's dinner party, and asks why he wasn't there - didn't he want to see them? Edward explains that he had a prior engagement, and Marianne is shocked. Lucy makes a cutting little comment about how Marianne shouldn't expect young men to keep their engagements. Elinor is angry, but Marianne calmly responds by praising Edward's conscience. This is too much for Edward, considering his current company, and he flees the scene. Lucy leaves soon thereafter. Marianne is enraged by Lucy's rudeness - couldn't she see that they just wanted to spend time with Edward, their real friend? Elinor half-heartedly stands up for Lucy, saying that she had a right to visit with them, as Edward is her friend, too. She can't say anything else, for fear that she might give away the big secret.", "analysis": ""} |
Elinor's curiosity to see Mrs. Ferrars was satisfied.-- She had found
in her every thing that could tend to make a farther connection between
the families undesirable.-- She had seen enough of her pride, her
meanness, and her determined prejudice against herself, to comprehend
all the difficulties that must have perplexed the engagement, and
retarded the marriage, of Edward and herself, had he been otherwise
free;--and she had seen almost enough to be thankful for her OWN sake,
that one greater obstacle preserved her from suffering under any other
of Mrs. Ferrars's creation, preserved her from all dependence upon her
caprice, or any solicitude for her good opinion. Or at least, if she
did not bring herself quite to rejoice in Edward's being fettered to
Lucy, she determined, that had Lucy been more amiable, she OUGHT to
have rejoiced.
She wondered that Lucy's spirits could be so very much elevated by the
civility of Mrs. Ferrars;--that her interest and her vanity should so
very much blind her as to make the attention which seemed only paid her
because she was NOT ELINOR, appear a compliment to herself--or to allow
her to derive encouragement from a preference only given her, because
her real situation was unknown. But that it was so, had not only been
declared by Lucy's eyes at the time, but was declared over again the
next morning more openly, for at her particular desire, Lady Middleton
set her down in Berkeley Street on the chance of seeing Elinor alone,
to tell her how happy she was.
The chance proved a lucky one, for a message from Mrs. Palmer soon
after she arrived, carried Mrs. Jennings away.
"My dear friend," cried Lucy, as soon as they were by themselves, "I
come to talk to you of my happiness. Could anything be so flattering
as Mrs. Ferrars's way of treating me yesterday? So exceeding affable
as she was!--You know how I dreaded the thoughts of seeing her;--but
the very moment I was introduced, there was such an affability in her
behaviour as really should seem to say, she had quite took a fancy to
me. Now was not it so?-- You saw it all; and was not you quite struck
with it?"
"She was certainly very civil to you."
"Civil!--Did you see nothing but only civility?-- I saw a vast deal
more. Such kindness as fell to the share of nobody but me!--No pride,
no hauteur, and your sister just the same--all sweetness and
affability!"
Elinor wished to talk of something else, but Lucy still pressed her to
own that she had reason for her happiness; and Elinor was obliged to go
on.--
"Undoubtedly, if they had known your engagement," said she, "nothing
could be more flattering than their treatment of you;--but as that was
not the case"--
"I guessed you would say so,"--replied Lucy quickly--"but there was no
reason in the world why Mrs. Ferrars should seem to like me, if she did
not, and her liking me is every thing. You shan't talk me out of my
satisfaction. I am sure it will all end well, and there will be no
difficulties at all, to what I used to think. Mrs. Ferrars is a
charming woman, and so is your sister. They are both delightful women,
indeed!--I wonder I should never hear you say how agreeable Mrs.
Dashwood was!"
To this Elinor had no answer to make, and did not attempt any.
"Are you ill, Miss Dashwood?--you seem low--you don't speak;--sure you
an't well."
"I never was in better health."
"I am glad of it with all my heart; but really you did not look it. I
should be sorry to have YOU ill; you, that have been the greatest
comfort to me in the world!--Heaven knows what I should have done
without your friendship."--
Elinor tried to make a civil answer, though doubting her own success.
But it seemed to satisfy Lucy, for she directly replied,
"Indeed I am perfectly convinced of your regard for me, and next to
Edward's love, it is the greatest comfort I have.--Poor Edward!--But
now there is one good thing, we shall be able to meet, and meet pretty
often, for Lady Middleton's delighted with Mrs. Dashwood, so we shall
be a good deal in Harley Street, I dare say, and Edward spends half his
time with his sister--besides, Lady Middleton and Mrs. Ferrars will
visit now;--and Mrs. Ferrars and your sister were both so good to say
more than once, they should always be glad to see me.-- They are such
charming women!--I am sure if ever you tell your sister what I think of
her, you cannot speak too high."
But Elinor would not give her any encouragement to hope that she SHOULD
tell her sister. Lucy continued.
"I am sure I should have seen it in a moment, if Mrs. Ferrars had took
a dislike to me. If she had only made me a formal courtesy, for
instance, without saying a word, and never after had took any notice of
me, and never looked at me in a pleasant way--you know what I mean--if
I had been treated in that forbidding sort of way, I should have gave
it all up in despair. I could not have stood it. For where she DOES
dislike, I know it is most violent."
Elinor was prevented from making any reply to this civil triumph, by
the door's being thrown open, the servant's announcing Mr. Ferrars, and
Edward's immediately walking in.
It was a very awkward moment; and the countenance of each shewed that
it was so. They all looked exceedingly foolish; and Edward seemed to
have as great an inclination to walk out of the room again, as to
advance farther into it. The very circumstance, in its unpleasantest
form, which they would each have been most anxious to avoid, had fallen
on them.--They were not only all three together, but were together
without the relief of any other person. The ladies recovered
themselves first. It was not Lucy's business to put herself forward,
and the appearance of secrecy must still be kept up. She could
therefore only LOOK her tenderness, and after slightly addressing him,
said no more.
But Elinor had more to do; and so anxious was she, for his sake and her
own, to do it well, that she forced herself, after a moment's
recollection, to welcome him, with a look and manner that were almost
easy, and almost open; and another struggle, another effort still
improved them. She would not allow the presence of Lucy, nor the
consciousness of some injustice towards herself, to deter her from
saying that she was happy to see him, and that she had very much
regretted being from home, when he called before in Berkeley Street.
She would not be frightened from paying him those attentions which, as
a friend and almost a relation, were his due, by the observant eyes of
Lucy, though she soon perceived them to be narrowly watching her.
Her manners gave some re-assurance to Edward, and he had courage enough
to sit down; but his embarrassment still exceeded that of the ladies in
a proportion, which the case rendered reasonable, though his sex might
make it rare; for his heart had not the indifference of Lucy's, nor
could his conscience have quite the ease of Elinor's.
Lucy, with a demure and settled air, seemed determined to make no
contribution to the comfort of the others, and would not say a word;
and almost every thing that WAS said, proceeded from Elinor, who was
obliged to volunteer all the information about her mother's health,
their coming to town, &c. which Edward ought to have inquired about,
but never did.
Her exertions did not stop here; for she soon afterwards felt herself
so heroically disposed as to determine, under pretence of fetching
Marianne, to leave the others by themselves; and she really did it, and
THAT in the handsomest manner, for she loitered away several minutes on
the landing-place, with the most high-minded fortitude, before she went
to her sister. When that was once done, however, it was time for the
raptures of Edward to cease; for Marianne's joy hurried her into the
drawing-room immediately. Her pleasure in seeing him was like every
other of her feelings, strong in itself, and strongly spoken. She met
him with a hand that would be taken, and a voice that expressed the
affection of a sister.
"Dear Edward!" she cried, "this is a moment of great happiness!--This
would almost make amends for every thing!"
Edward tried to return her kindness as it deserved, but before such
witnesses he dared not say half what he really felt. Again they all
sat down, and for a moment or two all were silent; while Marianne was
looking with the most speaking tenderness, sometimes at Edward and
sometimes at Elinor, regretting only that their delight in each other
should be checked by Lucy's unwelcome presence. Edward was the first
to speak, and it was to notice Marianne's altered looks, and express
his fear of her not finding London agree with her.
"Oh, don't think of me!" she replied with spirited earnestness, though
her eyes were filled with tears as she spoke, "don't think of MY
health. Elinor is well, you see. That must be enough for us both."
This remark was not calculated to make Edward or Elinor more easy, nor
to conciliate the good will of Lucy, who looked up at Marianne with no
very benignant expression.
"Do you like London?" said Edward, willing to say any thing that might
introduce another subject.
"Not at all. I expected much pleasure in it, but I have found none.
The sight of you, Edward, is the only comfort it has afforded; and
thank Heaven! you are what you always were!"
She paused--no one spoke.
"I think, Elinor," she presently added, "we must employ Edward to take
care of us in our return to Barton. In a week or two, I suppose, we
shall be going; and, I trust, Edward will not be very unwilling to
accept the charge."
Poor Edward muttered something, but what it was, nobody knew, not even
himself. But Marianne, who saw his agitation, and could easily trace
it to whatever cause best pleased herself, was perfectly satisfied, and
soon talked of something else.
"We spent such a day, Edward, in Harley Street yesterday! So dull, so
wretchedly dull!--But I have much to say to you on that head, which
cannot be said now."
And with this admirable discretion did she defer the assurance of her
finding their mutual relatives more disagreeable than ever, and of her
being particularly disgusted with his mother, till they were more in
private.
"But why were you not there, Edward?--Why did you not come?"
"I was engaged elsewhere."
"Engaged! But what was that, when such friends were to be met?"
"Perhaps, Miss Marianne," cried Lucy, eager to take some revenge on
her, "you think young men never stand upon engagements, if they have no
mind to keep them, little as well as great."
Elinor was very angry, but Marianne seemed entirely insensible of the
sting; for she calmly replied,
"Not so, indeed; for, seriously speaking, I am very sure that
conscience only kept Edward from Harley Street. And I really believe
he HAS the most delicate conscience in the world; the most scrupulous
in performing every engagement, however minute, and however it may make
against his interest or pleasure. He is the most fearful of giving
pain, of wounding expectation, and the most incapable of being selfish,
of any body I ever saw. Edward, it is so, and I will say it. What!
are you never to hear yourself praised!--Then you must be no friend of
mine; for those who will accept of my love and esteem, must submit to
my open commendation."
The nature of her commendation, in the present case, however, happened
to be particularly ill-suited to the feelings of two thirds of her
auditors, and was so very unexhilarating to Edward, that he very soon
got up to go away.
"Going so soon!" said Marianne; "my dear Edward, this must not be."
And drawing him a little aside, she whispered her persuasion that Lucy
could not stay much longer. But even this encouragement failed, for he
would go; and Lucy, who would have outstaid him, had his visit lasted
two hours, soon afterwards went away.
"What can bring her here so often?" said Marianne, on her leaving them.
"Could not she see that we wanted her gone!--how teazing to Edward!"
"Why so?--we were all his friends, and Lucy has been the longest known
to him of any. It is but natural that he should like to see her as
well as ourselves."
Marianne looked at her steadily, and said, "You know, Elinor, that this
is a kind of talking which I cannot bear. If you only hope to have
your assertion contradicted, as I must suppose to be the case, you
ought to recollect that I am the last person in the world to do it. I
cannot descend to be tricked out of assurances, that are not really
wanted."
She then left the room; and Elinor dared not follow her to say more,
for bound as she was by her promise of secrecy to Lucy, she could give
no information that would convince Marianne; and painful as the
consequences of her still continuing in an error might be, she was
obliged to submit to it. All that she could hope, was that Edward
would not often expose her or himself to the distress of hearing
Marianne's mistaken warmth, nor to the repetition of any other part of
the pain that had attended their recent meeting--and this she had every
reason to expect.
| 2,139 | Chapter 35 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210421140324/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sense-and-sensibility/summary/chapter-35 | Elinor is kind of glad that Mrs. Ferrars was so awful - it convinces her that marrying Edward would have come with its share of troubles, in the form of an evil mother-in-law. However, she still can't say that she's exactly happy that Edward is engaged to Lucy. Lucy herself stops by to gloat. She's exceedingly pleased at how nice Fanny and Mrs. Ferrars were to her. Elinor tries to remind her that they were only that nice because they didn't know about the engagement, but Lucy won't hear any of it. Lucy goes on and on about how wonderful the Ferrars are, and how wonderful life is. It's sickening, both to Elinor and to us. She even goes on about how Elinor is practically her best friend, other than Edward. She hopes that Elinor will tell Fanny just how much she, Lucy, was impressed by her. Lucy makes a rather pointed comment about how she would have known if Mrs. Ferrars disliked her, since she makes her dislike so apparent . At this unfortunate moment, things become even more awkward - Edward arrives. Wow. Hmm. This is really not a comfortable situation. Elinor welcomes him politely, which puts him slightly at ease. Lucy doesn't say a word, and so Elinor has to take care of the whole conversation. She then leaves Edward and Lucy on their own so that she can go fetch Marianne. Marianne, not knowing what's going on with the weird love triangle, is overjoyed by Edward's appearance. He's alarmed by her unwell appearance, but she shakes him off, saying that Elinor is well enough for both of them. Marianne suggests that Edward should escort the two of them home to Barton in a couple of weeks - but he mutters a lame excuse. This makes no difference to the excited Marianne. She goes on to tell him about the last night's dinner party, and asks why he wasn't there - didn't he want to see them? Edward explains that he had a prior engagement, and Marianne is shocked. Lucy makes a cutting little comment about how Marianne shouldn't expect young men to keep their engagements. Elinor is angry, but Marianne calmly responds by praising Edward's conscience. This is too much for Edward, considering his current company, and he flees the scene. Lucy leaves soon thereafter. Marianne is enraged by Lucy's rudeness - couldn't she see that they just wanted to spend time with Edward, their real friend? Elinor half-heartedly stands up for Lucy, saying that she had a right to visit with them, as Edward is her friend, too. She can't say anything else, for fear that she might give away the big secret. | null | 448 | 1 | [
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1,232 | true | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/chapters_20_to_26.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/The Prince/section_6_part_0.txt | The Prince.chapters 20-26 | section 7: chapters 20-26 | null | {"name": "Section 7: Chapters XX-XXVI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210417004655/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-prince/study-guide/summary-section-7-chapters-xx-xxvi", "summary": "A new prince cannot disarm his subjects, which would cause a backlash; rather, he should arm them, thereby instilling loyalty. The opposite applies for a prince who has just acquired a new state and attached it to his old one. In this case the prince must disarm the new state, for all arms must be in the hands of the prince's own soldiers - those who are used to his rule. Machiavelli disagrees with the adage that encouraging factionalism is a good way to keep power. Yes, this tactic may work in peacetime, but as soon as a foreign enemy comes along, the factionalized state is that much easier to conquer. Also, a faction can sometimes win out and overthrow the whole state, as has happened in Venice. Machiavelli approves of the deliberate planting of obstacles to a prince's rise and his power, in order for him to gain in reputation by overcoming them. \"Many hold that a shrewd prince will, when he can, subtly encourage some enmity to himself, so that by overcoming it he can augment his own reputation,\" he writes. Machiavelli then argues that men who are at first suspect to the prince can often be trusted more than those who seem immediately loyal to him; the former feel that they need to win the prince over, while the latter feel too secure in their positions. With a newly conquered state, \"it is much easier to gain as friends those men who were satisfied with the earlier state, and therefore hostile to the conqueror, than those men who, because they were discontented in the earlier state, looked with fervor on the new prince and helped him take over.\" The discontented often remain discontented. Machiavelli concludes this chapter, entitled \"Whether Building Fortresses and Other Defensive Policies Often Adapted By Princes Are Useful or Not,\" with a mention of, suitably enough, fortresses: \"the prince who fears his own people more than he does foreigners ought to build fortresses, but a prince who is more afraid of foreigners than of his own people can neglect them.\" Why? Because the best fortress of all is the support of the people. Moreover, a prince should never rely entirely on fortresses and feel that they mean he need not worry about whether or not his people support him. The next chapter, \"How a Prince Should Act to Acquire Reputation,\" presents Ferdinand of Spain as a key example. Ferdinand acquired his reputation through military projects, constantly following up one campaign with another - Granada, expelling the Moors, attacking Africa, campaigning in Italy, assaulting France - as a way of distracting from his more private machinations - unifying Aragon and Castille. Machiavelli refers to Ferdinand's behavior as \"despicable,\" yet he argues that these policies, by preoccupying the king's subjects and enthralling them, ultimately worked. A prince should take a stand if neighbors come to blows. Neutrality is not the way to go. If the neighbors are powerful, then the victor will invariably hate you if you were neutral; if the neighbors are weak, then you find yourself in an ideal position to render a state indebted to you by taking its side. Internally, a prince should reward the talents and endeavors of his subjects. He should encourage their work, should not confiscate holdings , should entertain the people with \"festivals and spectacles,\" and should show himself attentive to their needs while never diminishing his dignity. \"On a Prince's Private Counselors\" makes a more straightforward claim: that it is crucial for a prince to pick good ministers, because they in turn reflect on the prince himself. A good minister should think only of what is good for his master; that said, a prince should be sure to keep a minister obedient by honoring him and respecting his welfare. Next, Machiavelli turns to the subject of flatterers, in \"How to Avoid Flatterers.\" A prince should accept advice, but only when he has sought it out; uncalled-for advice is never welcome. A prudent prince will bring wise men into his council and give them alone \"free license to speak the truth.\" For his part, the prince should ask many questions, should seek opinions, and should hear out the views of others. The final three chapters of The Prince - \"Why the Princes of Italy Have Lost Their Dominions,\" \"The Influence of Luck on Human Affairs and the Ways to Counter It,\" and \"An Exhortation to Restore Italy to Liberty and Free Her From the Barbarians\" - return the book to that idealized vision: a unified Italy, brimming with renewed strength and vigor, a single nation rising above its divisions, healing its wounds, and striding like a colossus upon the world's stage. What has become of Italy's glorious potential? The problem, as Machiavelli identifies it, is essentially laziness. The rulers of Italy have not maintained their armed forces, idly figuring that quiet times never go away. This \"is a common failing of men,\" Machiavelli writes. They \"never think of storms so long as the sky is blue.\" When trouble comes, such princes run away, hoping to be called back when their former subjects tire of their conquerors. In the second of these three last chapters, Machiavelli discusses luck and its impact on political affairs. Italy is in trouble today, he argues, because of bad luck, but also because she has not guarded against it sufficiently. \"I think it may be true that Fortune governs half of our actions,\" Machiavelli writes, \"but that even so she leaves the other half more or less in our power to control.\" Machiavelli then closes The Prince with, as he puts it, an \"exhortation\": he directly addresses Lorenzo de Medici, as he did in the book's prefatory letter, arguing that he could be the prince who unites Italy. This hope for unification is echoed again in his mention of Cesare Borgia, who, \"at the zenith of his career deserted by Fortune.\" Machiavelli reminds Lorenzo to look at the examples of the past and restates the necessity of building one's own armies. \"The occasion must not be allowed to slip away,\" he argues. \"Italy has been waiting too long for a glimpse of her redeemer.\" Finally, Machiavelli concludes with a verse from Petrarch, translated as follows: \"Then virtue boldly shall engage/And swiftly vanquish barbarous rage,/Proving that ancient and heroic pride/In true Italian hearts has never died.\"", "analysis": "Once again, Machiavelli's slippery, flip-flopping view of human nature is on full display. In Chapter XXI, he writes: \"Men are never so dishonest that they will show gross ingratitude by turning immediately on their helpers. Besides, victories are never so decisive that the victor does not have to maintain some moderation, some show of justice.\" Did he not, only a number of pages earlier, argue that men are intrinsically \"rotten,\" liars and hypocrites of the highest magnitude, ready to turn against a helping hand as soon as it suits their needs? And what of justice? What became of keeping the end in sight, of wielding cruelty when necessary, of aiming for the decisive victory, whatever the cost? No, Machiavelli reasons: moderation is the way to proceed. Far more than is generally assumed, The Prince adopts an almost thesis-antithesis approach to politics and human nature, arguing in near-dialectical fashion through the thickets of human behavior. Machiavelli, despite his occasional categorical assertion and broad generalization, tends to acknowledge the complexity of mankind, of social structures, and of civilization. The apparent contradictions that riddle The Prince are arguably indicative of an actively searching mind; this is a restless book, replete with gaps and back-tracks, obfuscations and impasses, that in its entirety seeks to offer a vision of man as a political animal, groping for power but continually off-set by his own contrary impulses. It is almost a study in psychology, teasing out the aforementioned contradictions in an effort to arrive at some synthesis. Indeed, man as agent of his own destiny is a central theme for Machiavelli. In his chapter on luck, he writes that \"a prince who depends entirely on Fortune comes to grief immediately she changes.\" That said, a prince should adjust his behavior \"to the temper of the times.\" It is all about finding the happy medium, that precise balance between absolute individualism and an ability to adapt to the winds of change and to the mood of the era. Luck does play a major role in politics. Men have natural inclinations that are not easily adjusted, and in this case it is a matter of chance whether such temperaments fit the times or not. But even here, in the heart of this argument, Machiavelli invokes the importance of the self, of man's capacity to introduce change and to mold the times. He writes that it is \"better to be rash than timid, for Fortune is a woman, and the man who wants to hold her down must beat and bully her.\" This statement assumes that Fortune can be held down - which was far from a universal belief in Machiavelli's time. He goes on: \"Like a woman, too, is always a friend of the young, because they are less timid, more brutal, and take charge of her more recklessly.\" For all his prior emphasis on prudence and calculation, Machiavelli here prizes recklessness, boldness, and brutality. Therein lies perhaps the central struggle in The Prince: that between the need for bold, speedy maneuvers, the necessity of action, and the treatment of politics as a science, full of rules and conditions. A prince must be both human and beast, and as beast he must be both lion and fox. He must embrace the contradictions of humanity; he must rely on both thought and action; he must look to the past as he heads toward the future. Machiavelli's treatise is more than a prolonged letter intended to curry favor with the Medici or a how-to manual for power-grabbing; it is, fundamentally, an inquiry into the nature of man, and the ways in which that nature can be harnessed and used both for and against other men. The \"Prince\" of the title is neither hero nor villain. He is, quite simply, human."} |
1. Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their
subjects; others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions;
others have fostered enmities against themselves; others have laid
themselves out to gain over those whom they distrusted in the beginning
of their governments; some have built fortresses; some have overthrown
and destroyed them. And although one cannot give a final judgment on all
of these things unless one possesses the particulars of those states
in which a decision has to be made, nevertheless I will speak as
comprehensively as the matter of itself will admit.
2. There never was a new prince who has disarmed his subjects; rather
when he has found them disarmed he has always armed them, because, by
arming them, those arms become yours, those men who were distrusted
become faithful, and those who were faithful are kept so, and your
subjects become your adherents. And whereas all subjects cannot be
armed, yet when those whom you do arm are benefited, the others can be
handled more freely, and this difference in their treatment, which they
quite understand, makes the former your dependents, and the latter,
considering it to be necessary that those who have the most danger and
service should have the most reward, excuse you. But when you disarm
them, you at once offend them by showing that you distrust them, either
for cowardice or for want of loyalty, and either of these opinions
breeds hatred against you. And because you cannot remain unarmed, it
follows that you turn to mercenaries, which are of the character already
shown; even if they should be good they would not be sufficient to
defend you against powerful enemies and distrusted subjects. Therefore,
as I have said, a new prince in a new principality has always
distributed arms. Histories are full of examples. But when a prince
acquires a new state, which he adds as a province to his old one, then
it is necessary to disarm the men of that state, except those who have
been his adherents in acquiring it; and these again, with time and
opportunity, should be rendered soft and effeminate; and matters should
be managed in such a way that all the armed men in the state shall be
your own soldiers who in your old state were living near you.
3. Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed
to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia by factions and Pisa by
fortresses; and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their
tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily.
This may have been well enough in those times when Italy was in a way
balanced, but I do not believe that it can be accepted as a precept
for to-day, because I do not believe that factions can ever be of use;
rather it is certain that when the enemy comes upon you in divided
cities you are quickly lost, because the weakest party will always
assist the outside forces and the other will not be able to resist.
The Venetians, moved, as I believe, by the above reasons, fostered the
Guelph and Ghibelline factions in their tributary cities; and although
they never allowed them to come to bloodshed, yet they nursed these
disputes amongst them, so that the citizens, distracted by their
differences, should not unite against them. Which, as we saw, did not
afterwards turn out as expected, because, after the rout at Vaila, one
party at once took courage and seized the state. Such methods argue,
therefore, weakness in the prince, because these factions will never be
permitted in a vigorous principality; such methods for enabling one the
more easily to manage subjects are only useful in times of peace, but if
war comes this policy proves fallacious.
4. Without doubt princes become great when they overcome the
difficulties and obstacles by which they are confronted, and therefore
fortune, especially when she desires to make a new prince great, who
has a greater necessity to earn renown than an hereditary one, causes
enemies to arise and form designs against him, in order that he may have
the opportunity of overcoming them, and by them to mount higher, as by a
ladder which his enemies have raised. For this reason many consider that
a wise prince, when he has the opportunity, ought with craft to foster
some animosity against himself, so that, having crushed it, his renown
may rise higher.
5. Princes, especially new ones, have found more fidelity and assistance
in those men who in the beginning of their rule were distrusted than
among those who in the beginning were trusted. Pandolfo Petrucci, Prince
of Siena, ruled his state more by those who had been distrusted than by
others. But on this question one cannot speak generally, for it varies
so much with the individual; I will only say this, that those men who
at the commencement of a princedom have been hostile, if they are of
a description to need assistance to support themselves, can always be
gained over with the greatest ease, and they will be tightly held to
serve the prince with fidelity, inasmuch as they know it to be very
necessary for them to cancel by deeds the bad impression which he had
formed of them; and thus the prince always extracts more profit from
them than from those who, serving him in too much security, may neglect
his affairs. And since the matter demands it, I must not fail to warn a
prince, who by means of secret favours has acquired a new state, that he
must well consider the reasons which induced those to favour him who
did so; and if it be not a natural affection towards him, but only
discontent with their government, then he will only keep them friendly
with great trouble and difficulty, for it will be impossible to satisfy
them. And weighing well the reasons for this in those examples which
can be taken from ancient and modern affairs, we shall find that it is
easier for the prince to make friends of those men who were contented
under the former government, and are therefore his enemies, than of
those who, being discontented with it, were favourable to him and
encouraged him to seize it.
6. It has been a custom with princes, in order to hold their states
more securely, to build fortresses that may serve as a bridle and bit
to those who might design to work against them, and as a place of refuge
from a first attack. I praise this system because it has been made use
of formerly. Notwithstanding that, Messer Nicolo Vitelli in our times
has been seen to demolish two fortresses in Citta di Castello so that he
might keep that state; Guido Ubaldo, Duke of Urbino, on returning to
his dominion, whence he had been driven by Cesare Borgia, razed to the
foundations all the fortresses in that province, and considered that
without them it would be more difficult to lose it; the Bentivogli
returning to Bologna came to a similar decision. Fortresses, therefore,
are useful or not according to circumstances; if they do you good in one
way they injure you in another. And this question can be reasoned thus:
the prince who has more to fear from the people than from foreigners
ought to build fortresses, but he who has more to fear from foreigners
than from the people ought to leave them alone. The castle of Milan,
built by Francesco Sforza, has made, and will make, more trouble for the
house of Sforza than any other disorder in the state. For this reason
the best possible fortress is--not to be hated by the people, because,
although you may hold the fortresses, yet they will not save you if the
people hate you, for there will never be wanting foreigners to assist
a people who have taken arms against you. It has not been seen in our
times that such fortresses have been of use to any prince, unless to the
Countess of Forli,(*) when the Count Girolamo, her consort, was killed;
for by that means she was able to withstand the popular attack and wait
for assistance from Milan, and thus recover her state; and the posture
of affairs was such at that time that the foreigners could not assist
the people. But fortresses were of little value to her afterwards when
Cesare Borgia attacked her, and when the people, her enemy, were allied
with foreigners. Therefore, it would have been safer for her, both then
and before, not to have been hated by the people than to have had the
fortresses. All these things considered then, I shall praise him
who builds fortresses as well as him who does not, and I shall blame
whoever, trusting in them, cares little about being hated by the people.
(*) Catherine Sforza, a daughter of Galeazzo Sforza and
Lucrezia Landriani, born 1463, died 1509. It was to the
Countess of Forli that Machiavelli was sent as envoy on 1499.
A letter from Fortunati to the countess announces the
appointment: "I have been with the signori," wrote
Fortunati, "to learn whom they would send and when. They
tell me that Nicolo Machiavelli, a learned young Florentine
noble, secretary to my Lords of the Ten, is to leave with me
at once." Cf. "Catherine Sforza," by Count Pasolini,
translated by P. Sylvester, 1898.
Nothing makes a prince so much esteemed as great enterprises and setting
a fine example. We have in our time Ferdinand of Aragon, the present
King of Spain. He can almost be called a new prince, because he has
risen, by fame and glory, from being an insignificant king to be the
foremost king in Christendom; and if you will consider his deeds
you will find them all great and some of them extraordinary. In the
beginning of his reign he attacked Granada, and this enterprise was the
foundation of his dominions. He did this quietly at first and without
any fear of hindrance, for he held the minds of the barons of Castile
occupied in thinking of the war and not anticipating any innovations;
thus they did not perceive that by these means he was acquiring power
and authority over them. He was able with the money of the Church and
of the people to sustain his armies, and by that long war to lay the
foundation for the military skill which has since distinguished him.
Further, always using religion as a plea, so as to undertake greater
schemes, he devoted himself with pious cruelty to driving out and
clearing his kingdom of the Moors; nor could there be a more admirable
example, nor one more rare. Under this same cloak he assailed Africa,
he came down on Italy, he has finally attacked France; and thus his
achievements and designs have always been great, and have kept the minds
of his people in suspense and admiration and occupied with the issue of
them. And his actions have arisen in such a way, one out of the other,
that men have never been given time to work steadily against him.
Again, it much assists a prince to set unusual examples in internal
affairs, similar to those which are related of Messer Bernabo da Milano,
who, when he had the opportunity, by any one in civil life doing some
extraordinary thing, either good or bad, would take some method of
rewarding or punishing him, which would be much spoken about. And a
prince ought, above all things, always endeavour in every action to gain
for himself the reputation of being a great and remarkable man.
A prince is also respected when he is either a true friend or a
downright enemy, that is to say, when, without any reservation, he
declares himself in favour of one party against the other; which course
will always be more advantageous than standing neutral; because if two
of your powerful neighbours come to blows, they are of such a character
that, if one of them conquers, you have either to fear him or not.
In either case it will always be more advantageous for you to declare
yourself and to make war strenuously; because, in the first case, if
you do not declare yourself, you will invariably fall a prey to
the conqueror, to the pleasure and satisfaction of him who has been
conquered, and you will have no reasons to offer, nor anything to
protect or to shelter you. Because he who conquers does not want
doubtful friends who will not aid him in the time of trial; and he who
loses will not harbour you because you did not willingly, sword in hand,
court his fate.
Antiochus went into Greece, being sent for by the Aetolians to drive
out the Romans. He sent envoys to the Achaeans, who were friends of
the Romans, exhorting them to remain neutral; and on the other hand the
Romans urged them to take up arms. This question came to be discussed in
the council of the Achaeans, where the legate of Antiochus urged them to
stand neutral. To this the Roman legate answered: "As for that which has
been said, that it is better and more advantageous for your state not
to interfere in our war, nothing can be more erroneous; because by
not interfering you will be left, without favour or consideration, the
guerdon of the conqueror." Thus it will always happen that he who is not
your friend will demand your neutrality, whilst he who is your friend
will entreat you to declare yourself with arms. And irresolute princes,
to avoid present dangers, generally follow the neutral path, and are
generally ruined. But when a prince declares himself gallantly in favour
of one side, if the party with whom he allies himself conquers, although
the victor may be powerful and may have him at his mercy, yet he is
indebted to him, and there is established a bond of amity; and men are
never so shameless as to become a monument of ingratitude by oppressing
you. Victories after all are never so complete that the victor must not
show some regard, especially to justice. But if he with whom you ally
yourself loses, you may be sheltered by him, and whilst he is able he
may aid you, and you become companions on a fortune that may rise again.
In the second case, when those who fight are of such a character that
you have no anxiety as to who may conquer, so much the more is it
greater prudence to be allied, because you assist at the destruction
of one by the aid of another who, if he had been wise, would have saved
him; and conquering, as it is impossible that he should not do with your
assistance, he remains at your discretion. And here it is to be noted
that a prince ought to take care never to make an alliance with one
more powerful than himself for the purposes of attacking others, unless
necessity compels him, as is said above; because if he conquers you are
at his discretion, and princes ought to avoid as much as possible being
at the discretion of any one. The Venetians joined with France against
the Duke of Milan, and this alliance, which caused their ruin, could
have been avoided. But when it cannot be avoided, as happened to the
Florentines when the Pope and Spain sent armies to attack Lombardy, then
in such a case, for the above reasons, the prince ought to favour one of
the parties.
Never let any Government imagine that it can choose perfectly safe
courses; rather let it expect to have to take very doubtful ones,
because it is found in ordinary affairs that one never seeks to avoid
one trouble without running into another; but prudence consists in
knowing how to distinguish the character of troubles, and for choice to
take the lesser evil.
A prince ought also to show himself a patron of ability, and to honour
the proficient in every art. At the same time he should encourage his
citizens to practise their callings peaceably, both in commerce and
agriculture, and in every other following, so that the one should not be
deterred from improving his possessions for fear lest they be taken away
from him or another from opening up trade for fear of taxes; but the
prince ought to offer rewards to whoever wishes to do these things and
designs in any way to honour his city or state.
Further, he ought to entertain the people with festivals and spectacles
at convenient seasons of the year; and as every city is divided into
guilds or into societies,(*) he ought to hold such bodies in esteem, and
associate with them sometimes, and show himself an example of courtesy
and liberality; nevertheless, always maintaining the majesty of his
rank, for this he must never consent to abate in anything.
(*) "Guilds or societies," "in arti o in tribu." "Arti" were
craft or trade guilds, cf. Florio: "Arte . . . a whole
company of any trade in any city or corporation town." The
guilds of Florence are most admirably described by Mr
Edgcumbe Staley in his work on the subject (Methuen, 1906).
Institutions of a somewhat similar character, called
"artel," exist in Russia to-day, cf. Sir Mackenzie Wallace's
"Russia," ed. 1905: "The sons . . . were always during the
working season members of an artel. In some of the larger
towns there are artels of a much more complex kind--
permanent associations, possessing large capital, and
pecuniarily responsible for the acts of the individual
members." The word "artel," despite its apparent similarity,
has, Mr Aylmer Maude assures me, no connection with "ars" or
"arte." Its root is that of the verb "rotisya," to bind
oneself by an oath; and it is generally admitted to be only
another form of "rota," which now signifies a "regimental
company." In both words the underlying idea is that of a
body of men united by an oath. "Tribu" were possibly gentile
groups, united by common descent, and included individuals
connected by marriage. Perhaps our words "sects" or "clans"
would be most appropriate.
The choice of servants is of no little importance to a prince, and they
are good or not according to the discrimination of the prince. And the
first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is
by observing the men he has around him; and when they are capable and
faithful he may always be considered wise, because he has known how
to recognize the capable and to keep them faithful. But when they are
otherwise one cannot form a good opinion of him, for the prime error
which he made was in choosing them.
There were none who knew Messer Antonio da Venafro as the servant of
Pandolfo Petrucci, Prince of Siena, who would not consider Pandolfo to
be a very clever man in having Venafro for his servant. Because there
are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself;
another which appreciates what others comprehended; and a third which
neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is
the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless. Therefore,
it follows necessarily that, if Pandolfo was not in the first rank, he
was in the second, for whenever one has judgment to know good and
bad when it is said and done, although he himself may not have the
initiative, yet he can recognize the good and the bad in his servant,
and the one he can praise and the other correct; thus the servant cannot
hope to deceive him, and is kept honest.
But to enable a prince to form an opinion of his servant there is one
test which never fails; when you see the servant thinking more of his
own interests than of yours, and seeking inwardly his own profit in
everything, such a man will never make a good servant, nor will you ever
be able to trust him; because he who has the state of another in his
hands ought never to think of himself, but always of his prince, and
never pay any attention to matters in which the prince is not concerned.
On the other hand, to keep his servant honest the prince ought to study
him, honouring him, enriching him, doing him kindnesses, sharing with
him the honours and cares; and at the same time let him see that he
cannot stand alone, so that many honours may not make him desire more,
many riches make him wish for more, and that many cares may make him
dread chances. When, therefore, servants, and princes towards servants,
are thus disposed, they can trust each other, but when it is otherwise,
the end will always be disastrous for either one or the other.
I do not wish to leave out an important branch of this subject, for it
is a danger from which princes are with difficulty preserved, unless
they are very careful and discriminating. It is that of flatterers, of
whom courts are full, because men are so self-complacent in their own
affairs, and in a way so deceived in them, that they are preserved with
difficulty from this pest, and if they wish to defend themselves they
run the danger of falling into contempt. Because there is no other way
of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that
to tell you the truth does not offend you; but when every one may tell
you the truth, respect for you abates.
Therefore a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the
wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking
the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires,
and of none others; but he ought to question them upon everything, and
listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions.
With these councillors, separately and collectively, he ought to carry
himself in such a way that each of them should know that, the more
freely he shall speak, the more he shall be preferred; outside of
these, he should listen to no one, pursue the thing resolved on, and be
steadfast in his resolutions. He who does otherwise is either overthrown
by flatterers, or is so often changed by varying opinions that he falls
into contempt.
I wish on this subject to adduce a modern example. Fra Luca, the man of
affairs to Maximilian,(*) the present emperor, speaking of his majesty,
said: He consulted with no one, yet never got his own way in anything.
This arose because of his following a practice the opposite to the
above; for the emperor is a secretive man--he does not communicate his
designs to any one, nor does he receive opinions on them. But as in
carrying them into effect they become revealed and known, they are
at once obstructed by those men whom he has around him, and he, being
pliant, is diverted from them. Hence it follows that those things he
does one day he undoes the next, and no one ever understands what he
wishes or intends to do, and no one can rely on his resolutions.
(*) Maximilian I, born in 1459, died 1519, Emperor of the
Holy Roman Empire. He married, first, Mary, daughter of
Charles the Bold; after her death, Bianca Sforza; and thus
became involved in Italian politics.
A prince, therefore, ought always to take counsel, but only when he
wishes and not when others wish; he ought rather to discourage every one
from offering advice unless he asks it; but, however, he ought to be
a constant inquirer, and afterwards a patient listener concerning the
things of which he inquired; also, on learning that any one, on any
consideration, has not told him the truth, he should let his anger be
felt.
And if there are some who think that a prince who conveys an impression
of his wisdom is not so through his own ability, but through the good
advisers that he has around him, beyond doubt they are deceived, because
this is an axiom which never fails: that a prince who is not wise
himself will never take good advice, unless by chance he has yielded his
affairs entirely to one person who happens to be a very prudent man. In
this case indeed he may be well governed, but it would not be for long,
because such a governor would in a short time take away his state from
him.
But if a prince who is not inexperienced should take counsel from more
than one he will never get united counsels, nor will he know how to
unite them. Each of the counsellors will think of his own interests, and
the prince will not know how to control them or to see through them. And
they are not to be found otherwise, because men will always prove untrue
to you unless they are kept honest by constraint. Therefore it must be
inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of
the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good
counsels.
The previous suggestions, carefully observed, will enable a new prince
to appear well established, and render him at once more secure and fixed
in the state than if he had been long seated there. For the actions of
a new prince are more narrowly observed than those of an hereditary
one, and when they are seen to be able they gain more men and bind
far tighter than ancient blood; because men are attracted more by the
present than by the past, and when they find the present good they enjoy
it and seek no further; they will also make the utmost defence of a
prince if he fails them not in other things. Thus it will be a double
glory for him to have established a new principality, and adorned and
strengthened it with good laws, good arms, good allies, and with a good
example; so will it be a double disgrace to him who, born a prince,
shall lose his state by want of wisdom.
And if those seigniors are considered who have lost their states in
Italy in our times, such as the King of Naples, the Duke of Milan,
and others, there will be found in them, firstly, one common defect in
regard to arms from the causes which have been discussed at length; in
the next place, some one of them will be seen, either to have had the
people hostile, or if he has had the people friendly, he has not known
how to secure the nobles. In the absence of these defects states that
have power enough to keep an army in the field cannot be lost.
Philip of Macedon, not the father of Alexander the Great, but he who
was conquered by Titus Quintius, had not much territory compared to
the greatness of the Romans and of Greece who attacked him, yet being a
warlike man who knew how to attract the people and secure the nobles, he
sustained the war against his enemies for many years, and if in the
end he lost the dominion of some cities, nevertheless he retained the
kingdom.
Therefore, do not let our princes accuse fortune for the loss of their
principalities after so many years' possession, but rather their own
sloth, because in quiet times they never thought there could be a change
(it is a common defect in man not to make any provision in the calm
against the tempest), and when afterwards the bad times came they
thought of flight and not of defending themselves, and they hoped that
the people, disgusted with the insolence of the conquerors, would recall
them. This course, when others fail, may be good, but it is very bad to
have neglected all other expedients for that, since you would never
wish to fall because you trusted to be able to find someone later on to
restore you. This again either does not happen, or, if it does, it will
not be for your security, because that deliverance is of no avail which
does not depend upon yourself; those only are reliable, certain, and
durable that depend on yourself and your valour.
It is not unknown to me how many men have had, and still have, the
opinion that the affairs of the world are in such wise governed by
fortune and by God that men with their wisdom cannot direct them and
that no one can even help them; and because of this they would have us
believe that it is not necessary to labour much in affairs, but to let
chance govern them. This opinion has been more credited in our times
because of the great changes in affairs which have been seen, and
may still be seen, every day, beyond all human conjecture. Sometimes
pondering over this, I am in some degree inclined to their opinion.
Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that
Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions,(*) but that she still
leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.
(*) Frederick the Great was accustomed to say: "The older
one gets the more convinced one becomes that his Majesty
King Chance does three-quarters of the business of this
miserable universe." Sorel's "Eastern Question."
I compare her to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood
overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away
the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to
its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet,
though its nature be such, it does not follow therefore that men, when
the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defences
and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may
pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained nor so
dangerous. So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valour
has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where
she knows that barriers and defences have not been raised to constrain
her.
And if you will consider Italy, which is the seat of these changes, and
which has given to them their impulse, you will see it to be an open
country without barriers and without any defence. For if it had been
defended by proper valour, as are Germany, Spain, and France, either
this invasion would not have made the great changes it has made or it
would not have come at all. And this I consider enough to say concerning
resistance to fortune in general.
But confining myself more to the particular, I say that a prince may be
seen happy to-day and ruined to-morrow without having shown any change
of disposition or character. This, I believe, arises firstly from causes
that have already been discussed at length, namely, that the prince who
relies entirely on fortune is lost when it changes. I believe also that
he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of
the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will
not be successful. Because men are seen, in affairs that lead to the end
which every man has before him, namely, glory and riches, to get there
by various methods; one with caution, another with haste; one by force,
another by skill; one by patience, another by its opposite; and each one
succeeds in reaching the goal by a different method. One can also see of
two cautious men the one attain his end, the other fail; and similarly,
two men by different observances are equally successful, the one being
cautious, the other impetuous; all this arises from nothing else than
whether or not they conform in their methods to the spirit of the times.
This follows from what I have said, that two men working differently
bring about the same effect, and of two working similarly, one attains
his object and the other does not.
Changes in estate also issue from this, for if, to one who governs
himself with caution and patience, times and affairs converge in such a
way that his administration is successful, his fortune is made; but if
times and affairs change, he is ruined if he does not change his course
of action. But a man is not often found sufficiently circumspect to know
how to accommodate himself to the change, both because he cannot deviate
from what nature inclines him to do, and also because, having always
prospered by acting in one way, he cannot be persuaded that it is well
to leave it; and, therefore, the cautious man, when it is time to turn
adventurous, does not know how to do it, hence he is ruined; but had he
changed his conduct with the times fortune would not have changed.
Pope Julius the Second went to work impetuously in all his affairs, and
found the times and circumstances conform so well to that line of action
that he always met with success. Consider his first enterprise against
Bologna, Messer Giovanni Bentivogli being still alive. The Venetians
were not agreeable to it, nor was the King of Spain, and he had the
enterprise still under discussion with the King of France; nevertheless
he personally entered upon the expedition with his accustomed boldness
and energy, a move which made Spain and the Venetians stand irresolute
and passive, the latter from fear, the former from desire to recover
the kingdom of Naples; on the other hand, he drew after him the King of
France, because that king, having observed the movement, and desiring
to make the Pope his friend so as to humble the Venetians, found it
impossible to refuse him. Therefore Julius with his impetuous action
accomplished what no other pontiff with simple human wisdom could have
done; for if he had waited in Rome until he could get away, with his
plans arranged and everything fixed, as any other pontiff would have
done, he would never have succeeded. Because the King of France would
have made a thousand excuses, and the others would have raised a
thousand fears.
I will leave his other actions alone, as they were all alike, and they
all succeeded, for the shortness of his life did not let him experience
the contrary; but if circumstances had arisen which required him to go
cautiously, his ruin would have followed, because he would never have
deviated from those ways to which nature inclined him.
I conclude, therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind
steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are
successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out. For my part I consider
that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is
a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and
ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by
the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is,
therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are
less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.
Having carefully considered the subject of the above discourses, and
wondering within myself whether the present times were propitious to
a new prince, and whether there were elements that would give an
opportunity to a wise and virtuous one to introduce a new order of
things which would do honour to him and good to the people of this
country, it appears to me that so many things concur to favour a new
prince that I never knew a time more fit than the present.
And if, as I said, it was necessary that the people of Israel should be
captive so as to make manifest the ability of Moses; that the Persians
should be oppressed by the Medes so as to discover the greatness of the
soul of Cyrus; and that the Athenians should be dispersed to illustrate
the capabilities of Theseus: then at the present time, in order to
discover the virtue of an Italian spirit, it was necessary that Italy
should be reduced to the extremity that she is now in, that she should
be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians,
more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without order, beaten,
despoiled, torn, overrun; and to have endured every kind of desolation.
Although lately some spark may have been shown by one, which made us
think he was ordained by God for our redemption, nevertheless it was
afterwards seen, in the height of his career, that fortune rejected him;
so that Italy, left as without life, waits for him who shall yet heal
her wounds and put an end to the ravaging and plundering of Lombardy,
to the swindling and taxing of the kingdom and of Tuscany, and cleanse
those sores that for long have festered. It is seen how she entreats God
to send someone who shall deliver her from these wrongs and barbarous
insolencies. It is seen also that she is ready and willing to follow a
banner if only someone will raise it.
Nor is there to be seen at present one in whom she can place more hope
than in your illustrious house,(*) with its valour and fortune, favoured
by God and by the Church of which it is now the chief, and which could
be made the head of this redemption. This will not be difficult if you
will recall to yourself the actions and lives of the men I have named.
And although they were great and wonderful men, yet they were men, and
each one of them had no more opportunity than the present offers, for
their enterprises were neither more just nor easier than this, nor was
God more their friend than He is yours.
(*) Giuliano de Medici. He had just been created a cardinal
by Leo X. In 1523 Giuliano was elected Pope, and took the
title of Clement VII.
With us there is great justice, because that war is just which is
necessary, and arms are hallowed when there is no other hope but in
them. Here there is the greatest willingness, and where the willingness
is great the difficulties cannot be great if you will only follow those
men to whom I have directed your attention. Further than this, how
extraordinarily the ways of God have been manifested beyond example:
the sea is divided, a cloud has led the way, the rock has poured
forth water, it has rained manna, everything has contributed to
your greatness; you ought to do the rest. God is not willing to do
everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory
which belongs to us.
And it is not to be wondered at if none of the above-named Italians
have been able to accomplish all that is expected from your illustrious
house; and if in so many revolutions in Italy, and in so many campaigns,
it has always appeared as if military virtue were exhausted, this has
happened because the old order of things was not good, and none of us
have known how to find a new one. And nothing honours a man more than to
establish new laws and new ordinances when he himself was newly risen.
Such things when they are well founded and dignified will make him
revered and admired, and in Italy there are not wanting opportunities to
bring such into use in every form.
Here there is great valour in the limbs whilst it fails in the head.
Look attentively at the duels and the hand-to-hand combats, how superior
the Italians are in strength, dexterity, and subtlety. But when it comes
to armies they do not bear comparison, and this springs entirely from
the insufficiency of the leaders, since those who are capable are not
obedient, and each one seems to himself to know, there having never been
any one so distinguished above the rest, either by valour or fortune,
that others would yield to him. Hence it is that for so long a time,
and during so much fighting in the past twenty years, whenever there
has been an army wholly Italian, it has always given a poor account of
itself; the first witness to this is Il Taro, afterwards Allesandria,
Capua, Genoa, Vaila, Bologna, Mestri.(*)
(*) The battles of Il Taro, 1495; Alessandria, 1499; Capua,
1501; Genoa, 1507; Vaila, 1509; Bologna, 1511; Mestri, 1513.
If, therefore, your illustrious house wishes to follow these remarkable
men who have redeemed their country, it is necessary before all things,
as a true foundation for every enterprise, to be provided with your
own forces, because there can be no more faithful, truer, or better
soldiers. And although singly they are good, altogether they will
be much better when they find themselves commanded by their prince,
honoured by him, and maintained at his expense. Therefore it is
necessary to be prepared with such arms, so that you can be defended
against foreigners by Italian valour.
And although Swiss and Spanish infantry may be considered very
formidable, nevertheless there is a defect in both, by reason of which
a third order would not only be able to oppose them, but might be relied
upon to overthrow them. For the Spaniards cannot resist cavalry, and the
Switzers are afraid of infantry whenever they encounter them in close
combat. Owing to this, as has been and may again be seen, the Spaniards
are unable to resist French cavalry, and the Switzers are overthrown by
Spanish infantry. And although a complete proof of this latter cannot
be shown, nevertheless there was some evidence of it at the battle of
Ravenna, when the Spanish infantry were confronted by German battalions,
who follow the same tactics as the Swiss; when the Spaniards, by agility
of body and with the aid of their shields, got in under the pikes of the
Germans and stood out of danger, able to attack, while the Germans stood
helpless, and, if the cavalry had not dashed up, all would have been
over with them. It is possible, therefore, knowing the defects of both
these infantries, to invent a new one, which will resist cavalry and not
be afraid of infantry; this need not create a new order of arms, but
a variation upon the old. And these are the kind of improvements which
confer reputation and power upon a new prince.
This opportunity, therefore, ought not to be allowed to pass for letting
Italy at last see her liberator appear. Nor can one express the love
with which he would be received in all those provinces which have
suffered so much from these foreign scourings, with what thirst for
revenge, with what stubborn faith, with what devotion, with what tears.
What door would be closed to him? Who would refuse obedience to him?
What envy would hinder him? What Italian would refuse him homage? To all
of us this barbarous dominion stinks. Let, therefore, your illustrious
house take up this charge with that courage and hope with which all
just enterprises are undertaken, so that under its standard our native
country may be ennobled, and under its auspices may be verified that
saying of Petrarch:
Virtu contro al Furore
Prendera l'arme, e fia il combatter corto:
Che l'antico valore
Negli italici cuor non e ancor morto.
Virtue against fury shall advance the fight,
And it i' th' combat soon shall put to flight:
For the old Roman valour is not dead,
Nor in th' Italians' brests extinguished.
Edward Dacre, 1640.
| 7,000 | Section 7: Chapters XX-XXVI | https://web.archive.org/web/20210417004655/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-prince/study-guide/summary-section-7-chapters-xx-xxvi | A new prince cannot disarm his subjects, which would cause a backlash; rather, he should arm them, thereby instilling loyalty. The opposite applies for a prince who has just acquired a new state and attached it to his old one. In this case the prince must disarm the new state, for all arms must be in the hands of the prince's own soldiers - those who are used to his rule. Machiavelli disagrees with the adage that encouraging factionalism is a good way to keep power. Yes, this tactic may work in peacetime, but as soon as a foreign enemy comes along, the factionalized state is that much easier to conquer. Also, a faction can sometimes win out and overthrow the whole state, as has happened in Venice. Machiavelli approves of the deliberate planting of obstacles to a prince's rise and his power, in order for him to gain in reputation by overcoming them. "Many hold that a shrewd prince will, when he can, subtly encourage some enmity to himself, so that by overcoming it he can augment his own reputation," he writes. Machiavelli then argues that men who are at first suspect to the prince can often be trusted more than those who seem immediately loyal to him; the former feel that they need to win the prince over, while the latter feel too secure in their positions. With a newly conquered state, "it is much easier to gain as friends those men who were satisfied with the earlier state, and therefore hostile to the conqueror, than those men who, because they were discontented in the earlier state, looked with fervor on the new prince and helped him take over." The discontented often remain discontented. Machiavelli concludes this chapter, entitled "Whether Building Fortresses and Other Defensive Policies Often Adapted By Princes Are Useful or Not," with a mention of, suitably enough, fortresses: "the prince who fears his own people more than he does foreigners ought to build fortresses, but a prince who is more afraid of foreigners than of his own people can neglect them." Why? Because the best fortress of all is the support of the people. Moreover, a prince should never rely entirely on fortresses and feel that they mean he need not worry about whether or not his people support him. The next chapter, "How a Prince Should Act to Acquire Reputation," presents Ferdinand of Spain as a key example. Ferdinand acquired his reputation through military projects, constantly following up one campaign with another - Granada, expelling the Moors, attacking Africa, campaigning in Italy, assaulting France - as a way of distracting from his more private machinations - unifying Aragon and Castille. Machiavelli refers to Ferdinand's behavior as "despicable," yet he argues that these policies, by preoccupying the king's subjects and enthralling them, ultimately worked. A prince should take a stand if neighbors come to blows. Neutrality is not the way to go. If the neighbors are powerful, then the victor will invariably hate you if you were neutral; if the neighbors are weak, then you find yourself in an ideal position to render a state indebted to you by taking its side. Internally, a prince should reward the talents and endeavors of his subjects. He should encourage their work, should not confiscate holdings , should entertain the people with "festivals and spectacles," and should show himself attentive to their needs while never diminishing his dignity. "On a Prince's Private Counselors" makes a more straightforward claim: that it is crucial for a prince to pick good ministers, because they in turn reflect on the prince himself. A good minister should think only of what is good for his master; that said, a prince should be sure to keep a minister obedient by honoring him and respecting his welfare. Next, Machiavelli turns to the subject of flatterers, in "How to Avoid Flatterers." A prince should accept advice, but only when he has sought it out; uncalled-for advice is never welcome. A prudent prince will bring wise men into his council and give them alone "free license to speak the truth." For his part, the prince should ask many questions, should seek opinions, and should hear out the views of others. The final three chapters of The Prince - "Why the Princes of Italy Have Lost Their Dominions," "The Influence of Luck on Human Affairs and the Ways to Counter It," and "An Exhortation to Restore Italy to Liberty and Free Her From the Barbarians" - return the book to that idealized vision: a unified Italy, brimming with renewed strength and vigor, a single nation rising above its divisions, healing its wounds, and striding like a colossus upon the world's stage. What has become of Italy's glorious potential? The problem, as Machiavelli identifies it, is essentially laziness. The rulers of Italy have not maintained their armed forces, idly figuring that quiet times never go away. This "is a common failing of men," Machiavelli writes. They "never think of storms so long as the sky is blue." When trouble comes, such princes run away, hoping to be called back when their former subjects tire of their conquerors. In the second of these three last chapters, Machiavelli discusses luck and its impact on political affairs. Italy is in trouble today, he argues, because of bad luck, but also because she has not guarded against it sufficiently. "I think it may be true that Fortune governs half of our actions," Machiavelli writes, "but that even so she leaves the other half more or less in our power to control." Machiavelli then closes The Prince with, as he puts it, an "exhortation": he directly addresses Lorenzo de Medici, as he did in the book's prefatory letter, arguing that he could be the prince who unites Italy. This hope for unification is echoed again in his mention of Cesare Borgia, who, "at the zenith of his career deserted by Fortune." Machiavelli reminds Lorenzo to look at the examples of the past and restates the necessity of building one's own armies. "The occasion must not be allowed to slip away," he argues. "Italy has been waiting too long for a glimpse of her redeemer." Finally, Machiavelli concludes with a verse from Petrarch, translated as follows: "Then virtue boldly shall engage/And swiftly vanquish barbarous rage,/Proving that ancient and heroic pride/In true Italian hearts has never died." | Once again, Machiavelli's slippery, flip-flopping view of human nature is on full display. In Chapter XXI, he writes: "Men are never so dishonest that they will show gross ingratitude by turning immediately on their helpers. Besides, victories are never so decisive that the victor does not have to maintain some moderation, some show of justice." Did he not, only a number of pages earlier, argue that men are intrinsically "rotten," liars and hypocrites of the highest magnitude, ready to turn against a helping hand as soon as it suits their needs? And what of justice? What became of keeping the end in sight, of wielding cruelty when necessary, of aiming for the decisive victory, whatever the cost? No, Machiavelli reasons: moderation is the way to proceed. Far more than is generally assumed, The Prince adopts an almost thesis-antithesis approach to politics and human nature, arguing in near-dialectical fashion through the thickets of human behavior. Machiavelli, despite his occasional categorical assertion and broad generalization, tends to acknowledge the complexity of mankind, of social structures, and of civilization. The apparent contradictions that riddle The Prince are arguably indicative of an actively searching mind; this is a restless book, replete with gaps and back-tracks, obfuscations and impasses, that in its entirety seeks to offer a vision of man as a political animal, groping for power but continually off-set by his own contrary impulses. It is almost a study in psychology, teasing out the aforementioned contradictions in an effort to arrive at some synthesis. Indeed, man as agent of his own destiny is a central theme for Machiavelli. In his chapter on luck, he writes that "a prince who depends entirely on Fortune comes to grief immediately she changes." That said, a prince should adjust his behavior "to the temper of the times." It is all about finding the happy medium, that precise balance between absolute individualism and an ability to adapt to the winds of change and to the mood of the era. Luck does play a major role in politics. Men have natural inclinations that are not easily adjusted, and in this case it is a matter of chance whether such temperaments fit the times or not. But even here, in the heart of this argument, Machiavelli invokes the importance of the self, of man's capacity to introduce change and to mold the times. He writes that it is "better to be rash than timid, for Fortune is a woman, and the man who wants to hold her down must beat and bully her." This statement assumes that Fortune can be held down - which was far from a universal belief in Machiavelli's time. He goes on: "Like a woman, too, is always a friend of the young, because they are less timid, more brutal, and take charge of her more recklessly." For all his prior emphasis on prudence and calculation, Machiavelli here prizes recklessness, boldness, and brutality. Therein lies perhaps the central struggle in The Prince: that between the need for bold, speedy maneuvers, the necessity of action, and the treatment of politics as a science, full of rules and conditions. A prince must be both human and beast, and as beast he must be both lion and fox. He must embrace the contradictions of humanity; he must rely on both thought and action; he must look to the past as he heads toward the future. Machiavelli's treatise is more than a prolonged letter intended to curry favor with the Medici or a how-to manual for power-grabbing; it is, fundamentally, an inquiry into the nature of man, and the ways in which that nature can be harnessed and used both for and against other men. The "Prince" of the title is neither hero nor villain. He is, quite simply, human. | 1,061 | 630 | [
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107 | true | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/chapters_46_to_53.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_7_part_0.txt | Far from the Madding Crowd.chapters 46-53 | chapters 46-53 | null | {"name": "Chapters 46-53", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210108004047/https://www.gradesaver.com/far-from-the-madding-crowd/study-guide/summary-chapters-46-53", "summary": "While passing along the deserted beach near Budmouth, Troy decides to try and settle his emotions by taking a swim. He leaves his clothes on the beach and paddles out, only to get caught in a powerful current and dragged out to sea. At the last moment, he is saved by a boat of soldiers. When they row him back to shore, his clothes and money are gone; when the sailors invite him to join them on their upcoming voyage, Troy impulsively agrees. Back at the farm, word comes to Bathsheba that her husband has drowned. She finds this hard to believe, but there is strong evidence since an eye witness saw Troy being swept out to sea, and his clothes were found to identify him with. For all intents and purposes, Bathsheba is treated as a widow, which raises the hopes of Boldwood that he might someday court her. In the short term, Bathsheba formalizes Gabriel's position as the bailiff of the farm, and he is subsequently hired by Boldwood to manage the other farm as well. After some months have passed, Boldwood asks Liddy if there have been any hints of Bathsheba intending to remarry. Liddy tells him that Bathsheba once commented she intended to wait 6 more years before thinking about marriage, and Boldwood commits himself to waiting as long as it takes in pursuit of Bathsheba. In the autumn, almost a year after Fanny's death and Troy's disappearance, Bathsheba and her workers go to the annual sheep fair to display their flocks and conduct business. They are not aware that Troy is also present at the fair, as a member of a travelling circus. Troy had sailed to America and spent some time there teaching sword fighting and boxing, but grew tired of living in poverty and instability. He returned to England planning to reunite with Bathsheba but then found the idea of having to cope with her anger unappealing and impulsively joined the circus instead. Just before he is due to go onstage, Troy peeks out and is dismayed to find Bathsheba and Boldwood sitting in the audience. He improvises by increasing his disguise and refusing to speak during his performance, and manages to perform undetected. However, he notices with alarm that Bathsheba's former bailiff Pennyways has sighted him, and he suspects Pennyways will seize this opportunity to upset his former employer. Troy sneaks around to the far side of the tent where Boldwood and Bathsheba are and cuts a hole to listen through. He sees Pennyways come over to deliver a message, which he knows reveals that Troy is present at the fair. Bathsheba, however, is annoyed with Pennyways and does not open the note immediately, letting it dangle in her fingers. Troy seizes the note through the hole in the canvas and takes off. He then finds Pennyways and arranges to meet with him in order to protect his secret. Meanwhile, Boldwood and Bathsheba travel home together. Boldwood raises the question of her marrying again, and asks if she would consider marrying him. Bathsheba agrees first that she will not marry anyone else so long as Boldwood wants her, and then that by Christmastime she will answer whether or not she will marry him in 6 years' time. Bathsheba later discusses the situation with Gabriel, who tells her he sees nothing wrong with her considering marrying Boldwood, though he would prefer to see her married to someone she genuinely loves. Bathsheba finds herself somewhat annoyed that Gabriel did not seize this opportunity to raise the possibility of her remarrying him rather than Boldwood. On Christmas Eve, Boldwood hosts a large party at his home. Bathsheba is anxious, since she knows he will expect her to agree to an engagement. Boldwood is hopeful and optimistic, even though Gabriel cautions him that their engagement would be a lengthy one, and much could change. Meanwhile, Troy has been relying on Pennyways to provide him with information about Bathsheba and has learned that there are rumors she may be planning to marry Boldwood. He decides to go to the Christmas party in disguise. Outside of the Christmas party, some of the farmworkers discuss the rumors that Troy has been sighted around the town, and debate whether or not to tell Bathsheba. They decide not to, since they do not want to upset her, and they know that Boldwood has planned the entire party in her honor. However, when they catch sight of Troy lurking outside of the house, they decide they must alert their mistress. Inside, Bathsheba has quickly grown tired of the party, and withdraws in order to get ready to leave. Boldwood finds her and pressures her to agree to marry him. After protesting, Bathsheba agrees that she will marry Boldwood in 6 years, although she tries to object to him giving her a ring. Boldwood finally leaves her alone, and Bathsheba heads for the exit. As she passes through the party, she interrupts a conversation between Boldwood and a group of men. Boldwood noticed the men whispering amongst themselves and wants to find out what is happening. Before the group can get to the bottom of it, Troy enters the room. He is heavily wrapped up so some people, including Boldwood, do not immediately recognize him. However, he quickly reveals himself and demands that Bathsheba leave with him. She is frozen and in shock. Troy tries to grab her, and when he does so, Boldwood shoots him. He then tries to turn the gun on himself, but one of the servants prevents him, and he simply walks out of the house. He goes to the local police office and turns himself in. As news of the violence spreads, Gabriel hurries to the Boldwood farm. He finds Bathsheba calmly tending to Troy who is already dead. She sends him to get a doctor, but by the time Gabriel and the doctor return, she has taken Troy's body back to her own house. The two men hurry to Bathsheba's farmhouse to find that she has washed and prepared the corpse for burial.", "analysis": "Although Troy seemed to show genuine remorse at the time of Fanny's death, he quickly reverts to his self-centered and reckless behavior. By impulsively deciding to sail to America without sending any word of his whereabouts, Troy does not consider what impact this will have on Bathsheba's life. He simply wants to run away from his problems and avoid unpleasant consequences. However, he still feels entitled to the social status and comfortable life Bathsheba's spouse would enjoy. His hesitation around revealing his identity is rooted in his desire to maximize getting what he wants. He is not at all concerned with any problems or needs his wife might have. Boldwood's behavior is somewhat parallel to Troy's in the way that he is utterly fixated on getting what he wants, and does not care very much about other people's feelings. When Boldwood witnesses Bathsheba learning that Troy is assumed to be dead, he is not upset to see her suffering. Instead, he is hopeful that he now has a chance to marry her after all. He does at least wait a decent interval before beginning to enquire, and even though 6 years is a very long time, he is prepared to endure the wait. Still, Bathsheba's hesitation and doubt should make it clear that she is not truly happy about the prospect of marrying him, and yet he still persists in nagging at her to give him an answer. The way Troy treats her at the Christmas party highlights Bathsheba's passivity and the way she is viewed as an object men can claim ownership of. He tries to literally seize her and drag her away while she seems frozen in shock. Even though everyone at the party also seems horrified, they do not intervene. The relationship between a man and his wife largely meant that he could treat her however he wanted, and in that sense Boldwood's act of violence seems like a brave intervention. At the same time, he behaves in a radical and extreme way, and seems to need to vent his fury more so than protect a vulnerable woman. Once Troy is dead, Bathsheba returns to being calm, collected, and able to take charge of a situation. In a sense, it is as if his death reverses everything that has happened since they met, and she goes back to being the strong-willed and capable woman from the earlier parts of the novel. She has always been suspicious of whether or not he was actually dead, and now with his corpse lying in front of her she can be sure once and for all that she is free from her unfortunate marriage. While this does seem to liberate her to become independent and active again, it is also clearly traumatic for her. Bathsheba's fear has been for a long time that the rivalry amongst her suitors could lead to violence, and now this threat has come true."} |
THE GURGOYLE: ITS DOINGS
The tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection of
fourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each of the
four faces of its parapet. Of these eight carved protuberances
only two at this time continued to serve the purpose of their
erection--that of spouting the water from the lead roof within. One
mouth in each front had been closed by bygone church-wardens as
superfluous, and two others were broken away and choked--a matter not
of much consequence to the wellbeing of the tower, for the two mouths
which still remained open and active were gaping enough to do all the
work.
It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the
vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits
of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic
art there is no disputing the proposition. Weatherbury tower was a
somewhat early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parish
as distinct from cathedral churches, and the gurgoyles, which are the
necessary correlatives of a parapet, were exceptionally prominent--of
the boldest cut that the hand could shape, and of the most original
design that a human brain could conceive. There was, so to speak,
that symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristic
of British than of Continental grotesques of the period. All the
eight were different from each other. A beholder was convinced that
nothing on earth could be more hideous than those he saw on the north
side until he went round to the south. Of the two on this latter
face, only that at the south-eastern corner concerns the story. It
was too human to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a
man, too animal to be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to be
called a griffin. This horrible stone entity was fashioned as if
covered with a wrinkled hide; it had short, erect ears, eyes starting
from their sockets, and its fingers and hands were seizing the
corners of its mouth, which they thus seemed to pull open to give
free passage to the water it vomited. The lower row of teeth was
quite washed away, though the upper still remained. Here and thus,
jutting a couple of feet from the wall against which its feet rested
as a support, the creature had for four hundred years laughed at the
surrounding landscape, voicelessly in dry weather, and in wet with a
gurgling and snorting sound.
Troy slept on in the porch, and the rain increased outside. Presently
the gurgoyle spat. In due time a small stream began to trickle
through the seventy feet of aerial space between its mouth and
the ground, which the water-drops smote like duckshot in their
accelerated velocity. The stream thickened in substance, and
increased in power, gradually spouting further and yet further from
the side of the tower. When the rain fell in a steady and ceaseless
torrent the stream dashed downward in volumes.
We follow its course to the ground at this point of time. The end of
the liquid parabola has come forward from the wall, has advanced over
the plinth mouldings, over a heap of stones, over the marble border,
into the midst of Fanny Robin's grave.
The force of the stream had, until very lately, been received upon
some loose stones spread thereabout, which had acted as a shield to
the soil under the onset. These during the summer had been cleared
from the ground, and there was now nothing to resist the down-fall
but the bare earth. For several years the stream had not spouted
so far from the tower as it was doing on this night, and such a
contingency had been over-looked. Sometimes this obscure corner
received no inhabitant for the space of two or three years, and
then it was usually but a pauper, a poacher, or other sinner of
undignified sins.
The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directed all its
vengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was stirred into
motion, and boiled like chocolate. The water accumulated and washed
deeper down, and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into the
night as the head and chief among other noises of the kind created
by the deluging rain. The flowers so carefully planted by Fanny's
repentant lover began to move and writhe in their bed. The
winter-violets turned slowly upside down, and became a mere mat of
mud. Soon the snowdrop and other bulbs danced in the boiling mass
like ingredients in a cauldron. Plants of the tufted species were
loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.
Troy did not awake from his comfortless sleep till it was broad day.
Not having been in bed for two nights his shoulders felt stiff, his
feet tender, and his head heavy. He remembered his position, arose,
shivered, took the spade, and again went out.
The rain had quite ceased, and the sun was shining through the
green, brown, and yellow leaves, now sparkling and varnished by the
raindrops to the brightness of similar effects in the landscapes of
Ruysdael and Hobbema, and full of all those infinite beauties that
arise from the union of water and colour with high lights. The air
was rendered so transparent by the heavy fall of rain that the autumn
hues of the middle distance were as rich as those near at hand, and
the remote fields intercepted by the angle of the tower appeared in
the same plane as the tower itself.
He entered the gravel path which would take him behind the tower.
The path, instead of being stony as it had been the night before, was
browned over with a thin coating of mud. At one place in the path
he saw a tuft of stringy roots washed white and clean as a bundle
of tendons. He picked it up--surely it could not be one of the
primroses he had planted? He saw a bulb, another, and another as
he advanced. Beyond doubt they were the crocuses. With a face of
perplexed dismay Troy turned the corner and then beheld the wreck
the stream had made.
The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the ground, and in its
place was a hollow. The disturbed earth was washed over the grass
and pathway in the guise of the brown mud he had already seen, and it
spotted the marble tombstone with the same stains. Nearly all the
flowers were washed clean out of the ground, and they lay, roots
upwards, on the spots whither they had been splashed by the stream.
Troy's brow became heavily contracted. He set his teeth closely,
and his compressed lips moved as those of one in great pain. This
singular accident, by a strange confluence of emotions in him, was
felt as the sharpest sting of all. Troy's face was very expressive,
and any observer who had seen him now would hardly have believed him
to be a man who had laughed, and sung, and poured love-trifles into
a woman's ear. To curse his miserable lot was at first his impulse,
but even that lowest stage of rebellion needed an activity whose
absence was necessarily antecedent to the existence of the morbid
misery which wrung him. The sight, coming as it did, superimposed
upon the other dark scenery of the previous days, formed a sort of
climax to the whole panorama, and it was more than he could endure.
Sanguine by nature, Troy had a power of eluding grief by simply
adjourning it. He could put off the consideration of any particular
spectre till the matter had become old and softened by time. The
planting of flowers on Fanny's grave had been perhaps but a species
of elusion of the primary grief, and now it was as if his intention
had been known and circumvented.
Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood by this
dismantled grave, wished himself another man. It is seldom that a
person with much animal spirit does not feel that the fact of his
life being his own is the one qualification which singles it out as a
more hopeful life than that of others who may actually resemble him
in every particular. Troy had felt, in his transient way, hundreds
of times, that he could not envy other people their condition,
because the possession of that condition would have necessitated a
different personality, when he desired no other than his own. He had
not minded the peculiarities of his birth, the vicissitudes of his
life, the meteor-like uncertainty of all that related to him, because
these appertained to the hero of his story, without whom there would
have been no story at all for him; and it seemed to be only in the
nature of things that matters would right themselves at some proper
date and wind up well. This very morning the illusion completed its
disappearance, and, as it were, all of a sudden, Troy hated himself.
The suddenness was probably more apparent than real. A coral reef
which just comes short of the ocean surface is no more to the horizon
than if it had never been begun, and the mere finishing stroke is
what often appears to create an event which has long been potentially
an accomplished thing.
He stood and meditated--a miserable man. Whither should he
go? "He that is accursed, let him be accursed still," was the
pitiless anathema written in this spoliated effort of his new-born
solicitousness. A man who has spent his primal strength in
journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing
his course. Troy had, since yesterday, faintly reversed his; but the
merest opposition had disheartened him. To turn about would have
been hard enough under the greatest providential encouragement; but
to find that Providence, far from helping him into a new course, or
showing any wish that he might adopt one, actually jeered his first
trembling and critical attempt in that kind, was more than nature
could bear.
He slowly withdrew from the grave. He did not attempt to fill up the
hole, replace the flowers, or do anything at all. He simply threw up
his cards and forswore his game for that time and always. Going out
of the churchyard silently and unobserved--none of the villagers
having yet risen--he passed down some fields at the back, and emerged
just as secretly upon the high road. Shortly afterwards he had gone
from the village.
Meanwhile, Bathsheba remained a voluntary prisoner in the attic. The
door was kept locked, except during the entries and exits of Liddy,
for whom a bed had been arranged in a small adjoining room. The
light of Troy's lantern in the churchyard was noticed about ten
o'clock by the maid-servant, who casually glanced from the window in
that direction whilst taking her supper, and she called Bathsheba's
attention to it. They looked curiously at the phenomenon for a time,
until Liddy was sent to bed.
Bathsheba did not sleep very heavily that night. When her attendant
was unconscious and softly breathing in the next room, the mistress
of the house was still looking out of the window at the faint gleam
spreading from among the trees--not in a steady shine, but blinking
like a revolving coast-light, though this appearance failed to
suggest to her that a person was passing and repassing in front
of it. Bathsheba sat here till it began to rain, and the light
vanished, when she withdrew to lie restlessly in her bed and re-enact
in a worn mind the lurid scene of yesternight.
Almost before the first faint sign of dawn appeared she arose again,
and opened the window to obtain a full breathing of the new morning
air, the panes being now wet with trembling tears left by the night
rain, each one rounded with a pale lustre caught from primrose-hued
slashes through a cloud low down in the awakening sky. From the
trees came the sound of steady dripping upon the drifted leaves under
them, and from the direction of the church she could hear another
noise--peculiar, and not intermittent like the rest, the purl of
water falling into a pool.
Liddy knocked at eight o'clock, and Bathsheba un-locked the door.
"What a heavy rain we've had in the night, ma'am!" said Liddy, when
her inquiries about breakfast had been made.
"Yes, very heavy."
"Did you hear the strange noise from the churchyard?"
"I heard one strange noise. I've been thinking it must have been the
water from the tower spouts."
"Well, that's what the shepherd was saying, ma'am. He's now gone on
to see."
"Oh! Gabriel has been here this morning!"
"Only just looked in in passing--quite in his old way, which I
thought he had left off lately. But the tower spouts used to spatter
on the stones, and we are puzzled, for this was like the boiling of a
pot."
Not being able to read, think, or work, Bathsheba asked Liddy to stay
and breakfast with her. The tongue of the more childish woman still
ran upon recent events. "Are you going across to the church, ma'am?"
she asked.
"Not that I know of," said Bathsheba.
"I thought you might like to go and see where they have put Fanny.
The trees hide the place from your window."
Bathsheba had all sorts of dreads about meeting her husband. "Has
Mr. Troy been in to-night?" she said.
"No, ma'am; I think he's gone to Budmouth."
Budmouth! The sound of the word carried with it a much diminished
perspective of him and his deeds; there were thirteen miles interval
betwixt them now. She hated questioning Liddy about her husband's
movements, and indeed had hitherto sedulously avoided doing so; but
now all the house knew that there had been some dreadful disagreement
between them, and it was futile to attempt disguise. Bathsheba had
reached a stage at which people cease to have any appreciative regard
for public opinion.
"What makes you think he has gone there?" she said.
"Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this morning before
breakfast."
Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward heaviness of the
past twenty-four hours which had quenched the vitality of youth in
her without substituting the philosophy of maturer years, and she
resolved to go out and walk a little way. So when breakfast was
over, she put on her bonnet, and took a direction towards the church.
It was nine o'clock, and the men having returned to work again from
their first meal, she was not likely to meet many of them in the
road. Knowing that Fanny had been laid in the reprobates' quarter
of the graveyard, called in the parish "behind church," which was
invisible from the road, it was impossible to resist the impulse to
enter and look upon a spot which, from nameless feelings, she at
the same time dreaded to see. She had been unable to overcome an
impression that some connection existed between her rival and the
light through the trees.
Bathsheba skirted the buttress, and beheld the hole and the tomb, its
delicately veined surface splashed and stained just as Troy had seen
it and left it two hours earlier. On the other side of the scene
stood Gabriel. His eyes, too, were fixed on the tomb, and her
arrival having been noiseless, she had not as yet attracted his
attention. Bathsheba did not at once perceive that the grand tomb
and the disturbed grave were Fanny's, and she looked on both sides
and around for some humbler mound, earthed up and clodded in the
usual way. Then her eye followed Oak's, and she read the words with
which the inscription opened:--
ERECTED BY FRANCIS TROY
IN BELOVED MEMORY OF
FANNY ROBIN
Oak saw her, and his first act was to gaze inquiringly and learn how
she received this knowledge of the authorship of the work, which to
himself had caused considerable astonishment. But such discoveries
did not much affect her now. Emotional convulsions seemed to have
become the commonplaces of her history, and she bade him good
morning, and asked him to fill in the hole with the spade which
was standing by. Whilst Oak was doing as she desired, Bathsheba
collected the flowers, and began planting them with that sympathetic
manipulation of roots and leaves which is so conspicuous in a woman's
gardening, and which flowers seem to understand and thrive upon. She
requested Oak to get the churchwardens to turn the leadwork at the
mouth of the gurgoyle that hung gaping down upon them, that by this
means the stream might be directed sideways, and a repetition of the
accident prevented. Finally, with the superfluous magnanimity of
a woman whose narrower instincts have brought down bitterness upon
her instead of love, she wiped the mud spots from the tomb as if she
rather liked its words than otherwise, and went again home. [2]
[Footnote 2: The local tower and churchyard do not answer
precisely to the foregoing description.]
ADVENTURES BY THE SHORE
Troy wandered along towards the south. A composite feeling, made up
of disgust with the, to him, humdrum tediousness of a farmer's life,
gloomy images of her who lay in the churchyard, remorse, and a
general averseness to his wife's society, impelled him to seek a
home in any place on earth save Weatherbury. The sad accessories of
Fanny's end confronted him as vivid pictures which threatened to be
indelible, and made life in Bathsheba's house intolerable. At three
in the afternoon he found himself at the foot of a slope more than
a mile in length, which ran to the ridge of a range of hills lying
parallel with the shore, and forming a monotonous barrier between
the basin of cultivated country inland and the wilder scenery of the
coast. Up the hill stretched a road nearly straight and perfectly
white, the two sides approaching each other in a gradual taper till
they met the sky at the top about two miles off. Throughout the
length of this narrow and irksome inclined plane not a sign of life
was visible on this garish afternoon. Troy toiled up the road with a
languor and depression greater than any he had experienced for many a
day and year before. The air was warm and muggy, and the top seemed
to recede as he approached.
At last he reached the summit, and a wide and novel prospect burst
upon him with an effect almost like that of the Pacific upon Balboa's
gaze. The broad steely sea, marked only by faint lines, which had
a semblance of being etched thereon to a degree not deep enough to
disturb its general evenness, stretched the whole width of his front
and round to the right, where, near the town and port of Budmouth,
the sun bristled down upon it, and banished all colour, to substitute
in its place a clear oily polish. Nothing moved in sky, land, or
sea, except a frill of milkwhite foam along the nearer angles of the
shore, shreds of which licked the contiguous stones like tongues.
He descended and came to a small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs.
Troy's nature freshened within him; he thought he would rest and
bathe here before going farther. He undressed and plunged in.
Inside the cove the water was uninteresting to a swimmer, being
smooth as a pond, and to get a little of the ocean swell, Troy
presently swam between the two projecting spurs of rock which
formed the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean.
Unfortunately for Troy a current unknown to him existed outside,
which, unimportant to craft of any burden, was awkward for a swimmer
who might be taken in it unawares. Troy found himself carried to
the left and then round in a swoop out to sea.
He now recollected the place and its sinister character. Many
bathers had there prayed for a dry death from time to time, and, like
Gonzalo also, had been unanswered; and Troy began to deem it possible
that he might be added to their number. Not a boat of any kind was
at present within sight, but far in the distance Budmouth lay upon
the sea, as it were quietly regarding his efforts, and beside the
town the harbour showed its position by a dim meshwork of ropes and
spars. After well-nigh exhausting himself in attempts to get back to
the mouth of the cove, in his weakness swimming several inches deeper
than was his wont, keeping up his breathing entirely by his nostrils,
turning upon his back a dozen times over, swimming _en papillon_, and
so on, Troy resolved as a last resource to tread water at a slight
incline, and so endeavour to reach the shore at any point, merely
giving himself a gentle impetus inwards whilst carried on in the
general direction of the tide. This, necessarily a slow process,
he found to be not altogether so difficult, and though there was no
choice of a landing-place--the objects on shore passing by him in a
sad and slow procession--he perceptibly approached the extremity of a
spit of land yet further to the right, now well defined against the
sunny portion of the horizon. While the swimmer's eyes were fixed
upon the spit as his only means of salvation on this side of the
Unknown, a moving object broke the outline of the extremity, and
immediately a ship's boat appeared manned with several sailor lads,
her bows towards the sea.
All Troy's vigour spasmodically revived to prolong the struggle yet a
little further. Swimming with his right arm, he held up his left to
hail them, splashing upon the waves, and shouting with all his might.
From the position of the setting sun his white form was distinctly
visible upon the now deep-hued bosom of the sea to the east of the
boat, and the men saw him at once. Backing their oars and putting
the boat about, they pulled towards him with a will, and in five or
six minutes from the time of his first halloo, two of the sailors
hauled him in over the stern.
They formed part of a brig's crew, and had come ashore for sand.
Lending him what little clothing they could spare among them as a
slight protection against the rapidly cooling air, they agreed to
land him in the morning; and without further delay, for it was
growing late, they made again towards the roadstead where their
vessel lay.
And now night drooped slowly upon the wide watery levels in front;
and at no great distance from them, where the shoreline curved round,
and formed a long riband of shade upon the horizon, a series of
points of yellow light began to start into existence, denoting the
spot to be the site of Budmouth, where the lamps were being lighted
along the parade. The cluck of their oars was the only sound of any
distinctness upon the sea, and as they laboured amid the thickening
shades the lamp-lights grew larger, each appearing to send a flaming
sword deep down into the waves before it, until there arose, among
other dim shapes of the kind, the form of the vessel for which they
were bound.
DOUBTS ARISE--DOUBTS LINGER
Bathsheba underwent the enlargement of her husband's absence from
hours to days with a slight feeling of surprise, and a slight feeling
of relief; yet neither sensation rose at any time far above the
level commonly designated as indifference. She belonged to him: the
certainties of that position were so well defined, and the reasonable
probabilities of its issue so bounded that she could not speculate on
contingencies. Taking no further interest in herself as a splendid
woman, she acquired the indifferent feelings of an outsider in
contemplating her probable fate as a singular wretch; for Bathsheba
drew herself and her future in colours that no reality could exceed
for darkness. Her original vigorous pride of youth had sickened,
and with it had declined all her anxieties about coming years, since
anxiety recognizes a better and a worse alternative, and Bathsheba
had made up her mind that alternatives on any noteworthy scale had
ceased for her. Soon, or later--and that not very late--her husband
would be home again. And then the days of their tenancy of the Upper
Farm would be numbered. There had originally been shown by the agent
to the estate some distrust of Bathsheba's tenure as James Everdene's
successor, on the score of her sex, and her youth, and her beauty;
but the peculiar nature of her uncle's will, his own frequent
testimony before his death to her cleverness in such a pursuit, and
her vigorous marshalling of the numerous flocks and herds which came
suddenly into her hands before negotiations were concluded, had won
confidence in her powers, and no further objections had been raised.
She had latterly been in great doubt as to what the legal effects of
her marriage would be upon her position; but no notice had been taken
as yet of her change of name, and only one point was clear--that in
the event of her own or her husband's inability to meet the agent at
the forthcoming January rent-day, very little consideration would be
shown, and, for that matter, very little would be deserved. Once out
of the farm, the approach of poverty would be sure.
Hence Bathsheba lived in a perception that her purposes were broken
off. She was not a woman who could hope on without good materials
for the process, differing thus from the less far-sighted and
energetic, though more petted ones of the sex, with whom hope goes
on as a sort of clockwork which the merest food and shelter are
sufficient to wind up; and perceiving clearly that her mistake had
been a fatal one, she accepted her position, and waited coldly for
the end.
The first Saturday after Troy's departure she went to Casterbridge
alone, a journey she had not before taken since her marriage. On
this Saturday Bathsheba was passing slowly on foot through the crowd
of rural business-men gathered as usual in front of the market-house,
who were as usual gazed upon by the burghers with feelings that
those healthy lives were dearly paid for by exclusion from possible
aldermanship, when a man, who had apparently been following her,
said some words to another on her left hand. Bathsheba's ears were
keen as those of any wild animal, and she distinctly heard what the
speaker said, though her back was towards him.
"I am looking for Mrs. Troy. Is that she there?"
"Yes; that's the young lady, I believe," said the the person
addressed.
"I have some awkward news to break to her. Her husband is drowned."
As if endowed with the spirit of prophecy, Bathsheba gasped out, "No,
it is not true; it cannot be true!" Then she said and heard no more.
The ice of self-command which had latterly gathered over her was
broken, and the currents burst forth again, and overwhelmed her. A
darkness came into her eyes, and she fell.
But not to the ground. A gloomy man, who had been observing her from
under the portico of the old corn-exchange when she passed through
the group without, stepped quickly to her side at the moment of her
exclamation, and caught her in his arms as she sank down.
"What is it?" said Boldwood, looking up at the bringer of the big
news, as he supported her.
"Her husband was drowned this week while bathing in Lulwind Cove.
A coastguardsman found his clothes, and brought them into Budmouth
yesterday."
Thereupon a strange fire lighted up Boldwood's eye, and his face
flushed with the suppressed excitement of an unutterable thought.
Everybody's glance was now centred upon him and the unconscious
Bathsheba. He lifted her bodily off the ground, and smoothed down
the folds of her dress as a child might have taken a storm-beaten
bird and arranged its ruffled plumes, and bore her along the
pavement to the King's Arms Inn. Here he passed with her under the
archway into a private room; and by the time he had deposited--so
lothly--the precious burden upon a sofa, Bathsheba had opened her
eyes. Remembering all that had occurred, she murmured, "I want to go
home!"
Boldwood left the room. He stood for a moment in the passage to
recover his senses. The experience had been too much for his
consciousness to keep up with, and now that he had grasped it it had
gone again. For those few heavenly, golden moments she had been in
his arms. What did it matter about her not knowing it? She had been
close to his breast; he had been close to hers.
He started onward again, and sending a woman to her, went out to
ascertain all the facts of the case. These appeared to be limited to
what he had already heard. He then ordered her horse to be put into
the gig, and when all was ready returned to inform her. He found
that, though still pale and unwell, she had in the meantime sent for
the Budmouth man who brought the tidings, and learnt from him all
there was to know.
Being hardly in a condition to drive home as she had driven to town,
Boldwood, with every delicacy of manner and feeling, offered to get
her a driver, or to give her a seat in his phaeton, which was more
comfortable than her own conveyance. These proposals Bathsheba
gently declined, and the farmer at once departed.
About half-an-hour later she invigorated herself by an effort, and
took her seat and the reins as usual--in external appearance much
as if nothing had happened. She went out of the town by a tortuous
back street, and drove slowly along, unconscious of the road and the
scene. The first shades of evening were showing themselves when
Bathsheba reached home, where, silently alighting and leaving the
horse in the hands of the boy, she proceeded at once upstairs.
Liddy met her on the landing. The news had preceded Bathsheba to
Weatherbury by half-an-hour, and Liddy looked inquiringly into her
mistress's face. Bathsheba had nothing to say.
She entered her bedroom and sat by the window, and thought and
thought till night enveloped her, and the extreme lines only of her
shape were visible. Somebody came to the door, knocked, and opened
it.
"Well, what is it, Liddy?" she said.
"I was thinking there must be something got for you to wear," said
Liddy, with hesitation.
"What do you mean?"
"Mourning."
"No, no, no," said Bathsheba, hurriedly.
"But I suppose there must be something done for poor--"
"Not at present, I think. It is not necessary."
"Why not, ma'am?"
"Because he's still alive."
"How do you know that?" said Liddy, amazed.
"I don't know it. But wouldn't it have been different, or shouldn't
I have heard more, or wouldn't they have found him, Liddy?--or--I
don't know how it is, but death would have been different from how
this is. I am perfectly convinced that he is still alive!"
Bathsheba remained firm in this opinion till Monday, when two
circumstances conjoined to shake it. The first was a short paragraph
in the local newspaper, which, beyond making by a methodizing
pen formidable presumptive evidence of Troy's death by drowning,
contained the important testimony of a young Mr. Barker, M.D., of
Budmouth, who spoke to being an eyewitness of the accident, in a
letter to the editor. In this he stated that he was passing over the
cliff on the remoter side of the cove just as the sun was setting.
At that time he saw a bather carried along in the current outside the
mouth of the cove, and guessed in an instant that there was but a
poor chance for him unless he should be possessed of unusual muscular
powers. He drifted behind a projection of the coast, and Mr. Barker
followed along the shore in the same direction. But by the time that
he could reach an elevation sufficiently great to command a view of
the sea beyond, dusk had set in, and nothing further was to be seen.
The other circumstance was the arrival of his clothes, when it became
necessary for her to examine and identify them--though this had
virtually been done long before by those who inspected the letters in
his pockets. It was so evident to her in the midst of her agitation
that Troy had undressed in the full conviction of dressing again
almost immediately, that the notion that anything but death could
have prevented him was a perverse one to entertain.
Then Bathsheba said to herself that others were assured in their
opinion; strange that she should not be. A strange reflection
occurred to her, causing her face to flush. Suppose that Troy had
followed Fanny into another world. Had he done this intentionally,
yet contrived to make his death appear like an accident?
Nevertheless, this thought of how the apparent might differ from the
real--made vivid by her bygone jealousy of Fanny, and the remorse
he had shown that night--did not blind her to the perception of a
likelier difference, less tragic, but to herself far more disastrous.
When alone late that evening beside a small fire, and much calmed
down, Bathsheba took Troy's watch into her hand, which had been
restored to her with the rest of the articles belonging to him. She
opened the case as he had opened it before her a week ago. There was
the little coil of pale hair which had been as the fuze to this great
explosion.
"He was hers and she was his; they should be gone together," she
said. "I am nothing to either of them, and why should I keep
her hair?" She took it in her hand, and held it over the fire.
"No--I'll not burn it--I'll keep it in memory of her, poor thing!"
she added, snatching back her hand.
OAK'S ADVANCEMENT--A GREAT HOPE
The later autumn and the winter drew on apace, and the leaves lay
thick upon the turf of the glades and the mosses of the woods.
Bathsheba, having previously been living in a state of suspended
feeling which was not suspense, now lived in a mood of quietude which
was not precisely peacefulness. While she had known him to be alive
she could have thought of his death with equanimity; but now that it
might be she had lost him, she regretted that he was not hers still.
She kept the farm going, raked in her profits without caring keenly
about them, and expended money on ventures because she had done so
in bygone days, which, though not long gone by, seemed infinitely
removed from her present. She looked back upon that past over a
great gulf, as if she were now a dead person, having the faculty of
meditation still left in her, by means of which, like the mouldering
gentlefolk of the poet's story, she could sit and ponder what a gift
life used to be.
However, one excellent result of her general apathy was the
long-delayed installation of Oak as bailiff; but he having virtually
exercised that function for a long time already, the change, beyond
the substantial increase of wages it brought, was little more than a
nominal one addressed to the outside world.
Boldwood lived secluded and inactive. Much of his wheat and all his
barley of that season had been spoilt by the rain. It sprouted,
grew into intricate mats, and was ultimately thrown to the pigs in
armfuls. The strange neglect which had produced this ruin and waste
became the subject of whispered talk among all the people round; and
it was elicited from one of Boldwood's men that forgetfulness had
nothing to do with it, for he had been reminded of the danger to his
corn as many times and as persistently as inferiors dared to do.
The sight of the pigs turning in disgust from the rotten ears seemed
to arouse Boldwood, and he one evening sent for Oak. Whether it
was suggested by Bathsheba's recent act of promotion or not, the
farmer proposed at the interview that Gabriel should undertake the
superintendence of the Lower Farm as well as of Bathsheba's, because
of the necessity Boldwood felt for such aid, and the impossibility
of discovering a more trustworthy man. Gabriel's malignant star was
assuredly setting fast.
Bathsheba, when she learnt of this proposal--for Oak was obliged to
consult her--at first languidly objected. She considered that the
two farms together were too extensive for the observation of one
man. Boldwood, who was apparently determined by personal rather than
commercial reasons, suggested that Oak should be furnished with a
horse for his sole use, when the plan would present no difficulty,
the two farms lying side by side. Boldwood did not directly
communicate with her during these negotiations, only speaking to Oak,
who was the go-between throughout. All was harmoniously arranged at
last, and we now see Oak mounted on a strong cob, and daily trotting
the length and breadth of about two thousand acres in a cheerful spirit
of surveillance, as if the crops all belonged to him--the actual
mistress of the one-half and the master of the other, sitting in
their respective homes in gloomy and sad seclusion.
Out of this there arose, during the spring succeeding, a talk in the
parish that Gabriel Oak was feathering his nest fast.
"Whatever d'ye think," said Susan Tall, "Gable Oak is coming it quite
the dand. He now wears shining boots with hardly a hob in 'em, two
or three times a-week, and a tall hat a-Sundays, and 'a hardly knows
the name of smockfrock. When I see people strut enough to be cut up
into bantam cocks, I stand dormant with wonder, and says no more!"
It was eventually known that Gabriel, though paid a fixed wage by
Bathsheba independent of the fluctuations of agricultural profits,
had made an engagement with Boldwood by which Oak was to receive a
share of the receipts--a small share certainly, yet it was money of
a higher quality than mere wages, and capable of expansion in a way
that wages were not. Some were beginning to consider Oak a "near"
man, for though his condition had thus far improved, he lived in no
better style than before, occupying the same cottage, paring his own
potatoes, mending his stockings, and sometimes even making his bed
with his own hands. But as Oak was not only provokingly indifferent
to public opinion, but a man who clung persistently to old habits and
usages, simply because they were old, there was room for doubt as to
his motives.
A great hope had latterly germinated in Boldwood, whose unreasoning
devotion to Bathsheba could only be characterized as a fond madness
which neither time nor circumstance, evil nor good report, could
weaken or destroy. This fevered hope had grown up again like a grain
of mustard-seed during the quiet which followed the hasty conjecture
that Troy was drowned. He nourished it fearfully, and almost shunned
the contemplation of it in earnest, lest facts should reveal the
wildness of the dream. Bathsheba having at last been persuaded to
wear mourning, her appearance as she entered the church in that
guise was in itself a weekly addition to his faith that a time was
coming--very far off perhaps, yet surely nearing--when his waiting on
events should have its reward. How long he might have to wait he had
not yet closely considered. What he would try to recognize was that
the severe schooling she had been subjected to had made Bathsheba
much more considerate than she had formerly been of the feelings of
others, and he trusted that, should she be willing at any time in the
future to marry any man at all, that man would be himself. There was
a substratum of good feeling in her: her self-reproach for the injury
she had thoughtlessly done him might be depended upon now to a much
greater extent than before her infatuation and disappointment. It
would be possible to approach her by the channel of her good nature,
and to suggest a friendly businesslike compact between them for
fulfilment at some future day, keeping the passionate side of his
desire entirely out of her sight. Such was Boldwood's hope.
To the eyes of the middle-aged, Bathsheba was perhaps additionally
charming just now. Her exuberance of spirit was pruned down; the
original phantom of delight had shown herself to be not too bright
for human nature's daily food, and she had been able to enter this
second poetical phase without losing much of the first in the
process.
Bathsheba's return from a two months' visit to her old aunt at
Norcombe afforded the impassioned and yearning farmer a pretext for
inquiring directly after her--now possibly in the ninth month of her
widowhood--and endeavouring to get a notion of her state of mind
regarding him. This occurred in the middle of the haymaking, and
Boldwood contrived to be near Liddy, who was assisting in the fields.
"I am glad to see you out of doors, Lydia," he said pleasantly.
She simpered, and wondered in her heart why he should speak so
frankly to her.
"I hope Mrs. Troy is quite well after her long absence," he
continued, in a manner expressing that the coldest-hearted neighbour
could scarcely say less about her.
"She is quite well, sir."
"And cheerful, I suppose."
"Yes, cheerful."
"Fearful, did you say?"
"Oh no. I merely said she was cheerful."
"Tells you all her affairs?"
"No, sir."
"Some of them?"
"Yes, sir."
"Mrs. Troy puts much confidence in you, Lydia, and very wisely,
perhaps."
"She do, sir. I've been with her all through her troubles, and was
with her at the time of Mr. Troy's going and all. And if she were
to marry again I expect I should bide with her."
"She promises that you shall--quite natural," said the strategic
lover, throbbing throughout him at the presumption which Liddy's
words appeared to warrant--that his darling had thought of
re-marriage.
"No--she doesn't promise it exactly. I merely judge on my own
account."
"Yes, yes, I understand. When she alludes to the possibility of
marrying again, you conclude--"
"She never do allude to it, sir," said Liddy, thinking how very
stupid Mr. Boldwood was getting.
"Of course not," he returned hastily, his hope falling again. "You
needn't take quite such long reaches with your rake, Lydia--short
and quick ones are best. Well, perhaps, as she is absolute mistress
again now, it is wise of her to resolve never to give up her
freedom."
"My mistress did certainly once say, though not seriously, that she
supposed she might marry again at the end of seven years from last
year, if she cared to risk Mr. Troy's coming back and claiming her."
"Ah, six years from the present time. Said that she might. She
might marry at once in every reasonable person's opinion, whatever
the lawyers may say to the contrary."
"Have you been to ask them?" said Liddy, innocently.
"Not I," said Boldwood, growing red. "Liddy, you needn't stay here
a minute later than you wish, so Mr. Oak says. I am now going on a
little farther. Good-afternoon."
He went away vexed with himself, and ashamed of having for this one
time in his life done anything which could be called underhand. Poor
Boldwood had no more skill in finesse than a battering-ram, and he
was uneasy with a sense of having made himself to appear stupid and,
what was worse, mean. But he had, after all, lighted upon one fact
by way of repayment. It was a singularly fresh and fascinating fact,
and though not without its sadness it was pertinent and real. In
little more than six years from this time Bathsheba might certainly
marry him. There was something definite in that hope, for admitting
that there might have been no deep thought in her words to Liddy
about marriage, they showed at least her creed on the matter.
This pleasant notion was now continually in his mind. Six years were
a long time, but how much shorter than never, the idea he had for so
long been obliged to endure! Jacob had served twice seven years for
Rachel: what were six for such a woman as this? He tried to like the
notion of waiting for her better than that of winning her at once.
Boldwood felt his love to be so deep and strong and eternal, that
it was possible she had never yet known its full volume, and this
patience in delay would afford him an opportunity of giving sweet
proof on the point. He would annihilate the six years of his life as
if they were minutes--so little did he value his time on earth beside
her love. He would let her see, all those six years of intangible
ethereal courtship, how little care he had for anything but as it
bore upon the consummation.
Meanwhile the early and the late summer brought round the week in
which Greenhill Fair was held. This fair was frequently attended by
the folk of Weatherbury.
THE SHEEP FAIR--TROY TOUCHES HIS WIFE'S HAND
Greenhill was the Nijni Novgorod of South Wessex; and the busiest,
merriest, noisiest day of the whole statute number was the day of
the sheep fair. This yearly gathering was upon the summit of a
hill which retained in good preservation the remains of an ancient
earthwork, consisting of a huge rampart and entrenchment of an oval
form encircling the top of the hill, though somewhat broken down here
and there. To each of the two chief openings on opposite sides a
winding road ascended, and the level green space of ten or fifteen
acres enclosed by the bank was the site of the fair. A few permanent
erections dotted the spot, but the majority of visitors patronized
canvas alone for resting and feeding under during the time of their
sojourn here.
Shepherds who attended with their flocks from long distances started
from home two or three days, or even a week, before the fair, driving
their charges a few miles each day--not more than ten or twelve--and
resting them at night in hired fields by the wayside at previously
chosen points, where they fed, having fasted since morning. The
shepherd of each flock marched behind, a bundle containing his kit
for the week strapped upon his shoulders, and in his hand his crook,
which he used as the staff of his pilgrimage. Several of the sheep
would get worn and lame, and occasionally a lambing occurred on the
road. To meet these contingencies, there was frequently provided, to
accompany the flocks from the remoter points, a pony and waggon into
which the weakly ones were taken for the remainder of the journey.
The Weatherbury Farms, however, were no such long distance from the
hill, and those arrangements were not necessary in their case. But
the large united flocks of Bathsheba and Farmer Boldwood formed a
valuable and imposing multitude which demanded much attention, and
on this account Gabriel, in addition to Boldwood's shepherd and Cain
Ball, accompanied them along the way, through the decayed old town of
Kingsbere, and upward to the plateau,--old George the dog of course
behind them.
When the autumn sun slanted over Greenhill this morning and lighted
the dewy flat upon its crest, nebulous clouds of dust were to be seen
floating between the pairs of hedges which streaked the wide prospect
around in all directions. These gradually converged upon the base of
the hill, and the flocks became individually visible, climbing the
serpentine ways which led to the top. Thus, in a slow procession,
they entered the opening to which the roads tended, multitude after
multitude, horned and hornless--blue flocks and red flocks, buff
flocks and brown flocks, even green and salmon-tinted flocks,
according to the fancy of the colourist and custom of the farm.
Men were shouting, dogs were barking, with greatest animation, but
the thronging travellers in so long a journey had grown nearly
indifferent to such terrors, though they still bleated piteously at
the unwontedness of their experiences, a tall shepherd rising here
and there in the midst of them, like a gigantic idol amid a crowd
of prostrate devotees.
The great mass of sheep in the fair consisted of South Downs and the
old Wessex horned breeds; to the latter class Bathsheba's and Farmer
Boldwood's mainly belonged. These filed in about nine o'clock, their
vermiculated horns lopping gracefully on each side of their cheeks in
geometrically perfect spirals, a small pink and white ear nestling
under each horn. Before and behind came other varieties, perfect
leopards as to the full rich substance of their coats, and only
lacking the spots. There were also a few of the Oxfordshire breed,
whose wool was beginning to curl like a child's flaxen hair, though
surpassed in this respect by the effeminate Leicesters, which were in
turn less curly than the Cotswolds. But the most picturesque by far
was a small flock of Exmoors, which chanced to be there this year.
Their pied faces and legs, dark and heavy horns, tresses of wool
hanging round their swarthy foreheads, quite relieved the monotony
of the flocks in that quarter.
All these bleating, panting, and weary thousands had entered and were
penned before the morning had far advanced, the dog belonging to each
flock being tied to the corner of the pen containing it. Alleys for
pedestrians intersected the pens, which soon became crowded with
buyers and sellers from far and near.
In another part of the hill an altogether different scene began
to force itself upon the eye towards midday. A circular tent, of
exceptional newness and size, was in course of erection here. As
the day drew on, the flocks began to change hands, lightening the
shepherd's responsibilities; and they turned their attention to
this tent and inquired of a man at work there, whose soul seemed
concentrated on tying a bothering knot in no time, what was going
on.
"The Royal Hippodrome Performance of Turpin's Ride to York and the
Death of Black Bess," replied the man promptly, without turning his
eyes or leaving off tying.
As soon as the tent was completed the band struck up highly
stimulating harmonies, and the announcement was publicly made, Black
Bess standing in a conspicuous position on the outside, as a living
proof, if proof were wanted, of the truth of the oracular utterances
from the stage over which the people were to enter. These were so
convinced by such genuine appeals to heart and understanding both
that they soon began to crowd in abundantly, among the foremost being
visible Jan Coggan and Joseph Poorgrass, who were holiday keeping
here to-day.
"That's the great ruffen pushing me!" screamed a woman in front of
Jan over her shoulder at him when the rush was at its fiercest.
"How can I help pushing ye when the folk behind push me?" said
Coggan, in a deprecating tone, turning his head towards the aforesaid
folk as far as he could without turning his body, which was jammed as
in a vice.
There was a silence; then the drums and trumpets again sent forth
their echoing notes. The crowd was again ecstasied, and gave another
lurch in which Coggan and Poorgrass were again thrust by those behind
upon the women in front.
"Oh that helpless feymels should be at the mercy of such ruffens!"
exclaimed one of these ladies again, as she swayed like a reed shaken
by the wind.
"Now," said Coggan, appealing in an earnest voice to the public at
large as it stood clustered about his shoulder-blades, "did ye ever
hear such onreasonable woman as that? Upon my carcase, neighbours,
if I could only get out of this cheese-wring, the damn women might
eat the show for me!"
"Don't ye lose yer temper, Jan!" implored Joseph Poorgrass, in a
whisper. "They might get their men to murder us, for I think by the
shine of their eyes that they be a sinful form of womankind."
Jan held his tongue, as if he had no objection to be pacified to
please a friend, and they gradually reached the foot of the ladder,
Poorgrass being flattened like a jumping-jack, and the sixpence, for
admission, which he had got ready half-an-hour earlier, having become
so reeking hot in the tight squeeze of his excited hand that the
woman in spangles, brazen rings set with glass diamonds, and with
chalked face and shoulders, who took the money of him, hastily
dropped it again from a fear that some trick had been played to burn
her fingers. So they all entered, and the cloth of the tent, to the
eyes of an observer on the outside, became bulged into innumerable
pimples such as we observe on a sack of potatoes, caused by the
various human heads, backs, and elbows at high pressure within.
At the rear of the large tent there were two small dressing-tents.
One of these, alloted to the male performers, was partitioned into
halves by a cloth; and in one of the divisions there was sitting on
the grass, pulling on a pair of jack-boots, a young man whom we
instantly recognise as Sergeant Troy.
Troy's appearance in this position may be briefly accounted for. The
brig aboard which he was taken in Budmouth Roads was about to start
on a voyage, though somewhat short of hands. Troy read the articles
and joined, but before they sailed a boat was despatched across the
bay to Lulwind cove; as he had half expected, his clothes were gone.
He ultimately worked his passage to the United States, where he made
a precarious living in various towns as Professor of Gymnastics,
Sword Exercise, Fencing, and Pugilism. A few months were sufficient
to give him a distaste for this kind of life. There was a certain
animal form of refinement in his nature; and however pleasant a
strange condition might be whilst privations were easily warded off,
it was disadvantageously coarse when money was short. There was ever
present, too, the idea that he could claim a home and its comforts
did he but chose to return to England and Weatherbury Farm. Whether
Bathsheba thought him dead was a frequent subject of curious
conjecture. To England he did return at last; but the fact of
drawing nearer to Weatherbury abstracted its fascinations, and his
intention to enter his old groove at the place became modified. It
was with gloom he considered on landing at Liverpool that if he
were to go home his reception would be of a kind very unpleasant
to contemplate; for what Troy had in the way of emotion was an
occasional fitful sentiment which sometimes caused him as much
inconvenience as emotion of a strong and healthy kind. Bathsheba was
not a woman to be made a fool of, or a woman to suffer in silence;
and how could he endure existence with a spirited wife to whom at
first entering he would be beholden for food and lodging? Moreover,
it was not at all unlikely that his wife would fail at her farming,
if she had not already done so; and he would then become liable for
her maintenance: and what a life such a future of poverty with her
would be, the spectre of Fanny constantly between them, harrowing
his temper and embittering her words! Thus, for reasons touching on
distaste, regret, and shame commingled, he put off his return from
day to day, and would have decided to put it off altogether if he
could have found anywhere else the ready-made establishment which
existed for him there.
At this time--the July preceding the September in which we find
at Greenhill Fair--he fell in with a travelling circus which was
performing in the outskirts of a northern town. Troy introduced
himself to the manager by taming a restive horse of the troupe,
hitting a suspended apple with a pistol-bullet fired from the
animal's back when in full gallop, and other feats. For his
merits in these--all more or less based upon his experiences as a
dragoon-guardsman--Troy was taken into the company, and the play
of Turpin was prepared with a view to his personation of the chief
character. Troy was not greatly elated by the appreciative spirit in
which he was undoubtedly treated, but he thought the engagement might
afford him a few weeks for consideration. It was thus carelessly,
and without having formed any definite plan for the future, that Troy
found himself at Greenhill Fair with the rest of the company on this
day.
And now the mild autumn sun got lower, and in front of the pavilion
the following incident had taken place. Bathsheba--who was driven
to the fair that day by her odd man Poorgrass--had, like every one
else, read or heard the announcement that Mr. Francis, the Great
Cosmopolitan Equestrian and Roughrider, would enact the part of
Turpin, and she was not yet too old and careworn to be without a
little curiosity to see him. This particular show was by far the
largest and grandest in the fair, a horde of little shows grouping
themselves under its shade like chickens around a hen. The crowd had
passed in, and Boldwood, who had been watching all the day for an
opportunity of speaking to her, seeing her comparatively isolated,
came up to her side.
"I hope the sheep have done well to-day, Mrs. Troy?" he said,
nervously.
"Oh yes, thank you," said Bathsheba, colour springing up in the
centre of her cheeks. "I was fortunate enough to sell them all just
as we got upon the hill, so we hadn't to pen at all."
"And now you are entirely at leisure?"
"Yes, except that I have to see one more dealer in two hours' time:
otherwise I should be going home. He was looking at this large tent
and the announcement. Have you ever seen the play of 'Turpin's Ride
to York'? Turpin was a real man, was he not?"
"Oh yes, perfectly true--all of it. Indeed, I think I've heard Jan
Coggan say that a relation of his knew Tom King, Turpin's friend,
quite well."
"Coggan is rather given to strange stories connected with his
relations, we must remember. I hope they can all be believed."
"Yes, yes; we know Coggan. But Turpin is true enough. You have
never seen it played, I suppose?"
"Never. I was not allowed to go into these places when I was young.
Hark! What's that prancing? How they shout!"
"Black Bess just started off, I suppose. Am I right in supposing
you would like to see the performance, Mrs. Troy? Please excuse my
mistake, if it is one; but if you would like to, I'll get a seat for
you with pleasure." Perceiving that she hesitated, he added, "I
myself shall not stay to see it: I've seen it before."
Now Bathsheba did care a little to see the show, and had only
withheld her feet from the ladder because she feared to go in alone.
She had been hoping that Oak might appear, whose assistance in such
cases was always accepted as an inalienable right, but Oak was
nowhere to be seen; and hence it was that she said, "Then if you will
just look in first, to see if there's room, I think I will go in for
a minute or two."
And so a short time after this Bathsheba appeared in the tent with
Boldwood at her elbow, who, taking her to a "reserved" seat, again
withdrew.
This feature consisted of one raised bench in a very conspicuous
part of the circle, covered with red cloth, and floored with a piece
of carpet, and Bathsheba immediately found, to her confusion, that
she was the single reserved individual in the tent, the rest of
the crowded spectators, one and all, standing on their legs on the
borders of the arena, where they got twice as good a view of the
performance for half the money. Hence as many eyes were turned upon
her, enthroned alone in this place of honour, against a scarlet
background, as upon the ponies and clown who were engaged in
preliminary exploits in the centre, Turpin not having yet appeared.
Once there, Bathsheba was forced to make the best of it and remain:
she sat down, spreading her skirts with some dignity over the
unoccupied space on each side of her, and giving a new and feminine
aspect to the pavilion. In a few minutes she noticed the fat red
nape of Coggan's neck among those standing just below her, and Joseph
Poorgrass's saintly profile a little further on.
The interior was shadowy with a peculiar shade. The strange luminous
semi-opacities of fine autumn afternoons and eves intensified into
Rembrandt effects the few yellow sunbeams which came through holes
and divisions in the canvas, and spirted like jets of gold-dust
across the dusky blue atmosphere of haze pervading the tent, until
they alighted on inner surfaces of cloth opposite, and shone like
little lamps suspended there.
Troy, on peeping from his dressing-tent through a slit for a
reconnoitre before entering, saw his unconscious wife on high before
him as described, sitting as queen of the tournament. He started
back in utter confusion, for although his disguise effectually
concealed his personality, he instantly felt that she would be sure
to recognize his voice. He had several times during the day thought
of the possibility of some Weatherbury person or other appearing and
recognizing him; but he had taken the risk carelessly. If they see
me, let them, he had said. But here was Bathsheba in her own person;
and the reality of the scene was so much intenser than any of his
prefigurings that he felt he had not half enough considered the
point.
She looked so charming and fair that his cool mood about Weatherbury
people was changed. He had not expected her to exercise this power
over him in the twinkling of an eye. Should he go on, and care
nothing? He could not bring himself to do that. Beyond a politic
wish to remain unknown, there suddenly arose in him now a sense of
shame at the possibility that his attractive young wife, who already
despised him, should despise him more by discovering him in so mean a
condition after so long a time. He actually blushed at the thought,
and was vexed beyond measure that his sentiments of dislike towards
Weatherbury should have led him to dally about the country in this
way.
But Troy was never more clever than when absolutely at his wit's end.
He hastily thrust aside the curtain dividing his own little dressing
space from that of the manager and proprietor, who now appeared as
the individual called Tom King as far down as his waist, and as the
aforesaid respectable manager thence to his toes.
"Here's the devil to pay!" said Troy.
"How's that?"
"Why, there's a blackguard creditor in the tent I don't want to see,
who'll discover me and nab me as sure as Satan if I open my mouth.
What's to be done?"
"You must appear now, I think."
"I can't."
"But the play must proceed."
"Do you give out that Turpin has got a bad cold, and can't speak his
part, but that he'll perform it just the same without speaking."
The proprietor shook his head.
"Anyhow, play or no play, I won't open my mouth," said Troy, firmly.
"Very well, then let me see. I tell you how we'll manage," said the
other, who perhaps felt it would be extremely awkward to offend his
leading man just at this time. "I won't tell 'em anything about your
keeping silence; go on with the piece and say nothing, doing what
you can by a judicious wink now and then, and a few indomitable nods
in the heroic places, you know. They'll never find out that the
speeches are omitted."
This seemed feasible enough, for Turpin's speeches were not many or
long, the fascination of the piece lying entirely in the action; and
accordingly the play began, and at the appointed time Black Bess
leapt into the grassy circle amid the plaudits of the spectators.
At the turnpike scene, where Bess and Turpin are hotly pursued at
midnight by the officers, and the half-awake gatekeeper in his
tasselled nightcap denies that any horseman has passed, Coggan
uttered a broad-chested "Well done!" which could be heard all over
the fair above the bleating, and Poorgrass smiled delightedly with a
nice sense of dramatic contrast between our hero, who coolly leaps
the gate, and halting justice in the form of his enemies, who must
needs pull up cumbersomely and wait to be let through. At the death
of Tom King, he could not refrain from seizing Coggan by the hand,
and whispering, with tears in his eyes, "Of course he's not really
shot, Jan--only seemingly!" And when the last sad scene came on, and
the body of the gallant and faithful Bess had to be carried out on a
shutter by twelve volunteers from among the spectators, nothing could
restrain Poorgrass from lending a hand, exclaiming, as he asked
Jan to join him, "Twill be something to tell of at Warren's in
future years, Jan, and hand down to our children." For many a year
in Weatherbury, Joseph told, with the air of a man who had had
experiences in his time, that he touched with his own hand the hoof
of Bess as she lay upon the board upon his shoulder. If, as some
thinkers hold, immortality consists in being enshrined in others'
memories, then did Black Bess become immortal that day if she never
had done so before.
Meanwhile Troy had added a few touches to his ordinary make-up for
the character, the more effectually to disguise himself, and though
he had felt faint qualms on first entering, the metamorphosis
effected by judiciously "lining" his face with a wire rendered him
safe from the eyes of Bathsheba and her men. Nevertheless, he was
relieved when it was got through.
There was a second performance in the evening, and the tent was
lighted up. Troy had taken his part very quietly this time,
venturing to introduce a few speeches on occasion; and was just
concluding it when, whilst standing at the edge of the circle
contiguous to the first row of spectators, he observed within a
yard of him the eye of a man darted keenly into his side features.
Troy hastily shifted his position, after having recognized in the
scrutineer the knavish bailiff Pennyways, his wife's sworn enemy,
who still hung about the outskirts of Weatherbury.
At first Troy resolved to take no notice and abide by circumstances.
That he had been recognized by this man was highly probable; yet
there was room for a doubt. Then the great objection he had felt to
allowing news of his proximity to precede him to Weatherbury in the
event of his return, based on a feeling that knowledge of his present
occupation would discredit him still further in his wife's eyes,
returned in full force. Moreover, should he resolve not to return at
all, a tale of his being alive and being in the neighbourhood would
be awkward; and he was anxious to acquire a knowledge of his wife's
temporal affairs before deciding which to do.
In this dilemma Troy at once went out to reconnoitre. It occurred
to him that to find Pennyways, and make a friend of him if possible,
would be a very wise act. He had put on a thick beard borrowed from
the establishment, and in this he wandered about the fair-field. It
was now almost dark, and respectable people were getting their carts
and gigs ready to go home.
The largest refreshment booth in the fair was provided by an
innkeeper from a neighbouring town. This was considered an
unexceptionable place for obtaining the necessary food and rest:
Host Trencher (as he was jauntily called by the local newspaper)
being a substantial man of high repute for catering through all the
country round. The tent was divided into first and second-class
compartments, and at the end of the first-class division was a yet
further enclosure for the most exclusive, fenced off from the body
of the tent by a luncheon-bar, behind which the host himself stood
bustling about in white apron and shirt-sleeves, and looking as if
he had never lived anywhere but under canvas all his life. In these
penetralia were chairs and a table, which, on candles being lighted,
made quite a cozy and luxurious show, with an urn, plated tea and
coffee pots, china teacups, and plum cakes.
Troy stood at the entrance to the booth, where a gipsy-woman was
frying pancakes over a little fire of sticks and selling them at a
penny a-piece, and looked over the heads of the people within. He
could see nothing of Pennyways, but he soon discerned Bathsheba
through an opening into the reserved space at the further end. Troy
thereupon retreated, went round the tent into the darkness, and
listened. He could hear Bathsheba's voice immediately inside the
canvas; she was conversing with a man. A warmth overspread his
face: surely she was not so unprincipled as to flirt in a fair!
He wondered if, then, she reckoned upon his death as an absolute
certainty. To get at the root of the matter, Troy took a penknife
from his pocket and softly made two little cuts crosswise in the
cloth, which, by folding back the corners left a hole the size of a
wafer. Close to this he placed his face, withdrawing it again in a
movement of surprise; for his eye had been within twelve inches of
the top of Bathsheba's head. It was too near to be convenient. He
made another hole a little to one side and lower down, in a shaded
place beside her chair, from which it was easy and safe to survey
her by looking horizontally.
Troy took in the scene completely now. She was leaning back, sipping
a cup of tea that she held in her hand, and the owner of the male
voice was Boldwood, who had apparently just brought the cup to her,
Bathsheba, being in a negligent mood, leant so idly against the
canvas that it was pressed to the shape of her shoulder, and she was,
in fact, as good as in Troy's arms; and he was obliged to keep his
breast carefully backward that she might not feel its warmth through
the cloth as he gazed in.
Troy found unexpected chords of feeling to be stirred again within
him as they had been stirred earlier in the day. She was handsome
as ever, and she was his. It was some minutes before he could
counteract his sudden wish to go in, and claim her. Then he thought
how the proud girl who had always looked down upon him even whilst it
was to love him, would hate him on discovering him to be a strolling
player. Were he to make himself known, that chapter of his life
must at all risks be kept for ever from her and from the Weatherbury
people, or his name would be a byword throughout the parish. He
would be nicknamed "Turpin" as long as he lived. Assuredly before
he could claim her these few past months of his existence must be
entirely blotted out.
"Shall I get you another cup before you start, ma'am?" said Farmer
Boldwood.
"Thank you," said Bathsheba. "But I must be going at once. It was
great neglect in that man to keep me waiting here till so late. I
should have gone two hours ago, if it had not been for him. I had no
idea of coming in here; but there's nothing so refreshing as a cup of
tea, though I should never have got one if you hadn't helped me."
Troy scrutinized her cheek as lit by the candles, and watched each
varying shade thereon, and the white shell-like sinuosities of her
little ear. She took out her purse and was insisting to Boldwood on
paying for her tea for herself, when at this moment Pennyways entered
the tent. Troy trembled: here was his scheme for respectability
endangered at once. He was about to leave his hole of espial,
attempt to follow Pennyways, and find out if the ex-bailiff had
recognized him, when he was arrested by the conversation, and found
he was too late.
"Excuse me, ma'am," said Pennyways; "I've some private information
for your ear alone."
"I cannot hear it now," she said, coldly. That Bathsheba could not
endure this man was evident; in fact, he was continually coming to
her with some tale or other, by which he might creep into favour at
the expense of persons maligned.
"I'll write it down," said Pennyways, confidently. He stooped over
the table, pulled a leaf from a warped pocket-book, and wrote upon
the paper, in a round hand--
"YOUR HUSBAND IS HERE. I'VE SEEN HIM. WHO'S THE FOOL NOW?"
This he folded small, and handed towards her. Bathsheba would not
read it; she would not even put out her hand to take it. Pennyways,
then, with a laugh of derision, tossed it into her lap, and, turning
away, left her.
From the words and action of Pennyways, Troy, though he had not been
able to see what the ex-bailiff wrote, had not a moment's doubt that
the note referred to him. Nothing that he could think of could be
done to check the exposure. "Curse my luck!" he whispered, and
added imprecations which rustled in the gloom like a pestilent wind.
Meanwhile Boldwood said, taking up the note from her lap--
"Don't you wish to read it, Mrs. Troy? If not, I'll destroy it."
"Oh, well," said Bathsheba, carelessly, "perhaps it is unjust not to
read it; but I can guess what it is about. He wants me to recommend
him, or it is to tell me of some little scandal or another connected
with my work-people. He's always doing that."
Bathsheba held the note in her right hand. Boldwood handed towards
her a plate of cut bread-and-butter; when, in order to take a slice,
she put the note into her left hand, where she was still holding
the purse, and then allowed her hand to drop beside her close to
the canvas. The moment had come for saving his game, and Troy
impulsively felt that he would play the card. For yet another time
he looked at the fair hand, and saw the pink finger-tips, and the
blue veins of the wrist, encircled by a bracelet of coral chippings
which she wore: how familiar it all was to him! Then, with the
lightning action in which he was such an adept, he noiselessly
slipped his hand under the bottom of the tent-cloth, which was far
from being pinned tightly down, lifted it a little way, keeping his
eye to the hole, snatched the note from her fingers, dropped the
canvas, and ran away in the gloom towards the bank and ditch, smiling
at the scream of astonishment which burst from her. Troy then slid
down on the outside of the rampart, hastened round in the bottom of
the entrenchment to a distance of a hundred yards, ascended again,
and crossed boldly in a slow walk towards the front entrance of
the tent. His object was now to get to Pennyways, and prevent a
repetition of the announcement until such time as he should choose.
Troy reached the tent door, and standing among the groups there
gathered, looked anxiously for Pennyways, evidently not wishing to
make himself prominent by inquiring for him. One or two men were
speaking of a daring attempt that had just been made to rob a young
lady by lifting the canvas of the tent beside her. It was supposed
that the rogue had imagined a slip of paper which she held in her
hand to be a bank note, for he had seized it, and made off with
it, leaving her purse behind. His chagrin and disappointment at
discovering its worthlessness would be a good joke, it was said.
However, the occurrence seemed to have become known to few, for it
had not interrupted a fiddler, who had lately begun playing by the
door of the tent, nor the four bowed old men with grim countenances
and walking-sticks in hand, who were dancing "Major Malley's Reel"
to the tune. Behind these stood Pennyways. Troy glided up to him,
beckoned, and whispered a few words; and with a mutual glance of
concurrence the two men went into the night together.
BATHSHEBA TALKS WITH HER OUTRIDER
The arrangement for getting back again to Weatherbury had been that
Oak should take the place of Poorgrass in Bathsheba's conveyance and
drive her home, it being discovered late in the afternoon that Joseph
was suffering from his old complaint, a multiplying eye, and was,
therefore, hardly trustworthy as coachman and protector to a woman.
But Oak had found himself so occupied, and was full of so many
cares relative to those portions of Boldwood's flocks that were not
disposed of, that Bathsheba, without telling Oak or anybody, resolved
to drive home herself, as she had many times done from Casterbridge
Market, and trust to her good angel for performing the journey
unmolested. But having fallen in with Farmer Boldwood accidentally
(on her part at least) at the refreshment-tent, she found it
impossible to refuse his offer to ride on horseback beside her as
escort. It had grown twilight before she was aware, but Boldwood
assured her that there was no cause for uneasiness, as the moon
would be up in half-an-hour.
Immediately after the incident in the tent, she had risen to
go--now absolutely alarmed and really grateful for her old lover's
protection--though regretting Gabriel's absence, whose company she
would have much preferred, as being more proper as well as more
pleasant, since he was her own managing-man and servant. This,
however, could not be helped; she would not, on any consideration,
treat Boldwood harshly, having once already ill-used him, and the
moon having risen, and the gig being ready, she drove across the
hilltop in the wending way's which led downwards--to oblivious
obscurity, as it seemed, for the moon and the hill it flooded with
light were in appearance on a level, the rest of the world lying as
a vast shady concave between them. Boldwood mounted his horse, and
followed in close attendance behind. Thus they descended into the
lowlands, and the sounds of those left on the hill came like voices
from the sky, and the lights were as those of a camp in heaven. They
soon passed the merry stragglers in the immediate vicinity of the
hill, traversed Kingsbere, and got upon the high road.
The keen instincts of Bathsheba had perceived that the farmer's
staunch devotion to herself was still undiminished, and she
sympathized deeply. The sight had quite depressed her this evening;
had reminded her of her folly; she wished anew, as she had wished
many months ago, for some means of making reparation for her fault.
Hence her pity for the man who so persistently loved on to his own
injury and permanent gloom had betrayed Bathsheba into an injudicious
considerateness of manner, which appeared almost like tenderness,
and gave new vigour to the exquisite dream of a Jacob's seven years
service in poor Boldwood's mind.
He soon found an excuse for advancing from his position in the rear,
and rode close by her side. They had gone two or three miles in
the moonlight, speaking desultorily across the wheel of her gig
concerning the fair, farming, Oak's usefulness to them both, and
other indifferent subjects, when Boldwood said suddenly and simply--
"Mrs. Troy, you will marry again some day?"
This point-blank query unmistakably confused her, and it was not till
a minute or more had elapsed that she said, "I have not seriously
thought of any such subject."
"I quite understand that. Yet your late husband has been dead nearly
one year, and--"
"You forget that his death was never absolutely proved, and may not
have taken place; so that I may not be really a widow," she said,
catching at the straw of escape that the fact afforded.
"Not absolutely proved, perhaps, but it was proved circumstantially.
A man saw him drowning, too. No reasonable person has any doubt of
his death; nor have you, ma'am, I should imagine."
"I have none now, or I should have acted differently," she said,
gently. "I certainly, at first, had a strange unaccountable feeling
that he could not have perished, but I have been able to explain that
in several ways since. But though I am fully persuaded that I shall
see him no more, I am far from thinking of marriage with another. I
should be very contemptible to indulge in such a thought."
They were silent now awhile, and having struck into an unfrequented
track across a common, the creaks of Boldwood's saddle and her gig
springs were all the sounds to be heard. Boldwood ended the pause.
"Do you remember when I carried you fainting in my arms into the
King's Arms, in Casterbridge? Every dog has his day: that was mine."
"I know--I know it all," she said, hurriedly.
"I, for one, shall never cease regretting that events so fell out as
to deny you to me."
"I, too, am very sorry," she said, and then checked herself. "I
mean, you know, I am sorry you thought I--"
"I have always this dreary pleasure in thinking over those past times
with you--that I was something to you before HE was anything, and
that you belonged ALMOST to me. But, of course, that's nothing. You
never liked me."
"I did; and respected you, too."
"Do you now?"
"Yes."
"Which?"
"How do you mean which?"
"Do you like me, or do you respect me?"
"I don't know--at least, I cannot tell you. It is difficult for a
woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men
to express theirs. My treatment of you was thoughtless, inexcusable,
wicked! I shall eternally regret it. If there had been anything
I could have done to make amends I would most gladly have done
it--there was nothing on earth I so longed to do as to repair the
error. But that was not possible."
"Don't blame yourself--you were not so far in the wrong as you
suppose. Bathsheba, suppose you had real complete proof that you are
what, in fact, you are--a widow--would you repair the old wrong to me
by marrying me?"
"I cannot say. I shouldn't yet, at any rate."
"But you might at some future time of your life?"
"Oh yes, I might at some time."
"Well, then, do you know that without further proof of any kind you
may marry again in about six years from the present--subject to
nobody's objection or blame?"
"Oh yes," she said, quickly. "I know all that. But don't talk of
it--seven or six years--where may we all be by that time?"
"They will soon glide by, and it will seem an astonishingly short
time to look back upon when they are past--much less than to look
forward to now."
"Yes, yes; I have found that in my own experience."
"Now listen once more," Boldwood pleaded. "If I wait that time, will
you marry me? You own that you owe me amends--let that be your way
of making them."
"But, Mr. Boldwood--six years--"
"Do you want to be the wife of any other man?"
"No indeed! I mean, that I don't like to talk about this matter now.
Perhaps it is not proper, and I ought not to allow it. Let us drop
it. My husband may be living, as I said."
"Of course, I'll drop the subject if you wish. But propriety has
nothing to do with reasons. I am a middle-aged man, willing to
protect you for the remainder of our lives. On your side, at least,
there is no passion or blamable haste--on mine, perhaps, there is.
But I can't help seeing that if you choose from a feeling of pity,
and, as you say, a wish to make amends, to make a bargain with me for
a far-ahead time--an agreement which will set all things right and
make me happy, late though it may be--there is no fault to be found
with you as a woman. Hadn't I the first place beside you? Haven't
you been almost mine once already? Surely you can say to me as much
as this, you will have me back again should circumstances permit?
Now, pray speak! O Bathsheba, promise--it is only a little
promise--that if you marry again, you will marry me!"
His tone was so excited that she almost feared him at this moment,
even whilst she sympathized. It was a simple physical fear--the weak
of the strong; there was no emotional aversion or inner repugnance.
She said, with some distress in her voice, for she remembered vividly
his outburst on the Yalbury Road, and shrank from a repetition of his
anger:--
"I will never marry another man whilst you wish me to be your wife,
whatever comes--but to say more--you have taken me so by surprise--"
"But let it stand in these simple words--that in six years' time you
will be my wife? Unexpected accidents we'll not mention, because
those, of course, must be given way to. Now, this time I know you
will keep your word."
"That's why I hesitate to give it."
"But do give it! Remember the past, and be kind."
She breathed; and then said mournfully: "Oh what shall I do? I don't
love you, and I much fear that I never shall love you as much as a
woman ought to love a husband. If you, sir, know that, and I can
yet give you happiness by a mere promise to marry at the end of six
years, if my husband should not come back, it is a great honour to
me. And if you value such an act of friendship from a woman who
doesn't esteem herself as she did, and has little love left, why
I--I will--"
"Promise!"
"--Consider, if I cannot promise soon."
"But soon is perhaps never?"
"Oh no, it is not! I mean soon. Christmas, we'll say."
"Christmas!" He said nothing further till he added: "Well, I'll say
no more to you about it till that time."
Bathsheba was in a very peculiar state of mind, which showed how
entirely the soul is the slave of the body, the ethereal spirit
dependent for its quality upon the tangible flesh and blood. It is
hardly too much to say that she felt coerced by a force stronger than
her own will, not only into the act of promising upon this singularly
remote and vague matter, but into the emotion of fancying that she
ought to promise. When the weeks intervening between the night of
this conversation and Christmas day began perceptibly to diminish,
her anxiety and perplexity increased.
One day she was led by an accident into an oddly confidential
dialogue with Gabriel about her difficulty. It afforded her a little
relief--of a dull and cheerless kind. They were auditing accounts,
and something occurred in the course of their labours which led Oak
to say, speaking of Boldwood, "He'll never forget you, ma'am, never."
Then out came her trouble before she was aware; and she told him how
she had again got into the toils; what Boldwood had asked her, and
how he was expecting her assent. "The most mournful reason of all
for my agreeing to it," she said sadly, "and the true reason why I
think to do so for good or for evil, is this--it is a thing I have
not breathed to a living soul as yet--I believe that if I don't give
my word, he'll go out of his mind."
"Really, do ye?" said Gabriel, gravely.
"I believe this," she continued, with reckless frankness; "and Heaven
knows I say it in a spirit the very reverse of vain, for I am grieved
and troubled to my soul about it--I believe I hold that man's future
in my hand. His career depends entirely upon my treatment of him. O
Gabriel, I tremble at my responsibility, for it is terrible!"
"Well, I think this much, ma'am, as I told you years ago," said Oak,
"that his life is a total blank whenever he isn't hoping for 'ee; but
I can't suppose--I hope that nothing so dreadful hangs on to it as
you fancy. His natural manner has always been dark and strange, you
know. But since the case is so sad and odd-like, why don't ye give
the conditional promise? I think I would."
"But is it right? Some rash acts of my past life have taught me that
a watched woman must have very much circumspection to retain only a
very little credit, and I do want and long to be discreet in this!
And six years--why we may all be in our graves by that time, even if
Mr. Troy does not come back again, which he may not impossibly do!
Such thoughts give a sort of absurdity to the scheme. Now, isn't
it preposterous, Gabriel? However he came to dream of it, I cannot
think. But is it wrong? You know--you are older than I."
"Eight years older, ma'am."
"Yes, eight years--and is it wrong?"
"Perhaps it would be an uncommon agreement for a man and woman to
make: I don't see anything really wrong about it," said Oak, slowly.
"In fact the very thing that makes it doubtful if you ought to marry
en under any condition, that is, your not caring about him--for I
may suppose--"
"Yes, you may suppose that love is wanting," she said shortly. "Love
is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me--for
him or any one else."
"Well, your want of love seems to me the one thing that takes away
harm from such an agreement with him. If wild heat had to do wi'
it, making ye long to over-come the awkwardness about your husband's
vanishing, it mid be wrong; but a cold-hearted agreement to oblige a
man seems different, somehow. The real sin, ma'am in my mind, lies
in thinking of ever wedding wi' a man you don't love honest and
true."
"That I'm willing to pay the penalty of," said Bathsheba, firmly.
"You know, Gabriel, this is what I cannot get off my conscience--that
I once seriously injured him in sheer idleness. If I had never
played a trick upon him, he would never have wanted to marry me. Oh
if I could only pay some heavy damages in money to him for the harm
I did, and so get the sin off my soul that way!... Well, there's
the debt, which can only be discharged in one way, and I believe
I am bound to do it if it honestly lies in my power, without any
consideration of my own future at all. When a rake gambles away his
expectations, the fact that it is an inconvenient debt doesn't make
him the less liable. I've been a rake, and the single point I ask
you is, considering that my own scruples, and the fact that in the
eye of the law my husband is only missing, will keep any man from
marrying me until seven years have passed--am I free to entertain
such an idea, even though 'tis a sort of penance--for it will be
that? I HATE the act of marriage under such circumstances, and the
class of women I should seem to belong to by doing it!"
"It seems to me that all depends upon whe'r you think, as everybody
else do, that your husband is dead."
"Yes--I've long ceased to doubt that. I well know what would have
brought him back long before this time if he had lived."
"Well, then, in a religious sense you will be as free to THINK o'
marrying again as any real widow of one year's standing. But why
don't ye ask Mr. Thirdly's advice on how to treat Mr. Boldwood?"
"No. When I want a broad-minded opinion for general enlightenment,
distinct from special advice, I never go to a man who deals in
the subject professionally. So I like the parson's opinion on
law, the lawyer's on doctoring, the doctor's on business, and my
business-man's--that is, yours--on morals."
"And on love--"
"My own."
"I'm afraid there's a hitch in that argument," said Oak, with a grave
smile.
She did not reply at once, and then saying, "Good evening, Mr. Oak."
went away.
She had spoken frankly, and neither asked nor expected any reply
from Gabriel more satisfactory than that she had obtained. Yet in
the centremost parts of her complicated heart there existed at this
minute a little pang of disappointment, for a reason she would not
allow herself to recognize. Oak had not once wished her free that he
might marry her himself--had not once said, "I could wait for you as
well as he." That was the insect sting. Not that she would have
listened to any such hypothesis. O no--for wasn't she saying all
the time that such thoughts of the future were improper, and wasn't
Gabriel far too poor a man to speak sentiment to her? Yet he might
have just hinted about that old love of his, and asked, in a playful
off-hand way, if he might speak of it. It would have seemed pretty
and sweet, if no more; and then she would have shown how kind and
inoffensive a woman's "No" can sometimes be. But to give such cool
advice--the very advice she had asked for--it ruffled our heroine all
the afternoon.
CONVERGING COURSES
Christmas-eve came, and a party that Boldwood was to give in the
evening was the great subject of talk in Weatherbury. It was not
that the rarity of Christmas parties in the parish made this one a
wonder, but that Boldwood should be the giver. The announcement
had had an abnormal and incongruous sound, as if one should hear of
croquet-playing in a cathedral aisle, or that some much-respected
judge was going upon the stage. That the party was intended to be
a truly jovial one there was no room for doubt. A large bough of
mistletoe had been brought from the woods that day, and suspended
in the hall of the bachelor's home. Holly and ivy had followed in
armfuls. From six that morning till past noon the huge wood fire
in the kitchen roared and sparkled at its highest, the kettle, the
saucepan, and the three-legged pot appearing in the midst of the
flames like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; moreover, roasting
and basting operations were continually carried on in front of the
genial blaze.
As it grew later the fire was made up in the large long hall into
which the staircase descended, and all encumbrances were cleared out
for dancing. The log which was to form the back-brand of the evening
fire was the uncleft trunk of a tree, so unwieldy that it could be
neither brought nor rolled to its place; and accordingly two men were
to be observed dragging and heaving it in by chains and levers as the
hour of assembly drew near.
In spite of all this, the spirit of revelry was wanting in the
atmosphere of the house. Such a thing had never been attempted
before by its owner, and it was now done as by a wrench. Intended
gaieties would insist upon appearing like solemn grandeurs, the
organization of the whole effort was carried out coldly, by
hirelings, and a shadow seemed to move about the rooms, saying that
the proceedings were unnatural to the place and the lone man who
lived therein, and hence not good.
Bathsheba was at this time in her room, dressing for the event. She
had called for candles, and Liddy entered and placed one on each side
of her mistress's glass.
"Don't go away, Liddy," said Bathsheba, almost timidly. "I am
foolishly agitated--I cannot tell why. I wish I had not been obliged
to go to this dance; but there's no escaping now. I have not spoken
to Mr. Boldwood since the autumn, when I promised to see him at
Christmas on business, but I had no idea there was to be anything of
this kind."
"But I would go now," said Liddy, who was going with her; for
Boldwood had been indiscriminate in his invitations.
"Yes, I shall make my appearance, of course," said Bathsheba. "But I
am THE CAUSE of the party, and that upsets me!--Don't tell, Liddy."
"Oh no, ma'am. You the cause of it, ma'am?"
"Yes. I am the reason of the party--I. If it had not been for me,
there would never have been one. I can't explain any more--there's
no more to be explained. I wish I had never seen Weatherbury."
"That's wicked of you--to wish to be worse off than you are."
"No, Liddy. I have never been free from trouble since I have lived
here, and this party is likely to bring me more. Now, fetch my black
silk dress, and see how it sits upon me."
"But you will leave off that, surely, ma'am? You have been a
widow-lady fourteen months, and ought to brighten up a little on
such a night as this."
"Is it necessary? No; I will appear as usual, for if I were to wear
any light dress people would say things about me, and I should seem
to be rejoicing when I am solemn all the time. The party doesn't
suit me a bit; but never mind, stay and help to finish me off."
Boldwood was dressing also at this hour. A tailor from Casterbridge
was with him, assisting him in the operation of trying on a new coat
that had just been brought home.
Never had Boldwood been so fastidious, unreasonable about the fit,
and generally difficult to please. The tailor walked round and round
him, tugged at the waist, pulled the sleeve, pressed out the collar,
and for the first time in his experience Boldwood was not bored.
Times had been when the farmer had exclaimed against all such
niceties as childish, but now no philosophic or hasty rebuke whatever
was provoked by this man for attaching as much importance to a crease
in the coat as to an earthquake in South America. Boldwood at last
expressed himself nearly satisfied, and paid the bill, the tailor
passing out of the door just as Oak came in to report progress for
the day.
"Oh, Oak," said Boldwood. "I shall of course see you here to-night.
Make yourself merry. I am determined that neither expense nor
trouble shall be spared."
"I'll try to be here, sir, though perhaps it may not be very early,"
said Gabriel, quietly. "I am glad indeed to see such a change in
'ee from what it used to be."
"Yes--I must own it--I am bright to-night: cheerful and more than
cheerful--so much so that I am almost sad again with the sense that
all of it is passing away. And sometimes, when I am excessively
hopeful and blithe, a trouble is looming in the distance: so that I
often get to look upon gloom in me with content, and to fear a happy
mood. Still this may be absurd--I feel that it is absurd. Perhaps
my day is dawning at last."
"I hope it 'ill be a long and a fair one."
"Thank you--thank you. Yet perhaps my cheerfulness rests on a
slender hope. And yet I trust my hope. It is faith, not hope. I
think this time I reckon with my host.--Oak, my hands are a little
shaky, or something; I can't tie this neckerchief properly. Perhaps
you will tie it for me. The fact is, I have not been well lately,
you know."
"I am sorry to hear that, sir."
"Oh, it's nothing. I want it done as well as you can, please. Is
there any late knot in fashion, Oak?"
"I don't know, sir," said Oak. His tone had sunk to sadness.
Boldwood approached Gabriel, and as Oak tied the neckerchief the
farmer went on feverishly--
"Does a woman keep her promise, Gabriel?"
"If it is not inconvenient to her she may."
"--Or rather an implied promise."
"I won't answer for her implying," said Oak, with faint bitterness.
"That's a word as full o' holes as a sieve with them."
"Oak, don't talk like that. You have got quite cynical lately--how
is it? We seem to have shifted our positions: I have become the
young and hopeful man, and you the old and unbelieving one. However,
does a woman keep a promise, not to marry, but to enter on an
engagement to marry at some time? Now you know women better than
I--tell me."
"I am afeard you honour my understanding too much. However, she may
keep such a promise, if it is made with an honest meaning to repair
a wrong."
"It has not gone far yet, but I think it will soon--yes, I know it
will," he said, in an impulsive whisper. "I have pressed her upon
the subject, and she inclines to be kind to me, and to think of me
as a husband at a long future time, and that's enough for me. How
can I expect more? She has a notion that a woman should not marry
within seven years of her husband's disappearance--that her own self
shouldn't, I mean--because his body was not found. It may be merely
this legal reason which influences her, or it may be a religious
one, but she is reluctant to talk on the point. Yet she has
promised--implied--that she will ratify an engagement to-night."
"Seven years," murmured Oak.
"No, no--it's no such thing!" he said, with impatience. "Five years,
nine months, and a few days. Fifteen months nearly have passed since
he vanished, and is there anything so wonderful in an engagement of
little more than five years?"
"It seems long in a forward view. Don't build too much upon such
promises, sir. Remember, you have once be'n deceived. Her meaning
may be good; but there--she's young yet."
"Deceived? Never!" said Boldwood, vehemently. "She never promised
me at that first time, and hence she did not break her promise! If
she promises me, she'll marry me. Bathsheba is a woman to her word."
Troy was sitting in a corner of The White Hart tavern at
Casterbridge, smoking and drinking a steaming mixture from a glass.
A knock was given at the door, and Pennyways entered.
"Well, have you seen him?" Troy inquired, pointing to a chair.
"Boldwood?"
"No--Lawyer Long."
"He wadn' at home. I went there first, too."
"That's a nuisance."
"'Tis rather, I suppose."
"Yet I don't see that, because a man appears to be drowned and was
not, he should be liable for anything. I shan't ask any lawyer--not
I."
"But that's not it, exactly. If a man changes his name and so forth,
and takes steps to deceive the world and his own wife, he's a cheat,
and that in the eye of the law is ayless a rogue, and that is ayless
a lammocken vagabond; and that's a punishable situation."
"Ha-ha! Well done, Pennyways," Troy had laughed, but it was with
some anxiety that he said, "Now, what I want to know is this, do you
think there's really anything going on between her and Boldwood?
Upon my soul, I should never have believed it! How she must detest
me! Have you found out whether she has encouraged him?"
"I haen't been able to learn. There's a deal of feeling on his side
seemingly, but I don't answer for her. I didn't know a word about
any such thing till yesterday, and all I heard then was that she was
gwine to the party at his house to-night. This is the first time she
has ever gone there, they say. And they say that she've not so much
as spoke to him since they were at Greenhill Fair: but what can folk
believe o't? However, she's not fond of him--quite offish and quite
careless, I know."
"I'm not so sure of that.... She's a handsome woman, Pennyways, is
she not? Own that you never saw a finer or more splendid creature
in your life. Upon my honour, when I set eyes upon her that day I
wondered what I could have been made of to be able to leave her by
herself so long. And then I was hampered with that bothering show,
which I'm free of at last, thank the stars." He smoked on awhile,
and then added, "How did she look when you passed by yesterday?"
"Oh, she took no great heed of me, ye may well fancy; but she looked
well enough, far's I know. Just flashed her haughty eyes upon my
poor scram body, and then let them go past me to what was yond, much
as if I'd been no more than a leafless tree. She had just got off
her mare to look at the last wring-down of cider for the year; she
had been riding, and so her colours were up and her breath rather
quick, so that her bosom plimmed and fell--plimmed and fell--every
time plain to my eye. Ay, and there were the fellers round her
wringing down the cheese and bustling about and saying, 'Ware o' the
pommy, ma'am: 'twill spoil yer gown.' 'Never mind me,' says she.
Then Gabe brought her some of the new cider, and she must needs go
drinking it through a strawmote, and not in a nateral way at all.
'Liddy,' says she, 'bring indoors a few gallons, and I'll make some
cider-wine.' Sergeant, I was no more to her than a morsel of scroff
in the fuel-house!"
"I must go and find her out at once--O yes, I see that--I must go.
Oak is head man still, isn't he?"
"Yes, 'a b'lieve. And at Little Weatherbury Farm too. He manages
everything."
"'Twill puzzle him to manage her, or any other man of his compass!"
"I don't know about that. She can't do without him, and knowing it
well he's pretty independent. And she've a few soft corners to her
mind, though I've never been able to get into one, the devil's in't!"
"Ah, baily, she's a notch above you, and you must own it: a higher
class of animal--a finer tissue. However, stick to me, and neither
this haughty goddess, dashing piece of womanhood, Juno-wife of mine
(Juno was a goddess, you know), nor anybody else shall hurt you. But
all this wants looking into, I perceive. What with one thing and
another, I see that my work is well cut out for me."
"How do I look to-night, Liddy?" said Bathsheba, giving a final
adjustment to her dress before leaving the glass.
"I never saw you look so well before. Yes--I'll tell you when you
looked like it--that night, a year and a half ago, when you came in
so wildlike, and scolded us for making remarks about you and Mr.
Troy."
"Everybody will think that I am setting myself to captivate Mr.
Boldwood, I suppose," she murmured. "At least they'll say so. Can't
my hair be brushed down a little flatter? I dread going--yet I dread
the risk of wounding him by staying away."
"Anyhow, ma'am, you can't well be dressed plainer than you are,
unless you go in sackcloth at once. 'Tis your excitement is what
makes you look so noticeable to-night."
"I don't know what's the matter, I feel wretched at one time, and
buoyant at another. I wish I could have continued quite alone as I
have been for the last year or so, with no hopes and no fears, and
no pleasure and no grief."
"Now just suppose Mr. Boldwood should ask you--only just suppose
it--to run away with him, what would you do, ma'am?"
"Liddy--none of that," said Bathsheba, gravely. "Mind, I won't hear
joking on any such matter. Do you hear?"
"I beg pardon, ma'am. But knowing what rum things we women be, I
just said--however, I won't speak of it again."
"No marrying for me yet for many a year; if ever, 'twill be for
reasons very, very different from those you think, or others will
believe! Now get my cloak, for it is time to go."
"Oak," said Boldwood, "before you go I want to mention what has been
passing in my mind lately--that little arrangement we made about
your share in the farm I mean. That share is small, too small,
considering how little I attend to business now, and how much time
and thought you give to it. Well, since the world is brightening
for me, I want to show my sense of it by increasing your proportion
in the partnership. I'll make a memorandum of the arrangement which
struck me as likely to be convenient, for I haven't time to talk
about it now; and then we'll discuss it at our leisure. My intention
is ultimately to retire from the management altogether, and until you
can take all the expenditure upon your shoulders, I'll be a sleeping
partner in the stock. Then, if I marry her--and I hope--I feel I
shall, why--"
"Pray don't speak of it, sir," said Oak, hastily. "We don't know
what may happen. So many upsets may befall 'ee. There's many a
slip, as they say--and I would advise you--I know you'll pardon me
this once--not to be TOO SURE."
"I know, I know. But the feeling I have about increasing your share
is on account of what I know of you. Oak, I have learnt a little
about your secret: your interest in her is more than that of bailiff
for an employer. But you have behaved like a man, and I, as a sort
of successful rival--successful partly through your goodness of
heart--should like definitely to show my sense of your friendship
under what must have been a great pain to you."
"O that's not necessary, thank 'ee," said Oak, hurriedly. "I must get
used to such as that; other men have, and so shall I."
Oak then left him. He was uneasy on Boldwood's account, for he saw
anew that this constant passion of the farmer made him not the man
he once had been.
As Boldwood continued awhile in his room alone--ready and dressed to
receive his company--the mood of anxiety about his appearance seemed
to pass away, and to be succeeded by a deep solemnity. He looked out
of the window, and regarded the dim outline of the trees upon the
sky, and the twilight deepening to darkness.
Then he went to a locked closet, and took from a locked drawer
therein a small circular case the size of a pillbox, and was about to
put it into his pocket. But he lingered to open the cover and take
a momentary glance inside. It contained a woman's finger-ring, set
all the way round with small diamonds, and from its appearance had
evidently been recently purchased. Boldwood's eyes dwelt upon its
many sparkles a long time, though that its material aspect concerned
him little was plain from his manner and mien, which were those of
a mind following out the presumed thread of that jewel's future
history.
The noise of wheels at the front of the house became audible.
Boldwood closed the box, stowed it away carefully in his pocket, and
went out upon the landing. The old man who was his indoor factotum
came at the same moment to the foot of the stairs.
"They be coming, sir--lots of 'em--a-foot and a-driving!"
"I was coming down this moment. Those wheels I heard--is it Mrs.
Troy?"
"No, sir--'tis not she yet."
A reserved and sombre expression had returned to Boldwood's face
again, but it poorly cloaked his feelings when he pronounced
Bathsheba's name; and his feverish anxiety continued to show its
existence by a galloping motion of his fingers upon the side of
his thigh as he went down the stairs.
"How does this cover me?" said Troy to Pennyways. "Nobody would
recognize me now, I'm sure."
He was buttoning on a heavy grey overcoat of Noachian cut, with cape
and high collar, the latter being erect and rigid, like a girdling
wall, and nearly reaching to the verge of a travelling cap which was
pulled down over his ears.
Pennyways snuffed the candle, and then looked up and deliberately
inspected Troy.
"You've made up your mind to go then?" he said.
"Made up my mind? Yes; of course I have."
"Why not write to her? 'Tis a very queer corner that you have got
into, sergeant. You see all these things will come to light if you
go back, and they won't sound well at all. Faith, if I was you I'd
even bide as you be--a single man of the name of Francis. A good
wife is good, but the best wife is not so good as no wife at all.
Now that's my outspoke mind, and I've been called a long-headed
feller here and there."
"All nonsense!" said Troy, angrily. "There she is with plenty of
money, and a house and farm, and horses, and comfort, and here am I
living from hand to mouth--a needy adventurer. Besides, it is no use
talking now; it is too late, and I am glad of it; I've been seen and
recognized here this very afternoon. I should have gone back to her
the day after the fair, if it hadn't been for you talking about the
law, and rubbish about getting a separation; and I don't put it off
any longer. What the deuce put it into my head to run away at all, I
can't think! Humbugging sentiment--that's what it was. But what man
on earth was to know that his wife would be in such a hurry to get
rid of his name!"
"I should have known it. She's bad enough for anything."
"Pennyways, mind who you are talking to."
"Well, sergeant, all I say is this, that if I were you I'd go abroad
again where I came from--'tisn't too late to do it now. I wouldn't
stir up the business and get a bad name for the sake of living with
her--for all that about your play-acting is sure to come out, you
know, although you think otherwise. My eyes and limbs, there'll
be a racket if you go back just now--in the middle of Boldwood's
Christmasing!"
"H'm, yes. I expect I shall not be a very welcome guest if he has
her there," said the sergeant, with a slight laugh. "A sort of
Alonzo the Brave; and when I go in the guests will sit in silence and
fear, and all laughter and pleasure will be hushed, and the lights in
the chamber burn blue, and the worms--Ugh, horrible!--Ring for some
more brandy, Pennyways, I felt an awful shudder just then! Well,
what is there besides? A stick--I must have a walking-stick."
Pennyways now felt himself to be in something of a difficulty, for
should Bathsheba and Troy become reconciled it would be necessary
to regain her good opinion if he would secure the patronage of her
husband. "I sometimes think she likes you yet, and is a good woman
at bottom," he said, as a saving sentence. "But there's no telling
to a certainty from a body's outside. Well, you'll do as you like
about going, of course, sergeant, and as for me, I'll do as you tell
me."
"Now, let me see what the time is," said Troy, after emptying his
glass in one draught as he stood. "Half-past six o'clock. I shall
not hurry along the road, and shall be there then before nine."
CONCURRITUR--HORAE MOMENTO
Outside the front of Boldwood's house a group of men stood in the
dark, with their faces towards the door, which occasionally opened
and closed for the passage of some guest or servant, when a golden
rod of light would stripe the ground for the moment and vanish again,
leaving nothing outside but the glowworm shine of the pale lamp amid
the evergreens over the door.
"He was seen in Casterbridge this afternoon--so the boy said," one of
them remarked in a whisper. "And I for one believe it. His body was
never found, you know."
"'Tis a strange story," said the next. "You may depend upon't that
she knows nothing about it."
"Not a word."
"Perhaps he don't mean that she shall," said another man.
"If he's alive and here in the neighbourhood, he means mischief,"
said the first. "Poor young thing: I do pity her, if 'tis true.
He'll drag her to the dogs."
"O no; he'll settle down quiet enough," said one disposed to take a
more hopeful view of the case.
"What a fool she must have been ever to have had anything to do with
the man! She is so self-willed and independent too, that one is more
minded to say it serves her right than pity her."
"No, no. I don't hold with 'ee there. She was no otherwise than a
girl mind, and how could she tell what the man was made of? If 'tis
really true, 'tis too hard a punishment, and more than she ought to
hae.--Hullo, who's that?" This was to some footsteps that were heard
approaching.
"William Smallbury," said a dim figure in the shades, coming up and
joining them. "Dark as a hedge, to-night, isn't it? I all but missed
the plank over the river ath'art there in the bottom--never did such
a thing before in my life. Be ye any of Boldwood's workfolk?" He
peered into their faces.
"Yes--all o' us. We met here a few minutes ago."
"Oh, I hear now--that's Sam Samway: thought I knowed the voice, too.
Going in?"
"Presently. But I say, William," Samway whispered, "have ye heard
this strange tale?"
"What--that about Sergeant Troy being seen, d'ye mean, souls?" said
Smallbury, also lowering his voice.
"Ay: in Casterbridge."
"Yes, I have. Laban Tall named a hint of it to me but now--but I
don't think it. Hark, here Laban comes himself, 'a b'lieve." A
footstep drew near.
"Laban?"
"Yes, 'tis I," said Tall.
"Have ye heard any more about that?"
"No," said Tall, joining the group. "And I'm inclined to think we'd
better keep quiet. If so be 'tis not true, 'twill flurry her, and do
her much harm to repeat it; and if so be 'tis true, 'twill do no good
to forestall her time o' trouble. God send that it mid be a lie, for
though Henery Fray and some of 'em do speak against her, she's never
been anything but fair to me. She's hot and hasty, but she's a brave
girl who'll never tell a lie however much the truth may harm her, and
I've no cause to wish her evil."
"She never do tell women's little lies, that's true; and 'tis a thing
that can be said of very few. Ay, all the harm she thinks she says
to yer face: there's nothing underhand wi' her."
They stood silent then, every man busied with his own thoughts,
during which interval sounds of merriment could be heard within.
Then the front door again opened, the rays streamed out, the
well-known form of Boldwood was seen in the rectangular area of
light, the door closed, and Boldwood walked slowly down the path.
"'Tis master," one of the men whispered, as he neared them. "We'd
better stand quiet--he'll go in again directly. He would think it
unseemly o' us to be loitering here."
Boldwood came on, and passed by the men without seeing them, they
being under the bushes on the grass. He paused, leant over the gate,
and breathed a long breath. They heard low words come from him.
"I hope to God she'll come, or this night will be nothing but misery
to me! Oh my darling, my darling, why do you keep me in suspense
like this?"
He said this to himself, and they all distinctly heard it. Boldwood
remained silent after that, and the noise from indoors was again
just audible, until, a few minutes later, light wheels could be
distinguished coming down the hill. They drew nearer, and ceased at
the gate. Boldwood hastened back to the door, and opened it; and the
light shone upon Bathsheba coming up the path.
Boldwood compressed his emotion to mere welcome: the men marked her
light laugh and apology as she met him: he took her into the house;
and the door closed again.
"Gracious heaven, I didn't know it was like that with him!" said one
of the men. "I thought that fancy of his was over long ago."
"You don't know much of master, if you thought that," said Samway.
"I wouldn't he should know we heard what 'a said for the world,"
remarked a third.
"I wish we had told of the report at once," the first uneasily
continued. "More harm may come of this than we know of. Poor Mr.
Boldwood, it will be hard upon en. I wish Troy was in--Well, God
forgive me for such a wish! A scoundrel to play a poor wife such
tricks. Nothing has prospered in Weatherbury since he came here.
And now I've no heart to go in. Let's look into Warren's for a few
minutes first, shall us, neighbours?"
Samway, Tall, and Smallbury agreed to go to Warren's, and went out at
the gate, the remaining ones entering the house. The three soon drew
near the malt-house, approaching it from the adjoining orchard, and
not by way of the street. The pane of glass was illuminated as
usual. Smallbury was a little in advance of the rest when, pausing,
he turned suddenly to his companions and said, "Hist! See there."
The light from the pane was now perceived to be shining not upon the
ivied wall as usual, but upon some object close to the glass. It was
a human face.
"Let's come closer," whispered Samway; and they approached on tiptoe.
There was no disbelieving the report any longer. Troy's face was
almost close to the pane, and he was looking in. Not only was he
looking in, but he appeared to have been arrested by a conversation
which was in progress in the malt-house, the voices of the
interlocutors being those of Oak and the maltster.
"The spree is all in her honour, isn't it--hey?" said the old man.
"Although he made believe 'tis only keeping up o' Christmas?"
"I cannot say," replied Oak.
"Oh 'tis true enough, faith. I cannot understand Farmer Boldwood
being such a fool at his time of life as to ho and hanker after this
woman in the way 'a do, and she not care a bit about en."
The men, after recognizing Troy's features, withdrew across
the orchard as quietly as they had come. The air was big with
Bathsheba's fortunes to-night: every word everywhere concerned her.
When they were quite out of earshot all by one instinct paused.
"It gave me quite a turn--his face," said Tall, breathing.
"And so it did me," said Samway. "What's to be done?"
"I don't see that 'tis any business of ours," Smallbury murmured
dubiously.
"But it is! 'Tis a thing which is everybody's business," said
Samway. "We know very well that master's on a wrong tack, and that
she's quite in the dark, and we should let 'em know at once. Laban,
you know her best--you'd better go and ask to speak to her."
"I bain't fit for any such thing," said Laban, nervously. "I should
think William ought to do it if anybody. He's oldest."
"I shall have nothing to do with it," said Smallbury. "'Tis a
ticklish business altogether. Why, he'll go on to her himself in a
few minutes, ye'll see."
"We don't know that he will. Come, Laban."
"Very well, if I must I must, I suppose," Tall reluctantly answered.
"What must I say?"
"Just ask to see master."
"Oh no; I shan't speak to Mr. Boldwood. If I tell anybody, 'twill be
mistress."
"Very well," said Samway.
Laban then went to the door. When he opened it the hum of bustle
rolled out as a wave upon a still strand--the assemblage being
immediately inside the hall--and was deadened to a murmur as he
closed it again. Each man waited intently, and looked around at
the dark tree tops gently rocking against the sky and occasionally
shivering in a slight wind, as if he took interest in the scene,
which neither did. One of them began walking up and down, and then
came to where he started from and stopped again, with a sense that
walking was a thing not worth doing now.
"I should think Laban must have seen mistress by this time," said
Smallbury, breaking the silence. "Perhaps she won't come and speak
to him."
The door opened. Tall appeared, and joined them.
"Well?" said both.
"I didn't like to ask for her after all," Laban faltered out. "They
were all in such a stir, trying to put a little spirit into the
party. Somehow the fun seems to hang fire, though everything's there
that a heart can desire, and I couldn't for my soul interfere and
throw damp upon it--if 'twas to save my life, I couldn't!"
"I suppose we had better all go in together," said Samway, gloomily.
"Perhaps I may have a chance of saying a word to master."
So the men entered the hall, which was the room selected and arranged
for the gathering because of its size. The younger men and maids
were at last just beginning to dance. Bathsheba had been perplexed
how to act, for she was not much more than a slim young maid herself,
and the weight of stateliness sat heavy upon her. Sometimes she
thought she ought not to have come under any circumstances; then she
considered what cold unkindness that would have been, and finally
resolved upon the middle course of staying for about an hour only,
and gliding off unobserved, having from the first made up her mind
that she could on no account dance, sing, or take any active part in
the proceedings.
Her allotted hour having been passed in chatting and looking on,
Bathsheba told Liddy not to hurry herself, and went to the small
parlour to prepare for departure, which, like the hall, was decorated
with holly and ivy, and well lighted up.
Nobody was in the room, but she had hardly been there a moment when
the master of the house entered.
"Mrs. Troy--you are not going?" he said. "We've hardly begun!"
"If you'll excuse me, I should like to go now." Her manner was
restive, for she remembered her promise, and imagined what he was
about to say. "But as it is not late," she added, "I can walk home,
and leave my man and Liddy to come when they choose."
"I've been trying to get an opportunity of speaking to you," said
Boldwood. "You know perhaps what I long to say?"
Bathsheba silently looked on the floor.
"You do give it?" he said, eagerly.
"What?" she whispered.
"Now, that's evasion! Why, the promise. I don't want to intrude
upon you at all, or to let it become known to anybody. But do give
your word! A mere business compact, you know, between two people who
are beyond the influence of passion." Boldwood knew how false this
picture was as regarded himself; but he had proved that it was the
only tone in which she would allow him to approach her. "A promise
to marry me at the end of five years and three-quarters. You owe it
to me!"
"I feel that I do," said Bathsheba; "that is, if you demand it. But
I am a changed woman--an unhappy woman--and not--not--"
"You are still a very beautiful woman," said Boldwood. Honesty and
pure conviction suggested the remark, unaccompanied by any perception
that it might have been adopted by blunt flattery to soothe and win
her.
However, it had not much effect now, for she said, in a passionless
murmur which was in itself a proof of her words: "I have no feeling
in the matter at all. And I don't at all know what is right to do
in my difficult position, and I have nobody to advise me. But I
give my promise, if I must. I give it as the rendering of a debt,
conditionally, of course, on my being a widow."
"You'll marry me between five and six years hence?"
"Don't press me too hard. I'll marry nobody else."
"But surely you will name the time, or there's nothing in the promise
at all?"
"Oh, I don't know, pray let me go!" she said, her bosom beginning to
rise. "I am afraid what to do! I want to be just to you, and to be
that seems to be wronging myself, and perhaps it is breaking the
commandments. There is considerable doubt of his death, and then it
is dreadful; let me ask a solicitor, Mr. Boldwood, if I ought or no!"
"Say the words, dear one, and the subject shall be dismissed;
a blissful loving intimacy of six years, and then marriage--O
Bathsheba, say them!" he begged in a husky voice, unable to sustain
the forms of mere friendship any longer. "Promise yourself to me; I
deserve it, indeed I do, for I have loved you more than anybody in
the world! And if I said hasty words and showed uncalled-for heat
of manner towards you, believe me, dear, I did not mean to distress
you; I was in agony, Bathsheba, and I did not know what I said. You
wouldn't let a dog suffer what I have suffered, could you but know
it! Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you,
and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you never will know. Be
gracious, and give up a little to me, when I would give up my life
for you!"
The trimmings of her dress, as they quivered against the light,
showed how agitated she was, and at last she burst out crying. "And
you'll not--press me--about anything more--if I say in five or six
years?" she sobbed, when she had power to frame the words.
"Yes, then I'll leave it to time."
She waited a moment. "Very well. I'll marry you in six years from
this day, if we both live," she said solemnly.
"And you'll take this as a token from me."
Boldwood had come close to her side, and now he clasped one of her
hands in both his own, and lifted it to his breast.
"What is it? Oh I cannot wear a ring!" she exclaimed, on seeing
what he held; "besides, I wouldn't have a soul know that it's an
engagement! Perhaps it is improper? Besides, we are not engaged in
the usual sense, are we? Don't insist, Mr. Boldwood--don't!" In her
trouble at not being able to get her hand away from him at once, she
stamped passionately on the floor with one foot, and tears crowded to
her eyes again.
"It means simply a pledge--no sentiment--the seal of a practical
compact," he said more quietly, but still retaining her hand in
his firm grasp. "Come, now!" And Boldwood slipped the ring on her
finger.
"I cannot wear it," she said, weeping as if her heart would break.
"You frighten me, almost. So wild a scheme! Please let me go home!"
"Only to-night: wear it just to-night, to please me!"
Bathsheba sat down in a chair, and buried her face in her
handkerchief, though Boldwood kept her hand yet. At length she
said, in a sort of hopeless whisper--
"Very well, then, I will to-night, if you wish it so earnestly. Now
loosen my hand; I will, indeed I will wear it to-night."
"And it shall be the beginning of a pleasant secret courtship of six
years, with a wedding at the end?"
"It must be, I suppose, since you will have it so!" she said, fairly
beaten into non-resistance.
Boldwood pressed her hand, and allowed it to drop in her lap. "I am
happy now," he said. "God bless you!"
He left the room, and when he thought she might be sufficiently
composed sent one of the maids to her. Bathsheba cloaked the effects
of the late scene as she best could, followed the girl, and in a few
moments came downstairs with her hat and cloak on, ready to go. To
get to the door it was necessary to pass through the hall, and before
doing so she paused on the bottom of the staircase which descended
into one corner, to take a last look at the gathering.
There was no music or dancing in progress just now. At the lower
end, which had been arranged for the work-folk specially, a group
conversed in whispers, and with clouded looks. Boldwood was standing
by the fireplace, and he, too, though so absorbed in visions arising
from her promise that he scarcely saw anything, seemed at that moment
to have observed their peculiar manner, and their looks askance.
"What is it you are in doubt about, men?" he said.
One of them turned and replied uneasily: "It was something Laban
heard of, that's all, sir."
"News? Anybody married or engaged, born or dead?" inquired the
farmer, gaily. "Tell it to us, Tall. One would think from your
looks and mysterious ways that it was something very dreadful
indeed."
"Oh no, sir, nobody is dead," said Tall.
"I wish somebody was," said Samway, in a whisper.
"What do you say, Samway?" asked Boldwood, somewhat sharply. "If you
have anything to say, speak out; if not, get up another dance."
"Mrs. Troy has come downstairs," said Samway to Tall. "If you want
to tell her, you had better do it now."
"Do you know what they mean?" the farmer asked Bathsheba, across the
room.
"I don't in the least," said Bathsheba.
There was a smart rapping at the door. One of the men opened it
instantly, and went outside.
"Mrs. Troy is wanted," he said, on returning.
"Quite ready," said Bathsheba. "Though I didn't tell them to send."
"It is a stranger, ma'am," said the man by the door.
"A stranger?" she said.
"Ask him to come in," said Boldwood.
The message was given, and Troy, wrapped up to his eyes as we have
seen him, stood in the doorway.
There was an unearthly silence, all looking towards the newcomer.
Those who had just learnt that he was in the neighbourhood recognized
him instantly; those who did not were perplexed. Nobody noted
Bathsheba. She was leaning on the stairs. Her brow had heavily
contracted; her whole face was pallid, her lips apart, her eyes
rigidly staring at their visitor.
Boldwood was among those who did not notice that he was Troy. "Come
in, come in!" he repeated, cheerfully, "and drain a Christmas beaker
with us, stranger!"
Troy next advanced into the middle of the room, took off his cap,
turned down his coat-collar, and looked Boldwood in the face. Even
then Boldwood did not recognize that the impersonator of Heaven's
persistent irony towards him, who had once before broken in upon his
bliss, scourged him, and snatched his delight away, had come to do
these things a second time. Troy began to laugh a mechanical laugh:
Boldwood recognized him now.
Troy turned to Bathsheba. The poor girl's wretchedness at this time
was beyond all fancy or narration. She had sunk down on the lowest
stair; and there she sat, her mouth blue and dry, and her dark eyes
fixed vacantly upon him, as if she wondered whether it were not all
a terrible illusion.
Then Troy spoke. "Bathsheba, I come here for you!"
She made no reply.
"Come home with me: come!"
Bathsheba moved her feet a little, but did not rise. Troy went
across to her.
"Come, madam, do you hear what I say?" he said, peremptorily.
A strange voice came from the fireplace--a voice sounding far off
and confined, as if from a dungeon. Hardly a soul in the assembly
recognized the thin tones to be those of Boldwood. Sudden despair
had transformed him.
"Bathsheba, go with your husband!"
Nevertheless, she did not move. The truth was that Bathsheba was
beyond the pale of activity--and yet not in a swoon. She was in a
state of mental _gutta serena_; her mind was for the minute totally
deprived of light at the same time no obscuration was apparent from
without.
Troy stretched out his hand to pull her her towards him, when she
quickly shrank back. This visible dread of him seemed to irritate
Troy, and he seized her arm and pulled it sharply. Whether his grasp
pinched her, or whether his mere touch was the cause, was never
known, but at the moment of his seizure she writhed, and gave a
quick, low scream.
The scream had been heard but a few seconds when it was followed by
sudden deafening report that echoed through the room and stupefied
them all. The oak partition shook with the concussion, and the place
was filled with grey smoke.
In bewilderment they turned their eyes to Boldwood. At his back,
as stood before the fireplace, was a gun-rack, as is usual in
farmhouses, constructed to hold two guns. When Bathsheba had cried
out in her husband's grasp, Boldwood's face of gnashing despair had
changed. The veins had swollen, and a frenzied look had gleamed in
his eye. He had turned quickly, taken one of the guns, cocked it,
and at once discharged it at Troy.
Troy fell. The distance apart of the two men was so small that
the charge of shot did not spread in the least, but passed like a
bullet into his body. He uttered a long guttural sigh--there was
a contraction--an extension--then his muscles relaxed, and he lay
still.
Boldwood was seen through the smoke to be now again engaged with the
gun. It was double-barrelled, and he had, meanwhile, in some way
fastened his hand-kerchief to the trigger, and with his foot on the
other end was in the act of turning the second barrel upon himself.
Samway his man was the first to see this, and in the midst of the
general horror darted up to him. Boldwood had already twitched
the handkerchief, and the gun exploded a second time, sending its
contents, by a timely blow from Samway, into the beam which crossed
the ceiling.
"Well, it makes no difference!" Boldwood gasped. "There is another
way for me to die."
Then he broke from Samway, crossed the room to Bathsheba, and kissed
her hand. He put on his hat, opened the door, and went into the
darkness, nobody thinking of preventing him.
| 23,036 | Chapters 46-53 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210108004047/https://www.gradesaver.com/far-from-the-madding-crowd/study-guide/summary-chapters-46-53 | While passing along the deserted beach near Budmouth, Troy decides to try and settle his emotions by taking a swim. He leaves his clothes on the beach and paddles out, only to get caught in a powerful current and dragged out to sea. At the last moment, he is saved by a boat of soldiers. When they row him back to shore, his clothes and money are gone; when the sailors invite him to join them on their upcoming voyage, Troy impulsively agrees. Back at the farm, word comes to Bathsheba that her husband has drowned. She finds this hard to believe, but there is strong evidence since an eye witness saw Troy being swept out to sea, and his clothes were found to identify him with. For all intents and purposes, Bathsheba is treated as a widow, which raises the hopes of Boldwood that he might someday court her. In the short term, Bathsheba formalizes Gabriel's position as the bailiff of the farm, and he is subsequently hired by Boldwood to manage the other farm as well. After some months have passed, Boldwood asks Liddy if there have been any hints of Bathsheba intending to remarry. Liddy tells him that Bathsheba once commented she intended to wait 6 more years before thinking about marriage, and Boldwood commits himself to waiting as long as it takes in pursuit of Bathsheba. In the autumn, almost a year after Fanny's death and Troy's disappearance, Bathsheba and her workers go to the annual sheep fair to display their flocks and conduct business. They are not aware that Troy is also present at the fair, as a member of a travelling circus. Troy had sailed to America and spent some time there teaching sword fighting and boxing, but grew tired of living in poverty and instability. He returned to England planning to reunite with Bathsheba but then found the idea of having to cope with her anger unappealing and impulsively joined the circus instead. Just before he is due to go onstage, Troy peeks out and is dismayed to find Bathsheba and Boldwood sitting in the audience. He improvises by increasing his disguise and refusing to speak during his performance, and manages to perform undetected. However, he notices with alarm that Bathsheba's former bailiff Pennyways has sighted him, and he suspects Pennyways will seize this opportunity to upset his former employer. Troy sneaks around to the far side of the tent where Boldwood and Bathsheba are and cuts a hole to listen through. He sees Pennyways come over to deliver a message, which he knows reveals that Troy is present at the fair. Bathsheba, however, is annoyed with Pennyways and does not open the note immediately, letting it dangle in her fingers. Troy seizes the note through the hole in the canvas and takes off. He then finds Pennyways and arranges to meet with him in order to protect his secret. Meanwhile, Boldwood and Bathsheba travel home together. Boldwood raises the question of her marrying again, and asks if she would consider marrying him. Bathsheba agrees first that she will not marry anyone else so long as Boldwood wants her, and then that by Christmastime she will answer whether or not she will marry him in 6 years' time. Bathsheba later discusses the situation with Gabriel, who tells her he sees nothing wrong with her considering marrying Boldwood, though he would prefer to see her married to someone she genuinely loves. Bathsheba finds herself somewhat annoyed that Gabriel did not seize this opportunity to raise the possibility of her remarrying him rather than Boldwood. On Christmas Eve, Boldwood hosts a large party at his home. Bathsheba is anxious, since she knows he will expect her to agree to an engagement. Boldwood is hopeful and optimistic, even though Gabriel cautions him that their engagement would be a lengthy one, and much could change. Meanwhile, Troy has been relying on Pennyways to provide him with information about Bathsheba and has learned that there are rumors she may be planning to marry Boldwood. He decides to go to the Christmas party in disguise. Outside of the Christmas party, some of the farmworkers discuss the rumors that Troy has been sighted around the town, and debate whether or not to tell Bathsheba. They decide not to, since they do not want to upset her, and they know that Boldwood has planned the entire party in her honor. However, when they catch sight of Troy lurking outside of the house, they decide they must alert their mistress. Inside, Bathsheba has quickly grown tired of the party, and withdraws in order to get ready to leave. Boldwood finds her and pressures her to agree to marry him. After protesting, Bathsheba agrees that she will marry Boldwood in 6 years, although she tries to object to him giving her a ring. Boldwood finally leaves her alone, and Bathsheba heads for the exit. As she passes through the party, she interrupts a conversation between Boldwood and a group of men. Boldwood noticed the men whispering amongst themselves and wants to find out what is happening. Before the group can get to the bottom of it, Troy enters the room. He is heavily wrapped up so some people, including Boldwood, do not immediately recognize him. However, he quickly reveals himself and demands that Bathsheba leave with him. She is frozen and in shock. Troy tries to grab her, and when he does so, Boldwood shoots him. He then tries to turn the gun on himself, but one of the servants prevents him, and he simply walks out of the house. He goes to the local police office and turns himself in. As news of the violence spreads, Gabriel hurries to the Boldwood farm. He finds Bathsheba calmly tending to Troy who is already dead. She sends him to get a doctor, but by the time Gabriel and the doctor return, she has taken Troy's body back to her own house. The two men hurry to Bathsheba's farmhouse to find that she has washed and prepared the corpse for burial. | Although Troy seemed to show genuine remorse at the time of Fanny's death, he quickly reverts to his self-centered and reckless behavior. By impulsively deciding to sail to America without sending any word of his whereabouts, Troy does not consider what impact this will have on Bathsheba's life. He simply wants to run away from his problems and avoid unpleasant consequences. However, he still feels entitled to the social status and comfortable life Bathsheba's spouse would enjoy. His hesitation around revealing his identity is rooted in his desire to maximize getting what he wants. He is not at all concerned with any problems or needs his wife might have. Boldwood's behavior is somewhat parallel to Troy's in the way that he is utterly fixated on getting what he wants, and does not care very much about other people's feelings. When Boldwood witnesses Bathsheba learning that Troy is assumed to be dead, he is not upset to see her suffering. Instead, he is hopeful that he now has a chance to marry her after all. He does at least wait a decent interval before beginning to enquire, and even though 6 years is a very long time, he is prepared to endure the wait. Still, Bathsheba's hesitation and doubt should make it clear that she is not truly happy about the prospect of marrying him, and yet he still persists in nagging at her to give him an answer. The way Troy treats her at the Christmas party highlights Bathsheba's passivity and the way she is viewed as an object men can claim ownership of. He tries to literally seize her and drag her away while she seems frozen in shock. Even though everyone at the party also seems horrified, they do not intervene. The relationship between a man and his wife largely meant that he could treat her however he wanted, and in that sense Boldwood's act of violence seems like a brave intervention. At the same time, he behaves in a radical and extreme way, and seems to need to vent his fury more so than protect a vulnerable woman. Once Troy is dead, Bathsheba returns to being calm, collected, and able to take charge of a situation. In a sense, it is as if his death reverses everything that has happened since they met, and she goes back to being the strong-willed and capable woman from the earlier parts of the novel. She has always been suspicious of whether or not he was actually dead, and now with his corpse lying in front of her she can be sure once and for all that she is free from her unfortunate marriage. While this does seem to liberate her to become independent and active again, it is also clearly traumatic for her. Bathsheba's fear has been for a long time that the rivalry amongst her suitors could lead to violence, and now this threat has come true. | 1,016 | 488 | [
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5,658 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/chapters_20_to_21.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Lord Jim/section_14_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapters 20-21 | chapters 20-21 | null | {"name": "Chapters 20-21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219145744/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/l/lord-jim/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2021", "summary": "Marlow entered Stein's house late in the evening and was struck immediately by the dramatic figure of the old man, sitting at his desk, washed in the glow of a single spot of light in the darkened room. Then Marlow's eyes caught the outlines of the cases containing Stein's hobbies. He was surrounded by catacombs of beetles and long glass cases of butterflies. \"Marvelous,\" Stein whispered over one of the cases of butterflies. Marlow admired one butterfly in particular, and Stein told him that a butterfly was a masterpiece of nature. In comparison, man was amazing, but he was no masterpiece. Then Stein told Marlow how he had acquired this particular specimen. One day while on the outpost where he lived for so many years, he was called away to a meeting. The summons was fraudulent, however, and Stein encountered an ambush. But he feigned death and was able to kill three soldiers and drive off the others. He looked at one of the men whom he had killed, and suddenly, a shadow seemed to pass over the dead man's forehead. It was this very butterfly, a particularly rare variety that he had dreamed of and searched for all his life. Suddenly, here it was, fluttering slowly away from the corpse of a man who had tried to murder him. Acting just as instantly as he had during the ambush attempt, he clapped his hat over the butterfly. Immediately, Stein was so stunned by his good fortune that his knees collapsed under him. Life had reached its climax for him at that moment. Stein wanted nothing more. He had been victorious against his enemies, he had a beloved wife and daughter, and now he had the butterfly of his dreams. Marlow told Stein that he had come to him to discuss another kind of rare specimen -- a rare specimen of a man. Then he began describing Jim's unusual nature. Stein murmured that he understood Jim well: Jim was a romantic. Marlow accepted the diagnosis immediately. But what was to be done to cure him? he asked Stein. Stein answered that it was futile to try and \"cure\" a romantic. Instead, one should focus on helping him to understand how to live with his romanticism -- that is, \"how to live. . . . How to be. Ach! How to be.\" A man, he said, is born and it is as though he has fallen into a sea, a dream. And if he tries to crawl out of his dream, he drowns. To triumph in this sea of dreams, he must immerse himself in the destructive element and battle it into submission in his own individual way. \"Reality\" is only a dream; we should treat it with great seriousness, and yet we should hold ourselves at a distance from it, knowing that none of it matters ultimately. Thus, we are prevented from \"taking matters too much to heart.\" Jim's problem, Stein said, was taking matters \"too much to heart.\" He proposed that, for the present, he and Marlow should retire. In the morning, they would speak of \"practical\" solutions to Jim's problem. They would not try to cure Jim of his romanticism; instead, they would search for ways that they could give Jim a chance to live successfully with his romanticism. Marlow begins Chapter 21 by explaining where the settlement of Patusan is. It is a little-known post in the Malay Islands, forty miles inland and upriver, controlled by three warring factions. It is known to very few people in the mercantile world. Two years after Jim accepted Stein's offer of resident manager of the trading post, Marlow went to visit him in Patusan, and he marveled at the change that had been wrought in the young man. Clearly, Jim had accomplished much and had regulated much in Patusan. Marlow, of course, was filled with happiness. Jim's victory over his self-punishing romanticism had been an excellent triumph. And it was a victory, Marlow says, \"in which I had taken my part.\" Jim had achieved greatness. In fact, he had achieved such greatness that most of those who heard about it could never fathom it because their imaginations were too starved and too dull. Comparing Jim, who was once so flawed as to seem suicidal, with the masses of other men, Marlow says that Jim was like a \"light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone -- and as short-lived, alas!\"", "analysis": "In Chapter 19, Marlow had decided to take Jim's problems to a wealthy merchant named Stein, a respected and trustworthy man. Stein was also a world-renowned collector of rare butterflies and beetles. Marlow now offers us a history to Mr. Stein. The main point of this digression is to show us Stein's reaction to treachery, ambush, and betrayal as opposed to the capture of the most beautiful butterfly in the world. In other words, Stein thinks nothing of being betrayed, ambushed, and shot at by would-be assassins , but when, in the next moment, he finds one of the rarest butterflies in the world, his knees collapse with wonderment and joy. Therefore, this digression shows Stein to be probably one of the most magnificent romantics in the world, and thus, he will recognize immediately that Jim is also a romantic. Indeed, after hearing Jim's story, Stein immediately pronounces: \"He is romantic -- romantic.\" Clearly, Stein identifies with Jim and thinks of how many wonderful opportunities have come his way that he has missed while Jim has missed only one -- the chance to be the hero of the Patna episode instead of its scapegoat. Stein then suggests to Marlow that their problem is not how to cure Jim, but instead, how to teach him to live with himself. Chapter 21 introduces us to Patusan, where it is decided that Jim will be sent to replace the present, dishonest manager. The importance of Patusan is that it is the most isolated place in that part of the world. Consequently, it will allow Jim to be extremely isolated and so preoccupied that he will not have time to confront himself with massive attacks of guilt and self-recrimination. At the end of this chapter, we gain somewhat of an understanding of why Marlow has taken such pains with Jim: Marlow believes that \"We exist only in so far as we hang together,\" and since Jim is one of us, it becomes necessary for Marlow and Stein to look after Jim."} | 'Late in the evening I entered his study, after traversing an imposing
but empty dining-room very dimly lit. The house was silent. I was
preceded by an elderly grim Javanese servant in a sort of livery of
white jacket and yellow sarong, who, after throwing the door open,
exclaimed low, "O master!" and stepping aside, vanished in a mysterious
way as though he had been a ghost only momentarily embodied for that
particular service. Stein turned round with the chair, and in the same
movement his spectacles seemed to get pushed up on his forehead. He
welcomed me in his quiet and humorous voice. Only one corner of the vast
room, the corner in which stood his writing-desk, was strongly lighted
by a shaded reading-lamp, and the rest of the spacious apartment melted
into shapeless gloom like a cavern. Narrow shelves filled with dark
boxes of uniform shape and colour ran round the walls, not from floor
to ceiling, but in a sombre belt about four feet broad. Catacombs of
beetles. Wooden tablets were hung above at irregular intervals. The
light reached one of them, and the word Coleoptera written in gold
letters glittered mysteriously upon a vast dimness. The glass cases
containing the collection of butterflies were ranged in three long rows
upon slender-legged little tables. One of these cases had been removed
from its place and stood on the desk, which was bestrewn with oblong
slips of paper blackened with minute handwriting.
'"So you see me--so," he said. His hand hovered over the case where
a butterfly in solitary grandeur spread out dark bronze wings, seven
inches or more across, with exquisite white veinings and a gorgeous
border of yellow spots. "Only one specimen like this they have in _your_
London, and then--no more. To my small native town this my collection I
shall bequeath. Something of me. The best."
'He bent forward in the chair and gazed intently, his chin over the
front of the case. I stood at his back. "Marvellous," he whispered, and
seemed to forget my presence. His history was curious. He had been born
in Bavaria, and when a youth of twenty-two had taken an active part in
the revolutionary movement of 1848. Heavily compromised, he managed
to make his escape, and at first found a refuge with a poor republican
watchmaker in Trieste. From there he made his way to Tripoli with a
stock of cheap watches to hawk about,--not a very great opening truly,
but it turned out lucky enough, because it was there he came upon a
Dutch traveller--a rather famous man, I believe, but I don't remember
his name. It was that naturalist who, engaging him as a sort of
assistant, took him to the East. They travelled in the Archipelago
together and separately, collecting insects and birds, for four years or
more. Then the naturalist went home, and Stein, having no home to go to,
remained with an old trader he had come across in his journeys in the
interior of Celebes--if Celebes may be said to have an interior. This
old Scotsman, the only white man allowed to reside in the country at the
time, was a privileged friend of the chief ruler of Wajo States, who
was a woman. I often heard Stein relate how that chap, who was slightly
paralysed on one side, had introduced him to the native court a short
time before another stroke carried him off. He was a heavy man with
a patriarchal white beard, and of imposing stature. He came into
the council-hall where all the rajahs, pangerans, and headmen were
assembled, with the queen, a fat wrinkled woman (very free in her
speech, Stein said), reclining on a high couch under a canopy. He
dragged his leg, thumping with his stick, and grasped Stein's arm,
leading him right up to the couch. "Look, queen, and you rajahs, this is
my son," he proclaimed in a stentorian voice. "I have traded with your
fathers, and when I die he shall trade with you and your sons."
'By means of this simple formality Stein inherited the Scotsman's
privileged position and all his stock-in-trade, together with a
fortified house on the banks of the only navigable river in the country.
Shortly afterwards the old queen, who was so free in her speech, died,
and the country became disturbed by various pretenders to the throne.
Stein joined the party of a younger son, the one of whom thirty years
later he never spoke otherwise but as "my poor Mohammed Bonso." They
both became the heroes of innumerable exploits; they had wonderful
adventures, and once stood a siege in the Scotsman's house for a month,
with only a score of followers against a whole army. I believe the
natives talk of that war to this day. Meantime, it seems, Stein never
failed to annex on his own account every butterfly or beetle he could
lay hands on. After some eight years of war, negotiations, false truces,
sudden outbreaks, reconciliation, treachery, and so on, and just as
peace seemed at last permanently established, his "poor Mohammed
Bonso" was assassinated at the gate of his own royal residence while
dismounting in the highest spirits on his return from a successful
deer-hunt. This event rendered Stein's position extremely insecure,
but he would have stayed perhaps had it not been that a short time
afterwards he lost Mohammed's sister ("my dear wife the princess," he
used to say solemnly), by whom he had had a daughter--mother and child
both dying within three days of each other from some infectious fever.
He left the country, which this cruel loss had made unbearable to
him. Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What
followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which
remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream. He
had a little money; he started life afresh, and in the course of years
acquired a considerable fortune. At first he had travelled a good deal
amongst the islands, but age had stolen upon him, and of late he seldom
left his spacious house three miles out of town, with an extensive
garden, and surrounded by stables, offices, and bamboo cottages for
his servants and dependants, of whom he had many. He drove in his buggy
every morning to town, where he had an office with white and Chinese
clerks. He owned a small fleet of schooners and native craft, and dealt
in island produce on a large scale. For the rest he lived solitary,
but not misanthropic, with his books and his collection, classing and
arranging specimens, corresponding with entomologists in Europe, writing
up a descriptive catalogue of his treasures. Such was the history of
the man whom I had come to consult upon Jim's case without any definite
hope. Simply to hear what he would have to say would have been a relief.
I was very anxious, but I respected the intense, almost passionate,
absorption with which he looked at a butterfly, as though on the bronze
sheen of these frail wings, in the white tracings, in the gorgeous
markings, he could see other things, an image of something as perishable
and defying destruction as these delicate and lifeless tissues
displaying a splendour unmarred by death.
'"Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The beauty--but
that is nothing--look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And
so strong! And so exact! This is Nature--the balance of colossal forces.
Every star is so--and every blade of grass stands so--and the mighty
Kosmos ib perfect equilibrium produces--this. This wonder; this
masterpiece of Nature--the great artist."
'"Never heard an entomologist go on like this," I observed cheerfully.
"Masterpiece! And what of man?"
'"Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece," he said, keeping his
eyes fixed on the glass case. "Perhaps the artist was a little mad. Eh?
What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is
not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should
he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making
a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the
blades of grass? . . ."
'"Catching butterflies," I chimed in.
'He smiled, threw himself back in his chair, and stretched his legs.
"Sit down," he said. "I captured this rare specimen myself one very fine
morning. And I had a very big emotion. You don't know what it is for a
collector to capture such a rare specimen. You can't know."
'I smiled at my ease in a rocking-chair. His eyes seemed to look far
beyond the wall at which they stared; and he narrated how, one night,
a messenger arrived from his "poor Mohammed," requiring his presence
at the "residenz"--as he called it--which was distant some nine or ten
miles by a bridle-path over a cultivated plain, with patches of forest
here and there. Early in the morning he started from his fortified
house, after embracing his little Emma, and leaving the "princess," his
wife, in command. He described how she came with him as far as the
gate, walking with one hand on the neck of his horse; she had on a white
jacket, gold pins in her hair, and a brown leather belt over her left
shoulder with a revolver in it. "She talked as women will talk," he
said, "telling me to be careful, and to try to get back before dark, and
what a great wickedness it was for me to go alone. We were at war, and
the country was not safe; my men were putting up bullet-proof shutters
to the house and loading their rifles, and she begged me to have no fear
for her. She could defend the house against anybody till I returned. And
I laughed with pleasure a little. I liked to see her so brave and young
and strong. I too was young then. At the gate she caught hold of my
hand and gave it one squeeze and fell back. I made my horse stand still
outside till I heard the bars of the gate put up behind me. There was a
great enemy of mine, a great noble--and a great rascal too--roaming with
a band in the neighbourhood. I cantered for four or five miles; there
had been rain in the night, but the musts had gone up, up--and the
face of the earth was clean; it lay smiling to me, so fresh and
innocent--like a little child. Suddenly somebody fires a volley--twenty
shots at least it seemed to me. I hear bullets sing in my ear, and
my hat jumps to the back of my head. It was a little intrigue, you
understand. They got my poor Mohammed to send for me and then laid
that ambush. I see it all in a minute, and I think--This wants a little
management. My pony snort, jump, and stand, and I fall slowly forward
with my head on his mane. He begins to walk, and with one eye I could
see over his neck a faint cloud of smoke hanging in front of a clump
of bamboos to my left. I think--Aha! my friends, why you not wait long
enough before you shoot? This is not yet gelungen. Oh no! I get hold of
my revolver with my right hand--quiet--quiet. After all, there were only
seven of these rascals. They get up from the grass and start running
with their sarongs tucked up, waving spears above their heads, and
yelling to each other to look out and catch the horse, because I was
dead. I let them come as close as the door here, and then bang, bang,
bang--take aim each time too. One more shot I fire at a man's back, but
I miss. Too far already. And then I sit alone on my horse with the clean
earth smiling at me, and there are the bodies of three men lying on the
ground. One was curled up like a dog, another on his back had an arm
over his eyes as if to keep off the sun, and the third man he draws up
his leg very slowly and makes it with one kick straight again. I watch
him very carefully from my horse, but there is no more--bleibt ganz
ruhig--keep still, so. And as I looked at his face for some sign of life
I observed something like a faint shadow pass over his forehead. It was
the shadow of this butterfly. Look at the form of the wing. This species
fly high with a strong flight. I raised my eyes and I saw him fluttering
away. I think--Can it be possible? And then I lost him. I dismounted
and went on very slow, leading my horse and holding my revolver with one
hand and my eyes darting up and down and right and left, everywhere! At
last I saw him sitting on a small heap of dirt ten feet away. At once
my heart began to beat quick. I let go my horse, keep my revolver in one
hand, and with the other snatch my soft felt hat off my head. One step.
Steady. Another step. Flop! I got him! When I got up I shook like a leaf
with excitement, and when I opened these beautiful wings and made sure
what a rare and so extraordinary perfect specimen I had, my head went
round and my legs became so weak with emotion that I had to sit on the
ground. I had greatly desired to possess myself of a specimen of that
species when collecting for the professor. I took long journeys and
underwent great privations; I had dreamed of him in my sleep, and here
suddenly I had him in my fingers--for myself! In the words of the poet"
(he pronounced it "boet")--
"'So halt' ich's endlich denn in meinen Handen,
Und nenn' es in gewissem Sinne mein.'"
He gave to the last word the emphasis of a suddenly lowered voice, and
withdrew his eyes slowly from my face. He began to charge a long-stemmed
pipe busily and in silence, then, pausing with his thumb on the orifice
of the bowl, looked again at me significantly.
'"Yes, my good friend. On that day I had nothing to desire; I had
greatly annoyed my principal enemy; I was young, strong; I had
friendship; I had the love" (he said "lof") "of woman, a child I had,
to make my heart very full--and even what I had once dreamed in my sleep
had come into my hand too!"
'He struck a match, which flared violently. His thoughtful placid face
twitched once.
'"Friend, wife, child," he said slowly, gazing at the small
flame--"phoo!" The match was blown out. He sighed and turned again to
the glass case. The frail and beautiful wings quivered faintly, as if
his breath had for an instant called back to life that gorgeous object
of his dreams.
'"The work," he began suddenly, pointing to the scattered slips, and in
his usual gentle and cheery tone, "is making great progress. I have been
this rare specimen describing. . . . Na! And what is your good news?"
'"To tell you the truth, Stein," I said with an effort that surprised
me, "I came here to describe a specimen. . . ."
'"Butterfly?" he asked, with an unbelieving and humorous eagerness.
'"Nothing so perfect," I answered, feeling suddenly dispirited with all
sorts of doubts. "A man!"
'"Ach so!" he murmured, and his smiling countenance, turned to me,
became grave. Then after looking at me for a while he said slowly,
"Well--I am a man too."
'Here you have him as he was; he knew how to be so generously
encouraging as to make a scrupulous man hesitate on the brink of
confidence; but if I did hesitate it was not for long.
'He heard me out, sitting with crossed legs. Sometimes his head would
disappear completely in a great eruption of smoke, and a sympathetic
growl would come out from the cloud. When I finished he uncrossed his
legs, laid down his pipe, leaned forward towards me earnestly with his
elbows on the arms of his chair, the tips of his fingers together.
'"I understand very well. He is romantic."
'He had diagnosed the case for me, and at first I was quite startled to
find how simple it was; and indeed our conference resembled so much a
medical consultation--Stein, of learned aspect, sitting in an arm-chair
before his desk; I, anxious, in another, facing him, but a little to one
side--that it seemed natural to ask--
'"What's good for it?"
'He lifted up a long forefinger.
'"There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us from being ourselves
cure!" The finger came down on the desk with a smart rap. The case
which he had made to look so simple before became if possible still
simpler--and altogether hopeless. There was a pause. "Yes," said I,
"strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to
live."
'He approved with his head, a little sadly as it seemed. "Ja! ja! In
general, adapting the words of your great poet: That is the
question. . . ." He went on nodding sympathetically. . . . "How to be!
Ach! How to be."
'He stood up with the tips of his fingers resting on the desk.
'"We want in so many different ways to be," he began again. "This
magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it;
but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He want to be so,
and again he want to be so. . . ." He moved his hand up, then down. . . .
"He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil--and every time he
shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow--so fine as he can
never be. . . . In a dream. . . ."
'He lowered the glass lid, the automatic lock clicked sharply, and
taking up the case in both hands he bore it religiously away to its
place, passing out of the bright circle of the lamp into the ring of
fainter light--into shapeless dusk at last. It had an odd effect--as
if these few steps had carried him out of this concrete and perplexed
world. His tall form, as though robbed of its substance, hovered
noiselessly over invisible things with stooping and indefinite
movements; his voice, heard in that remoteness where he could be
glimpsed mysteriously busy with immaterial cares, was no longer
incisive, seemed to roll voluminous and grave--mellowed by distance.
'"And because you not always can keep your eyes shut there comes the
real trouble--the heart pain--the world pain. I tell you, my friend, it
is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for
the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. . . .
Ja! . . . And all the time you are such a fine fellow too! Wie? Was?
Gott im Himmel! How can that be? Ha! ha! ha!"
'The shadow prowling amongst the graves of butterflies laughed
boisterously.
'"Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into
a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into
the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns--nicht wahr?
. . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit
yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water
make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me--how to be?"
'His voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, as though away there in
the dusk he had been inspired by some whisper of knowledge. "I will tell
you! For that too there is only one way."
'With a hasty swish-swish of his slippers he loomed up in the ring of
faint light, and suddenly appeared in the bright circle of the lamp. His
extended hand aimed at my breast like a pistol; his deepset eyes seemed
to pierce through me, but his twitching lips uttered no word, and the
austere exaltation of a certitude seen in the dusk vanished from his
face. The hand that had been pointing at my breast fell, and by-and-by,
coming a step nearer, he laid it gently on my shoulder. There were
things, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only he
had lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot--he forgot. The light
had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant
shadows. He sat down and, with both elbows on the desk, rubbed his
forehead. "And yet it is true--it is true. In the destructive element
immerse." . . . He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one
hand on each side of his face. "That was the way. To follow the dream,
and again to follow the dream--and so--ewig--usque ad finem. . . ." The
whisper of his conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain
expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn--or was it,
perchance, at the coming of the night? One had not the courage to
decide; but it was a charming and deceptive light, throwing the
impalpable poesy of its dimness over pitfalls--over graves. His life had
begun in sacrifice, in enthusiasm for generous ideas; he had travelled
very far, on various ways, on strange paths, and whatever he followed
it had been without faltering, and therefore without shame and without
regret. In so far he was right. That was the way, no doubt. Yet for all
that, the great plain on which men wander amongst graves and pitfalls
remained very desolate under the impalpable poesy of its crepuscular
light, overshadowed in the centre, circled with a bright edge as if
surrounded by an abyss full of flames. When at last I broke the silence
it was to express the opinion that no one could be more romantic than
himself.
'He shook his head slowly, and afterwards looked at me with a patient
and inquiring glance. It was a shame, he said. There we were sitting
and talking like two boys, instead of putting our heads together to find
something practical--a practical remedy--for the evil--for the great
evil--he repeated, with a humorous and indulgent smile. For all that,
our talk did not grow more practical. We avoided pronouncing Jim's name
as though we had tried to keep flesh and blood out of our discussion,
or he were nothing but an erring spirit, a suffering and nameless shade.
"Na!" said Stein, rising. "To-night you sleep here, and in the morning
we shall do something practical--practical. . . ." He lit a two-branched
candlestick and led the way. We passed through empty dark rooms,
escorted by gleams from the lights Stein carried. They glided along the
waxed floors, sweeping here and there over the polished surface of
a table, leaped upon a fragmentary curve of a piece of furniture, or
flashed perpendicularly in and out of distant mirrors, while the forms
of two men and the flicker of two flames could be seen for a moment
stealing silently across the depths of a crystalline void. He walked
slowly a pace in advance with stooping courtesy; there was a profound,
as it were a listening, quietude on his face; the long flaxen locks
mixed with white threads were scattered thinly upon his slightly bowed
neck.
'"He is romantic--romantic," he repeated. "And that is very bad--very
bad. . . . Very good, too," he added. "But _is he_?" I queried.
'"Gewiss," he said, and stood still holding up the candelabrum, but
without looking at me. "Evident! What is it that by inward pain makes
him know himself? What is it that for you and me makes him--exist?"
'At that moment it was difficult to believe in Jim's existence--starting
from a country parsonage, blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of
dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material
world--but his imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with
an irresistible force! I saw it vividly, as though in our progress
through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and
the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames
within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to
absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half
submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. "Perhaps he is," I
admitted with a slight laugh, whose unexpectedly loud reverberation
made me lower my voice directly; "but I am sure you are." With his head
dropping on his breast and the light held high he began to walk again.
"Well--I exist, too," he said.
'He preceded me. My eyes followed his movements, but what I did see was
not the head of the firm, the welcome guest at afternoon receptions,
the correspondent of learned societies, the entertainer of stray
naturalists; I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had known
how to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humble
surroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war--in
all the exalted elements of romance. At the door of my room he faced me.
"Yes," I said, as though carrying on a discussion, "and amongst other
things you dreamed foolishly of a certain butterfly; but when one
fine morning your dream came in your way you did not let the splendid
opportunity escape. Did you? Whereas he . . ." Stein lifted his hand.
"And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams
I had lost that had come in my way?" He shook his head regretfully. "It
seems to me that some would have been very fine--if I had made them come
true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don't know." "Whether his
were fine or not," I said, "he knows of one which he certainly did not
catch." "Everybody knows of one or two like that," said Stein; "and that
is the trouble--the great trouble. . . ."
'He shook hands on the threshold, peered into my room under his
raised arm. "Sleep well. And to-morrow we must do something
practical--practical. . . ."
'Though his own room was beyond mine I saw him return the way he came.
He was going back to his butterflies.'
'I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan?' Marlow resumed,
after a silence occupied in the careful lighting of a cigar. 'It does
not matter; there's many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of
a night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere
of its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to the
astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,
weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of its
light--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering. Thus with Patusan. It
was referred to knowingly in the inner government circles in Batavia,
especially as to its irregularities and aberrations, and it was known
by name to some few, very few, in the mercantile world. Nobody, however,
had been there, and I suspect no one desired to go there in person,
just as an astronomer, I should fancy, would strongly object to being
transported into a distant heavenly body, where, parted from his earthly
emoluments, he would be bewildered by the view of an unfamiliar heavens.
However, neither heavenly bodies nor astronomers have anything to do
with Patusan. It was Jim who went there. I only meant you to understand
that had Stein arranged to send him into a star of the fifth magnitude
the change could not have been greater. He left his earthly failings
behind him and what sort of reputation he had, and there was a totally
new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon. Entirely
new, entirely remarkable. And he got hold of them in a remarkable way.
'Stein was the man who knew more about Patusan than anybody else. More
than was known in the government circles I suspect. I have no doubt he
had been there, either in his butterfly-hunting days or later on, when
he tried in his incorrigible way to season with a pinch of romance the
fattening dishes of his commercial kitchen. There were very few places
in the Archipelago he had not seen in the original dusk of their being,
before light (and even electric light) had been carried into them for
the sake of better morality and--and--well--the greater profit, too.
It was at breakfast of the morning following our talk about Jim that he
mentioned the place, after I had quoted poor Brierly's remark: "Let him
creep twenty feet underground and stay there." He looked up at me with
interested attention, as though I had been a rare insect. "This could be
done, too," he remarked, sipping his coffee. "Bury him in some sort,"
I explained. "One doesn't like to do it of course, but it would be the
best thing, seeing what he is." "Yes; he is young," Stein mused. "The
youngest human being now in existence," I affirmed. "Schon. There's
Patusan," he went on in the same tone. . . . "And the woman is dead
now," he added incomprehensibly.
'Of course I don't know that story; I can only guess that once before
Patusan had been used as a grave for some sin, transgression, or
misfortune. It is impossible to suspect Stein. The only woman that
had ever existed for him was the Malay girl he called "My wife the
princess," or, more rarely, in moments of expansion, "the mother of my
Emma." Who was the woman he had mentioned in connection with Patusan I
can't say; but from his allusions I understand she had been an educated
and very good-looking Dutch-Malay girl, with a tragic or perhaps only a
pitiful history, whose most painful part no doubt was her marriage with
a Malacca Portuguese who had been clerk in some commercial house in
the Dutch colonies. I gathered from Stein that this man was an
unsatisfactory person in more ways than one, all being more or less
indefinite and offensive. It was solely for his wife's sake that Stein
had appointed him manager of Stein & Co.'s trading post in Patusan;
but commercially the arrangement was not a success, at any rate for
the firm, and now the woman had died, Stein was disposed to try another
agent there. The Portuguese, whose name was Cornelius, considered
himself a very deserving but ill-used person, entitled by his abilities
to a better position. This man Jim would have to relieve. "But I don't
think he will go away from the place," remarked Stein. "That has nothing
to do with me. It was only for the sake of the woman that I . . . But as
I think there is a daughter left, I shall let him, if he likes to stay,
keep the old house."
'Patusan is a remote district of a native-ruled state, and the chief
settlement bears the same name. At a point on the river about forty
miles from the sea, where the first houses come into view, there can
be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep
hills very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep
fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the
valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the appearance from the
settlement is of one irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the
two halves leaning slightly apart. On the third day after the full, the
moon, as seen from the open space in front of Jim's house (he had a very
fine house in the native style when I visited him), rose exactly behind
these hills, its diffused light at first throwing the two masses into
intensely black relief, and then the nearly perfect disc, glowing
ruddily, appeared, gliding upwards between the sides of the chasm, till
it floated away above the summits, as if escaping from a yawning grave
in gentle triumph. "Wonderful effect," said Jim by my side. "Worth
seeing. Is it not?"
'And this question was put with a note of personal pride that made me
smile, as though he had had a hand in regulating that unique spectacle.
He had regulated so many things in Patusan--things that would have
appeared as much beyond his control as the motions of the moon and the
stars.
'It was inconceivable. That was the distinctive quality of the part into
which Stein and I had tumbled him unwittingly, with no other notion than
to get him out of the way; out of his own way, be it understood. That
was our main purpose, though, I own, I might have had another motive
which had influenced me a little. I was about to go home for a time;
and it may be I desired, more than I was aware of myself, to dispose of
him--to dispose of him, you understand--before I left. I was going home,
and he had come to me from there, with his miserable trouble and his
shadowy claim, like a man panting under a burden in a mist. I cannot
say I had ever seen him distinctly--not even to this day, after I had
my last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood
the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the
inseparable part of our knowledge. I did not know so much more about
myself. And then, I repeat, I was going home--to that home distant
enough for all its hearthstones to be like one hearthstone, by which the
humblest of us has the right to sit. We wander in our thousands over the
face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the
seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me
that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--those whom we
obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most
free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,--even those for whom
home holds no dear face, no familiar voice,--even they have to meet the
spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its
valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees--a
mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy,
to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear
conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed
very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under
the surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love, the men
we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the
pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with
clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. I
think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call
their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to
meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit--it is those who
understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular
right to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes! few of us understand, but
we all feel it though, and I say _all_ without exception, because those
who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth
whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land
from which he draws his faith together with his life. I don't know
how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but
powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion--I don't
care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference
means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered.
He would never go home now. Not he. Never. Had he been capable of
picturesque manifestations he would have shuddered at the thought
and made you shudder too. But he was not of that sort, though he was
expressive enough in his way. Before the idea of going home he would
grow desperately stiff and immovable, with lowered chin and pouted lips,
and with those candid blue eyes of his glowering darkly under a frown,
as if before something unbearable, as if before something revolting.
There was imagination in that hard skull of his, over which the thick
clustering hair fitted like a cap. As to me, I have no imagination (I
would be more certain about him today, if I had), and I do not mean to
imply that I figured to myself the spirit of the land uprising above the
white cliffs of Dover, to ask me what I--returning with no bones broken,
so to speak--had done with my very young brother. I could not make
such a mistake. I knew very well he was of those about whom there is
no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly,
without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. The spirit of
the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of
innumerable lives. Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we
hang together. He had straggled in a way; he had not hung on; but he was
aware of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a man's
more intense life makes his death more touching than the death of a
tree. I happened to be handy, and I happened to be touched. That's all
there is to it. I was concerned as to the way he would go out. It would
have hurt me if, for instance, he had taken to drink. The earth is so
small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-eyed,
swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his canvas shoes,
and with a flutter of rags about the elbows, who, on the strength of old
acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars. You know the awful
jaunty bearing of these scarecrows coming to you from a decent past,
the rasping careless voice, the half-averted impudent glances--those
meetings more trying to a man who believes in the solidarity of our
lives than the sight of an impenitent death-bed to a priest. That, to
tell you the truth, was the only danger I could see for him and for
me; but I also mistrusted my want of imagination. It might even come
to something worse, in some way it was beyond my powers of fancy to
foresee. He wouldn't let me forget how imaginative he was, and your
imaginative people swing farther in any direction, as if given a longer
scope of cable in the uneasy anchorage of life. They do. They take to
drink too. It may be I was belittling him by such a fear. How could I
tell? Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic. I only
knew he was one of us. And what business had he to be romantic? I
am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused
reflections because there remains so little to be told of him. He
existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for
you. I've led him out by the hand; I have paraded him before you. Were
my commonplace fears unjust? I won't say--not even now. You may be able
to tell better, since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of
the game. At any rate, they were superfluous. He did not go out, not at
all; on the contrary, he came on wonderfully, came on straight as a die
and in excellent form, which showed that he could stay as well as spurt.
I ought to be delighted, for it is a victory in which I had taken my
part; but I am not so pleased as I would have expected to be. I ask
myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in
which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines--a
straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And
besides, the last word is not said,--probably shall never be said. Are
not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our
stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given
up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be
pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to
say our last word--the last word of our love, of our desire, faith,
remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be
shaken, I suppose--at least, not by us who know so many truths about
either. My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved
greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in
the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds.
I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your
imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is
respectable to have no illusions--and safe--and profitable--and dull.
Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that
light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow
of sparks struck from a cold stone--and as short-lived, alas!'
| 6,484 | Chapters 20-21 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219145744/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/l/lord-jim/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2021 | Marlow entered Stein's house late in the evening and was struck immediately by the dramatic figure of the old man, sitting at his desk, washed in the glow of a single spot of light in the darkened room. Then Marlow's eyes caught the outlines of the cases containing Stein's hobbies. He was surrounded by catacombs of beetles and long glass cases of butterflies. "Marvelous," Stein whispered over one of the cases of butterflies. Marlow admired one butterfly in particular, and Stein told him that a butterfly was a masterpiece of nature. In comparison, man was amazing, but he was no masterpiece. Then Stein told Marlow how he had acquired this particular specimen. One day while on the outpost where he lived for so many years, he was called away to a meeting. The summons was fraudulent, however, and Stein encountered an ambush. But he feigned death and was able to kill three soldiers and drive off the others. He looked at one of the men whom he had killed, and suddenly, a shadow seemed to pass over the dead man's forehead. It was this very butterfly, a particularly rare variety that he had dreamed of and searched for all his life. Suddenly, here it was, fluttering slowly away from the corpse of a man who had tried to murder him. Acting just as instantly as he had during the ambush attempt, he clapped his hat over the butterfly. Immediately, Stein was so stunned by his good fortune that his knees collapsed under him. Life had reached its climax for him at that moment. Stein wanted nothing more. He had been victorious against his enemies, he had a beloved wife and daughter, and now he had the butterfly of his dreams. Marlow told Stein that he had come to him to discuss another kind of rare specimen -- a rare specimen of a man. Then he began describing Jim's unusual nature. Stein murmured that he understood Jim well: Jim was a romantic. Marlow accepted the diagnosis immediately. But what was to be done to cure him? he asked Stein. Stein answered that it was futile to try and "cure" a romantic. Instead, one should focus on helping him to understand how to live with his romanticism -- that is, "how to live. . . . How to be. Ach! How to be." A man, he said, is born and it is as though he has fallen into a sea, a dream. And if he tries to crawl out of his dream, he drowns. To triumph in this sea of dreams, he must immerse himself in the destructive element and battle it into submission in his own individual way. "Reality" is only a dream; we should treat it with great seriousness, and yet we should hold ourselves at a distance from it, knowing that none of it matters ultimately. Thus, we are prevented from "taking matters too much to heart." Jim's problem, Stein said, was taking matters "too much to heart." He proposed that, for the present, he and Marlow should retire. In the morning, they would speak of "practical" solutions to Jim's problem. They would not try to cure Jim of his romanticism; instead, they would search for ways that they could give Jim a chance to live successfully with his romanticism. Marlow begins Chapter 21 by explaining where the settlement of Patusan is. It is a little-known post in the Malay Islands, forty miles inland and upriver, controlled by three warring factions. It is known to very few people in the mercantile world. Two years after Jim accepted Stein's offer of resident manager of the trading post, Marlow went to visit him in Patusan, and he marveled at the change that had been wrought in the young man. Clearly, Jim had accomplished much and had regulated much in Patusan. Marlow, of course, was filled with happiness. Jim's victory over his self-punishing romanticism had been an excellent triumph. And it was a victory, Marlow says, "in which I had taken my part." Jim had achieved greatness. In fact, he had achieved such greatness that most of those who heard about it could never fathom it because their imaginations were too starved and too dull. Comparing Jim, who was once so flawed as to seem suicidal, with the masses of other men, Marlow says that Jim was like a "light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone -- and as short-lived, alas!" | In Chapter 19, Marlow had decided to take Jim's problems to a wealthy merchant named Stein, a respected and trustworthy man. Stein was also a world-renowned collector of rare butterflies and beetles. Marlow now offers us a history to Mr. Stein. The main point of this digression is to show us Stein's reaction to treachery, ambush, and betrayal as opposed to the capture of the most beautiful butterfly in the world. In other words, Stein thinks nothing of being betrayed, ambushed, and shot at by would-be assassins , but when, in the next moment, he finds one of the rarest butterflies in the world, his knees collapse with wonderment and joy. Therefore, this digression shows Stein to be probably one of the most magnificent romantics in the world, and thus, he will recognize immediately that Jim is also a romantic. Indeed, after hearing Jim's story, Stein immediately pronounces: "He is romantic -- romantic." Clearly, Stein identifies with Jim and thinks of how many wonderful opportunities have come his way that he has missed while Jim has missed only one -- the chance to be the hero of the Patna episode instead of its scapegoat. Stein then suggests to Marlow that their problem is not how to cure Jim, but instead, how to teach him to live with himself. Chapter 21 introduces us to Patusan, where it is decided that Jim will be sent to replace the present, dishonest manager. The importance of Patusan is that it is the most isolated place in that part of the world. Consequently, it will allow Jim to be extremely isolated and so preoccupied that he will not have time to confront himself with massive attacks of guilt and self-recrimination. At the end of this chapter, we gain somewhat of an understanding of why Marlow has taken such pains with Jim: Marlow believes that "We exist only in so far as we hang together," and since Jim is one of us, it becomes necessary for Marlow and Stein to look after Jim. | 753 | 341 | [
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110 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/60.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_21_part_2.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 59 | chapter 59 | null | {"name": "CHAPTER 59", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD66.asp", "summary": "The final Chapter has Angel and Liza Lu nearing the West Hill. Looking down at the valley below, they watch a black flag rising on the tower, which indicates that Tess has been executed as the law demands. The two speechless gazers bend themselves down to the earth, as if prayer. Hardy ends the book that \"justice\" was done and the \"President of the Immortals has ended his sport with Tess.", "analysis": "Notes The final chapter has Tess being punished for the murder of Alec. It is a brief chapter and no details of her death are given. Angel and Liza Lu simply watch the black flag rising. The lack of description surrounding the event is a clear statement by Hardy; Tess's death seems small in comparison to the sufferings she has undergone in life, all as a result of Alec's lust. Hardy, therefore, implies the tragedy of the law; while it punishes physical acts of violence, such as murder, it does nothing to punish the perpetrator of emotional violence, who also destroys life. The final words of the novel \"justice was done\" are spoken by the author in bitter irony. It is an intense statement about the tragedy of Tess Durbeyfield Clare. Sport\" is also an apt word to describe the painful experience that Tess underwent. Indeed her life was a game of fate in which she was no more than a pawn, mauled and handled mercilessly to prove that a mere mortal has no right to rise above destiny"} |
The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime capital
of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the
brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and
freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument
of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping
High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediaeval cross, and from
the mediaeval cross to the bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping
was in progress which usually ushers in an old-fashioned market-day.
From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every Wintoncestrian
knows, ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a
measured mile, leaving the houses gradually behind. Up this road
from the precincts of the city two persons were walking rapidly,
as if unconscious of the trying ascent--unconscious through
preoccupation and not through buoyancy. They had emerged upon this
road through a narrow, barred wicket in a high wall a little lower
down. They seemed anxious to get out of the sight of the houses and
of their kind, and this road appeared to offer the quickest means
of doing so. Though they were young, they walked with bowed heads,
which gait of grief the sun's rays smiled on pitilessly.
One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall budding
creature--half girl, half woman--a spiritualized image of Tess,
slighter than she, but with the same beautiful eyes--Clare's
sister-in-law, 'Liza-Lu. Their pale faces seemed to have shrunk
to half their natural size. They moved on hand in hand, and never
spoke a word, the drooping of their heads being that of Giotto's
"Two Apostles".
When they had nearly reached the top of the great West Hill the
clocks in the town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes,
and, walking onward yet a few steps, they reached the first
milestone, standing whitely on the green margin of the grass, and
backed by the down, which here was open to the road. They entered
upon the turf, and, impelled by a force that seemed to overrule their
will, suddenly stood still, turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense
beside the stone.
The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In the valley
beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings
showing as in an isometric drawing--among them the broad cathedral
tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave,
the spires of St Thomas's, the pinnacled tower of the College, and,
more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice,
where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.
Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine's Hill;
further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost
in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.
Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other
city edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs,
and rows of short barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole
contrasting greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities
of the Gothic erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in
passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible enough up
here. The wicket from which the pair had lately emerged was in the
wall of this structure. From the middle of the building an ugly
flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east horizon, and
viewed from this spot, on its shady side and against the light, it
seemed the one blot on the city's beauty. Yet it was with this blot,
and not with the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.
Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes
were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck
something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the
breeze. It was a black flag.
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean
phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights
and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless
gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and
remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued
to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined
hands again, and went on.
| 685 | CHAPTER 59 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD66.asp | The final Chapter has Angel and Liza Lu nearing the West Hill. Looking down at the valley below, they watch a black flag rising on the tower, which indicates that Tess has been executed as the law demands. The two speechless gazers bend themselves down to the earth, as if prayer. Hardy ends the book that "justice" was done and the "President of the Immortals has ended his sport with Tess. | Notes The final chapter has Tess being punished for the murder of Alec. It is a brief chapter and no details of her death are given. Angel and Liza Lu simply watch the black flag rising. The lack of description surrounding the event is a clear statement by Hardy; Tess's death seems small in comparison to the sufferings she has undergone in life, all as a result of Alec's lust. Hardy, therefore, implies the tragedy of the law; while it punishes physical acts of violence, such as murder, it does nothing to punish the perpetrator of emotional violence, who also destroys life. The final words of the novel "justice was done" are spoken by the author in bitter irony. It is an intense statement about the tragedy of Tess Durbeyfield Clare. Sport" is also an apt word to describe the painful experience that Tess underwent. Indeed her life was a game of fate in which she was no more than a pawn, mauled and handled mercilessly to prove that a mere mortal has no right to rise above destiny | 71 | 179 | [
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1,232 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/03.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Prince/section_2_part_0.txt | The Prince.chapter 3 | chapter 3 | null | {"name": "Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201108110625/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-prince/summary-and-analysis/chapter-3", "summary": "New principalities always cause problems for the prince. People are willing to change rulers to better their own lot, but they soon discover that things have gotten worse, because a new ruler must harm those he conquers. Then you have as enemies those you harmed while seizing power, as well as those who put you in power, because you can never satisfy all of their ambitions. If conquered territories annexed to yours are similar in location and customs, it is easy to keep them, especially if they were hereditary principalities not used to independence. As long as you do not change their way of life, you need only wipe out the old ruling family to keep them. But if new territories are different in language and customs, they are difficult to keep. The best methods are to go and live there yourself, to establish colonies in them, to protect the neighboring minor powers, to weaken strong factions within the state, and to guard against foreign powers. It is important to deal with developing political problems early, rather than wait until it is too late, because wars can never be avoided, only postponed. King Louis did not follow these policies in Italy and therefore failed to keep his territories. He also erred by making the Church more powerful, because to make others powerful is to weaken yourself.", "analysis": "In this long chapter about annexed territories, Machiavelli makes several of the observations that have contributed to his reputation for ruthlessness. First, he notes that conquering rulers must inevitably injure those they conquer. Then he advises conquerors to exterminate old ruling families to avoid threats to their power. Discussing colonies, he says they are effective because the only ones they harm are a few poor people who lose their homes and lands, and these people are in no position to harm the prince. In this context, he makes the famous statement that men should either be caressed or destroyed, meaning that if you must harm people, harm them so severely that they will not be able to take revenge on you. Other pieces of Machiavelli's advice seem more humane. He justifies colonies as an effective means to control a new territory because they harm the minimum number of people, and it is impossible for a new ruler to avoid doing some harm to his subjects. Colonies are definitely more desirable than occupation by an army, which harms everyone in the new state and makes the new ruler hated. While he sees violence as an unavoidable part of government, he strives for the most efficient and controlled use of violence. Yet readers may object that Machiavelli advises the prince to act humanely only when doing so has a tangible benefit, not because doing so is ethical. Machiavelli's advice to the prince is always grounded in the best way to acquire and increase power, rather than in considerations of right or wrong. Power is depicted as a scarce resource to be energetically collected and carefully guarded, as in Machiavelli's observation that giving power to another takes power from yourself. This intensely competitive outlook precludes ideas of cooperation or shared responsibility. Much of this chapter is concerned with detailed analysis of the examples provided by the Romans in ancient times and King Louis in more recent times. Louis's invasion was the beginning of a turbulent period for Italy, and its repercussions occupy Machiavelli's attention later in the book. Glossary Ludovico Ludovico Sforza , Duke of Milan and son of Francesco Sforza. Turks/Greece Forces of the Ottoman Empire controlled Greece and much of the Balkan peninsula in the 15th century and followed a policy of settling in their conquered territories. Aetolians The Aetolians and Achaeans were rival confederacies of Greek states. In circa 211 B.C., the Aetolians asked the Romans to help them fight against Philip V of Macedon. The Romans defeated Philip and, a few years later, defeated the Aetolians and their new ally, Antiochus III of Syria, effectively taking over Greece. King Louis Louis XII , King of France."} |
But the difficulties occur in a new principality. And firstly, if it be
not entirely new, but is, as it were, a member of a state which, taken
collectively, may be called composite, the changes arise chiefly from
an inherent difficulty which there is in all new principalities; for
men change their rulers willingly, hoping to better themselves, and this
hope induces them to take up arms against him who rules: wherein they
are deceived, because they afterwards find by experience they have
gone from bad to worse. This follows also on another natural and common
necessity, which always causes a new prince to burden those who have
submitted to him with his soldiery and with infinite other hardships
which he must put upon his new acquisition.
In this way you have enemies in all those whom you have injured in
seizing that principality, and you are not able to keep those friends
who put you there because of your not being able to satisfy them in the
way they expected, and you cannot take strong measures against them,
feeling bound to them. For, although one may be very strong in armed
forces, yet in entering a province one has always need of the goodwill
of the natives.
For these reasons Louis the Twelfth, King of France, quickly occupied
Milan, and as quickly lost it; and to turn him out the first time it
only needed Lodovico's own forces; because those who had opened the
gates to him, finding themselves deceived in their hopes of future
benefit, would not endure the ill-treatment of the new prince. It is
very true that, after acquiring rebellious provinces a second time,
they are not so lightly lost afterwards, because the prince, with
little reluctance, takes the opportunity of the rebellion to punish the
delinquents, to clear out the suspects, and to strengthen himself in the
weakest places. Thus to cause France to lose Milan the first time it was
enough for the Duke Lodovico(*) to raise insurrections on the borders;
but to cause him to lose it a second time it was necessary to bring
the whole world against him, and that his armies should be defeated and
driven out of Italy; which followed from the causes above mentioned.
(*) Duke Lodovico was Lodovico Moro, a son of Francesco
Sforza, who married Beatrice d'Este. He ruled over Milan
from 1494 to 1500, and died in 1510.
Nevertheless Milan was taken from France both the first and the second
time. The general reasons for the first have been discussed; it remains
to name those for the second, and to see what resources he had, and what
any one in his situation would have had for maintaining himself more
securely in his acquisition than did the King of France.
Now I say that those dominions which, when acquired, are added to an
ancient state by him who acquires them, are either of the same country
and language, or they are not. When they are, it is easier to hold them,
especially when they have not been accustomed to self-government; and
to hold them securely it is enough to have destroyed the family of the
prince who was ruling them; because the two peoples, preserving in other
things the old conditions, and not being unlike in customs, will live
quietly together, as one has seen in Brittany, Burgundy, Gascony, and
Normandy, which have been bound to France for so long a time: and,
although there may be some difference in language, nevertheless the
customs are alike, and the people will easily be able to get on amongst
themselves. He who has annexed them, if he wishes to hold them, has only
to bear in mind two considerations: the one, that the family of their
former lord is extinguished; the other, that neither their laws nor
their taxes are altered, so that in a very short time they will become
entirely one body with the old principality.
But when states are acquired in a country differing in language,
customs, or laws, there are difficulties, and good fortune and great
energy are needed to hold them, and one of the greatest and most real
helps would be that he who has acquired them should go and reside there.
This would make his position more secure and durable, as it has made
that of the Turk in Greece, who, notwithstanding all the other measures
taken by him for holding that state, if he had not settled there, would
not have been able to keep it. Because, if one is on the spot, disorders
are seen as they spring up, and one can quickly remedy them; but if one
is not at hand, they are heard of only when they are great, and then one
can no longer remedy them. Besides this, the country is not pillaged
by your officials; the subjects are satisfied by prompt recourse to the
prince; thus, wishing to be good, they have more cause to love him, and
wishing to be otherwise, to fear him. He who would attack that state
from the outside must have the utmost caution; as long as the prince
resides there it can only be wrested from him with the greatest
difficulty.
The other and better course is to send colonies to one or two places,
which may be as keys to that state, for it is necessary either to do
this or else to keep there a great number of cavalry and infantry. A
prince does not spend much on colonies, for with little or no expense he
can send them out and keep them there, and he offends a minority only of
the citizens from whom he takes lands and houses to give them to the new
inhabitants; and those whom he offends, remaining poor and scattered,
are never able to injure him; whilst the rest being uninjured are easily
kept quiet, and at the same time are anxious not to err for fear it
should happen to them as it has to those who have been despoiled. In
conclusion, I say that these colonies are not costly, they are more
faithful, they injure less, and the injured, as has been said, being
poor and scattered, cannot hurt. Upon this, one has to remark that men
ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge
themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot;
therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a
kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
But in maintaining armed men there in place of colonies one spends much
more, having to consume on the garrison all the income from the
state, so that the acquisition turns into a loss, and many more are
exasperated, because the whole state is injured; through the shifting
of the garrison up and down all become acquainted with hardship, and
all become hostile, and they are enemies who, whilst beaten on their
own ground, are yet able to do hurt. For every reason, therefore, such
guards are as useless as a colony is useful.
Again, the prince who holds a country differing in the above respects
ought to make himself the head and defender of his less powerful
neighbours, and to weaken the more powerful amongst them, taking care
that no foreigner as powerful as himself shall, by any accident, get
a footing there; for it will always happen that such a one will be
introduced by those who are discontented, either through excess of
ambition or through fear, as one has seen already. The Romans were
brought into Greece by the Aetolians; and in every other country where
they obtained a footing they were brought in by the inhabitants. And the
usual course of affairs is that, as soon as a powerful foreigner enters
a country, all the subject states are drawn to him, moved by the hatred
which they feel against the ruling power. So that in respect to those
subject states he has not to take any trouble to gain them over to
himself, for the whole of them quickly rally to the state which he has
acquired there. He has only to take care that they do not get hold of
too much power and too much authority, and then with his own forces, and
with their goodwill, he can easily keep down the more powerful of them,
so as to remain entirely master in the country. And he who does not
properly manage this business will soon lose what he has acquired, and
whilst he does hold it he will have endless difficulties and troubles.
The Romans, in the countries which they annexed, observed closely these
measures; they sent colonies and maintained friendly relations with(*)
the minor powers, without increasing their strength; they kept down the
greater, and did not allow any strong foreign powers to gain authority.
Greece appears to me sufficient for an example. The Achaeans and
Aetolians were kept friendly by them, the kingdom of Macedonia was
humbled, Antiochus was driven out; yet the merits of the Achaeans and
Aetolians never secured for them permission to increase their power, nor
did the persuasions of Philip ever induce the Romans to be his friends
without first humbling him, nor did the influence of Antiochus make them
agree that he should retain any lordship over the country. Because the
Romans did in these instances what all prudent princes ought to do,
who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones, for
which they must prepare with every energy, because, when foreseen, it is
easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine
is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable; for it
happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever,
that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to
detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or
treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to
cure. Thus it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise
have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they
can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen,
they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them,
there is no longer a remedy. Therefore, the Romans, foreseeing troubles,
dealt with them at once, and, even to avoid a war, would not let them
come to a head, for they knew that war is not to be avoided, but is only
to be put off to the advantage of others; moreover they wished to fight
with Philip and Antiochus in Greece so as not to have to do it in Italy;
they could have avoided both, but this they did not wish; nor did that
ever please them which is forever in the mouths of the wise ones of our
time:--Let us enjoy the benefits of the time--but rather the benefits of
their own valour and prudence, for time drives everything before it, and
is able to bring with it good as well as evil, and evil as well as good.
(*) See remark in the introduction on the word
"intrattenere."
But let us turn to France and inquire whether she has done any of the
things mentioned. I will speak of Louis(*) (and not of Charles)(+) as
the one whose conduct is the better to be observed, he having held
possession of Italy for the longest period; and you will see that he
has done the opposite to those things which ought to be done to retain a
state composed of divers elements.
(*) Louis XII, King of France, "The Father of the People,"
born 1462, died 1515.
(+) Charles VIII, King of France, born 1470, died 1498.
King Louis was brought into Italy by the ambition of the Venetians, who
desired to obtain half the state of Lombardy by his intervention. I
will not blame the course taken by the king, because, wishing to get a
foothold in Italy, and having no friends there--seeing rather that every
door was shut to him owing to the conduct of Charles--he was forced to
accept those friendships which he could get, and he would have succeeded
very quickly in his design if in other matters he had not made some
mistakes. The king, however, having acquired Lombardy, regained at once
the authority which Charles had lost: Genoa yielded; the Florentines
became his friends; the Marquess of Mantua, the Duke of Ferrara, the
Bentivogli, my lady of Forli, the Lords of Faenza, of Pesaro, of
Rimini, of Camerino, of Piombino, the Lucchese, the Pisans, the
Sienese--everybody made advances to him to become his friend. Then could
the Venetians realize the rashness of the course taken by them, which,
in order that they might secure two towns in Lombardy, had made the king
master of two-thirds of Italy.
Let any one now consider with what little difficulty the king could have
maintained his position in Italy had he observed the rules above laid
down, and kept all his friends secure and protected; for although they
were numerous they were both weak and timid, some afraid of the Church,
some of the Venetians, and thus they would always have been forced to
stand in with him, and by their means he could easily have made himself
secure against those who remained powerful. But he was no sooner in
Milan than he did the contrary by assisting Pope Alexander to occupy the
Romagna. It never occurred to him that by this action he was weakening
himself, depriving himself of friends and of those who had thrown
themselves into his lap, whilst he aggrandized the Church by adding much
temporal power to the spiritual, thus giving it greater authority. And
having committed this prime error, he was obliged to follow it up, so
much so that, to put an end to the ambition of Alexander, and to prevent
his becoming the master of Tuscany, he was himself forced to come into
Italy.
And as if it were not enough to have aggrandized the Church, and
deprived himself of friends, he, wishing to have the kingdom of Naples,
divided it with the King of Spain, and where he was the prime arbiter in
Italy he takes an associate, so that the ambitious of that country and
the malcontents of his own should have somewhere to shelter; and whereas
he could have left in the kingdom his own pensioner as king, he drove
him out, to put one there who was able to drive him, Louis, out in turn.
The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always
do so when they can, and for this they will be praised not blamed; but
when they cannot do so, yet wish to do so by any means, then there is
folly and blame. Therefore, if France could have attacked Naples with
her own forces she ought to have done so; if she could not, then she
ought not to have divided it. And if the partition which she made with
the Venetians in Lombardy was justified by the excuse that by it she got
a foothold in Italy, this other partition merited blame, for it had not
the excuse of that necessity.
Therefore Louis made these five errors: he destroyed the minor powers,
he increased the strength of one of the greater powers in Italy, he
brought in a foreign power, he did not settle in the country, he did not
send colonies. Which errors, had he lived, were not enough to injure
him had he not made a sixth by taking away their dominions from the
Venetians; because, had he not aggrandized the Church, nor brought Spain
into Italy, it would have been very reasonable and necessary to humble
them; but having first taken these steps, he ought never to have
consented to their ruin, for they, being powerful, would always have
kept off others from designs on Lombardy, to which the Venetians would
never have consented except to become masters themselves there; also
because the others would not wish to take Lombardy from France in order
to give it to the Venetians, and to run counter to both they would not
have had the courage.
And if any one should say: "King Louis yielded the Romagna to Alexander
and the kingdom to Spain to avoid war," I answer for the reasons given
above that a blunder ought never to be perpetrated to avoid war, because
it is not to be avoided, but is only deferred to your disadvantage. And
if another should allege the pledge which the king had given to the
Pope that he would assist him in the enterprise, in exchange for the
dissolution of his marriage(*) and for the cap to Rouen,(+) to that I
reply what I shall write later on concerning the faith of princes, and
how it ought to be kept.
(*) Louis XII divorced his wife, Jeanne, daughter of Louis
XI, and married in 1499 Anne of Brittany, widow of Charles
VIII, in order to retain the Duchy of Brittany for the
crown.
(+) The Archbishop of Rouen. He was Georges d'Amboise,
created a cardinal by Alexander VI. Born 1460, died 1510.
Thus King Louis lost Lombardy by not having followed any of the
conditions observed by those who have taken possession of countries and
wished to retain them. Nor is there any miracle in this, but much that
is reasonable and quite natural. And on these matters I spoke at Nantes
with Rouen, when Valentino, as Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander,
was usually called, occupied the Romagna, and on Cardinal Rouen
observing to me that the Italians did not understand war, I replied
to him that the French did not understand statecraft, meaning that
otherwise they would not have allowed the Church to reach such
greatness. And in fact it has been seen that the greatness of the Church
and of Spain in Italy has been caused by France, and her ruin may be
attributed to them. From this a general rule is drawn which never or
rarely fails: that he who is the cause of another becoming powerful
is ruined; because that predominancy has been brought about either by
astuteness or else by force, and both are distrusted by him who has been
raised to power.
| 2,914 | Chapter 3 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201108110625/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-prince/summary-and-analysis/chapter-3 | New principalities always cause problems for the prince. People are willing to change rulers to better their own lot, but they soon discover that things have gotten worse, because a new ruler must harm those he conquers. Then you have as enemies those you harmed while seizing power, as well as those who put you in power, because you can never satisfy all of their ambitions. If conquered territories annexed to yours are similar in location and customs, it is easy to keep them, especially if they were hereditary principalities not used to independence. As long as you do not change their way of life, you need only wipe out the old ruling family to keep them. But if new territories are different in language and customs, they are difficult to keep. The best methods are to go and live there yourself, to establish colonies in them, to protect the neighboring minor powers, to weaken strong factions within the state, and to guard against foreign powers. It is important to deal with developing political problems early, rather than wait until it is too late, because wars can never be avoided, only postponed. King Louis did not follow these policies in Italy and therefore failed to keep his territories. He also erred by making the Church more powerful, because to make others powerful is to weaken yourself. | In this long chapter about annexed territories, Machiavelli makes several of the observations that have contributed to his reputation for ruthlessness. First, he notes that conquering rulers must inevitably injure those they conquer. Then he advises conquerors to exterminate old ruling families to avoid threats to their power. Discussing colonies, he says they are effective because the only ones they harm are a few poor people who lose their homes and lands, and these people are in no position to harm the prince. In this context, he makes the famous statement that men should either be caressed or destroyed, meaning that if you must harm people, harm them so severely that they will not be able to take revenge on you. Other pieces of Machiavelli's advice seem more humane. He justifies colonies as an effective means to control a new territory because they harm the minimum number of people, and it is impossible for a new ruler to avoid doing some harm to his subjects. Colonies are definitely more desirable than occupation by an army, which harms everyone in the new state and makes the new ruler hated. While he sees violence as an unavoidable part of government, he strives for the most efficient and controlled use of violence. Yet readers may object that Machiavelli advises the prince to act humanely only when doing so has a tangible benefit, not because doing so is ethical. Machiavelli's advice to the prince is always grounded in the best way to acquire and increase power, rather than in considerations of right or wrong. Power is depicted as a scarce resource to be energetically collected and carefully guarded, as in Machiavelli's observation that giving power to another takes power from yourself. This intensely competitive outlook precludes ideas of cooperation or shared responsibility. Much of this chapter is concerned with detailed analysis of the examples provided by the Romans in ancient times and King Louis in more recent times. Louis's invasion was the beginning of a turbulent period for Italy, and its repercussions occupy Machiavelli's attention later in the book. Glossary Ludovico Ludovico Sforza , Duke of Milan and son of Francesco Sforza. Turks/Greece Forces of the Ottoman Empire controlled Greece and much of the Balkan peninsula in the 15th century and followed a policy of settling in their conquered territories. Aetolians The Aetolians and Achaeans were rival confederacies of Greek states. In circa 211 B.C., the Aetolians asked the Romans to help them fight against Philip V of Macedon. The Romans defeated Philip and, a few years later, defeated the Aetolians and their new ally, Antiochus III of Syria, effectively taking over Greece. King Louis Louis XII , King of France. | 226 | 449 | [
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28,054 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/62.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Brothers Karamazov/section_61_part_0.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 9.chapter 9 | book 9, chapter 9 | null | {"name": "Book 9, Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-9-chapter-9", "summary": "Parfenovich then reads Dmitri a \"Resolution,\" which formally places him under arrest. After another long speech declaring his innocence, Dmitri bids farewell and offers his hand to Parfenovich, who rejects it. Grushenka says a brief good-bye to Dmitri, this time with none of the hysterics of their other encounters, and she promises to stick by him. They load Dmitri into a cart to take him back to town. Just before he leaves, Kalganov pops up and shakes his hand. Dmitri leaves, and the scene ends with Kalganov sitting in a corner, crying into his hands.", "analysis": ""} | Chapter IX. They Carry Mitya Away
When the protocol had been signed, Nikolay Parfenovitch turned solemnly to
the prisoner and read him the "Committal," setting forth, that in such a
year, on such a day, in such a place, the investigating lawyer of such-
and-such a district court, having examined so-and-so (to wit, Mitya)
accused of this and of that (all the charges were carefully written out)
and having considered that the accused, not pleading guilty to the charges
made against him, had brought forward nothing in his defense, while the
witnesses, so-and-so, and so-and-so, and the circumstances such-and-such
testify against him, acting in accordance with such-and-such articles of
the Statute Book, and so on, has ruled, that, in order to preclude so-and-
so (Mitya) from all means of evading pursuit and judgment he be detained
in such-and-such a prison, which he hereby notifies to the accused and
communicates a copy of this same "Committal" to the deputy prosecutor, and
so on, and so on.
In brief, Mitya was informed that he was, from that moment, a prisoner,
and that he would be driven at once to the town, and there shut up in a
very unpleasant place. Mitya listened attentively, and only shrugged his
shoulders.
"Well, gentlemen, I don't blame you. I'm ready.... I understand that
there's nothing else for you to do."
Nikolay Parfenovitch informed him gently that he would be escorted at once
by the rural police officer, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, who happened to be on
the spot....
"Stay," Mitya interrupted, suddenly, and impelled by uncontrollable
feeling he pronounced, addressing all in the room:
"Gentlemen, we're all cruel, we're all monsters, we all make men weep, and
mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now,
of all I am the lowest reptile! I've sworn to amend, and every day I've
done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a
blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a
force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! But the
thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public
shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I
shall be purified, gentlemen? But listen, for the last time, I am not
guilty of my father's blood. I accept my punishment, not because I killed
him, but because I meant to kill him, and perhaps I really might have
killed him. Still I mean to fight it out with you. I warn you of that.
I'll fight it out with you to the end, and then God will decide. Good-by,
gentlemen, don't be vexed with me for having shouted at you during the
examination. Oh, I was still such a fool then.... In another minute I
shall be a prisoner, but now, for the last time, as a free man, Dmitri
Karamazov offers you his hand. Saying good-by to you, I say it to all
men."
His voice quivered and he stretched out his hand, but Nikolay
Parfenovitch, who happened to stand nearest to him, with a sudden, almost
nervous movement, hid his hands behind his back. Mitya instantly noticed
this, and started. He let his outstretched hand fall at once.
"The preliminary inquiry is not yet over," Nikolay Parfenovitch faltered,
somewhat embarrassed. "We will continue it in the town, and I, for my
part, of course, am ready to wish you all success ... in your defense....
As a matter of fact, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, I've always been disposed to
regard you as, so to speak, more unfortunate than guilty. All of us here,
if I may make bold to speak for all, we are all ready to recognize that
you are, at bottom, a young man of honor, but, alas, one who has been
carried away by certain passions to a somewhat excessive degree...."
Nikolay Parfenovitch's little figure was positively majestic by the time
he had finished speaking. It struck Mitya that in another minute this
"boy" would take his arm, lead him to another corner, and renew their
conversation about "girls." But many quite irrelevant and inappropriate
thoughts sometimes occur even to a prisoner when he is being led out to
execution.
"Gentlemen, you are good, you are humane, may I see _her_ to say 'good-by'
for the last time?" asked Mitya.
"Certainly, but considering ... in fact, now it's impossible except in the
presence of--"
"Oh, well, if it must be so, it must!"
Grushenka was brought in, but the farewell was brief, and of few words,
and did not at all satisfy Nikolay Parfenovitch. Grushenka made a deep bow
to Mitya.
"I have told you I am yours, and I will be yours. I will follow you for
ever, wherever they may send you. Farewell; you are guiltless, though
you've been your own undoing."
Her lips quivered, tears flowed from her eyes.
"Forgive me, Grusha, for my love, for ruining you, too, with my love."
Mitya would have said something more, but he broke off and went out. He
was at once surrounded by men who kept a constant watch on him. At the
bottom of the steps to which he had driven up with such a dash the day
before with Andrey's three horses, two carts stood in readiness. Mavriky
Mavrikyevitch, a sturdy, thick-set man with a wrinkled face, was annoyed
about something, some sudden irregularity. He was shouting angrily. He
asked Mitya to get into the cart with somewhat excessive surliness.
"When I stood him drinks in the tavern, the man had quite a different
face," thought Mitya, as he got in. At the gates there was a crowd of
people, peasants, women and drivers. Trifon Borissovitch came down the
steps too. All stared at Mitya.
"Forgive me at parting, good people!" Mitya shouted suddenly from the
cart.
"Forgive us too!" he heard two or three voices.
"Good-by to you, too, Trifon Borissovitch!"
But Trifon Borissovitch did not even turn round. He was, perhaps, too
busy. He, too, was shouting and fussing about something. It appeared that
everything was not yet ready in the second cart, in which two constables
were to accompany Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. The peasant who had been ordered
to drive the second cart was pulling on his smock, stoutly maintaining
that it was not his turn to go, but Akim's. But Akim was not to be seen.
They ran to look for him. The peasant persisted and besought them to wait.
"You see what our peasants are, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. They've no shame!"
exclaimed Trifon Borissovitch. "Akim gave you twenty-five copecks the day
before yesterday. You've drunk it all and now you cry out. I'm simply
surprised at your good-nature, with our low peasants, Mavriky
Mavrikyevitch, that's all I can say."
"But what do we want a second cart for?" Mitya put in. "Let's start with
the one, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. I won't be unruly, I won't run away from
you, old fellow. What do we want an escort for?"
"I'll trouble you, sir, to learn how to speak to me if you've never been
taught. I'm not 'old fellow' to you, and you can keep your advice for
another time!" Mavriky Mavrikyevitch snapped out savagely, as though glad
to vent his wrath.
Mitya was reduced to silence. He flushed all over. A moment later he felt
suddenly very cold. The rain had ceased, but the dull sky was still
overcast with clouds, and a keen wind was blowing straight in his face.
"I've taken a chill," thought Mitya, twitching his shoulders.
At last Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, too, got into the cart, sat down heavily,
and, as though without noticing it, squeezed Mitya into the corner. It is
true that he was out of humor and greatly disliked the task that had been
laid upon him.
"Good-by, Trifon Borissovitch!" Mitya shouted again, and felt himself,
that he had not called out this time from good-nature, but involuntarily,
from resentment.
But Trifon Borissovitch stood proudly, with both hands behind his back,
and staring straight at Mitya with a stern and angry face, he made no
reply.
"Good-by, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, good-by!" he heard all at once the voice of
Kalganov, who had suddenly darted out. Running up to the cart he held out
his hand to Mitya. He had no cap on.
Mitya had time to seize and press his hand.
"Good-by, dear fellow! I shan't forget your generosity," he cried warmly.
But the cart moved and their hands parted. The bell began ringing and
Mitya was driven off.
Kalganov ran back, sat down in a corner, bent his head, hid his face in
his hands, and burst out crying. For a long while he sat like that, crying
as though he were a little boy instead of a young man of twenty. Oh, he
believed almost without doubt in Mitya's guilt.
"What are these people? What can men be after this?" he exclaimed
incoherently, in bitter despondency, almost despair. At that moment he had
no desire to live.
"Is it worth it? Is it worth it?" exclaimed the boy in his grief.
| 1,391 | Book 9, Chapter 9 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-9-chapter-9 | Parfenovich then reads Dmitri a "Resolution," which formally places him under arrest. After another long speech declaring his innocence, Dmitri bids farewell and offers his hand to Parfenovich, who rejects it. Grushenka says a brief good-bye to Dmitri, this time with none of the hysterics of their other encounters, and she promises to stick by him. They load Dmitri into a cart to take him back to town. Just before he leaves, Kalganov pops up and shakes his hand. Dmitri leaves, and the scene ends with Kalganov sitting in a corner, crying into his hands. | null | 95 | 1 | [
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1,130 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/1130-chapters/37.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra/section_36_part_0.txt | The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra.act iv.scene xii | act iv, scene xii | null | {"name": "Act IV, Scene xii", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210116191009/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/antony-cleopatra/summary/act-iv-scene-xii", "summary": "Antony watches the battle at sea with Scarus and frets that he can't see Caesar's troops yet. He leaves Scarus to go look from a different vantage point. Scarus notes in an aside that the augurs were hesitant to state their predictions about this sea battle, which can't be good. Antony returns to Scarus in a fury--Cleopatra's fleet has deserted them again and Antony's fleet has yielded to Caesar's, greeting them like friends. He doesn't care to take revenge on his troops, only on Cleopatra. Antony is sure she's the one that led him to this course. Antony demands that all the remaining soldiers leave, as he doesn't care about them anymore. He privately laments that Fortune has deserted him and now favors Caesar instead. He damns Cleopatra for luring him to Egypt and identifies her as the cause of his loss. Cleopatra enters and Antony rages at her, saying she should go be part of Caesar's victory march for all the masses to see her. He even hopes Octavia might scratch up her face with her fingernails. Cleopatra flees Antony's fury. He's glad that woman's gone. He wishes he had killed her earlier, which would have saved many lives. He resolves that she'll die for selling him out to Caesar, whom he calls \"the young Roman boy.\"", "analysis": ""} | SCENE XII.
A hill near Alexandria
Enter ANTONY and SCARUS
ANTONY. Yet they are not join'd. Where yond pine does stand
I shall discover all. I'll bring thee word
Straight how 'tis like to go. Exit
SCARUS. Swallows have built
In Cleopatra's sails their nests. The augurers
Say they know not, they cannot tell; look grimly,
And dare not speak their knowledge. Antony
Is valiant and dejected; and by starts
His fretted fortunes give him hope and fear
Of what he has and has not.
[Alarum afar off, as at a sea-fight]
Re-enter ANTONY
ANTONY. All is lost!
This foul Egyptian hath betrayed me.
My fleet hath yielded to the foe, and yonder
They cast their caps up and carouse together
Like friends long lost. Triple-turn'd whore! 'tis thou
Hast sold me to this novice; and my heart
Makes only wars on thee. Bid them all fly;
For when I am reveng'd upon my charm,
I have done all. Bid them all fly; begone. Exit SCARUS
O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more!
Fortune and Antony part here; even here
Do we shake hands. All come to this? The hearts
That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is bark'd
That overtopp'd them all. Betray'd I am.
O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm-
Whose eye beck'd forth my wars and call'd them home,
Whose bosom was my crownet, my chief end-
Like a right gypsy hath at fast and loose
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.
What, Eros, Eros!
Enter CLEOPATRA
Ah, thou spell! Avaunt!
CLEOPATRA. Why is my lord enrag'd against his love?
ANTONY. Vanish, or I shall give thee thy deserving
And blemish Caesar's triumph. Let him take thee
And hoist thee up to the shouting plebeians;
Follow his chariot, like the greatest spot
Of all thy sex; most monster-like, be shown
For poor'st diminutives, for doits, and let
Patient Octavia plough thy visage up
With her prepared nails. Exit CLEOPATRA
'Tis well th'art gone,
If it be well to live; but better 'twere
Thou fell'st into my fury, for one death
Might have prevented many. Eros, ho!
The shirt of Nessus is upon me; teach me,
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage;
Let me lodge Lichas on the horns o' th' moon,
And with those hands that grasp'd the heaviest club
Subdue my worthiest self. The witch shall die.
To the young Roman boy she hath sold me, and I fall
Under this plot. She dies for't. Eros, ho! Exit
ACT_4|SC_13
| 752 | Act IV, Scene xii | https://web.archive.org/web/20210116191009/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/antony-cleopatra/summary/act-iv-scene-xii | Antony watches the battle at sea with Scarus and frets that he can't see Caesar's troops yet. He leaves Scarus to go look from a different vantage point. Scarus notes in an aside that the augurs were hesitant to state their predictions about this sea battle, which can't be good. Antony returns to Scarus in a fury--Cleopatra's fleet has deserted them again and Antony's fleet has yielded to Caesar's, greeting them like friends. He doesn't care to take revenge on his troops, only on Cleopatra. Antony is sure she's the one that led him to this course. Antony demands that all the remaining soldiers leave, as he doesn't care about them anymore. He privately laments that Fortune has deserted him and now favors Caesar instead. He damns Cleopatra for luring him to Egypt and identifies her as the cause of his loss. Cleopatra enters and Antony rages at her, saying she should go be part of Caesar's victory march for all the masses to see her. He even hopes Octavia might scratch up her face with her fingernails. Cleopatra flees Antony's fury. He's glad that woman's gone. He wishes he had killed her earlier, which would have saved many lives. He resolves that she'll die for selling him out to Caesar, whom he calls "the young Roman boy." | null | 218 | 1 | [
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5,658 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/37.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Lord Jim/section_36_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapter 37 | chapter 37 | null | {"name": "Chapter 37", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210118112654/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/lord-jim/summary/chapter-37", "summary": "If you thought we were done with Marlow's storytelling, we hate to break it to you. We've got another round coming. In the letters, Marlow describes an encounter he has with a dying pirate named Gentleman Brown. According to Marlow, Brown's story will help fill in the gaps at the end of Jim's story. Marlow then jumps back in time to when he first learned of this story at Stein's house. He was there visiting Stein, and ran into Jewel and Tamb' Itam. Tamb' Itam said that Jim wouldn't fight, and Jewel woodenly said that Jim left her. We're not quite sure what they're talking about, but we have a bad feeling about this.", "analysis": ""} | 'It all begins with a remarkable exploit of a man called Brown, who
stole with complete success a Spanish schooner out of a small bay near
Zamboanga. Till I discovered the fellow my information was incomplete,
but most unexpectedly I did come upon him a few hours before he gave up
his arrogant ghost. Fortunately he was willing and able to talk between
the choking fits of asthma, and his racked body writhed with malicious
exultation at the bare thought of Jim. He exulted thus at the idea that
he had "paid out the stuck-up beggar after all." He gloated over his
action. I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if
I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms
of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by
resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to
the body. The story also reveals unsuspected depths of cunning in the
wretched Cornelius, whose abject and intense hate acts like a subtle
inspiration, pointing out an unerring way towards revenge.
'"I could see directly I set my eyes on him what sort of a fool he was,"
gasped the dying Brown. "He a man! Hell! He was a hollow sham. As if he
couldn't have said straight out, 'Hands off my plunder!' blast him! That
would have been like a man! Rot his superior soul! He had me there--but
he hadn't devil enough in him to make an end of me. Not he! A thing like
that letting me off as if I wasn't worth a kick! . . ." Brown struggled
desperately for breath. . . . "Fraud. . . . Letting me off. . . . And
so I did make an end of him after all. . . ." He choked again. . . . "I
expect this thing'll kill me, but I shall die easy now. You . . . you
here . . . I don't know your name--I would give you a five-pound note
if--if I had it--for the news--or my name's not Brown. . . ." He grinned
horribly. . . . "Gentleman Brown."
'He said all these things in profound gasps, staring at me with his
yellow eyes out of a long, ravaged, brown face; he jerked his left arm;
a pepper-and-salt matted beard hung almost into his lap; a dirty ragged
blanket covered his legs. I had found him out in Bankok through that
busybody Schomberg, the hotel-keeper, who had, confidentially, directed
me where to look. It appears that a sort of loafing, fuddled vagabond--a
white man living amongst the natives with a Siamese woman--had
considered it a great privilege to give a shelter to the last days of
the famous Gentleman Brown. While he was talking to me in the wretched
hovel, and, as it were, fighting for every minute of his life, the
Siamese woman, with big bare legs and a stupid coarse face, sat in a
dark corner chewing betel stolidly. Now and then she would get up for
the purpose of shooing a chicken away from the door. The whole hut shook
when she walked. An ugly yellow child, naked and pot-bellied like a
little heathen god, stood at the foot of the couch, finger in mouth,
lost in a profound and calm contemplation of the dying man.
'He talked feverishly; but in the middle of a word, perhaps, an
invisible hand would take him by the throat, and he would look at me
dumbly with an expression of doubt and anguish. He seemed to fear that
I would get tired of waiting and go away, leaving him with his tale
untold, with his exultation unexpressed. He died during the night, I
believe, but by that time I had nothing more to learn.
'So much as to Brown, for the present.
'Eight months before this, coming into Samarang, I went as usual to see
Stein. On the garden side of the house a Malay on the verandah greeted
me shyly, and I remembered that I had seen him in Patusan, in Jim's
house, amongst other Bugis men who used to come in the evening to talk
interminably over their war reminiscences and to discuss State affairs.
Jim had pointed him out to me once as a respectable petty trader owning
a small seagoing native craft, who had showed himself "one of the best
at the taking of the stockade." I was not very surprised to see him,
since any Patusan trader venturing as far as Samarang would naturally
find his way to Stein's house. I returned his greeting and passed on. At
the door of Stein's room I came upon another Malay in whom I recognised
Tamb' Itam.
'I asked him at once what he was doing there; it occurred to me that
Jim might have come on a visit. I own I was pleased and excited at the
thought. Tamb' Itam looked as if he did not know what to say. "Is Tuan
Jim inside?" I asked impatiently. "No," he mumbled, hanging his head
for a moment, and then with sudden earnestness, "He would not fight. He
would not fight," he repeated twice. As he seemed unable to say anything
else, I pushed him aside and went in.
'Stein, tall and stooping, stood alone in the middle of the room between
the rows of butterfly cases. "Ach! is it you, my friend?" he said
sadly, peering through his glasses. A drab sack-coat of alpaca hung,
unbuttoned, down to his knees. He had a Panama hat on his head, and
there were deep furrows on his pale cheeks. "What's the matter now?"
I asked nervously. "There's Tamb' Itam there. . . ." "Come and see the
girl. Come and see the girl. She is here," he said, with a half-hearted
show of activity. I tried to detain him, but with gentle obstinacy he
would take no notice of my eager questions. "She is here, she is here,"
he repeated, in great perturbation. "They came here two days ago. An old
man like me, a stranger--sehen Sie--cannot do much. . . . Come this way.
. . . Young hearts are unforgiving. . . ." I could see he was in utmost
distress. . . . "The strength of life in them, the cruel strength of
life. . . ." He mumbled, leading me round the house; I followed him,
lost in dismal and angry conjectures. At the door of the drawing-room he
barred my way. "He loved her very much," he said interrogatively, and
I only nodded, feeling so bitterly disappointed that I would not trust
myself to speak. "Very frightful," he murmured. "She can't understand
me. I am only a strange old man. Perhaps you . . . she knows you. Talk
to her. We can't leave it like this. Tell her to forgive him. It was
very frightful." "No doubt," I said, exasperated at being in the dark;
"but have you forgiven him?" He looked at me queerly. "You shall hear,"
he said, and opening the door, absolutely pushed me in.
'You know Stein's big house and the two immense reception-rooms,
uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full of solitude and of shining
things that look as if never beheld by the eye of man? They are cool
on the hottest days, and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave
underground. I passed through one, and in the other I saw the girl
sitting at the end of a big mahogany table, on which she rested her
head, the face hidden in her arms. The waxed floor reflected her dimly
as though it had been a sheet of frozen water. The rattan screens were
down, and through the strange greenish gloom made by the foliage of the
trees outside a strong wind blew in gusts, swaying the long draperies
of windows and doorways. Her white figure seemed shaped in snow; the
pendent crystals of a great chandelier clicked above her head like
glittering icicles. She looked up and watched my approach. I was chilled
as if these vast apartments had been the cold abode of despair.
'She recognised me at once, and as soon as I had stopped, looking down
at her: "He has left me," she said quietly; "you always leave us--for
your own ends." Her face was set. All the heat of life seemed withdrawn
within some inaccessible spot in her breast. "It would have been easy to
die with him," she went on, and made a slight weary gesture as if giving
up the incomprehensible. "He would not! It was like a blindness--and yet
it was I who was speaking to him; it was I who stood before his eyes;
it was at me that he looked all the time! Ah! you are hard, treacherous,
without truth, without compassion. What makes you so wicked? Or is it
that you are all mad?"
'I took her hand; it did not respond, and when I dropped it, it hung
down to the floor. That indifference, more awful than tears, cries, and
reproaches, seemed to defy time and consolation. You felt that nothing
you could say would reach the seat of the still and benumbing pain.
'Stein had said, "You shall hear." I did hear. I heard it all, listening
with amazement, with awe, to the tones of her inflexible weariness.
She could not grasp the real sense of what she was telling me, and her
resentment filled me with pity for her--for him too. I stood rooted to
the spot after she had finished. Leaning on her arm, she stared with
hard eyes, and the wind passed in gusts, the crystals kept on clicking
in the greenish gloom. She went on whispering to herself: "And yet he
was looking at me! He could see my face, hear my voice, hear my grief!
When I used to sit at his feet, with my cheek against his knee and his
hand on my head, the curse of cruelty and madness was already within
him, waiting for the day. The day came! . . . and before the sun had
set he could not see me any more--he was made blind and deaf and without
pity, as you all are. He shall have no tears from me. Never, never. Not
one tear. I will not! He went away from me as if I had been worse than
death. He fled as if driven by some accursed thing he had heard or seen
in his sleep. . . ."
'Her steady eyes seemed to strain after the shape of a man torn out of
her arms by the strength of a dream. She made no sign to my silent bow.
I was glad to escape.
'I saw her once again, the same afternoon. On leaving her I had gone
in search of Stein, whom I could not find indoors; and I wandered out,
pursued by distressful thoughts, into the gardens, those famous gardens
of Stein, in which you can find every plant and tree of tropical
lowlands. I followed the course of the canalised stream, and sat for
a long time on a shaded bench near the ornamental pond, where some
waterfowl with clipped wings were diving and splashing noisily. The
branches of casuarina trees behind me swayed lightly, incessantly,
reminding me of the soughing of fir trees at home.
'This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my
meditations. She had said he had been driven away from her by a
dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be
no forgiveness for such a transgression. And yet is not mankind itself,
pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and
its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive
devotion? And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
'When I rose to get back to the house I caught sight of Stein's drab
coat through a gap in the foliage, and very soon at a turn of the path
I came upon him walking with the girl. Her little hand rested on his
forearm, and under the broad, flat rim of his Panama hat he bent over
her, grey-haired, paternal, with compassionate and chivalrous deference.
I stood aside, but they stopped, facing me. His gaze was bent on the
ground at his feet; the girl, erect and slight on his arm, stared
sombrely beyond my shoulder with black, clear, motionless eyes.
"Schrecklich," he murmured. "Terrible! Terrible! What can one do?" He
seemed to be appealing to me, but her youth, the length of the days
suspended over her head, appealed to me more; and suddenly, even as I
realised that nothing could be said, I found myself pleading his cause
for her sake. "You must forgive him," I concluded, and my own voice
seemed to me muffled, lost in un irresponsive deaf immensity. "We all
want to be forgiven," I added after a while.
'"What have I done?" she asked with her lips only.
'"You always mistrusted him," I said.
'"He was like the others," she pronounced slowly.
'"Not like the others," I protested, but she continued evenly, without
any feeling--
'"He was false." And suddenly Stein broke in. "No! no! no! My poor
child! . . ." He patted her hand lying passively on his sleeve. "No! no!
Not false! True! True! True!" He tried to look into her stony face. "You
don't understand. Ach! Why you do not understand? . . . Terrible," he
said to me. "Some day she _shall_ understand."
'"Will you explain?" I asked, looking hard at him. They moved on.
'I watched them. Her gown trailed on the path, her black hair fell
loose. She walked upright and light by the side of the tall man, whose
long shapeless coat hung in perpendicular folds from the stooping
shoulders, whose feet moved slowly. They disappeared beyond that
spinney (you may remember) where sixteen different kinds of bamboo grow
together, all distinguishable to the learned eye. For my part, I was
fascinated by the exquisite grace and beauty of that fluted grove,
crowned with pointed leaves and feathery heads, the lightness, the
vigour, the charm as distinct as a voice of that unperplexed luxuriating
life. I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would
linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It
was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories
crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.
'I drove back to town the same afternoon, taking with me Tamb' Itam
and the other Malay, in whose seagoing craft they had escaped in the
bewilderment, fear, and gloom of the disaster. The shock of it seemed to
have changed their natures. It had turned her passion into stone, and
it made the surly taciturn Tamb' Itam almost loquacious. His surliness,
too, was subdued into puzzled humility, as though he had seen the
failure of a potent charm in a supreme moment. The Bugis trader, a shy
hesitating man, was very clear in the little he had to say. Both were
evidently over-awed by a sense of deep inexpressible wonder, by the
touch of an inscrutable mystery.'
There with Marlow's signature the letter proper ended. The privileged
reader screwed up his lamp, and solitary above the billowy roofs of the
town, like a lighthouse-keeper above the sea, he turned to the pages of
the story.
| 2,390 | Chapter 37 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210118112654/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/lord-jim/summary/chapter-37 | If you thought we were done with Marlow's storytelling, we hate to break it to you. We've got another round coming. In the letters, Marlow describes an encounter he has with a dying pirate named Gentleman Brown. According to Marlow, Brown's story will help fill in the gaps at the end of Jim's story. Marlow then jumps back in time to when he first learned of this story at Stein's house. He was there visiting Stein, and ran into Jewel and Tamb' Itam. Tamb' Itam said that Jim wouldn't fight, and Jewel woodenly said that Jim left her. We're not quite sure what they're talking about, but we have a bad feeling about this. | null | 114 | 1 | [
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5,658 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/26.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Lord Jim/section_25_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapter 26 | chapter 26 | null | {"name": "Chapter 26", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210118112654/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/lord-jim/summary/chapter-26", "summary": "Now is as good a time as any to tell you a bit more about Doramin, so Marlow gives us the scoop about this guy, and his son Dain Waris. Doramin is the leader of a group called the Bugis, merchants who emigrated to Patusan from Celebes. He's also an enemy of Doramin, which might explain why Jim felt safe taking refuge at his house. Doramin and his people consider teaming up against the Rajah with a fanatic named Sherif Ali. By the way, that's also the name of Omar Sharif's character in Lawrence of Arabia. Coincidence? But clever Jim has an even better idea. Doramin and his followers should attack Sherif Ali and eliminate the threat he poses. A battle ensues.", "analysis": ""} |
'Doramin was one of the most remarkable men of his race I had ever seen.
His bulk for a Malay was immense, but he did not look merely fat; he
looked imposing, monumental. This motionless body, clad in rich stuffs,
coloured silks, gold embroideries; this huge head, enfolded in a
red-and-gold headkerchief; the flat, big, round face, wrinkled,
furrowed, with two semicircular heavy folds starting on each side of
wide, fierce nostrils, and enclosing a thick-lipped mouth; the throat
like a bull; the vast corrugated brow overhanging the staring proud
eyes--made a whole that, once seen, can never be forgotten. His
impassive repose (he seldom stirred a limb when once he sat down) was
like a display of dignity. He was never known to raise his voice. It
was a hoarse and powerful murmur, slightly veiled as if heard from a
distance. When he walked, two short, sturdy young fellows, naked to the
waist, in white sarongs and with black skull-caps on the backs of their
heads, sustained his elbows; they would ease him down and stand behind
his chair till he wanted to rise, when he would turn his head slowly,
as if with difficulty, to the right and to the left, and then they would
catch him under his armpits and help him up. For all that, there was
nothing of a cripple about him: on the contrary, all his ponderous
movements were like manifestations of a mighty deliberate force. It
was generally believed he consulted his wife as to public affairs; but
nobody, as far as I know, had ever heard them exchange a single word.
When they sat in state by the wide opening it was in silence. They could
see below them in the declining light the vast expanse of the forest
country, a dark sleeping sea of sombre green undulating as far as the
violet and purple range of mountains; the shining sinuosity of the river
like an immense letter S of beaten silver; the brown ribbon of houses
following the sweep of both banks, overtopped by the twin hills uprising
above the nearer tree-tops. They were wonderfully contrasted: she,
light, delicate, spare, quick, a little witch-like, with a touch of
motherly fussiness in her repose; he, facing her, immense and heavy,
like a figure of a man roughly fashioned of stone, with something
magnanimous and ruthless in his immobility. The son of these old people
was a most distinguished youth.
'They had him late in life. Perhaps he was not really so young as he
looked. Four- or five-and-twenty is not so young when a man is already
father of a family at eighteen. When he entered the large room, lined
and carpeted with fine mats, and with a high ceiling of white sheeting,
where the couple sat in state surrounded by a most deferential retinue,
he would make his way straight to Doramin, to kiss his hand--which the
other abandoned to him, majestically--and then would step across to
stand by his mother's chair. I suppose I may say they idolised him, but
I never caught them giving him an overt glance. Those, it is true, were
public functions. The room was generally thronged. The solemn formality
of greetings and leave-takings, the profound respect expressed in
gestures, on the faces, in the low whispers, is simply indescribable.
"It's well worth seeing," Jim had assured me while we were crossing the
river, on our way back. "They are like people in a book, aren't they?"
he said triumphantly. "And Dain Waris--their son--is the best
friend (barring you) I ever had. What Mr. Stein would call a good
'war-comrade.' I was in luck. Jove! I was in luck when I tumbled amongst
them at my last gasp." He meditated with bowed head, then rousing
himself he added--'"Of course I didn't go to sleep over it, but . . ."
He paused again. "It seemed to come to me," he murmured. "All at once I
saw what I had to do . . ."
'There was no doubt that it had come to him; and it had come through
war, too, as is natural, since this power that came to him was the power
to make peace. It is in this sense alone that might so often is right.
You must not think he had seen his way at once. When he arrived the
Bugis community was in a most critical position. "They were all afraid,"
he said to me--"each man afraid for himself; while I could see as plain
as possible that they must do something at once, if they did not want
to go under one after another, what between the Rajah and that vagabond
Sherif." But to see that was nothing. When he got his idea he had
to drive it into reluctant minds, through the bulwarks of fear, of
selfishness. He drove it in at last. And that was nothing. He had to
devise the means. He devised them--an audacious plan; and his task
was only half done. He had to inspire with his own confidence a lot
of people who had hidden and absurd reasons to hang back; he had to
conciliate imbecile jealousies, and argue away all sorts of senseless
mistrusts. Without the weight of Doramin's authority, and his son's
fiery enthusiasm, he would have failed. Dain Waris, the distinguished
youth, was the first to believe in him; theirs was one of those strange,
profound, rare friendships between brown and white, in which the very
difference of race seems to draw two human beings closer by some mystic
element of sympathy. Of Dain Waris, his own people said with pride that
he knew how to fight like a white man. This was true; he had that
sort of courage--the courage in the open, I may say--but he had also a
European mind. You meet them sometimes like that, and are surprised to
discover unexpectedly a familiar turn of thought, an unobscured vision,
a tenacity of purpose, a touch of altruism. Of small stature, but
admirably well proportioned, Dain Waris had a proud carriage, a
polished, easy bearing, a temperament like a clear flame. His dusky
face, with big black eyes, was in action expressive, and in repose
thoughtful. He was of a silent disposition; a firm glance, an ironic
smile, a courteous deliberation of manner seemed to hint at great
reserves of intelligence and power. Such beings open to the Western eye,
so often concerned with mere surfaces, the hidden possibilities of races
and lands over which hangs the mystery of unrecorded ages. He not only
trusted Jim, he understood him, I firmly believe. I speak of him because
he had captivated me. His--if I may say so--his caustic placidity,
and, at the same time, his intelligent sympathy with Jim's aspirations,
appealed to me. I seemed to behold the very origin of friendship. If
Jim took the lead, the other had captivated his leader. In fact, Jim
the leader was a captive in every sense. The land, the people, the
friendship, the love, were like the jealous guardians of his body.
Every day added a link to the fetters of that strange freedom. I felt
convinced of it, as from day to day I learned more of the story.
'The story! Haven't I heard the story? I've heard it on the march, in
camp (he made me scour the country after invisible game); I've listened
to a good part of it on one of the twin summits, after climbing the last
hundred feet or so on my hands and knees. Our escort (we had volunteer
followers from village to village) had camped meantime on a bit of level
ground half-way up the slope, and in the still breathless evening the
smell of wood-smoke reached our nostrils from below with the penetrating
delicacy of some choice scent. Voices also ascended, wonderful in their
distinct and immaterial clearness. Jim sat on the trunk of a felled
tree, and pulling out his pipe began to smoke. A new growth of grass and
bushes was springing up; there were traces of an earthwork under a mass
of thorny twigs. "It all started from here," he said, after a long and
meditative silence. On the other hill, two hundred yards across a sombre
precipice, I saw a line of high blackened stakes, showing here and there
ruinously--the remnants of Sherif Ali's impregnable camp.
'But it had been taken, though. That had been his idea. He had
mounted Doramin's old ordnance on the top of that hill; two rusty iron
7-pounders, a lot of small brass cannon--currency cannon. But if the
brass guns represent wealth, they can also, when crammed recklessly to
the muzzle, send a solid shot to some little distance. The thing was
to get them up there. He showed me where he had fastened the cables,
explained how he had improvised a rude capstan out of a hollowed log
turning upon a pointed stake, indicated with the bowl of his pipe the
outline of the earthwork. The last hundred feet of the ascent had been
the most difficult. He had made himself responsible for success on his
own head. He had induced the war party to work hard all night. Big
fires lighted at intervals blazed all down the slope, "but up here," he
explained, "the hoisting gang had to fly around in the dark." From the
top he saw men moving on the hillside like ants at work. He himself on
that night had kept on rushing down and climbing up like a squirrel,
directing, encouraging, watching all along the line. Old Doramin had
himself carried up the hill in his arm-chair. They put him down on the
level place upon the slope, and he sat there in the light of one of the
big fires--"amazing old chap--real old chieftain," said Jim, "with his
little fierce eyes--a pair of immense flintlock pistols on his knees.
Magnificent things, ebony, silver-mounted, with beautiful locks and
a calibre like an old blunderbuss. A present from Stein, it seems--in
exchange for that ring, you know. Used to belong to good old McNeil. God
only knows how _he_ came by them. There he sat, moving neither hand nor
foot, a flame of dry brushwood behind him, and lots of people rushing
about, shouting and pulling round him--the most solemn, imposing old
chap you can imagine. He wouldn't have had much chance if Sherif Ali had
let his infernal crew loose at us and stampeded my lot. Eh? Anyhow, he
had come up there to die if anything went wrong. No mistake! Jove! It
thrilled me to see him there--like a rock. But the Sherif must have
thought us mad, and never troubled to come and see how we got on. Nobody
believed it could be done. Why! I think the very chaps who pulled and
shoved and sweated over it did not believe it could be done! Upon my
word I don't think they did. . . ."
'He stood erect, the smouldering brier-wood in his clutch, with a smile
on his lips and a sparkle in his boyish eyes. I sat on the stump of a
tree at his feet, and below us stretched the land, the great expanse of
the forests, sombre under the sunshine, rolling like a sea, with glints
of winding rivers, the grey spots of villages, and here and there a
clearing, like an islet of light amongst the dark waves of continuous
tree-tops. A brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous landscape;
the light fell on it as if into an abyss. The land devoured the
sunshine; only far off, along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and
polished within the faint haze, seemed to rise up to the sky in a wall
of steel.
'And there I was with him, high in the sunshine on the top of that
historic hill of his. He dominated the forest, the secular gloom, the
old mankind. He was like a figure set up on a pedestal, to represent in
his persistent youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that
never grow old, that have emerged from the gloom. I don't know why he
should always have appeared to me symbolic. Perhaps this is the real
cause of my interest in his fate. I don't know whether it was exactly
fair to him to remember the incident which had given a new direction to
his life, but at that very moment I remembered very distinctly. It was
like a shadow in the light.'
| 1,925 | Chapter 26 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210118112654/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/lord-jim/summary/chapter-26 | Now is as good a time as any to tell you a bit more about Doramin, so Marlow gives us the scoop about this guy, and his son Dain Waris. Doramin is the leader of a group called the Bugis, merchants who emigrated to Patusan from Celebes. He's also an enemy of Doramin, which might explain why Jim felt safe taking refuge at his house. Doramin and his people consider teaming up against the Rajah with a fanatic named Sherif Ali. By the way, that's also the name of Omar Sharif's character in Lawrence of Arabia. Coincidence? But clever Jim has an even better idea. Doramin and his followers should attack Sherif Ali and eliminate the threat he poses. A battle ensues. | null | 122 | 1 | [
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107 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/14.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_13_part_0.txt | Far from the Madding Crowd.chapter 14 | chapter 14 | null | {"name": "Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-14", "summary": "Boldwood sat in his living room, \"where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan Sunday lasting all the week.\" He was increasingly fascinated by the anonymous valentine, which \"must have had an origin and a motive.\" In spite of himself, Boldwood kept reverting to the mystery. He tried to visualize the sender. Sticking the letter in the corner of his mirror, he was conscious of it through the night. He slept badly and rose to watch the sunrise. Unearthly colors played on the glazed fields. When the mailman came in his cart and proffered him an envelope, \"Boldwood seized and opened it, expecting another anonymous one -- so greatly are people's ideas of probability a mere sense that precedent will repeat itself.\" The mailman pointed out that the letter was for the new shepherd, and Boldwood realized that it was intended for Gabriel Oak. Recognizing a distant figure across the field, followed by a dog, Boldwood left to take the letter to Gabriel and to apologize for having opened it.", "analysis": "Hardy has furthered the plot by introducing the matter of the anonymous valentine and following it with another letter handed to Boldwood. Additional facets of Boldwood's character are revealed. Boldwood's complexities are here contrasted with Bathsheba's lack of sophistication; her frivolity is set alongside the brooding nature of the farmer. Oblivious to the effect of her whim, Bathsheba has undoubtedly slept the night through. One is struck by the abundance of figures of speech in this chapter. These are stock in trade for any writer, but they are expertly handled by Hardy. As has been mentioned, Hardy drew his images from many sources -- visual, physical, historical, natural, and mythological."} |
EFFECT OF THE LETTER--SUNRISE
At dusk, on the evening of St. Valentine's Day, Boldwood sat down
to supper as usual, by a beaming fire of aged logs. Upon the
mantel-shelf before him was a time-piece, surmounted by a spread
eagle, and upon the eagle's wings was the letter Bathsheba had sent.
Here the bachelor's gaze was continually fastening itself, till the
large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye;
and as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon,
although they were too remote for his sight--
"MARRY ME."
The pert injunction was like those crystal substances which,
colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about them. Here,
in the quiet of Boldwood's parlour, where everything that was not
grave was extraneous, and where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan
Sunday lasting all the week, the letter and its dictum changed their
tenor from the thoughtlessness of their origin to a deep solemnity,
imbibed from their accessories now.
Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood had felt
the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the
direction of an ideal passion. The disturbance was as the first
floating weed to Columbus--the contemptibly little suggesting
possibilities of the infinitely great.
The letter must have had an origin and a motive. That the latter
was of the smallest magnitude compatible with its existence at all,
Boldwood, of course, did not know. And such an explanation did not
strike him as a possibility even. It is foreign to a mystified
condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of
approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a
course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result. The
vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing
into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent
to the person confounded by the issue.
When Boldwood went to bed he placed the valentine in the corner of
the looking-glass. He was conscious of its presence, even when his
back was turned upon it. It was the first time in Boldwood's life
that such an event had occurred. The same fascination that caused
him to think it an act which had a deliberate motive prevented
him from regarding it as an impertinence. He looked again at
the direction. The mysterious influences of night invested the
writing with the presence of the unknown writer. Somebody's--some
WOMAN'S--hand had travelled softly over the paper bearing his name;
her unrevealed eyes had watched every curve as she formed it; her
brain had seen him in imagination the while. Why should she have
imagined him? Her mouth--were the lips red or pale, plump or
creased?--had curved itself to a certain expression as the pen went
on--the corners had moved with all their natural tremulousness: what
had been the expression?
The vision of the woman writing, as a supplement to the words
written, had no individuality. She was a misty shape, and well she
might be, considering that her original was at that moment sound
asleep and oblivious of all love and letter-writing under the sky.
Whenever Boldwood dozed she took a form, and comparatively ceased to
be a vision: when he awoke there was the letter justifying the dream.
The moon shone to-night, and its light was not of a customary kind.
His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen
had that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and
lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in
strange places, and putting lights where shadows had used to be.
The substance of the epistle had occupied him but little in
comparison with the fact of its arrival. He suddenly wondered
if anything more might be found in the envelope than what he had
withdrawn. He jumped out of bed in the weird light, took the
letter, pulled out the flimsy sheet, shook the envelope--searched it.
Nothing more was there. Boldwood looked, as he had a hundred times
the preceding day, at the insistent red seal: "Marry me," he said
aloud.
The solemn and reserved yeoman again closed the letter, and stuck
it in the frame of the glass. In doing so he caught sight of his
reflected features, wan in expression, and insubstantial in form.
He saw how closely compressed was his mouth, and that his eyes were
wide-spread and vacant. Feeling uneasy and dissatisfied with himself
for this nervous excitability, he returned to bed.
Then the dawn drew on. The full power of the clear heaven was not
equal to that of a cloudy sky at noon, when Boldwood arose and
dressed himself. He descended the stairs and went out towards the
gate of a field to the east, leaning over which he paused and looked
around.
It was one of the usual slow sunrises of this time of the year, and
the sky, pure violet in the zenith, was leaden to the northward,
and murky to the east, where, over the snowy down or ewe-lease on
Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently resting upon the ridge, the
only half of the sun yet visible burnt rayless, like a red and
flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone. The whole effect
resembled a sunset as childhood resembles age.
In other directions, the fields and sky were so much of one colour by
the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts
the horizon occurred; and in general there was here, too, that
before-mentioned preternatural inversion of light and shade which
attends the prospect when the garish brightness commonly in the sky
is found on the earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky. Over
the west hung the wasting moon, now dull and greenish-yellow, like
tarnished brass.
Boldwood was listlessly noting how the frost had hardened and glazed
the surface of the snow, till it shone in the red eastern light with
the polish of marble; how, in some portions of the slope, withered
grass-bents, encased in icicles, bristled through the smooth wan
coverlet in the twisted and curved shapes of old Venetian glass; and
how the footprints of a few birds, which had hopped over the snow
whilst it lay in the state of a soft fleece, were now frozen to a
short permanency. A half-muffled noise of light wheels interrupted
him. Boldwood turned back into the road. It was the mail-cart--a
crazy, two-wheeled vehicle, hardly heavy enough to resist a puff of
wind. The driver held out a letter. Boldwood seized it and opened
it, expecting another anonymous one--so greatly are people's ideas of
probability a mere sense that precedent will repeat itself.
"I don't think it is for you, sir," said the man, when he saw
Boldwood's action. "Though there is no name, I think it is for your
shepherd."
Boldwood looked then at the address--
To the New Shepherd,
Weatherbury Farm,
Near Casterbridge
"Oh--what a mistake!--it is not mine. Nor is it for my shepherd. It
is for Miss Everdene's. You had better take it on to him--Gabriel
Oak--and say I opened it in mistake."
At this moment, on the ridge, up against the blazing sky, a figure
was visible, like the black snuff in the midst of a candle-flame.
Then it moved and began to bustle about vigorously from place to
place, carrying square skeleton masses, which were riddled by the
same rays. A small figure on all fours followed behind. The tall
form was that of Gabriel Oak; the small one that of George; the
articles in course of transit were hurdles.
"Wait," said Boldwood. "That's the man on the hill. I'll take the
letter to him myself."
To Boldwood it was now no longer merely a letter to another man. It
was an opportunity. Exhibiting a face pregnant with intention, he
entered the snowy field.
Gabriel, at that minute, descended the hill towards the right. The
glow stretched down in this direction now, and touched the distant
roof of Warren's Malthouse--whither the shepherd was apparently bent:
Boldwood followed at a distance.
| 1,300 | Chapter 14 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-14 | Boldwood sat in his living room, "where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan Sunday lasting all the week." He was increasingly fascinated by the anonymous valentine, which "must have had an origin and a motive." In spite of himself, Boldwood kept reverting to the mystery. He tried to visualize the sender. Sticking the letter in the corner of his mirror, he was conscious of it through the night. He slept badly and rose to watch the sunrise. Unearthly colors played on the glazed fields. When the mailman came in his cart and proffered him an envelope, "Boldwood seized and opened it, expecting another anonymous one -- so greatly are people's ideas of probability a mere sense that precedent will repeat itself." The mailman pointed out that the letter was for the new shepherd, and Boldwood realized that it was intended for Gabriel Oak. Recognizing a distant figure across the field, followed by a dog, Boldwood left to take the letter to Gabriel and to apologize for having opened it. | Hardy has furthered the plot by introducing the matter of the anonymous valentine and following it with another letter handed to Boldwood. Additional facets of Boldwood's character are revealed. Boldwood's complexities are here contrasted with Bathsheba's lack of sophistication; her frivolity is set alongside the brooding nature of the farmer. Oblivious to the effect of her whim, Bathsheba has undoubtedly slept the night through. One is struck by the abundance of figures of speech in this chapter. These are stock in trade for any writer, but they are expertly handled by Hardy. As has been mentioned, Hardy drew his images from many sources -- visual, physical, historical, natural, and mythological. | 170 | 110 | [
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110 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/26.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_10_part_2.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 26 | chapter 26 | null | {"name": "CHAPTER 26", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD35.asp", "summary": "In the evening, Mr. Clare tells Angel that he has saved the money not spent on Angel's Cambridge education. He is willing to give it to his son so that he may purchase some land to farm. They then talk about a suitable wife for Angel. Mr. Clare suggests that his son marry Mercy Chant, a wonderful Christian girl who is the daughter of a neighbor. Angel admits that he has someone else in mind, a young woman who is familiar with farming. His mother quizzes him about her social background, but Angel says it makes no difference in a farmer's wife. Instead, he praises the other virtues of his beloved Tess. In the end, his parents judge Tess to be inferior to Mercy and her many accomplishments, and Angel is sad at their prejudices. At the end of the discussion, his parents advise Angel not to rush into anything and agree to meet Tess in the future. When it is time for Angel to return to the farm, his father accompanies him for awhile. As they walk, Mr. Clare speaks of his successes and his failures. He is particularly bothered by the fact that a young man from the D'Urberville family has been remiss in his spiritual duties. When Mr. Clare confronted him, they argued. Mr. Clare feels like he has failed to influence this young man and continues to pray for him. Angel is upset about the treatment his father has received from the D'Urbervilles, and his dislike for such unscrupulous, historical families increases. The irony is obvious.", "analysis": "Notes It is important to notice the difference between the attitudes of Mr. and Mrs. Clare towards Tess. She is concerned about Tess's social background, questioning if she is a lady. Mr. Clare is not worried about her wealth or social status; instead, he is totally concerned about her religious background. Angel tells his mother that social class is unimportant on a farm and assures his father of Tess's religious beliefs. Angel thinks to himself that he must work on Tess's religion and plans to give her appropriate reading material to enlighten her. Before she has ever agreed to marry Angel, he is already trying to change Tess, foreshadowing that there will be future problems in this relationship. It is obvious to the reader that the young D'Urberville whom Mr. Clare discusses is none other than Alec. It is ironic that Mr. Clare is praying for this young man and hopes that it will benefit Alec in the future. Angel's reaction to the discussion is also significant. He is disgusted over the young man's unscrupulous behavior and resents his wealthy family"} |
It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found
opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his
heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind
his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of
their walking boots. When the service was over they went out of the
room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.
The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the
attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale--either
in England or in the Colonies. His father then told him that, as he
had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he
had felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the
purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel
himself unduly slighted.
"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father, "you will no
doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years."
This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel onward to the
other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was
then six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming
business he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all
matters--some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic
labours of his establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be
well, therefore, for him to marry?
His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel
put the question--
"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty
hard-working farmer?"
"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in
your goings-out and your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters
little. Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend
and neighbour, Dr Chant--"
"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good
butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and
rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and
estimate the value of sheep and calves?"
"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable." Mr
Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before.
"I was going to add," he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you
will not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more
to your mother's mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you
used to show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour
Chant's daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the younger
clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table--altar, as I
was shocked to hear her call it one day--with flowers and other stuff
on festival occasions. But her father, who is quite as opposed to
such flummery as I, says that can be cured. It is a mere girlish
outbreak which, I am sure, will not be permanent."
"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father, don't you
think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant,
but one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments,
understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself,
would suit me infinitely better?"
His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer's
wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the
impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to
advance the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious.
He said that fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who
possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist,
and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say
whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church
School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction
on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith;
honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste
as a vestal, and, in personal appearance, exceptionally beautiful.
"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into--a lady, in
short?" asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study
during the conversation.
"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady," said Angel,
unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to
say. But she IS a lady, nevertheless--in feeling and nature."
"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."
"Pooh!--what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel quickly.
"How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I
have, and shall have to do?"
"Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm,"
returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.
"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the
life I am going to lead?--while as to her reading, I can take that
in hand. She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew
her. She's brim full of poetry--actualized poetry, if I may use the
expression. She LIVES what paper-poets only write... And she is an
unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus,
and species you desire to propagate."
"O Angel, you are mocking!"
"Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend Church almost
every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you
will tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality,
and feel that I may do worse than choose her." Angel waxed quite
earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which
(never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had
been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other
milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially
naturalistic.
In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right
whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and
Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that
she at least was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of
the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never
would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said
finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would
not object to see her.
Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now.
He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents
were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as
middle-class people, which it would require some tact to overcome.
For though legally at liberty to do as he chose, and though their
daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical difference
to their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them,
he wished for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the
most important decision of his life.
He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in
Tess's life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that
he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance--not for her skill
in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for
her simple formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air
existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable
to him. He held that education had as yet but little affected the
beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It
was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral
and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably,
elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human
nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see,
might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those
lives which had been brought under its influence. This belief was
confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been
extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community,
had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the
good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman
of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise
and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.
It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left
the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one
was to return to his college, and the other to his curacy. Angel
might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart
at Talbothays. He would have been an awkward member of the
party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal
religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there
was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness
would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him. To
neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.
His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him,
on his own mare, a little way along the road. Having fairly well
advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as
they jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father's
account of his parish difficulties, and the coldness of brother
clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of
the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious
Calvinistic doctrine.
"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to
recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea.
He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been
the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and
well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.
As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young
upstart squire named d'Urberville, living some forty miles off, in
the neighbourhood of Trantridge.
"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?"
asked his son. "That curiously historic worn-out family with its
ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?"
"O no. The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty
or eighty years ago--at least, I believe so. This seems to be a
new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former
knightly line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure. But it is odd
to hear you express interest in old families. I thought you set less
store by them even than I."
"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel with a
little impatience. "Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of
their being old. Some of the wise even among themselves 'exclaim
against their own succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically,
dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly attached to them."
This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too
subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had
been about to relate; which was that after the death of the senior
so-called d'Urberville, the young man developed the most culpable
passions, though he had a blind mother, whose condition should have
made him know better. A knowledge of his career having come to
the ears of Mr Clare, when he was in that part of the country
preaching missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to
the delinquent on his spiritual state. Though he was a stranger,
occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and
took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be required of thee!" The young man much resented this
directness of attack, and in the war of words which followed when
they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr Clare, without
respect for his gray hairs.
Angel flushed with distress.
"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not expose yourself
to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"
"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of
self-abnegation. "The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor,
foolish young man. Do you suppose his incensed words could give
me any pain, or even his blows? 'Being reviled we bless; being
persecuted we suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we are made as the
filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this
day.' Those ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly
true at this present hour."
"Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?"
"No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state
of intoxication."
"No!"
"A dozen times, my boy. What then? I have saved them from the guilt
of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived
to thank me, and praise God."
"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently. "But I fear
otherwise, from what you say."
"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare. "And I continue to pray
for him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never
meet again. But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may
spring up in his heart as a good seed some day."
Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child; and though
the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma, he revered
his practice and recognized the hero under the pietist. Perhaps he
revered his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that,
in the question of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once
thought of inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless.
The same unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting
a living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the
position of poor parsons for the term of their activities; yet Angel
admired it none the less. Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel
often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than
was either of his brethren.
| 2,210 | CHAPTER 26 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD35.asp | In the evening, Mr. Clare tells Angel that he has saved the money not spent on Angel's Cambridge education. He is willing to give it to his son so that he may purchase some land to farm. They then talk about a suitable wife for Angel. Mr. Clare suggests that his son marry Mercy Chant, a wonderful Christian girl who is the daughter of a neighbor. Angel admits that he has someone else in mind, a young woman who is familiar with farming. His mother quizzes him about her social background, but Angel says it makes no difference in a farmer's wife. Instead, he praises the other virtues of his beloved Tess. In the end, his parents judge Tess to be inferior to Mercy and her many accomplishments, and Angel is sad at their prejudices. At the end of the discussion, his parents advise Angel not to rush into anything and agree to meet Tess in the future. When it is time for Angel to return to the farm, his father accompanies him for awhile. As they walk, Mr. Clare speaks of his successes and his failures. He is particularly bothered by the fact that a young man from the D'Urberville family has been remiss in his spiritual duties. When Mr. Clare confronted him, they argued. Mr. Clare feels like he has failed to influence this young man and continues to pray for him. Angel is upset about the treatment his father has received from the D'Urbervilles, and his dislike for such unscrupulous, historical families increases. The irony is obvious. | Notes It is important to notice the difference between the attitudes of Mr. and Mrs. Clare towards Tess. She is concerned about Tess's social background, questioning if she is a lady. Mr. Clare is not worried about her wealth or social status; instead, he is totally concerned about her religious background. Angel tells his mother that social class is unimportant on a farm and assures his father of Tess's religious beliefs. Angel thinks to himself that he must work on Tess's religion and plans to give her appropriate reading material to enlighten her. Before she has ever agreed to marry Angel, he is already trying to change Tess, foreshadowing that there will be future problems in this relationship. It is obvious to the reader that the young D'Urberville whom Mr. Clare discusses is none other than Alec. It is ironic that Mr. Clare is praying for this young man and hopes that it will benefit Alec in the future. Angel's reaction to the discussion is also significant. He is disgusted over the young man's unscrupulous behavior and resents his wealthy family | 260 | 181 | [
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161 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/08.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Sense and Sensibility/section_7_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 8 | chapter 8 | null | {"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility24.asp", "summary": "This chapter gives an extended character sketch of Mrs. Jennings. Wealthy and contented, she is anxious to see young men and women settled in life. Thus, when she spots Colonel Brandon admiring Marianne as she is playing the piano, she immediately pairs them up as a suitable couple. She voices her thoughts aloud to both Brandon and Marianne. While the Colonel ignores her remarks, Marianne expresses shock at the suggestion. She rejects the Colonel on the basis of his age and his reserved temperament. Elinor, though, does not agree with her sister.", "analysis": "Notes Mrs. Jennings is a typical matron: she delights in making matches between eligible men and women. She is happy to gain the acquaintance of the Dashwood girls. When she observes the Colonel admiring Marianne's talent, she concludes that Brandon is in love with the girl. She amuses herself by teasing both Marianne and the Colonel. Austen once again points out the difference in the attitudes of the two sisters. Elinor, with her better judgment, is able to assess the merits of Brandon and finds him an eligible bachelor. Marianne, fed on romantic literature, does not find the Colonel exciting enough to capture her heart. She discards the idea of him as a match for herself because he is twice her age and does not display vigor and enthusiasm. CHAPTER 9 Summary The Dashwoods settle down to a life of peace and contentment. They keep themselves occupied, and John Middleton visits them frequently. One morning, while Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor are engaged in the household duties, Marianne and Margaret venture out to explore the countryside. They get carried away by the beauty of the natural surroundings and start climbing up a hill, despite the rough weather. Suddenly it starts raining, and they head towards home. Marianne misses her step, twists her ankle and falls down. A gentleman riding by takes pity on her and carries her to her house. He introduces himself as Willoughby, from Allenham. He impresses everyone with his appearance and charming manners, and Marianne is smitten. Later in the day, when John Middleton pays them a visit, the family floods him with questions about Willoughby. Sir John talks favorably of the dashing young man. Notes The theme of love is developed. Jane Austen convincingly constructs a situation in which Marianne gets to meet the 'hero' of her dreams. Elinor has already met a good man; it is time for Marianne to find her partner. Marianne's accident, and her rescue by a knight in shining armor, resembles a scene from a fairy tale or romantic fiction. Marianne is overpowered by the striking appearance and charming manners of Willoughby. He is everything Marianne has wanted in a man: he is handsome, dashing and chivalrous. The chapter thus introduces another main character. Willoughby is a man with charm and vitality; he easily impresses beautiful girls like Marianne. His imposing presence is in direct contrast to the subdued character of the Colonel. John Middleton feels sorry for the Colonel and hopes that Marianne will realize his worth. CHAPTER 10 Summary Chapter 10 highlights the character of Willoughby and places him in further contrast to Colonel Brandon. Willoughby slowly but surely captures Marianne's heart with his enchanting ways. He also wins the approval of Mrs. Dashwood. Only Elinor is restrained in her praise for him. She is able to gauge Colonel Brandon's true feelings for Marianne, and thus feels sorry for him. She also feels hurt by the manner in which both Willoughby and Marianne ridicule the Colonel. Notes Marianne finds Willoughby an ideal suitor and is happy to seek his favor. However, Elinor is able to see through his superficial conduct. She observes that he is impulsive, prejudiced and opinionated, much like her sister. He speaks before he thinks, and he thoughtlessly hurts the Colonel's feelings with his careless remarks. Austen reveals Elinor's maturity by having her analyze the characters of Willoughby and the Colonel. She understands the real worth of the Colonel and values his sentiments. She considers him to be \"a sensible man, well-bred, well-informed, of gentle address, and--an amiable heart. \" She ranks him higher as a man than Willoughby. This chapter hints at the fate of Marianne in the hands of Willoughby. Elinor, as Austen's mouthpiece, conveys her apprehension about this shallow and ostentatious man."} |
Mrs. Jennings was a widow with an ample jointure. She had only two
daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and
she had now therefore nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the
world. In the promotion of this object she was zealously active, as
far as her ability reached; and missed no opportunity of projecting
weddings among all the young people of her acquaintance. She was
remarkably quick in the discovery of attachments, and had enjoyed the
advantage of raising the blushes and the vanity of many a young lady by
insinuations of her power over such a young man; and this kind of
discernment enabled her soon after her arrival at Barton decisively to
pronounce that Colonel Brandon was very much in love with Marianne
Dashwood. She rather suspected it to be so, on the very first evening
of their being together, from his listening so attentively while she
sang to them; and when the visit was returned by the Middletons' dining
at the cottage, the fact was ascertained by his listening to her again.
It must be so. She was perfectly convinced of it. It would be an
excellent match, for HE was rich, and SHE was handsome. Mrs. Jennings
had been anxious to see Colonel Brandon well married, ever since her
connection with Sir John first brought him to her knowledge; and she
was always anxious to get a good husband for every pretty girl.
The immediate advantage to herself was by no means inconsiderable, for
it supplied her with endless jokes against them both. At the park she
laughed at the colonel, and in the cottage at Marianne. To the former
her raillery was probably, as far as it regarded only himself,
perfectly indifferent; but to the latter it was at first
incomprehensible; and when its object was understood, she hardly knew
whether most to laugh at its absurdity, or censure its impertinence,
for she considered it as an unfeeling reflection on the colonel's
advanced years, and on his forlorn condition as an old bachelor.
Mrs. Dashwood, who could not think a man five years younger than
herself, so exceedingly ancient as he appeared to the youthful fancy of
her daughter, ventured to clear Mrs. Jennings from the probability of
wishing to throw ridicule on his age.
"But at least, Mama, you cannot deny the absurdity of the accusation,
though you may not think it intentionally ill-natured. Colonel Brandon
is certainly younger than Mrs. Jennings, but he is old enough to be MY
father; and if he were ever animated enough to be in love, must have
long outlived every sensation of the kind. It is too ridiculous! When
is a man to be safe from such wit, if age and infirmity will not
protect him?"
"Infirmity!" said Elinor, "do you call Colonel Brandon infirm? I can
easily suppose that his age may appear much greater to you than to my
mother; but you can hardly deceive yourself as to his having the use of
his limbs!"
"Did not you hear him complain of the rheumatism? and is not that the
commonest infirmity of declining life?"
"My dearest child," said her mother, laughing, "at this rate you must
be in continual terror of MY decay; and it must seem to you a miracle
that my life has been extended to the advanced age of forty."
"Mama, you are not doing me justice. I know very well that Colonel
Brandon is not old enough to make his friends yet apprehensive of
losing him in the course of nature. He may live twenty years longer.
But thirty-five has nothing to do with matrimony."
"Perhaps," said Elinor, "thirty-five and seventeen had better not have
any thing to do with matrimony together. But if there should by any
chance happen to be a woman who is single at seven and twenty, I should
not think Colonel Brandon's being thirty-five any objection to his
marrying HER."
"A woman of seven and twenty," said Marianne, after pausing a moment,
"can never hope to feel or inspire affection again, and if her home be
uncomfortable, or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring
herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the
provision and security of a wife. In his marrying such a woman
therefore there would be nothing unsuitable. It would be a compact of
convenience, and the world would be satisfied. In my eyes it would be
no marriage at all, but that would be nothing. To me it would seem
only a commercial exchange, in which each wished to be benefited at the
expense of the other."
"It would be impossible, I know," replied Elinor, "to convince you that
a woman of seven and twenty could feel for a man of thirty-five
anything near enough to love, to make him a desirable companion to her.
But I must object to your dooming Colonel Brandon and his wife to the
constant confinement of a sick chamber, merely because he chanced to
complain yesterday (a very cold damp day) of a slight rheumatic feel in
one of his shoulders."
"But he talked of flannel waistcoats," said Marianne; "and with me a
flannel waistcoat is invariably connected with aches, cramps,
rheumatisms, and every species of ailment that can afflict the old and
the feeble."
"Had he been only in a violent fever, you would not have despised him
half so much. Confess, Marianne, is not there something interesting to
you in the flushed cheek, hollow eye, and quick pulse of a fever?"
Soon after this, upon Elinor's leaving the room, "Mama," said
Marianne, "I have an alarm on the subject of illness which I cannot
conceal from you. I am sure Edward Ferrars is not well. We have now
been here almost a fortnight, and yet he does not come. Nothing but
real indisposition could occasion this extraordinary delay. What else
can detain him at Norland?"
"Had you any idea of his coming so soon?" said Mrs. Dashwood. "I had
none. On the contrary, if I have felt any anxiety at all on the
subject, it has been in recollecting that he sometimes showed a want of
pleasure and readiness in accepting my invitation, when I talked of his
coming to Barton. Does Elinor expect him already?"
"I have never mentioned it to her, but of course she must."
"I rather think you are mistaken, for when I was talking to her
yesterday of getting a new grate for the spare bedchamber, she observed
that there was no immediate hurry for it, as it was not likely that the
room would be wanted for some time."
"How strange this is! what can be the meaning of it! But the whole of
their behaviour to each other has been unaccountable! How cold, how
composed were their last adieus! How languid their conversation the
last evening of their being together! In Edward's farewell there was no
distinction between Elinor and me: it was the good wishes of an
affectionate brother to both. Twice did I leave them purposely
together in the course of the last morning, and each time did he most
unaccountably follow me out of the room. And Elinor, in quitting
Norland and Edward, cried not as I did. Even now her self-command is
invariable. When is she dejected or melancholy? When does she try to
avoid society, or appear restless and dissatisfied in it?"
| 1,174 | Chapter 8 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility24.asp | This chapter gives an extended character sketch of Mrs. Jennings. Wealthy and contented, she is anxious to see young men and women settled in life. Thus, when she spots Colonel Brandon admiring Marianne as she is playing the piano, she immediately pairs them up as a suitable couple. She voices her thoughts aloud to both Brandon and Marianne. While the Colonel ignores her remarks, Marianne expresses shock at the suggestion. She rejects the Colonel on the basis of his age and his reserved temperament. Elinor, though, does not agree with her sister. | Notes Mrs. Jennings is a typical matron: she delights in making matches between eligible men and women. She is happy to gain the acquaintance of the Dashwood girls. When she observes the Colonel admiring Marianne's talent, she concludes that Brandon is in love with the girl. She amuses herself by teasing both Marianne and the Colonel. Austen once again points out the difference in the attitudes of the two sisters. Elinor, with her better judgment, is able to assess the merits of Brandon and finds him an eligible bachelor. Marianne, fed on romantic literature, does not find the Colonel exciting enough to capture her heart. She discards the idea of him as a match for herself because he is twice her age and does not display vigor and enthusiasm. CHAPTER 9 Summary The Dashwoods settle down to a life of peace and contentment. They keep themselves occupied, and John Middleton visits them frequently. One morning, while Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor are engaged in the household duties, Marianne and Margaret venture out to explore the countryside. They get carried away by the beauty of the natural surroundings and start climbing up a hill, despite the rough weather. Suddenly it starts raining, and they head towards home. Marianne misses her step, twists her ankle and falls down. A gentleman riding by takes pity on her and carries her to her house. He introduces himself as Willoughby, from Allenham. He impresses everyone with his appearance and charming manners, and Marianne is smitten. Later in the day, when John Middleton pays them a visit, the family floods him with questions about Willoughby. Sir John talks favorably of the dashing young man. Notes The theme of love is developed. Jane Austen convincingly constructs a situation in which Marianne gets to meet the 'hero' of her dreams. Elinor has already met a good man; it is time for Marianne to find her partner. Marianne's accident, and her rescue by a knight in shining armor, resembles a scene from a fairy tale or romantic fiction. Marianne is overpowered by the striking appearance and charming manners of Willoughby. He is everything Marianne has wanted in a man: he is handsome, dashing and chivalrous. The chapter thus introduces another main character. Willoughby is a man with charm and vitality; he easily impresses beautiful girls like Marianne. His imposing presence is in direct contrast to the subdued character of the Colonel. John Middleton feels sorry for the Colonel and hopes that Marianne will realize his worth. CHAPTER 10 Summary Chapter 10 highlights the character of Willoughby and places him in further contrast to Colonel Brandon. Willoughby slowly but surely captures Marianne's heart with his enchanting ways. He also wins the approval of Mrs. Dashwood. Only Elinor is restrained in her praise for him. She is able to gauge Colonel Brandon's true feelings for Marianne, and thus feels sorry for him. She also feels hurt by the manner in which both Willoughby and Marianne ridicule the Colonel. Notes Marianne finds Willoughby an ideal suitor and is happy to seek his favor. However, Elinor is able to see through his superficial conduct. She observes that he is impulsive, prejudiced and opinionated, much like her sister. He speaks before he thinks, and he thoughtlessly hurts the Colonel's feelings with his careless remarks. Austen reveals Elinor's maturity by having her analyze the characters of Willoughby and the Colonel. She understands the real worth of the Colonel and values his sentiments. She considers him to be "a sensible man, well-bred, well-informed, of gentle address, and--an amiable heart. " She ranks him higher as a man than Willoughby. This chapter hints at the fate of Marianne in the hands of Willoughby. Elinor, as Austen's mouthpiece, conveys her apprehension about this shallow and ostentatious man. | 92 | 628 | [
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28,054 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/75.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Brothers Karamazov/section_13_part_7.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 11.chapter 6 | book 11, chapter 6 | null | {"name": "book 11, Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section14/", "summary": "The First Meeting with Smerdyakov Since the murder, Smerdyakov has been sick and is now near death. Ivan has visited him twice, and now goes to see him again. During their first visit, Smerdyakov asserts that Ivan left his father on the day of the murder because he suspected his brother Dmitri would kill their father, and Ivan secretly wanted their father to die", "analysis": ""} | Chapter VI. The First Interview With Smerdyakov
This was the third time that Ivan had been to see Smerdyakov since his
return from Moscow. The first time he had seen him and talked to him was
on the first day of his arrival, then he had visited him once more, a
fortnight later. But his visits had ended with that second one, so that it
was now over a month since he had seen him. And he had scarcely heard
anything of him.
Ivan had only returned five days after his father's death, so that he was
not present at the funeral, which took place the day before he came back.
The cause of his delay was that Alyosha, not knowing his Moscow address,
had to apply to Katerina Ivanovna to telegraph to him, and she, not
knowing his address either, telegraphed to her sister and aunt, reckoning
on Ivan's going to see them as soon as he arrived in Moscow. But he did
not go to them till four days after his arrival. When he got the telegram,
he had, of course, set off post-haste to our town. The first to meet him
was Alyosha, and Ivan was greatly surprised to find that, in opposition to
the general opinion of the town, he refused to entertain a suspicion
against Mitya, and spoke openly of Smerdyakov as the murderer. Later on,
after seeing the police captain and the prosecutor, and hearing the
details of the charge and the arrest, he was still more surprised at
Alyosha, and ascribed his opinion only to his exaggerated brotherly
feeling and sympathy with Mitya, of whom Alyosha, as Ivan knew, was very
fond.
By the way, let us say a word or two of Ivan's feeling to his brother
Dmitri. He positively disliked him; at most, felt sometimes a compassion
for him, and even that was mixed with great contempt, almost repugnance.
Mitya's whole personality, even his appearance, was extremely unattractive
to him. Ivan looked with indignation on Katerina Ivanovna's love for his
brother. Yet he went to see Mitya on the first day of his arrival, and
that interview, far from shaking Ivan's belief in his guilt, positively
strengthened it. He found his brother agitated, nervously excited. Mitya
had been talkative, but very absent-minded and incoherent. He used violent
language, accused Smerdyakov, and was fearfully muddled. He talked
principally about the three thousand roubles, which he said had been
"stolen" from him by his father.
"The money was mine, it was my money," Mitya kept repeating. "Even if I
had stolen it, I should have had the right."
He hardly contested the evidence against him, and if he tried to turn a
fact to his advantage, it was in an absurd and incoherent way. He hardly
seemed to wish to defend himself to Ivan or any one else. Quite the
contrary, he was angry and proudly scornful of the charges against him; he
was continually firing up and abusing every one. He only laughed
contemptuously at Grigory's evidence about the open door, and declared
that it was "the devil that opened it." But he could not bring forward any
coherent explanation of the fact. He even succeeded in insulting Ivan
during their first interview, telling him sharply that it was not for
people who declared that "everything was lawful," to suspect and question
him. Altogether he was anything but friendly with Ivan on that occasion.
Immediately after that interview with Mitya, Ivan went for the first time
to see Smerdyakov.
In the railway train on his way from Moscow, he kept thinking of
Smerdyakov and of his last conversation with him on the evening before he
went away. Many things seemed to him puzzling and suspicious. But when he
gave his evidence to the investigating lawyer Ivan said nothing, for the
time, of that conversation. He put that off till he had seen Smerdyakov,
who was at that time in the hospital.
Doctor Herzenstube and Varvinsky, the doctor he met in the hospital,
confidently asserted in reply to Ivan's persistent questions, that
Smerdyakov's epileptic attack was unmistakably genuine, and were surprised
indeed at Ivan asking whether he might not have been shamming on the day
of the catastrophe. They gave him to understand that the attack was an
exceptional one, the fits persisting and recurring several times, so that
the patient's life was positively in danger, and it was only now, after
they had applied remedies, that they could assert with confidence that the
patient would survive. "Though it might well be," added Doctor
Herzenstube, "that his reason would be impaired for a considerable period,
if not permanently." On Ivan's asking impatiently whether that meant that
he was now mad, they told him that this was not yet the case, in the full
sense of the word, but that certain abnormalities were perceptible. Ivan
decided to find out for himself what those abnormalities were.
At the hospital he was at once allowed to see the patient. Smerdyakov was
lying on a truckle-bed in a separate ward. There was only one other bed in
the room, and in it lay a tradesman of the town, swollen with dropsy, who
was obviously almost dying; he could be no hindrance to their
conversation. Smerdyakov grinned uncertainly on seeing Ivan, and for the
first instant seemed nervous. So at least Ivan fancied. But that was only
momentary. For the rest of the time he was struck, on the contrary, by
Smerdyakov's composure. From the first glance Ivan had no doubt that he
was very ill. He was very weak; he spoke slowly, seeming to move his
tongue with difficulty; he was much thinner and sallower. Throughout the
interview, which lasted twenty minutes, he kept complaining of headache
and of pain in all his limbs. His thin emasculate face seemed to have
become so tiny; his hair was ruffled, and his crest of curls in front
stood up in a thin tuft. But in the left eye, which was screwed up and
seemed to be insinuating something, Smerdyakov showed himself unchanged.
"It's always worth while speaking to a clever man." Ivan was reminded of
that at once. He sat down on the stool at his feet. Smerdyakov, with
painful effort, shifted his position in bed, but he was not the first to
speak. He remained dumb, and did not even look much interested.
"Can you talk to me?" asked Ivan. "I won't tire you much."
"Certainly I can," mumbled Smerdyakov, in a faint voice. "Has your honor
been back long?" he added patronizingly, as though encouraging a nervous
visitor.
"I only arrived to-day.... To see the mess you are in here." Smerdyakov
sighed.
"Why do you sigh? You knew of it all along," Ivan blurted out.
Smerdyakov was stolidly silent for a while.
"How could I help knowing? It was clear beforehand. But how could I tell
it would turn out like that?"
"What would turn out? Don't prevaricate! You've foretold you'd have a fit;
on the way down to the cellar, you know. You mentioned the very spot."
"Have you said so at the examination yet?" Smerdyakov queried with
composure.
Ivan felt suddenly angry.
"No, I haven't yet, but I certainly shall. You must explain a great deal
to me, my man; and let me tell you, I am not going to let you play with
me!"
"Why should I play with you, when I put my whole trust in you, as in God
Almighty?" said Smerdyakov, with the same composure, only for a moment
closing his eyes.
"In the first place," began Ivan, "I know that epileptic fits can't be
told beforehand. I've inquired; don't try and take me in. You can't
foretell the day and the hour. How was it you told me the day and the hour
beforehand, and about the cellar, too? How could you tell that you would
fall down the cellar stairs in a fit, if you didn't sham a fit on
purpose?"
"I had to go to the cellar anyway, several times a day, indeed,"
Smerdyakov drawled deliberately. "I fell from the garret just in the same
way a year ago. It's quite true you can't tell the day and hour of a fit
beforehand, but you can always have a presentiment of it."
"But you did foretell the day and the hour!"
"In regard to my epilepsy, sir, you had much better inquire of the doctors
here. You can ask them whether it was a real fit or a sham; it's no use my
saying any more about it."
"And the cellar? How could you know beforehand of the cellar?"
"You don't seem able to get over that cellar! As I was going down to the
cellar, I was in terrible dread and doubt. What frightened me most was
losing you and being left without defense in all the world. So I went down
into the cellar thinking, 'Here, it'll come on directly, it'll strike me
down directly, shall I fall?' And it was through this fear that I suddenly
felt the spasm that always comes ... and so I went flying. All that and
all my previous conversation with you at the gate the evening before, when
I told you how frightened I was and spoke of the cellar, I told all that
to Doctor Herzenstube and Nikolay Parfenovitch, the investigating lawyer,
and it's all been written down in the protocol. And the doctor here, Mr.
Varvinsky, maintained to all of them that it was just the thought of it
brought it on, the apprehension that I might fall. It was just then that
the fit seized me. And so they've written it down, that it's just how it
must have happened, simply from my fear."
As he finished, Smerdyakov drew a deep breath, as though exhausted.
"Then you have said all that in your evidence?" said Ivan, somewhat taken
aback. He had meant to frighten him with the threat of repeating their
conversation, and it appeared that Smerdyakov had already reported it all
himself.
"What have I to be afraid of? Let them write down the whole truth,"
Smerdyakov pronounced firmly.
"And have you told them every word of our conversation at the gate?"
"No, not to say every word."
"And did you tell them that you can sham fits, as you boasted then?"
"No, I didn't tell them that either."
"Tell me now, why did you send me then to Tchermashnya?"
"I was afraid you'd go away to Moscow; Tchermashnya is nearer, anyway."
"You are lying; you suggested my going away yourself; you told me to get
out of the way of trouble."
"That was simply out of affection and my sincere devotion to you,
foreseeing trouble in the house, to spare you. Only I wanted to spare
myself even more. That's why I told you to get out of harm's way, that you
might understand that there would be trouble in the house, and would
remain at home to protect your father."
"You might have said it more directly, you blockhead!" Ivan suddenly fired
up.
"How could I have said it more directly then? It was simply my fear that
made me speak, and you might have been angry, too. I might well have been
apprehensive that Dmitri Fyodorovitch would make a scene and carry away
that money, for he considered it as good as his own; but who could tell
that it would end in a murder like this? I thought that he would only
carry off the three thousand that lay under the master's mattress in the
envelope, and you see, he's murdered him. How could you guess it either,
sir?"
"But if you say yourself that it couldn't be guessed, how could I have
guessed and stayed at home? You contradict yourself!" said Ivan,
pondering.
"You might have guessed from my sending you to Tchermashnya and not to
Moscow."
"How could I guess it from that?"
Smerdyakov seemed much exhausted, and again he was silent for a minute.
"You might have guessed from the fact of my asking you not to go to
Moscow, but to Tchermashnya, that I wanted to have you nearer, for
Moscow's a long way off, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch, knowing you are not far
off, would not be so bold. And if anything had happened, you might have
come to protect me, too, for I warned you of Grigory Vassilyevitch's
illness, and that I was afraid of having a fit. And when I explained those
knocks to you, by means of which one could go in to the deceased, and that
Dmitri Fyodorovitch knew them all through me, I thought that you would
guess yourself that he would be sure to do something, and so wouldn't go
to Tchermashnya even, but would stay."
"He talks very coherently," thought Ivan, "though he does mumble; what's
the derangement of his faculties that Herzenstube talked of?"
"You are cunning with me, damn you!" he exclaimed, getting angry.
"But I thought at the time that you quite guessed," Smerdyakov parried
with the simplest air.
"If I'd guessed, I should have stayed," cried Ivan.
"Why, I thought that it was because you guessed, that you went away in
such a hurry, only to get out of trouble, only to run away and save
yourself in your fright."
"You think that every one is as great a coward as yourself?"
"Forgive me, I thought you were like me."
"Of course, I ought to have guessed," Ivan said in agitation; "and I did
guess there was some mischief brewing on your part ... only you are lying,
you are lying again," he cried, suddenly recollecting. "Do you remember
how you went up to the carriage and said to me, 'It's always worth while
speaking to a clever man'? So you were glad I went away, since you praised
me?"
Smerdyakov sighed again and again. A trace of color came into his face.
"If I was pleased," he articulated rather breathlessly, "it was simply
because you agreed not to go to Moscow, but to Tchermashnya. For it was
nearer, anyway. Only when I said these words to you, it was not by way of
praise, but of reproach. You didn't understand it."
"What reproach?"
"Why, that foreseeing such a calamity you deserted your own father, and
would not protect us, for I might have been taken up any time for stealing
that three thousand."
"Damn you!" Ivan swore again. "Stay, did you tell the prosecutor and the
investigating lawyer about those knocks?"
"I told them everything just as it was."
Ivan wondered inwardly again.
"If I thought of anything then," he began again, "it was solely of some
wickedness on your part. Dmitri might kill him, but that he would steal--I
did not believe that then.... But I was prepared for any wickedness from
you. You told me yourself you could sham a fit. What did you say that
for?"
"It was just through my simplicity, and I never have shammed a fit on
purpose in my life. And I only said so then to boast to you. It was just
foolishness. I liked you so much then, and was open-hearted with you."
"My brother directly accuses you of the murder and theft."
"What else is left for him to do?" said Smerdyakov, with a bitter grin.
"And who will believe him with all the proofs against him? Grigory
Vassilyevitch saw the door open. What can he say after that? But never
mind him! He is trembling to save himself."
He slowly ceased speaking; then suddenly, as though on reflection, added:
"And look here again. He wants to throw it on me and make out that it is
the work of my hands--I've heard that already. But as to my being clever at
shamming a fit: should I have told you beforehand that I could sham one,
if I really had had such a design against your father? If I had been
planning such a murder could I have been such a fool as to give such
evidence against myself beforehand? And to his son, too! Upon my word! Is
that likely? As if that could be, such a thing has never happened. No one
hears this talk of ours now, except Providence itself, and if you were to
tell of it to the prosecutor and Nikolay Parfenovitch you might defend me
completely by doing so, for who would be likely to be such a criminal, if
he is so open-hearted beforehand? Any one can see that."
"Well," and Ivan got up to cut short the conversation, struck by
Smerdyakov's last argument. "I don't suspect you at all, and I think it's
absurd, indeed, to suspect you. On the contrary, I am grateful to you for
setting my mind at rest. Now I am going, but I'll come again. Meanwhile,
good-by. Get well. Is there anything you want?"
"I am very thankful for everything. Marfa Ignatyevna does not forget me,
and provides me anything I want, according to her kindness. Good people
visit me every day."
"Good-by. But I shan't say anything of your being able to sham a fit, and
I don't advise you to, either," something made Ivan say suddenly.
"I quite understand. And if you don't speak of that, I shall say nothing
of that conversation of ours at the gate."
Then it happened that Ivan went out, and only when he had gone a dozen
steps along the corridor, he suddenly felt that there was an insulting
significance in Smerdyakov's last words. He was almost on the point of
turning back, but it was only a passing impulse, and muttering,
"Nonsense!" he went out of the hospital.
His chief feeling was one of relief at the fact that it was not
Smerdyakov, but Mitya, who had committed the murder, though he might have
been expected to feel the opposite. He did not want to analyze the reason
for this feeling, and even felt a positive repugnance at prying into his
sensations. He felt as though he wanted to make haste to forget something.
In the following days he became convinced of Mitya's guilt, as he got to
know all the weight of evidence against him. There was evidence of people
of no importance, Fenya and her mother, for instance, but the effect of it
was almost overpowering. As to Perhotin, the people at the tavern, and at
Plotnikov's shop, as well as the witnesses at Mokroe, their evidence
seemed conclusive. It was the details that were so damning. The secret of
the knocks impressed the lawyers almost as much as Grigory's evidence as
to the open door. Grigory's wife, Marfa, in answer to Ivan's questions,
declared that Smerdyakov had been lying all night the other side of the
partition wall. "He was not three paces from our bed," and that although
she was a sound sleeper she waked several times and heard him moaning, "He
was moaning the whole time, moaning continually."
Talking to Herzenstube, and giving it as his opinion that Smerdyakov was
not mad, but only rather weak, Ivan only evoked from the old man a subtle
smile.
"Do you know how he spends his time now?" he asked; "learning lists of
French words by heart. He has an exercise-book under his pillow with the
French words written out in Russian letters for him by some one, he he
he!"
Ivan ended by dismissing all doubts. He could not think of Dmitri without
repulsion. Only one thing was strange, however. Alyosha persisted that
Dmitri was not the murderer, and that "in all probability" Smerdyakov was.
Ivan always felt that Alyosha's opinion meant a great deal to him, and so
he was astonished at it now. Another thing that was strange was that
Alyosha did not make any attempt to talk about Mitya with Ivan, that he
never began on the subject and only answered his questions. This, too,
struck Ivan particularly.
But he was very much preoccupied at that time with something quite apart
from that. On his return from Moscow, he abandoned himself hopelessly to
his mad and consuming passion for Katerina Ivanovna. This is not the time
to begin to speak of this new passion of Ivan's, which left its mark on
all the rest of his life: this would furnish the subject for another
novel, which I may perhaps never write. But I cannot omit to mention here
that when Ivan, on leaving Katerina Ivanovna with Alyosha, as I've related
already, told him, "I am not keen on her," it was an absolute lie: he
loved her madly, though at times he hated her so that he might have
murdered her. Many causes helped to bring about this feeling. Shattered by
what had happened with Mitya, she rushed on Ivan's return to meet him as
her one salvation. She was hurt, insulted and humiliated in her feelings.
And here the man had come back to her, who had loved her so ardently
before (oh! she knew that very well), and whose heart and intellect she
considered so superior to her own. But the sternly virtuous girl did not
abandon herself altogether to the man she loved, in spite of the Karamazov
violence of his passions and the great fascination he had for her. She was
continually tormented at the same time by remorse for having deserted
Mitya, and in moments of discord and violent anger (and they were
numerous) she told Ivan so plainly. This was what he had called to Alyosha
"lies upon lies." There was, of course, much that was false in it, and
that angered Ivan more than anything.... But of all this later.
He did, in fact, for a time almost forget Smerdyakov's existence, and yet,
a fortnight after his first visit to him, he began to be haunted by the
same strange thoughts as before. It's enough to say that he was
continually asking himself, why was it that on that last night in Fyodor
Pavlovitch's house he had crept out on to the stairs like a thief and
listened to hear what his father was doing below? Why had he recalled that
afterwards with repulsion? Why next morning, had he been suddenly so
depressed on the journey? Why, as he reached Moscow, had he said to
himself, "I am a scoundrel"? And now he almost fancied that these
tormenting thoughts would make him even forget Katerina Ivanovna, so
completely did they take possession of him again. It was just after
fancying this, that he met Alyosha in the street. He stopped him at once,
and put a question to him:
"Do you remember when Dmitri burst in after dinner and beat father, and
afterwards I told you in the yard that I reserved 'the right to
desire'?... Tell me, did you think then that I desired father's death or
not?"
"I did think so," answered Alyosha, softly.
"It was so, too; it was not a matter of guessing. But didn't you fancy
then that what I wished was just that 'one reptile should devour another';
that is, just that Dmitri should kill father, and as soon as possible ...
and that I myself was even prepared to help to bring that about?"
Alyosha turned rather pale, and looked silently into his brother's face.
"Speak!" cried Ivan, "I want above everything to know what you thought
then. I want the truth, the truth!"
He drew a deep breath, looking angrily at Alyosha before his answer came.
"Forgive me, I did think that, too, at the time," whispered Alyosha, and
he did not add one softening phrase.
"Thanks," snapped Ivan, and, leaving Alyosha, he went quickly on his way.
From that time Alyosha noticed that Ivan began obviously to avoid him and
seemed even to have taken a dislike to him, so much so that Alyosha gave
up going to see him. Immediately after that meeting with him, Ivan had not
gone home, but went straight to Smerdyakov again.
| 3,662 | book 11, Chapter 6 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section14/ | The First Meeting with Smerdyakov Since the murder, Smerdyakov has been sick and is now near death. Ivan has visited him twice, and now goes to see him again. During their first visit, Smerdyakov asserts that Ivan left his father on the day of the murder because he suspected his brother Dmitri would kill their father, and Ivan secretly wanted their father to die | null | 64 | 1 | [
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110 | false | novelguide | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/36.txt | finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_5_part_2.txt | Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter xxxvi | chapter xxxvi | null | {"name": "Chapter XXXVI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase5-chapter35-44", "summary": "The following morning Angel prepares breakfast and leaves to go to the flour mill: \"the pair, in truth, were but the ashes of their former selves\". Tess suggests divorce but he says it is impossible. She suggests returning home, and he agrees", "analysis": ""} |
Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as
though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its
extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full
glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and
his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of
not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be
done? From above there was no sound; but in a few minutes there came
a knock at the door. He remembered that it would be the neighbouring
cottager's wife, who was to minister to their wants while they
remained here.
The presence of a third person in the house would be extremely
awkward just now, and, being already dressed, he opened the window
and informed her that they could manage to shift for themselves that
morning. She had a milk-can in her hand, which he told her to leave
at the door. When the dame had gone away he searched in the back
quarters of the house for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was
plenty of eggs, butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare
soon had breakfast laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered
him facile in domestic preparations. The smoke of the kindled wood
rose from the chimney without like a lotus-headed column; local
people who were passing by saw it, and thought of the newly-married
couple, and envied their happiness.
Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the foot of the
stairs, called in a conventional voice--
"Breakfast is ready!"
He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the morning air.
When, after a short space, he came back she was already in the
sitting-room mechanically readjusting the breakfast things. As she
was fully attired, and the interval since his calling her had been
but two or three minutes, she must have been dressed or nearly so
before he went to summon her. Her hair was twisted up in a large
round mass at the back of her head, and she had put on one of the
new frocks--a pale blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of
white. Her hands and face appeared to be cold, and she had possibly
been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long time without any fire.
The marked civility of Clare's tone in calling her seemed to have
inspired her, for the moment, with a new glimmer of hope. But it
soon died when she looked at him.
The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the
hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed
as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any
more.
He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like
undemonstrativeness. At last she came up to him, looking in his
sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness that her own
formed a visible object also.
"Angel!" she said, and paused, touching him with her fingers lightly
as a breeze, as though she could hardly believe to be there in the
flesh the man who was once her lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale
cheek still showed its wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had
left glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth was
almost as pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she was still,
under the stress of her mental grief the life beat so brokenly that
a little further pull upon it would cause real illness, dull her
characteristic eyes, and make her mouth thin.
She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had
set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed
at her with a stupefied air.
"Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!"
"It is true."
"Every word?"
"Every word."
He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a
lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some
sort of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated--
"It is true."
"Is he living?" Angel then asked.
"The baby died."
"But the man?"
"He is alive."
A last despair passed over Clare's face.
"Is he in England?"
"Yes."
He took a few vague steps.
"My position--is this," he said abruptly. "I thought--any man would
have thought--that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with
social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should
secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks;
but--However, I am no man to reproach you, and I will not."
Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been
needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had
lost all round.
"Angel--I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had
not known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you;
though I hoped you would never--"
Her voice grew husky.
"A last way?"
"I mean, to get rid of me. You CAN get rid of me."
"How?"
"By divorcing me."
"Good heavens--how can you be so simple! How can I divorce you?"
"Can't you--now I have told you? I thought my confession would give
you grounds for that."
"O Tess--you are too, too--childish--unformed--crude, I suppose! I
don't know what you are. You don't understand the law--you don't
understand!"
"What--you cannot?"
"Indeed I cannot."
A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener's face.
"I thought--I thought," she whispered. "O, now I see how wicked I
seem to you! Believe me--believe me, on my soul, I never thought but
that you could! I hoped you would not; yet I believed, without a
doubt, that you could cast me off if you were determined, and didn't
love me at--at--all!"
"You were mistaken," he said.
"O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last night! But I
hadn't the courage. That's just like me!"
"The courage to do what?"
As she did not answer he took her by the hand.
"What were you thinking of doing?" he inquired.
"Of putting an end to myself."
"When?"
She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his. "Last night,"
she answered.
"Where?"
"Under your mistletoe."
"My good--! How?" he asked sternly.
"I'll tell you, if you won't be angry with me!" she said, shrinking.
"It was with the cord of my box. But I could not--do the last thing!
I was afraid that it might cause a scandal to your name."
The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from her, and not
volunteered, shook him perceptibly. But he still held her, and,
letting his glance fall from her face downwards, he said, "Now,
listen to this. You must not dare to think of such a horrible thing!
How could you! You will promise me as your husband to attempt that
no more."
"I am ready to promise. I saw how wicked it was."
"Wicked! The idea was unworthy of you beyond description."
"But, Angel," she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm unconcern upon
him, "it was thought of entirely on your account--to set you free
without the scandal of the divorce that I thought you would have to
get. I should never have dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to
do it with my own hand is too good for me, after all. It is you, my
ruined husband, who ought to strike the blow. I think I should love
you more, if that were possible, if you could bring yourself to do
it, since there's no other way of escape for 'ee. I feel I am so
utterly worthless! So very greatly in the way!"
"Ssh!"
"Well, since you say no, I won't. I have no wish opposed to yours."
He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of the night
her activities had dropped to zero, and there was no further rashness
to be feared.
Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table with more
or less success, and they sat down both on the same side, so that
their glances did not meet. There was at first something awkward
in hearing each other eat and drink, but this could not be escaped;
moreover, the amount of eating done was small on both sides.
Breakfast over, he rose, and telling her the hour at which he might
be expected to dinner, went off to the miller's in a mechanical
pursuance of the plan of studying that business, which had been his
only practical reason for coming here.
When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently saw his form
crossing the great stone bridge which conducted to the mill premises.
He sank behind it, crossed the railway beyond, and disappeared.
Then, without a sigh, she turned her attention to the room, and began
clearing the table and setting it in order.
The charwoman soon came. Her presence was at first a strain upon
Tess, but afterwards an alleviation. At half-past twelve she
left her assistant alone in the kitchen, and, returning to the
sitting-room, waited for the reappearance of Angel's form behind the
bridge.
About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a
quarter of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner
served by the time he should enter. He went first to the room where
they had washed their hands together the day before, and as he
entered the sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the dishes as if
by his own motion.
"How punctual!" he said.
"Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge," said she.
The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing
during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and
the old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him
greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been
in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining
conventual buildings--now a heap of ruins. He left the house again
in the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself
through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way
and, when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she
made herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour.
Clare's shape appeared at the door. "You must not work like this," he
said. "You are not my servant; you are my wife."
She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. "I may think myself
that--indeed?" she murmured, in piteous raillery. "You mean in name!
Well, I don't want to be anything more."
"You MAY think so, Tess! You are. What do you mean?"
"I don't know," she said hastily, with tears in her accents. "I
thought I--because I am not respectable, I mean. I told you I
thought I was not respectable enough long ago--and on that account
I didn't want to marry you, only--only you urged me!"
She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him. It would almost
have won round any man but Angel Clare. Within the remote depths of
his constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general,
there lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a
soft loam, which turned the edge of everything that attempted to
traverse it. It had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked
his acceptance of Tess. Moreover, his affection itself was less fire
than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased
to believe he ceased to follow: contrasting in this with many
impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what
they intellectually despise. He waited till her sobbing ceased.
"I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you," he
said, in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general.
"It isn't a question of respectability, but one of principle!"
He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her,
being still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls
with such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by
appearances. There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of
sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him.
But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts,
and hardly opened her mouth. The firmness of her devotion to him was
indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing
that he could say made her unseemly; she sought not her own; was not
provoked; thought no evil of his treatment of her. She might just
now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking
modern world.
This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as the
preceding ones had been passed. On one, and only one, occasion did
she--the formerly free and independent Tess--venture to make any
advances. It was on the third occasion of his starting after a meal
to go out to the flour-mill. As he was leaving the table he said
"Goodbye," and she replied in the same words, at the same time
inclining her mouth in the way of his. He did not avail himself of
the invitation, saying, as he turned hastily aside--
"I shall be home punctually."
Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often enough had
he tried to reach those lips against her consent--often had he said
gaily that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and
milk and honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance
from them, and other follies of that sort. But he did not care for
them now. He observed her sudden shrinking, and said gently--
"You know, I have to think of a course. It was imperative that we
should stay together a little while, to avoid the scandal to you that
would have resulted from our immediate parting. But you must see it
is only for form's sake."
"Yes," said Tess absently.
He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still, and wished for a
moment that he had responded yet more kindly, and kissed her once at
least.
Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in the same
house, truly; but more widely apart than before they were lovers. It
was evident to her that he was, as he had said, living with paralyzed
activities in his endeavour to think of a plan of procedure. She
was awe-stricken to discover such determination under such apparent
flexibility. His consistency was, indeed, too cruel. She no longer
expected forgiveness now. More than once she thought of going away
from him during his absence at the mill; but she feared that this,
instead of benefiting him, might be the means of hampering and
humiliating him yet more if it should become known.
Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had been
unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with
thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former
pulsating, flexuous domesticity. He walked about saying to himself,
"What's to be done--what's to be done?" and by chance she overheard
him. It caused her to break the reserve about their future which had
hitherto prevailed.
"I suppose--you are not going to live with me--long, are you, Angel?"
she asked, the sunk corners of her mouth betraying how purely
mechanical were the means by which she retained that expression of
chastened calm upon her face.
"I cannot" he said, "without despising myself, and what is worse,
perhaps, despising you. I mean, of course, cannot live with you
in the ordinary sense. At present, whatever I feel, I do not
despise you. And, let me speak plainly, or you may not see all my
difficulties. How can we live together while that man lives?--he
being your husband in nature, and not I. If he were dead it might
be different... Besides, that's not all the difficulty; it lies in
another consideration--one bearing upon the future of other people
than ourselves. Think of years to come, and children being born to
us, and this past matter getting known--for it must get known. There
is not an uttermost part of the earth but somebody comes from it or
goes to it from elsewhere. Well, think of wretches of our flesh and
blood growing up under a taunt which they will gradually get to feel
the full force of with their expanding years. What an awakening
for them! What a prospect! Can you honestly say 'Remain' after
contemplating this contingency? Don't you think we had better
endure the ills we have than fly to others?"
Her eyelids, weighted with trouble, continued drooping as before.
"I cannot say 'Remain,'" she answered, "I cannot; I had not thought
so far."
Tess's feminine hope--shall we confess it?--had been so obstinately
recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious visions of a
domiciliary intimacy continued long enough to break down his coldness
even against his judgement. Though unsophisticated in the usual
sense, she was not incomplete; and it would have denoted deficiency
of womanhood if she had not instinctively known what an argument lies
in propinquity. Nothing else would serve her, she knew, if this
failed. It was wrong to hope in what was of the nature of strategy,
she said to herself: yet that sort of hope she could not extinguish.
His last representation had now been made, and it was, as she said,
a new view. She had truly never thought so far as that, and his
lucid picture of possible offspring who would scorn her was one that
brought deadly convictions to an honest heart which was humanitarian
to its centre. Sheer experience had already taught her that in some
circumstances there was one thing better than to lead a good life,
and that was to be saved from leading any life whatever. Like all
who have been previsioned by suffering, she could, in the words of
M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the fiat, "You shall be
born," particularly if addressed to potential issue of hers.
Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that, till now, Tess
had been hoodwinked by her love for Clare into forgetting it might
result in vitalizations that would inflict upon others what she had
bewailed as misfortune to herself.
She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the
self-combating proclivity of the supersensitive, an answer thereto
arose in Clare's own mind, and he almost feared it. It was based
on her exceptional physical nature; and she might have used it
promisingly. She might have added besides: "On an Australian upland
or Texan plain, who is to know or care about my misfortunes, or to
reproach me or you?" Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted
the momentary presentment as if it were the inevitable. And she
may have been right. The intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only
its own bitterness, but its husband's, and even if these assumed
reproaches were not likely to be addressed to him or to his by
strangers, they might have reached his ears from his own fastidious
brain.
It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk the odd
paradox that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man.
We do not say it. Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a
fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporal
presence is something less appealing than corporal absence; the
latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects
of the real. She found that her personality did not plead her cause
so forcibly as she had anticipated. The figurative phrase was true:
she was another woman than the one who had excited his desire.
"I have thought over what you say," she remarked to him, moving her
forefinger over the tablecloth, her other hand, which bore the ring
that mocked them both, supporting her forehead. "It is quite true,
all of it; it must be. You must go away from me."
"But what can you do?"
"I can go home."
Clare had not thought of that.
"Are you sure?" he inquired.
"Quite sure. We ought to part, and we may as well get it past and
done. You once said that I was apt to win men against their better
judgement; and if I am constantly before your eyes I may cause you
to change your plans in opposition to your reason and wish; and
afterwards your repentance and my sorrow will be terrible."
"And you would like to go home?" he asked.
"I want to leave you, and go home."
"Then it shall be so."
Though she did not look up at him, she started. There was a
difference between the proposition and the covenant, which she had
felt only too quickly.
"I feared it would come to this," she murmured, her countenance
meekly fixed. "I don't complain, Angel, I--I think it best. What
you said has quite convinced me. Yes, though nobody else should
reproach me if we should stay together, yet somewhen, years hence,
you might get angry with me for any ordinary matter, and knowing what
you do of my bygones, you yourself might be tempted to say words, and
they might be overheard, perhaps by my own children. O, what only
hurts me now would torture and kill me then! I will go--to-morrow."
"And I shall not stay here. Though I didn't like to initiate it, I
have seen that it was advisable we should part--at least for a while,
till I can better see the shape that things have taken, and can write
to you."
Tess stole a glance at her husband. He was pale, even tremulous;
but, as before, she was appalled by the determination revealed in the
depths of this gentle being she had married--the will to subdue the
grosser to the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the
flesh to the spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead
leaves upon the tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency.
He may have observed her look, for he explained--
"I think of people more kindly when I am away from them"; adding
cynically, "God knows; perhaps we will shake down together some day,
for weariness; thousands have done it!"
That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and began to pack
also. Both knew that it was in their two minds that they might part
the next morning for ever, despite the gloss of assuaging conjectures
thrown over their proceeding because they were of the sort to whom
any parting which has an air of finality is a torture. He knew,
and she knew, that, though the fascination which each had exercised
over the other--on her part independently of accomplishments--would
probably in the first days of their separation be even more potent
than ever, time must attenuate that effect; the practical arguments
against accepting her as a housemate might pronounce themselves more
strongly in the boreal light of a remoter view. Moreover, when two
people are once parted--have abandoned a common domicile and a common
environment--new growths insensibly bud upward to fill each vacated
place; unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and old plans are
forgotten.
| 3,938 | Chapter XXXVI | https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase5-chapter35-44 | The following morning Angel prepares breakfast and leaves to go to the flour mill: "the pair, in truth, were but the ashes of their former selves". Tess suggests divorce but he says it is impossible. She suggests returning home, and he agrees | null | 42 | 1 | [
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110 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/17.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_16_part_0.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 17 | chapter 17 | null | {"name": "Phase III: \"The Rally,\" Chapter Seventeen", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210424232301/http://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary/chapter-17", "summary": "This was long before the days of milking machines, so when the cows are all in the barnyard, the dairymaids and dairymen come out of their cottages to start milking. The dairymaids all sit alongside the cows on their stools, with their cheeks pressed against the animals' flanks, watching Tess curiously as they milk the cows. One of the men comes over to her--it's \"Dairyman Dick,\" a.k.a. \"Mr. Richard Crick,\" the owner of the farm and Tess's new boss. He looks her over, asks about her experience, and says he knew her mother well--she had come from this part of the country, and had only moved to Blackmoor Vale after marrying Jack Durbeyfield. He offers Tess a cup of tea, but she says she'll start milking immediately. Tess begins milking, and finds the rhythmic pumping of the cow's udders to be soothing and meditative. Dairyman Crick does his share of the milking, too, and they all set to work in silence. There are more than one hundred cows in his herd--quite a lot. Someone remarks that the cows aren't giving up their usual yield. Some think it's because there's a new dairymaid. They sing a ballad as a group, because tradition has it that singing helps induce the cows to give more milk. One of the dairymen asks someone to bring out his harp, while admitting that a fiddle would be better. The dairyman in question asks why fiddles are better. Tess hadn't seen him before, and still can't. He's on the other side of his cow. The first dairyman gives a lengthy explanation in the form of a folktale about a man who played a Christmas hymn to a bull on a fiddle, and tricked the bull into thinking it was the Nativity. The second dairyman finishes his cow, under the watchful eye of Dairyman Crick, who gives him a few pointers. The second dairyman stands up, and Tess has a good look at him. He's dressed the same as everyone else, but he looks different--more educated, more reserved, more sad. He looks familiar to her. She realizes that it's the man who had been walking through Marlott on the day of the club-walking--it's the man who had not danced with her. She panics momentarily. What if he has connections in Blackmoor, and is able to learn about her past? But he doesn't seem to recognize her. He's grown up a fair amount in the last couple of years, too. She doesn't see him at supper, and asks no questions about him. Her bedroom is over the milk house, and she shares it with three other milkmaids. Tess is ready to fall asleep immediately, but the girl in the bed next to her insists on telling her about the strange milkman. His name is Mr. Angel Clare, and he's learning about milking, and about all kinds of farming so that he can be a gentleman farmer somewhere. He plays the harp, and is the son of a parson, and is too busy \"wi' his own thoughts to notice girls.\" His father, the parson Mr. Clare, is a very good preacher. That's the parson that the man had told Tess about on her way back from Trantridge, so she perks up a bit, and asks more about him. The girl tells Tess that both of Angel's brothers are parsons now, like their father, but Angel opted for a different career route. Tess isn't able to stay awake for much more gossip, so she falls asleep.", "analysis": ""} |
The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out
of the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the
maids walking in pattens, not on account of the weather, but to keep
their shoes above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on
her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting
against the cow, and looked musingly along the animal's flank at Tess
as she approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down,
resting flat on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not
observe her.
One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man--whose long white "pinner"
was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and
whose jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect--the
master-dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as
a working milker and butter maker here during six days, and on the
seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church,
being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme:
Dairyman Dick
All the week:--
On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.
Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.
The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking time, but it
happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand--for the days were
busy ones now--and he received her warmly; inquiring for her mother
and the rest of the family--(though this as a matter of form merely,
for in reality he had not been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield's existence
till apprised of the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess).
"Oh--ay, as a lad I knowed your part o' the country very well," he
said terminatively. "Though I've never been there since. And a aged
woman of ninety that use to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long
ago, told me that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmoor
Vale came originally from these parts, and that 'twere a old ancient
race that had all but perished off the earth--though the new
generations didn't know it. But, Lord, I took no notice of the old
woman's ramblings, not I."
"Oh no--it is nothing," said Tess.
Then the talk was of business only.
"You can milk 'em clean, my maidy? I don't want my cows going azew at
this time o' year."
She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down.
She had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had
grown delicate.
"Quite sure you can stand it? 'Tis comfortable enough here for rough
folk; but we don't live in a cowcumber frame."
She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness
seemed to win him over.
"Well, I suppose you'll want a dish o' tay, or victuals of some sort,
hey? Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it. But faith, if 'twas I,
I should be as dry as a kex wi' travelling so far."
"I'll begin milking now, to get my hand in," said Tess.
She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment--to the
surprise--indeed, slight contempt--of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind
it had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.
"Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said indifferently, while
holding up the pail that she sipped from. "'Tis what I hain't
touched for years--not I. Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds
like lead. You can try your hand upon she," he pursued, nodding to
the nearest cow. "Not but what she do milk rather hard. We've hard
ones and we've easy ones, like other folks. However, you'll find out
that soon enough."
When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her
stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists
into the pail, she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new
foundation for her future. The conviction bred serenity, her pulse
slowed, and she was able to look about her.
The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the
men operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier
natures. It was a large dairy. There were nearly a hundred
milchers under Crick's management, all told; and of the herd the
master-dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away
from home. These were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his
journey-milkmen being more or less casually hired, he would not
entrust this half-dozen to their treatment, lest, from indifference,
they should not milk them fully; nor to the maids, lest they should
fail in the same way for lack of finger-grip; with the result that in
course of time the cows would "go azew"--that is, dry up. It was not
the loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious, but that
with the decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately
cessation, of supply.
After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk
in the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the
milk-jets into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation
to one or other of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand
still. The only movements were those of the milkers' hands up and
down, and the swing of the cows' tails. Thus they all worked on,
encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either slope
of the valley--a level landscape compounded of old landscapes long
forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in character very greatly from
the landscape they composed now.
"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow
he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in
one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next
hard-yielder in his vicinity, "to my thinking, the cows don't gie
down their milk to-day as usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin
keeping back like this, she'll not be worth going under by
midsummer."
"'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said Jonathan Kail.
"I've noticed such things afore."
"To be sure. It may be so. I didn't think o't."
"I've been told that it goes up into their horns at such times," said
a dairymaid.
"Well, as to going up into their horns," replied Dairyman Crick
dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical
possibilities, "I couldn't say; I certainly could not. But as nott
cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don't quite
agree to it. Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan?
Why do nott cows give less milk in a year than horned?"
"I don't!" interposed the milkmaid, "Why do they?"
"Because there bain't so many of 'em," said the dairyman.
"Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk
to-day. Folks, we must lift up a stave or two--that's the only cure
for't."
Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement
to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield;
and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody--in purely
business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the
result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement
during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen
or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was
afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone
flames around him, one of the male milkers said--
"I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a man's wind!
You should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best."
Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to
the dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in the shape of "Why?"
came as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had
been spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto
perceived.
"Oh yes; there's nothing like a fiddle," said the dairyman. "Though
I do think that bulls are more moved by a tune than cows--at least
that's my experience. Once there was an old aged man over at
Mellstock--William Dewy by name--one of the family that used to do
a good deal of business as tranters over there--Jonathan, do ye
mind?--I knowed the man by sight as well as I know my own brother, in
a manner of speaking. Well, this man was a coming home along from a
wedding, where he had been playing his fiddle, one fine moonlight
night, and for shortness' sake he took a cut across Forty-acres, a
field lying that way, where a bull was out to grass. The bull seed
William, and took after him, horns aground, begad; and though William
runned his best, and hadn't MUCH drink in him (considering 'twas a
wedding, and the folks well off), he found he'd never reach the fence
and get over in time to save himself. Well, as a last thought, he
pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and struck up a jig, turning to
the bull, and backing towards the corner. The bull softened down,
and stood still, looking hard at William Dewy, who fiddled on and on;
till a sort of a smile stole over the bull's face. But no sooner
did William stop his playing and turn to get over hedge than the
bull would stop his smiling and lower his horns towards the seat of
William's breeches. Well, William had to turn about and play on,
willy-nilly; and 'twas only three o'clock in the world, and 'a knowed
that nobody would come that way for hours, and he so leery and tired
that 'a didn't know what to do. When he had scraped till about four
o'clock he felt that he verily would have to give over soon, and he
said to himself, 'There's only this last tune between me and eternal
welfare! Heaven save me, or I'm a done man.' Well, then he called to
mind how he'd seen the cattle kneel o' Christmas Eves in the dead o'
night. It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into his head to
play a trick upon the bull. So he broke into the 'Tivity Hymm, just
as at Christmas carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went the
bull on his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if 'twere the
true 'Tivity night and hour. As soon as his horned friend were down,
William turned, clinked off like a long-dog, and jumped safe over
hedge, before the praying bull had got on his feet again to take
after him. William used to say that he'd seen a man look a fool
a good many times, but never such a fool as that bull looked when
he found his pious feelings had been played upon, and 'twas not
Christmas Eve. ... Yes, William Dewy, that was the man's name; and
I can tell you to a foot where's he a-lying in Mellstock Churchyard
at this very moment--just between the second yew-tree and the north
aisle."
"It's a curious story; it carries us back to medieval times, when
faith was a living thing!"
The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by the voice
behind the dun cow; but as nobody understood the reference, no notice
was taken, except that the narrator seemed to think it might imply
scepticism as to his tale.
"Well, 'tis quite true, sir, whether or no. I knowed the man well."
"Oh yes; I have no doubt of it," said the person behind the dun cow.
Tess's attention was thus attracted to the dairyman's interlocutor,
of whom she could see but the merest patch, owing to his burying his
head so persistently in the flank of the milcher. She could not
understand why he should be addressed as "sir" even by the dairyman
himself. But no explanation was discernible; he remained under the
cow long enough to have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation
now and then, as if he could not get on.
"Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle," said the dairyman. "'Tis
knack, not strength, that does it."
"So I find," said the other, standing up at last and stretching his
arms. "I think I have finished her, however, though she made my
fingers ache."
Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the ordinary white
pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when milking, and his
boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his
local livery. Beneath it was something educated, reserved, subtle,
sad, differing.
But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by
the discovery that he was one whom she had seen before. Such
vicissitudes had Tess passed through since that time that for a
moment she could not remember where she had met him; and then it
flashed upon her that he was the pedestrian who had joined in the
club-dance at Marlott--the passing stranger who had come she knew
not whence, had danced with others but not with her, and slightingly
left her, and gone on his way with his friends.
The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an incident
anterior to her troubles produced a momentary dismay lest,
recognizing her also, he should by some means discover her story.
But it passed away when she found no sign of remembrance in him. She
saw by degrees that since their first and only encounter his mobile
face had grown more thoughtful, and had acquired a young man's
shapely moustache and beard--the latter of the palest straw colour
where it began upon his cheeks, and deepening to a warm brown farther
from its root. Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a dark
velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters, and a starched white
shirt. Without the milking-gear nobody could have guessed what
he was. He might with equal probability have been an eccentric
landowner or a gentlemanly ploughman. That he was but a novice at
dairy work she had realized in a moment, from the time he had spent
upon the milking of one cow.
Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another of the
newcomer, "How pretty she is!" with something of real generosity and
admiration, though with a half hope that the auditors would qualify
the assertion--which, strictly speaking, they might have done,
prettiness being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in
Tess. When the milking was finished for the evening they straggled
indoors, where Mrs Crick, the dairyman's wife--who was too
respectable to go out milking herself, and wore a hot stuff gown in
warm weather because the dairymaids wore prints--was giving an eye
to the leads and things.
Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in the dairy-house
besides herself, most of the helpers going to their homes. She saw
nothing at supper-time of the superior milker who had commented on
the story, and asked no questions about him, the remainder of the
evening being occupied in arranging her place in the bed-chamber.
It was a large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long; the
sleeping-cots of the other three indoor milkmaids being in the same
apartment. They were blooming young women, and, except one, rather
older than herself. By bedtime Tess was thoroughly tired, and fell
asleep immediately.
But one of the girls, who occupied an adjoining bed, was more wakeful
than Tess, and would insist upon relating to the latter various
particulars of the homestead into which she had just entered. The
girl's whispered words mingled with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy
mind, they seemed to be generated by the darkness in which they
floated.
"Mr Angel Clare--he that is learning milking, and that plays
the harp--never says much to us. He is a pa'son's son, and is
too much taken up wi' his own thoughts to notice girls. He is
the dairyman's pupil--learning farming in all its branches. He
has learnt sheep-farming at another place, and he's now mastering
dairy-work.... Yes, he is quite the gentleman-born. His father is
the Reverent Mr Clare at Emminster--a good many miles from here."
"Oh--I have heard of him," said her companion, now awake. "A very
earnest clergyman, is he not?"
"Yes--that he is--the earnestest man in all Wessex, they say--the
last of the old Low Church sort, they tell me--for all about here be
what they call High. All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made
pa'sons too."
Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the present Mr
Clare was not made a parson like his brethren, and gradually fell
asleep again, the words of her informant coming to her along with the
smell of the cheeses in the adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured
dripping of the whey from the wrings downstairs.
| 2,689 | Phase III: "The Rally," Chapter Seventeen | https://web.archive.org/web/20210424232301/http://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary/chapter-17 | This was long before the days of milking machines, so when the cows are all in the barnyard, the dairymaids and dairymen come out of their cottages to start milking. The dairymaids all sit alongside the cows on their stools, with their cheeks pressed against the animals' flanks, watching Tess curiously as they milk the cows. One of the men comes over to her--it's "Dairyman Dick," a.k.a. "Mr. Richard Crick," the owner of the farm and Tess's new boss. He looks her over, asks about her experience, and says he knew her mother well--she had come from this part of the country, and had only moved to Blackmoor Vale after marrying Jack Durbeyfield. He offers Tess a cup of tea, but she says she'll start milking immediately. Tess begins milking, and finds the rhythmic pumping of the cow's udders to be soothing and meditative. Dairyman Crick does his share of the milking, too, and they all set to work in silence. There are more than one hundred cows in his herd--quite a lot. Someone remarks that the cows aren't giving up their usual yield. Some think it's because there's a new dairymaid. They sing a ballad as a group, because tradition has it that singing helps induce the cows to give more milk. One of the dairymen asks someone to bring out his harp, while admitting that a fiddle would be better. The dairyman in question asks why fiddles are better. Tess hadn't seen him before, and still can't. He's on the other side of his cow. The first dairyman gives a lengthy explanation in the form of a folktale about a man who played a Christmas hymn to a bull on a fiddle, and tricked the bull into thinking it was the Nativity. The second dairyman finishes his cow, under the watchful eye of Dairyman Crick, who gives him a few pointers. The second dairyman stands up, and Tess has a good look at him. He's dressed the same as everyone else, but he looks different--more educated, more reserved, more sad. He looks familiar to her. She realizes that it's the man who had been walking through Marlott on the day of the club-walking--it's the man who had not danced with her. She panics momentarily. What if he has connections in Blackmoor, and is able to learn about her past? But he doesn't seem to recognize her. He's grown up a fair amount in the last couple of years, too. She doesn't see him at supper, and asks no questions about him. Her bedroom is over the milk house, and she shares it with three other milkmaids. Tess is ready to fall asleep immediately, but the girl in the bed next to her insists on telling her about the strange milkman. His name is Mr. Angel Clare, and he's learning about milking, and about all kinds of farming so that he can be a gentleman farmer somewhere. He plays the harp, and is the son of a parson, and is too busy "wi' his own thoughts to notice girls." His father, the parson Mr. Clare, is a very good preacher. That's the parson that the man had told Tess about on her way back from Trantridge, so she perks up a bit, and asks more about him. The girl tells Tess that both of Angel's brothers are parsons now, like their father, but Angel opted for a different career route. Tess isn't able to stay awake for much more gossip, so she falls asleep. | null | 585 | 1 | [
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161 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/16.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Sense and Sensibility/section_15_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 16 | chapter 16 | null | {"name": "Chapter 16", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility30.asp", "summary": "Puzzled about his hasty departure, Mrs. Jennings. shows concern for the Colonel. Elinor feels anxious about Marianne and wonders why she has not disclosed her engagement to her mother. Willoughby visits them everyday and displays his affection for Marianne. On one of his visits, he reveals his attachment to Barton Cottage and asks Mrs. Dashwood not to make changes there.", "analysis": "Notes A few more facts about Colonel Brandon are revealed. Mrs. Jennings talks about his estate at Delaford and about his relatives. Her dropping hints about the family and fortune of Colonel Brandon enhances the desire of the reader to know more about this elusive character. Elinor is concerned about Marianne and her relationship with Willoughby. Though she is aware of their mutual affection, she is not sure about the seriousness of their relationship; Marianne has not spoken about it to any one of them. Willoughby displays another facet of his personality. He can be very sentimental. He talks about his deep attachment to Barton Cottage and shows concern when Mrs. Dashwood expresses her desire to renovate it. He also expresses his gratitude towards them for their kindness. Through his words and actions, he hints at his emotional involvement with Marianne. CHAPTER 15 Summary Mrs. Dashwood, Elinor and Margaret make their customary visit to the Park. On their return, they are shocked to see Marianne looking dejected and flustered. Willoughby informs them about his decision to leave for London immediately. However, his explanation for this sudden departure does not convince Elinor. She suspects something more serious. Mrs. Dashwood is not so pessimistic. Marianne drowns herself in sorrow but refrains from talking about it. Notes The cheerful atmosphere of Barton Cottage is disrupted. Marianne, who had been blissful in the company of Willoughby, now looks miserable. Since she does not reveal anything about Willoughby's conversation with her before his departure to London, mystery shrouds their relationship. The incident casts a cloud over the family. Elinor is puzzled at Willoughby's change of behavior with Marianne and at his sudden plans to visit London. She suspects Willoughby's intentions and is doubtful of his integrity. Mrs. Dashwood, too, is disturbed although she does not share Elinor's view. Jane Austen frequently reminds the reader about Elinor's superior sense and reasoning ability. After observing Willoughby before his departure, she tries to analyze his behavior and his decision to take leave of them so abruptly. Willoughby, who had always spoken openly about all matters, could have revealed the real reason behind his visit to London unless he desperately needed to conceal something. Mrs. Dashwood, blinded by her faith in Willoughby, refuses to entertain negative thoughts about him. She feels sure of Willoughby's feelings for her daughter and hopes for the best. CHAPTER 16 Summary Marianne broods over her plight but hardly talks about Willoughby. Sometimes she inadvertently reveals her feelings for him. One morning, as they are walking in the countryside, they are surprised to encounter Edward Ferrars, who has arrived to visit them at Barton. Marianne is delighted to meet him and is glad for her sister. She welcomes Edward with open arms. Notes Marianne isolates herself from the others and becomes engulfed in a cloud of gloom. By sulking over her fate, she disturbs the peace of her family. She lacks restraint and has no regard for the others in her family. Willoughby exits from the scene and Edward enters. Willoughby's departure had disturbed the members of the Dashwood family, but Edward's visit gladdens them: Edward's arrival at Barton is like a streak of sunlight in an overcast sky. His presence even manages to lift Marianne out of her depression. She forgets her sorrow for the moment and welcomes him. His visit seems to offer her some consolation. She talks to him animatedly and asks him about Norland. Elinor is elated to see Edward but shows restraint in her behavior towards him. She keeps her emotions in control and tries to react normally to the situation."} |
Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able
to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She
would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next
morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than
when she lay down in it. But the feelings which made such composure a
disgrace, left her in no danger of incurring it. She was awake the
whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it. She got up with a
headache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment;
giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters, and forbidding all
attempt at consolation from either. Her sensibility was potent enough!
When breakfast was over she walked out by herself, and wandered about
the village of Allenham, indulging the recollection of past enjoyment
and crying over the present reverse for the chief of the morning.
The evening passed off in the equal indulgence of feeling. She played
over every favourite song that she had been used to play to Willoughby,
every air in which their voices had been oftenest joined, and sat at
the instrument gazing on every line of music that he had written out
for her, till her heart was so heavy that no farther sadness could be
gained; and this nourishment of grief was every day applied. She spent
whole hours at the pianoforte alternately singing and crying; her voice
often totally suspended by her tears. In books too, as well as in
music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and
present was certain of giving. She read nothing but what they had been
used to read together.
Such violence of affliction indeed could not be supported for ever; it
sunk within a few days into a calmer melancholy; but these employments,
to which she daily recurred, her solitary walks and silent meditations,
still produced occasional effusions of sorrow as lively as ever.
No letter from Willoughby came; and none seemed expected by Marianne.
Her mother was surprised, and Elinor again became uneasy. But Mrs.
Dashwood could find explanations whenever she wanted them, which at
least satisfied herself.
"Remember, Elinor," said she, "how very often Sir John fetches our
letters himself from the post, and carries them to it. We have already
agreed that secrecy may be necessary, and we must acknowledge that it
could not be maintained if their correspondence were to pass through
Sir John's hands."
Elinor could not deny the truth of this, and she tried to find in it a
motive sufficient for their silence. But there was one method so
direct, so simple, and in her opinion so eligible of knowing the real
state of the affair, and of instantly removing all mystery, that she
could not help suggesting it to her mother.
"Why do you not ask Marianne at once," said she, "whether she is or she
is not engaged to Willoughby? From you, her mother, and so kind, so
indulgent a mother, the question could not give offence. It would be
the natural result of your affection for her. She used to be all
unreserve, and to you more especially."
"I would not ask such a question for the world. Supposing it possible
that they are not engaged, what distress would not such an enquiry
inflict! At any rate it would be most ungenerous. I should never
deserve her confidence again, after forcing from her a confession of
what is meant at present to be unacknowledged to any one. I know
Marianne's heart: I know that she dearly loves me, and that I shall not
be the last to whom the affair is made known, when circumstances make
the revealment of it eligible. I would not attempt to force the
confidence of any one; of a child much less; because a sense of duty
would prevent the denial which her wishes might direct."
Elinor thought this generosity overstrained, considering her sister's
youth, and urged the matter farther, but in vain; common sense, common
care, common prudence, were all sunk in Mrs. Dashwood's romantic
delicacy.
It was several days before Willoughby's name was mentioned before
Marianne by any of her family; Sir John and Mrs. Jennings, indeed, were
not so nice; their witticisms added pain to many a painful hour;--but
one evening, Mrs. Dashwood, accidentally taking up a volume of
Shakespeare, exclaimed,
"We have never finished Hamlet, Marianne; our dear Willoughby went away
before we could get through it. We will put it by, that when he comes
again...But it may be months, perhaps, before THAT happens."
"Months!" cried Marianne, with strong surprise. "No--nor many weeks."
Mrs. Dashwood was sorry for what she had said; but it gave Elinor
pleasure, as it produced a reply from Marianne so expressive of
confidence in Willoughby and knowledge of his intentions.
One morning, about a week after his leaving the country, Marianne was
prevailed on to join her sisters in their usual walk, instead of
wandering away by herself. Hitherto she had carefully avoided every
companion in her rambles. If her sisters intended to walk on the
downs, she directly stole away towards the lanes; if they talked of the
valley, she was as speedy in climbing the hills, and could never be
found when the others set off. But at length she was secured by the
exertions of Elinor, who greatly disapproved such continual seclusion.
They walked along the road through the valley, and chiefly in silence,
for Marianne's MIND could not be controlled, and Elinor, satisfied with
gaining one point, would not then attempt more. Beyond the entrance of
the valley, where the country, though still rich, was less wild and
more open, a long stretch of the road which they had travelled on first
coming to Barton, lay before them; and on reaching that point, they
stopped to look around them, and examine a prospect which formed the
distance of their view from the cottage, from a spot which they had
never happened to reach in any of their walks before.
Amongst the objects in the scene, they soon discovered an animated one;
it was a man on horseback riding towards them. In a few minutes they
could distinguish him to be a gentleman; and in a moment afterwards
Marianne rapturously exclaimed,
"It is he; it is indeed;--I know it is!"--and was hastening to meet
him, when Elinor cried out,
"Indeed, Marianne, I think you are mistaken. It is not Willoughby.
The person is not tall enough for him, and has not his air."
"He has, he has," cried Marianne, "I am sure he has. His air, his
coat, his horse. I knew how soon he would come."
She walked eagerly on as she spoke; and Elinor, to screen Marianne from
particularity, as she felt almost certain of its not being Willoughby,
quickened her pace and kept up with her. They were soon within thirty
yards of the gentleman. Marianne looked again; her heart sunk within
her; and abruptly turning round, she was hurrying back, when the voices
of both her sisters were raised to detain her; a third, almost as well
known as Willoughby's, joined them in begging her to stop, and she
turned round with surprise to see and welcome Edward Ferrars.
He was the only person in the world who could at that moment be
forgiven for not being Willoughby; the only one who could have gained a
smile from her; but she dispersed her tears to smile on HIM, and in her
sister's happiness forgot for a time her own disappointment.
He dismounted, and giving his horse to his servant, walked back with
them to Barton, whither he was purposely coming to visit them.
He was welcomed by them all with great cordiality, but especially by
Marianne, who showed more warmth of regard in her reception of him than
even Elinor herself. To Marianne, indeed, the meeting between Edward
and her sister was but a continuation of that unaccountable coldness
which she had often observed at Norland in their mutual behaviour. On
Edward's side, more particularly, there was a deficiency of all that a
lover ought to look and say on such an occasion. He was confused,
seemed scarcely sensible of pleasure in seeing them, looked neither
rapturous nor gay, said little but what was forced from him by
questions, and distinguished Elinor by no mark of affection. Marianne
saw and listened with increasing surprise. She began almost to feel a
dislike of Edward; and it ended, as every feeling must end with her, by
carrying back her thoughts to Willoughby, whose manners formed a
contrast sufficiently striking to those of his brother elect.
After a short silence which succeeded the first surprise and enquiries
of meeting, Marianne asked Edward if he came directly from London. No,
he had been in Devonshire a fortnight.
"A fortnight!" she repeated, surprised at his being so long in the same
county with Elinor without seeing her before.
He looked rather distressed as he added, that he had been staying with
some friends near Plymouth.
"Have you been lately in Sussex?" said Elinor.
"I was at Norland about a month ago."
"And how does dear, dear Norland look?" cried Marianne.
"Dear, dear Norland," said Elinor, "probably looks much as it always
does at this time of the year. The woods and walks thickly covered
with dead leaves."
"Oh," cried Marianne, "with what transporting sensation have I formerly
seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven
in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season,
the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They
are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as
possible from the sight."
"It is not every one," said Elinor, "who has your passion for dead
leaves."
"No; my feelings are not often shared, not often understood. But
SOMETIMES they are."--As she said this, she sunk into a reverie for a
few moments;--but rousing herself again, "Now, Edward," said she,
calling his attention to the prospect, "here is Barton valley. Look up
to it, and be tranquil if you can. Look at those hills! Did you ever
see their equals? To the left is Barton park, amongst those woods and
plantations. You may see the end of the house. And there, beneath
that farthest hill, which rises with such grandeur, is our cottage."
"It is a beautiful country," he replied; "but these bottoms must be
dirty in winter."
"How can you think of dirt, with such objects before you?"
"Because," replied he, smiling, "among the rest of the objects before
me, I see a very dirty lane."
"How strange!" said Marianne to herself as she walked on.
"Have you an agreeable neighbourhood here? Are the Middletons pleasant
people?"
"No, not all," answered Marianne; "we could not be more unfortunately
situated."
"Marianne," cried her sister, "how can you say so? How can you be so
unjust? They are a very respectable family, Mr. Ferrars; and towards
us have behaved in the friendliest manner. Have you forgot, Marianne,
how many pleasant days we have owed to them?"
"No," said Marianne, in a low voice, "nor how many painful moments."
Elinor took no notice of this; and directing her attention to their
visitor, endeavoured to support something like discourse with him, by
talking of their present residence, its conveniences, &c. extorting
from him occasional questions and remarks. His coldness and reserve
mortified her severely; she was vexed and half angry; but resolving to
regulate her behaviour to him by the past rather than the present, she
avoided every appearance of resentment or displeasure, and treated him
as she thought he ought to be treated from the family connection.
| 1,849 | Chapter 16 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility30.asp | Puzzled about his hasty departure, Mrs. Jennings. shows concern for the Colonel. Elinor feels anxious about Marianne and wonders why she has not disclosed her engagement to her mother. Willoughby visits them everyday and displays his affection for Marianne. On one of his visits, he reveals his attachment to Barton Cottage and asks Mrs. Dashwood not to make changes there. | Notes A few more facts about Colonel Brandon are revealed. Mrs. Jennings talks about his estate at Delaford and about his relatives. Her dropping hints about the family and fortune of Colonel Brandon enhances the desire of the reader to know more about this elusive character. Elinor is concerned about Marianne and her relationship with Willoughby. Though she is aware of their mutual affection, she is not sure about the seriousness of their relationship; Marianne has not spoken about it to any one of them. Willoughby displays another facet of his personality. He can be very sentimental. He talks about his deep attachment to Barton Cottage and shows concern when Mrs. Dashwood expresses her desire to renovate it. He also expresses his gratitude towards them for their kindness. Through his words and actions, he hints at his emotional involvement with Marianne. CHAPTER 15 Summary Mrs. Dashwood, Elinor and Margaret make their customary visit to the Park. On their return, they are shocked to see Marianne looking dejected and flustered. Willoughby informs them about his decision to leave for London immediately. However, his explanation for this sudden departure does not convince Elinor. She suspects something more serious. Mrs. Dashwood is not so pessimistic. Marianne drowns herself in sorrow but refrains from talking about it. Notes The cheerful atmosphere of Barton Cottage is disrupted. Marianne, who had been blissful in the company of Willoughby, now looks miserable. Since she does not reveal anything about Willoughby's conversation with her before his departure to London, mystery shrouds their relationship. The incident casts a cloud over the family. Elinor is puzzled at Willoughby's change of behavior with Marianne and at his sudden plans to visit London. She suspects Willoughby's intentions and is doubtful of his integrity. Mrs. Dashwood, too, is disturbed although she does not share Elinor's view. Jane Austen frequently reminds the reader about Elinor's superior sense and reasoning ability. After observing Willoughby before his departure, she tries to analyze his behavior and his decision to take leave of them so abruptly. Willoughby, who had always spoken openly about all matters, could have revealed the real reason behind his visit to London unless he desperately needed to conceal something. Mrs. Dashwood, blinded by her faith in Willoughby, refuses to entertain negative thoughts about him. She feels sure of Willoughby's feelings for her daughter and hopes for the best. CHAPTER 16 Summary Marianne broods over her plight but hardly talks about Willoughby. Sometimes she inadvertently reveals her feelings for him. One morning, as they are walking in the countryside, they are surprised to encounter Edward Ferrars, who has arrived to visit them at Barton. Marianne is delighted to meet him and is glad for her sister. She welcomes Edward with open arms. Notes Marianne isolates herself from the others and becomes engulfed in a cloud of gloom. By sulking over her fate, she disturbs the peace of her family. She lacks restraint and has no regard for the others in her family. Willoughby exits from the scene and Edward enters. Willoughby's departure had disturbed the members of the Dashwood family, but Edward's visit gladdens them: Edward's arrival at Barton is like a streak of sunlight in an overcast sky. His presence even manages to lift Marianne out of her depression. She forgets her sorrow for the moment and welcomes him. His visit seems to offer her some consolation. She talks to him animatedly and asks him about Norland. Elinor is elated to see Edward but shows restraint in her behavior towards him. She keeps her emotions in control and tries to react normally to the situation. | 60 | 601 | [
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161 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/23.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Sense and Sensibility/section_22_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 23 | chapter 23 | null | {"name": "Chapter 23", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210421140324/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sense-and-sensibility/summary/chapter-23", "summary": "Elinor, sadly, has no grounds for doubt left...it's definitely Edward that Lucy Steele is engaged to. Her feelings are all over the place - has Edward deceived her? Does he really care for Lucy at all? After all, everyone else is also sure that Edward loves Elinor - so what's going on, anyway? Elinor also feels bad for Edward; after all, he's the one who going to be stuck with uneducated, shrewd Lucy Steele. Even if he was infatuated with her as a teenager, what must he think now? Furthermore, what's going to happen when they've been married for years and years? Also, there's the problem of Edward's snobby mom, who'll surely have a conniption fit when she finds out that he's engaged to Lucy, who's inferior to Elinor in social station. All things considered, Elinor feels worse for Edward than for herself. She resolves to keep her troubles from Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood, figuring that they can't possibly help her with any of this. Elinor resolves to talk more to Lucy about this whole thing. She wants to see how much Lucy actually cares for Edward. Elinor also has a sneaking suspicion that Lucy might be jealous of her, given how much Edward praises her, as well as Sir John's jokes about how she and Edward are in love. Unfortunately, there are very few chances to talk privately with Lucy, since Sir John and Lady Middleton keep everyone busy with dinners, games, and group activities. One day, though, Lady Middleton invites all of the young ladies over to keep her company at dinner while Sir John hangs out with his guy friends. It turns out to be quite a dull gathering, but Elinor hopes to find a chance to talk to Lucy alone. Lucy, taking a hint from Lady Middleton, says she's going to work on a basket she's making for Annamaria, while everyone else plays cards. Elinor takes this opportunity to also opt out of the card game, saying that she'll go help Lucy with her task. Lucy and Elinor settle down to work near the piano, so nobody else will hear their conversation.", "analysis": ""} |
However small Elinor's general dependence on Lucy's veracity might be,
it was impossible for her on serious reflection to suspect it in the
present case, where no temptation could be answerable to the folly of
inventing a falsehood of such a description. What Lucy had asserted to
be true, therefore, Elinor could not, dared not longer doubt; supported
as it was too on every side by such probabilities and proofs, and
contradicted by nothing but her own wishes. Their opportunity of
acquaintance in the house of Mr. Pratt was a foundation for the rest,
at once indisputable and alarming; and Edward's visit near Plymouth,
his melancholy state of mind, his dissatisfaction at his own prospects,
his uncertain behaviour towards herself, the intimate knowledge of the
Miss Steeles as to Norland and their family connections, which had
often surprised her, the picture, the letter, the ring, formed
altogether such a body of evidence, as overcame every fear of
condemning him unfairly, and established as a fact, which no partiality
could set aside, his ill-treatment of herself.--Her resentment of such
behaviour, her indignation at having been its dupe, for a short time
made her feel only for herself; but other ideas, other considerations,
soon arose. Had Edward been intentionally deceiving her? Had he
feigned a regard for her which he did not feel? Was his engagement to
Lucy an engagement of the heart? No; whatever it might once have been,
she could not believe it such at present. His affection was all her
own. She could not be deceived in that. Her mother, sisters, Fanny,
all had been conscious of his regard for her at Norland; it was not an
illusion of her own vanity. He certainly loved her. What a softener
of the heart was this persuasion! How much could it not tempt her to
forgive! He had been blamable, highly blamable, in remaining at
Norland after he first felt her influence over him to be more than it
ought to be. In that, he could not be defended; but if he had injured
her, how much more had he injured himself; if her case were pitiable,
his was hopeless. His imprudence had made her miserable for a while;
but it seemed to have deprived himself of all chance of ever being
otherwise. She might in time regain tranquillity; but HE, what had he
to look forward to? Could he ever be tolerably happy with Lucy Steele;
could he, were his affection for herself out of the question, with his
integrity, his delicacy, and well-informed mind, be satisfied with a
wife like her--illiterate, artful, and selfish?
The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind him to every
thing but her beauty and good nature; but the four succeeding
years--years, which if rationally spent, give such improvement to the
understanding, must have opened his eyes to her defects of education,
while the same period of time, spent on her side in inferior society
and more frivolous pursuits, had perhaps robbed her of that simplicity
which might once have given an interesting character to her beauty.
If in the supposition of his seeking to marry herself, his difficulties
from his mother had seemed great, how much greater were they now likely
to be, when the object of his engagement was undoubtedly inferior in
connections, and probably inferior in fortune to herself. These
difficulties, indeed, with a heart so alienated from Lucy, might not
press very hard upon his patience; but melancholy was the state of the
person by whom the expectation of family opposition and unkindness,
could be felt as a relief!
As these considerations occurred to her in painful succession, she wept
for him, more than for herself. Supported by the conviction of having
done nothing to merit her present unhappiness, and consoled by the
belief that Edward had done nothing to forfeit her esteem, she thought
she could even now, under the first smart of the heavy blow, command
herself enough to guard every suspicion of the truth from her mother
and sisters. And so well was she able to answer her own expectations,
that when she joined them at dinner only two hours after she had first
suffered the extinction of all her dearest hopes, no one would have
supposed from the appearance of the sisters, that Elinor was mourning
in secret over obstacles which must divide her for ever from the object
of her love, and that Marianne was internally dwelling on the
perfections of a man, of whose whole heart she felt thoroughly
possessed, and whom she expected to see in every carriage which drove
near their house.
The necessity of concealing from her mother and Marianne, what had been
entrusted in confidence to herself, though it obliged her to unceasing
exertion, was no aggravation of Elinor's distress. On the contrary it
was a relief to her, to be spared the communication of what would give
such affliction to them, and to be saved likewise from hearing that
condemnation of Edward, which would probably flow from the excess of
their partial affection for herself, and which was more than she felt
equal to support.
From their counsel, or their conversation, she knew she could receive
no assistance, their tenderness and sorrow must add to her distress,
while her self-command would neither receive encouragement from their
example nor from their praise. She was stronger alone, and her own
good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken,
her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as with regrets so
poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.
Much as she had suffered from her first conversation with Lucy on the
subject, she soon felt an earnest wish of renewing it; and this for
more reasons than one. She wanted to hear many particulars of their
engagement repeated again, she wanted more clearly to understand what
Lucy really felt for Edward, whether there were any sincerity in her
declaration of tender regard for him, and she particularly wanted to
convince Lucy, by her readiness to enter on the matter again, and her
calmness in conversing on it, that she was no otherwise interested in
it than as a friend, which she very much feared her involuntary
agitation, in their morning discourse, must have left at least
doubtful. That Lucy was disposed to be jealous of her appeared very
probable: it was plain that Edward had always spoken highly in her
praise, not merely from Lucy's assertion, but from her venturing to
trust her on so short a personal acquaintance, with a secret so
confessedly and evidently important. And even Sir John's joking
intelligence must have had some weight. But indeed, while Elinor
remained so well assured within herself of being really beloved by
Edward, it required no other consideration of probabilities to make it
natural that Lucy should be jealous; and that she was so, her very
confidence was a proof. What other reason for the disclosure of the
affair could there be, but that Elinor might be informed by it of
Lucy's superior claims on Edward, and be taught to avoid him in future?
She had little difficulty in understanding thus much of her rival's
intentions, and while she was firmly resolved to act by her as every
principle of honour and honesty directed, to combat her own affection
for Edward and to see him as little as possible; she could not deny
herself the comfort of endeavouring to convince Lucy that her heart was
unwounded. And as she could now have nothing more painful to hear on
the subject than had already been told, she did not mistrust her own
ability of going through a repetition of particulars with composure.
But it was not immediately that an opportunity of doing so could be
commanded, though Lucy was as well disposed as herself to take
advantage of any that occurred; for the weather was not often fine
enough to allow of their joining in a walk, where they might most
easily separate themselves from the others; and though they met at
least every other evening either at the park or cottage, and chiefly at
the former, they could not be supposed to meet for the sake of
conversation. Such a thought would never enter either Sir John or Lady
Middleton's head; and therefore very little leisure was ever given for
a general chat, and none at all for particular discourse. They met for
the sake of eating, drinking, and laughing together, playing at cards,
or consequences, or any other game that was sufficiently noisy.
One or two meetings of this kind had taken place, without affording
Elinor any chance of engaging Lucy in private, when Sir John called at
the cottage one morning, to beg, in the name of charity, that they
would all dine with Lady Middleton that day, as he was obliged to
attend the club at Exeter, and she would otherwise be quite alone,
except her mother and the two Miss Steeles. Elinor, who foresaw a
fairer opening for the point she had in view, in such a party as this
was likely to be, more at liberty among themselves under the tranquil
and well-bred direction of Lady Middleton than when her husband united
them together in one noisy purpose, immediately accepted the
invitation; Margaret, with her mother's permission, was equally
compliant, and Marianne, though always unwilling to join any of their
parties, was persuaded by her mother, who could not bear to have her
seclude herself from any chance of amusement, to go likewise.
The young ladies went, and Lady Middleton was happily preserved from
the frightful solitude which had threatened her. The insipidity of the
meeting was exactly such as Elinor had expected; it produced not one
novelty of thought or expression, and nothing could be less interesting
than the whole of their discourse both in the dining parlour and
drawing room: to the latter, the children accompanied them, and while
they remained there, she was too well convinced of the impossibility of
engaging Lucy's attention to attempt it. They quitted it only with the
removal of the tea-things. The card-table was then placed, and Elinor
began to wonder at herself for having ever entertained a hope of
finding time for conversation at the park. They all rose up in
preparation for a round game.
"I am glad," said Lady Middleton to Lucy, "you are not going to finish
poor little Annamaria's basket this evening; for I am sure it must hurt
your eyes to work filigree by candlelight. And we will make the dear
little love some amends for her disappointment to-morrow, and then I
hope she will not much mind it."
This hint was enough, Lucy recollected herself instantly and replied,
"Indeed you are very much mistaken, Lady Middleton; I am only waiting
to know whether you can make your party without me, or I should have
been at my filigree already. I would not disappoint the little angel
for all the world: and if you want me at the card-table now, I am
resolved to finish the basket after supper."
"You are very good, I hope it won't hurt your eyes--will you ring the
bell for some working candles? My poor little girl would be sadly
disappointed, I know, if the basket was not finished tomorrow, for
though I told her it certainly would not, I am sure she depends upon
having it done."
Lucy directly drew her work table near her and reseated herself with an
alacrity and cheerfulness which seemed to infer that she could taste no
greater delight than in making a filigree basket for a spoilt child.
Lady Middleton proposed a rubber of Casino to the others. No one made
any objection but Marianne, who with her usual inattention to the forms
of general civility, exclaimed, "Your Ladyship will have the goodness
to excuse ME--you know I detest cards. I shall go to the piano-forte;
I have not touched it since it was tuned." And without farther
ceremony, she turned away and walked to the instrument.
Lady Middleton looked as if she thanked heaven that SHE had never made
so rude a speech.
"Marianne can never keep long from that instrument you know, ma'am,"
said Elinor, endeavouring to smooth away the offence; "and I do not
much wonder at it; for it is the very best toned piano-forte I ever
heard."
The remaining five were now to draw their cards.
"Perhaps," continued Elinor, "if I should happen to cut out, I may be
of some use to Miss Lucy Steele, in rolling her papers for her; and
there is so much still to be done to the basket, that it must be
impossible I think for her labour singly, to finish it this evening. I
should like the work exceedingly, if she would allow me a share in it."
"Indeed I shall be very much obliged to you for your help," cried Lucy,
"for I find there is more to be done to it than I thought there was;
and it would be a shocking thing to disappoint dear Annamaria after
all."
"Oh! that would be terrible, indeed," said Miss Steele-- "Dear little
soul, how I do love her!"
"You are very kind," said Lady Middleton to Elinor; "and as you really
like the work, perhaps you will be as well pleased not to cut in till
another rubber, or will you take your chance now?"
Elinor joyfully profited by the first of these proposals, and thus by a
little of that address which Marianne could never condescend to
practise, gained her own end, and pleased Lady Middleton at the same
time. Lucy made room for her with ready attention, and the two fair
rivals were thus seated side by side at the same table, and, with the
utmost harmony, engaged in forwarding the same work. The pianoforte at
which Marianne, wrapped up in her own music and her own thoughts, had
by this time forgotten that any body was in the room besides herself,
was luckily so near them that Miss Dashwood now judged she might
safely, under the shelter of its noise, introduce the interesting
subject, without any risk of being heard at the card-table.
| 2,212 | Chapter 23 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210421140324/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sense-and-sensibility/summary/chapter-23 | Elinor, sadly, has no grounds for doubt left...it's definitely Edward that Lucy Steele is engaged to. Her feelings are all over the place - has Edward deceived her? Does he really care for Lucy at all? After all, everyone else is also sure that Edward loves Elinor - so what's going on, anyway? Elinor also feels bad for Edward; after all, he's the one who going to be stuck with uneducated, shrewd Lucy Steele. Even if he was infatuated with her as a teenager, what must he think now? Furthermore, what's going to happen when they've been married for years and years? Also, there's the problem of Edward's snobby mom, who'll surely have a conniption fit when she finds out that he's engaged to Lucy, who's inferior to Elinor in social station. All things considered, Elinor feels worse for Edward than for herself. She resolves to keep her troubles from Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood, figuring that they can't possibly help her with any of this. Elinor resolves to talk more to Lucy about this whole thing. She wants to see how much Lucy actually cares for Edward. Elinor also has a sneaking suspicion that Lucy might be jealous of her, given how much Edward praises her, as well as Sir John's jokes about how she and Edward are in love. Unfortunately, there are very few chances to talk privately with Lucy, since Sir John and Lady Middleton keep everyone busy with dinners, games, and group activities. One day, though, Lady Middleton invites all of the young ladies over to keep her company at dinner while Sir John hangs out with his guy friends. It turns out to be quite a dull gathering, but Elinor hopes to find a chance to talk to Lucy alone. Lucy, taking a hint from Lady Middleton, says she's going to work on a basket she's making for Annamaria, while everyone else plays cards. Elinor takes this opportunity to also opt out of the card game, saying that she'll go help Lucy with her task. Lucy and Elinor settle down to work near the piano, so nobody else will hear their conversation. | null | 356 | 1 | [
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110 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/chapters_1_to_4.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_0_part_0.txt | Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapters 1-4 | chapters 1-4 | null | {"name": "Chapters 1-4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219151046/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary-and-analysis/phase-the-first-the-maiden-chapters-14", "summary": "The setting is in Wessex, in the south of England, during the late 1800s. John Durbeyfield is on his way home after working as a higgler/haggler. He encounters a local parson who tells him of his family history: The Durbeyfields are descended from the once famous d'Urbervilles, a wealthy family dating back to the time of William the Conqueror. John, feeling a rush of superiority, hurries home to tell his family of the good news. The family has had a difficult life, with John a poor provider and his wife barely managing to keep the family fed and clothed. There are seven children in all; Tess, or Theresa, is the oldest. Joan, John's wife, hatches a plan to send the 16-year-old Tess to \"claim kin\" at a nearby relation, a woman of wealth and position. When John has had too much to drink, Tess and her brother Abraham set out with the family horse to deliver beehives at a nearby farmer's market. While en route, Tess and Abraham fall asleep in the wagon, and the horse, Prince, is killed accidentally by the local mail cart. Because Tess had allowed Prince to wander into the oncoming lane and had inadvertently caused the accident between the mail cart and the Durbeyfield wagon, she feels it is her responsibility to make matters right. It is at this point that Joan Durbeyfield introduces the plan for Tess to visit their d'Urberville relations. Tess initially objects to the plan, but with the family horse now dead, she relents and goes to the d'Urberville family to seek money or work.", "analysis": "Several themes appear early on in the novel. First, is the part that fate plays in our lives. Hardy uses the device of a poor family learning of their former circumstances and former history. It is only by chance that Parson Tringham and John Durbeyfield pass on the road, an encounter that gives the parson the opportunity to share information he has about Durbeyfield's ancestors. In fact, it was even chance that led Parson Tringham to suspect that the d'Urbervilles and Durbeyfields were connected at all; he simply happened to see the Durbeyfield name of John's wagon while he was investigating the \"vicissitudes of the d'Urberville family.\" The question becomes, would they have been better off not knowing that they were descended from nobility? Initially, the information seems like a boon to a family that, before the end of these four chapters, is in dire need of help, but it sets off a chain of events that, in the end, bring only tragedy. A second theme appears in Chapter 1 when Parson Tringham mentions \"how the mighty are fallen.\" In this novel, we will see how the mighty have fallen and how the poor arise from their situations in life only to be forced down again by circumstances beyond their control. Hardy here is preaching against the attitudes that Victorian England held at the time, that the wealthy control the lives of others. He seems to be making the argument that social position has a devastating effect upon the lives of those who must endure under the weight of class repression. Hardy's use of the celebration of May Day, or May 1, is also significant. First, this is the where readers get their first glimpse of the young girl Tess. Dressed in white, she is a symbol of innocence and purity and gaiety at the celebration. Tess is among her friends at a May Day dance in Marlott, their hometown. Second, Hardy notes that such clubs, which are forgotten in the cities, still retain their former glory in the country where Tess lives, another indication that Tess is neither sophisticated nor worldly -- a character trait that leaves her unprepared for the advances of a worldly man like Alec d'Urberville. Finally, May Day itself is an ancient celebration, dating back to pagan times, when the Romans celebrated the goddess Floralia, who represented new spring flowers. Maia, the goddess of May, was celebrated for spring growth and replenishment. In this way, Hardy connects the Christian world and pagan world in the celebration of a former pagan holiday that had taken on Christian overtones. In this setting, Hardy describes Tess as \"a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experienced . . . for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.\" In essence, she is a lovely, innocent young girl on the brink of womanhood. Glossary haggler/higgler a dealer who travels from place to place selling wares or goods, such as fruit. wold old . Women's club-walking A procession by the members of a local club or clubs: esp. the annual festival of a benefit club or friendly society. vamp trudge, tramp, walk . Cerealia celebration in honor of Ceres, Roman goddess of the harvest. Old Style days the time before 1752 when Great Britain replaced the Julian Calendar, old-style dating, with Gregorian, or new-style dating. Market-niche the amount of alcohol that he would normally drink on a market day. Uncribbed, uncabined after murdering Banquo, in Macbeth , Macbeth refers to himself as \"cabined, cribbed, confined.\" Whitsun Holidays the time around the seventh Sunday after Easter, Whitsuntide or Whit Sunday. Club-walking and other festivities were held in parishes at Whitsuntide. clipsing and colling hugging . diment diamond . Cubit's Cupid's. fess pleased . poppet a doll, or puppet. Sixth Standard in the National School the highest level available in school supported by government funds run by the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. The first schools were established in 1811. Mommet a term of abuse or contempt . larry commotion, disturbance . Oliver Grumble's Oliver Cromwell. plim swell . vlee fly; a one-horse hackney-carriage . Mampus crowd . rafted disturbed, unsettled . outhouse a building separate from but near a main building. In nineteenth-century British usage, outhouse probably does not refer to a privy. Revised Code reference to the Education Department's Revised Codes of 1862 and 1867, which linked the funding for schools to their size and to student performance on standardized assessment examinations. \"Nature's holy plan\" from Wordsworth, \"Lines Written in Early Spring\" . limed caught with birdlime; here, Abraham is compared to a bird ensnared in bird-lime. off-license without a license; here, Rolliver's is not licensed to sell alcohol for consumption on the premises. gaffer a foreman of a group of workers. sumple supple . \"green malt on the floor\" the expression refers to pregnancy before marriage. nater nature . Stubbard-tree a kind of apple tree."} |
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking
homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining
Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him
were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him
somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a
smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not
thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung
upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite
worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off.
Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a gray mare,
who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune.
"Good night t'ee," said the man with the basket.
"Good night, Sir John," said the parson.
The pedestrian, after another pace or two, halted, and turned round.
"Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day on this road
about this time, and I said 'Good night,' and you made reply '_Good
night, Sir John_,' as now."
"I did," said the parson.
"And once before that--near a month ago."
"I may have."
"Then what might your meaning be in calling me 'Sir John' these
different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler?"
The parson rode a step or two nearer.
"It was only my whim," he said; and, after a moment's hesitation: "It
was on account of a discovery I made some little time ago, whilst I
was hunting up pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson
Tringham, the antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don't you really know,
Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal representative of the ancient
and knightly family of the d'Urbervilles, who derive their descent
from Sir Pagan d'Urberville, that renowned knight who came from
Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey
Roll?"
"Never heard it before, sir!"
"Well it's true. Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch
the profile of your face better. Yes, that's the d'Urberville nose
and chin--a little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve
knights who assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his
conquest of Glamorganshire. Branches of your family held manors over
all this part of England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the
time of King Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich
enough to give a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the
Second's time your forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to
attend the great Council there. You declined a little in Oliver
Cromwell's time, but to no serious extent, and in Charles the
Second's reign you were made Knights of the Royal Oak for your
loyalty. Aye, there have been generations of Sir Johns among
you, and if knighthood were hereditary, like a baronetcy, as it
practically was in old times, when men were knighted from father
to son, you would be Sir John now."
"Ye don't say so!"
"In short," concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with
his switch, "there's hardly such another family in England."
"Daze my eyes, and isn't there?" said Durbeyfield. "And here have I
been knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if I
was no more than the commonest feller in the parish... And how long
hev this news about me been knowed, Pa'son Tringham?"
The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware, it had quite
died out of knowledge, and could hardly be said to be known at all.
His own investigations had begun on a day in the preceding spring
when, having been engaged in tracing the vicissitudes of the
d'Urberville family, he had observed Durbeyfield's name on his
waggon, and had thereupon been led to make inquiries about his
father and grandfather till he had no doubt on the subject.
"At first I resolved not to disturb you with such a useless piece of
information," said he. "However, our impulses are too strong for our
judgement sometimes. I thought you might perhaps know something of
it all the while."
"Well, I have heard once or twice, 'tis true, that my family had seen
better days afore they came to Blackmoor. But I took no notice o't,
thinking it to mean that we had once kept two horses where we now
keep only one. I've got a wold silver spoon, and a wold graven seal
at home, too; but, Lord, what's a spoon and seal? ... And to think
that I and these noble d'Urbervilles were one flesh all the time.
'Twas said that my gr't-granfer had secrets, and didn't care to talk
of where he came from... And where do we raise our smoke, now,
parson, if I may make so bold; I mean, where do we d'Urbervilles
live?"
"You don't live anywhere. You are extinct--as a county family."
"That's bad."
"Yes--what the mendacious family chronicles call extinct in the male
line--that is, gone down--gone under."
"Then where do we lie?"
"At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in your vaults,
with your effigies under Purbeck-marble canopies."
"And where be our family mansions and estates?"
"You haven't any."
"Oh? No lands neither?"
"None; though you once had 'em in abundance, as I said, for you
family consisted of numerous branches. In this county there was a
seat of yours at Kingsbere, and another at Sherton, and another in
Millpond, and another at Lullstead, and another at Wellbridge."
"And shall we ever come into our own again?"
"Ah--that I can't tell!"
"And what had I better do about it, sir?" asked Durbeyfield, after a
pause.
"Oh--nothing, nothing; except chasten yourself with the thought of
'how are the mighty fallen.' It is a fact of some interest to the
local historian and genealogist, nothing more. There are several
families among the cottagers of this county of almost equal lustre.
Good night."
"But you'll turn back and have a quart of beer wi' me on the strength
o't, Pa'son Tringham? There's a very pretty brew in tap at The Pure
Drop--though, to be sure, not so good as at Rolliver's."
"No, thank you--not this evening, Durbeyfield. You've had enough
already." Concluding thus, the parson rode on his way, with doubts
as to his discretion in retailing this curious bit of lore.
When he was gone, Durbeyfield walked a few steps in a profound
reverie, and then sat down upon the grassy bank by the roadside,
depositing his basket before him. In a few minutes a youth appeared
in the distance, walking in the same direction as that which had been
pursued by Durbeyfield. The latter, on seeing him, held up his hand,
and the lad quickened his pace and came near.
"Boy, take up that basket! I want 'ee to go on an errand for me."
The lath-like stripling frowned. "Who be you, then, John
Durbeyfield, to order me about and call me 'boy'? You know my
name as well as I know yours!"
"Do you, do you? That's the secret--that's the secret! Now obey my
orders, and take the message I'm going to charge 'ee wi'... Well,
Fred, I don't mind telling you that the secret is that I'm one of a
noble race--it has been just found out by me this present afternoon,
P.M." And as he made the announcement, Durbeyfield, declining from
his sitting position, luxuriously stretched himself out upon the bank
among the daisies.
The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from
crown to toe.
"Sir John d'Urberville--that's who I am," continued the prostrate
man. "That is if knights were baronets--which they be. 'Tis
recorded in history all about me. Dost know of such a place, lad,
as Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill?"
"Ees. I've been there to Greenhill Fair."
"Well, under the church of that city there lie--"
"'Tisn't a city, the place I mean; leastwise 'twaddn' when I was
there--'twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o' place."
"Never you mind the place, boy, that's not the question before us.
Under the church of that there parish lie my ancestors--hundreds of
'em--in coats of mail and jewels, in gr't lead coffins weighing tons
and tons. There's not a man in the county o' South-Wessex that's
got grander and nobler skillentons in his family than I."
"Oh?"
"Now take up that basket, and goo on to Marlott, and when you've come
to The Pure Drop Inn, tell 'em to send a horse and carriage to me
immed'ately, to carry me hwome. And in the bottom o' the carriage
they be to put a noggin o' rum in a small bottle, and chalk it up
to my account. And when you've done that goo on to my house with
the basket, and tell my wife to put away that washing, because she
needn't finish it, and wait till I come hwome, as I've news to tell
her."
As the lad stood in a dubious attitude, Durbeyfield put his hand in
his pocket, and produced a shilling, one of the chronically few that
he possessed.
"Here's for your labour, lad."
This made a difference in the young man's estimate of the position.
"Yes, Sir John. Thank 'ee. Anything else I can do for 'ee, Sir
John?"
"Tell 'em at hwome that I should like for supper,--well, lamb's fry
if they can get it; and if they can't, black-pot; and if they can't
get that, well chitterlings will do."
"Yes, Sir John."
The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the notes of a brass
band were heard from the direction of the village.
"What's that?" said Durbeyfield. "Not on account o' I?"
"'Tis the women's club-walking, Sir John. Why, your da'ter is one o'
the members."
"To be sure--I'd quite forgot it in my thoughts of greater things!
Well, vamp on to Marlott, will ye, and order that carriage, and
maybe I'll drive round and inspect the club."
The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the grass and
daisies in the evening sun. Not a soul passed that way for a long
while, and the faint notes of the band were the only human sounds
audible within the rim of blue hills.
The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the
beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled
and secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or
landscape-painter, though within a four hours' journey from London.
It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the
summits of the hills that surround it--except perhaps during the
droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad
weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous,
and miry ways.
This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are
never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the
bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill,
Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The
traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score
of miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches
the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted
to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing
absolutely from that which he has passed through. Behind him the
hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give
an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the
hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the
valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more
delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from
this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads
overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath
is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the
middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond
is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited;
with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass
and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is
the Vale of Blackmoor.
The district is of historic, no less than of topographical interest.
The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of White Hart, from
a curious legend of King Henry III's reign, in which the killing by
a certain Thomas de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart which the king
had run down and spared, was made the occasion of a heavy fine.
In those days, and till comparatively recent times, the country was
densely wooded. Even now, traces of its earlier condition are to be
found in the old oak copses and irregular belts of timber that yet
survive upon its slopes, and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so
many of its pastures.
The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades
remain. Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised
form. The May-Day dance, for instance, was to be discerned on
the afternoon under notice, in the guise of the club revel, or
"club-walking," as it was there called.
It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of Marlott,
though its real interest was not observed by the participators in the
ceremony. Its singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of
walking in procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the
members being solely women. In men's clubs such celebrations were,
though expiring, less uncommon; but either the natural shyness of the
softer sex, or a sarcastic attitude on the part of male relatives,
had denuded such women's clubs as remained (if any other did) or this
their glory and consummation. The club of Marlott alone lived to
uphold the local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if
not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked
still.
The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns--a gay survival from
Old Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms--days
before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a
monotonous average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in a
processional march of two and two round the parish. Ideal and real
clashed slightly as the sun lit up their figures against the green
hedges and creeper-laced house-fronts; for, though the whole troop
wore white garments, no two whites were alike among them. Some
approached pure blanching; some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the
older characters (which had possibly lain by folded for many a year)
inclined to a cadaverous tint, and to a Georgian style.
In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every woman and girl
carried in her right hand a peeled willow wand, and in her left a
bunch of white flowers. The peeling of the former, and the selection
of the latter, had been an operation of personal care.
There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train,
their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and
trouble, having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance
in such a jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more
to be gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom
the years were drawing nigh when she should say, "I have no pleasure
in them," than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed
over here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and
warm.
The young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the band, and their
heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine every tone of gold,
and black, and brown. Some had beautiful eyes, others a beautiful
nose, others a beautiful mouth and figure: few, if any, had all. A
difficulty of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public
scrutiny, an inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate
self-consciousness from their features, was apparent in them, and
showed that they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many
eyes.
And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each
had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some
affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which,
though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will.
They were all cheerful, and many of them merry.
They came round by The Pure Drop Inn, and were turning out of the
high road to pass through a wicket-gate into the meadows, when one of
the women said--
"The Load-a-Lord! Why, Tess Durbeyfield, if there isn't thy father
riding hwome in a carriage!"
A young member of the band turned her head at the exclamation.
She was a fine and handsome girl--not handsomer than some others,
possibly--but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added
eloquence to colour and shape. She wore a red ribbon in her hair,
and was the only one of the white company who could boast of such
a pronounced adornment. As she looked round Durbeyfield was seen
moving along the road in a chaise belonging to The Pure Drop, driven
by a frizzle-headed brawny damsel with her gown-sleeves rolled above
her elbows. This was the cheerful servant of that establishment,
who, in her part of factotum, turned groom and ostler at times.
Durbeyfield, leaning back, and with his eyes closed luxuriously, was
waving his hand above his head, and singing in a slow recitative--
"I've-got-a-gr't-family-vault-at-Kingsbere--and
knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffins-there!"
The clubbists tittered, except the girl called Tess--in whom a slow
heat seemed to rise at the sense that her father was making himself
foolish in their eyes.
"He's tired, that's all," she said hastily, "and he has got a lift
home, because our own horse has to rest to-day."
"Bless thy simplicity, Tess," said her companions. "He's got his
market-nitch. Haw-haw!"
"Look here; I won't walk another inch with you, if you say any jokes
about him!" Tess cried, and the colour upon her cheeks spread over
her face and neck. In a moment her eyes grew moist, and her glance
drooped to the ground. Perceiving that they had really pained her
they said no more, and order again prevailed. Tess's pride would not
allow her to turn her head again, to learn what her father's meaning
was, if he had any; and thus she moved on with the whole body to the
enclosure where there was to be dancing on the green. By the time
the spot was reached she has recovered her equanimity, and tapped her
neighbour with her wand and talked as usual.
Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of
emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue
to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic
intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing
approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an
utterance as any to be found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red
mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled
into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the
middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked
along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could
sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling
from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her
mouth now and then.
Yet few knew, and still fewer considered this. A small minority,
mainly strangers, would look long at her in casually passing by, and
grow momentarily fascinated by her freshness, and wonder if they
would ever see her again: but to almost everybody she was a fine and
picturesque country girl, and no more.
Nothing was seen or heard further of Durbeyfield in his triumphal
chariot under the conduct of the ostleress, and the club having
entered the allotted space, dancing began. As there were no men in
the company, the girls danced at first with each other, but when the
hour for the close of labour drew on, the masculine inhabitants of
the village, together with other idlers and pedestrians, gathered
round the spot, and appeared inclined to negotiate for a partner.
Among these on-lookers were three young men of a superior class,
carrying small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders, and stout
sticks in their hands. Their general likeness to each other, and
their consecutive ages, would almost have suggested that they might
be, what in fact they were, brothers. The eldest wore the white tie,
high waistcoat, and thin-brimmed hat of the regulation curate; the
second was the normal undergraduate; the appearance of the third and
youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there
was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying
that he had hardly as yet found the entrance to his professional
groove. That he was a desultory tentative student of something and
everything might only have been predicted of him.
These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they were spending
their Whitsun holidays in a walking tour through the Vale of
Blackmoor, their course being south-westerly from the town of Shaston
on the north-east.
They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired as to the
meaning of the dance and the white-frocked maids. The two elder of
the brothers were plainly not intending to linger more than a moment,
but the spectacle of a bevy of girls dancing without male partners
seemed to amuse the third, and make him in no hurry to move on. He
unstrapped his knapsack, put it, with his stick, on the hedge-bank,
and opened the gate.
"What are you going to do, Angel?" asked the eldest.
"I am inclined to go and have a fling with them. Why not all of
us--just for a minute or two--it will not detain us long?"
"No--no; nonsense!" said the first. "Dancing in public with a troop
of country hoydens--suppose we should be seen! Come along, or it
will be dark before we get to Stourcastle, and there's no place we
can sleep at nearer than that; besides, we must get through another
chapter of _A Counterblast to Agnosticism_ before we turn in, now I
have taken the trouble to bring the book."
"All right--I'll overtake you and Cuthbert in five minutes; don't
stop; I give my word that I will, Felix."
The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on, taking their
brother's knapsack to relieve him in following, and the youngest
entered the field.
"This is a thousand pities," he said gallantly, to two or three of
the girls nearest him, as soon as there was a pause in the dance.
"Where are your partners, my dears?"
"They've not left off work yet," answered one of the boldest.
"They'll be here by and by. Till then, will you be one, sir?"
"Certainly. But what's one among so many!"
"Better than none. 'Tis melancholy work facing and footing it to one
of your own sort, and no clipsing and colling at all. Now, pick and
choose."
"'Ssh--don't be so for'ard!" said a shyer girl.
The young man, thus invited, glanced them over, and attempted some
discrimination; but, as the group were all so new to him, he could
not very well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to
hand, which was not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it
happen to be Tess Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons,
monumental record, the d'Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in
her life's battle as yet, even to the extent of attracting to her a
dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest peasantry. So much
for Norman blood unaided by Victorian lucre.
The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed
down; but she was envied by all as the first who enjoyed the luxury
of a masculine partner that evening. Yet such was the force of
example that the village young men, who had not hastened to enter
the gate while no intruder was in the way, now dropped in quickly,
and soon the couples became leavened with rustic youth to a marked
extent, till at length the plainest woman in the club was no longer
compelled to foot it on the masculine side of the figure.
The church clock struck, when suddenly the student said that he must
leave--he had been forgetting himself--he had to join his companions.
As he fell out of the dance his eyes lighted on Tess Durbeyfield,
whose own large orbs wore, to tell the truth, the faintest aspect of
reproach that he had not chosen her. He, too, was sorry then that,
owing to her backwardness, he had not observed her; and with that in
his mind he left the pasture.
On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run down the lane
westward, and had soon passed the hollow and mounted the next rise.
He had not yet overtaken his brothers, but he paused to get breath,
and looked back. He could see the white figures of the girls in the
green enclosure whirling about as they had whirled when he was among
them. They seemed to have quite forgotten him already.
All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart
by the hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be the pretty
maiden with whom he had not danced. Trifling as the matter was, he
yet instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished
that he had asked her; he wished that he had inquired her name. She
was so modest, so expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin
white gown that he felt he had acted stupidly.
However, it could not be helped, and turning, and bending himself to
a rapid walk, he dismissed the subject from his mind.
As for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge the incident
from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long
time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but ah! they did
not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not
till the rays of the sun had absorbed the young stranger's retreating
figure on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and
answered her would-be partner in the affirmative.
She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a
certain zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she
enjoyed treading a measure purely for its own sake; little divining
when she saw "the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing
pains, and the agreeable distresses" of those girls who had been
wooed and won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The
struggles and wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an
amusement to her--no more; and when they became fierce she rebuked
them.
She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father's
odd appearance and manner returned upon the girl's mind to make her
anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from
the dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at
which the parental cottage lay.
While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she
had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well--so
well. They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of
the house, occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone
floor, to which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a
vigorous gallopade, the favourite ditty of "The Spotted Cow"--
I saw her lie do'-own in yon'-der green gro'-ove;
Come, love!' and I'll tell' you where!'
The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a
moment, and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take the
place of the melody.
"God bless thy diment eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy cherry
mouth! And thy Cubit's thighs! And every bit o' thy blessed body!"
After this invocation the rocking and the singing would recommence,
and the "Spotted Cow" proceed as before. So matters stood when Tess
opened the door and paused upon the mat within it, surveying the
scene.
The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl's senses
with an unspeakable dreariness. From the holiday gaieties of the
field--the white gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling
movements on the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the
stranger--to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled spectacle,
what a step! Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill
self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother
in these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.
There stood her mother amid the group of children, as Tess had left
her, hanging over the Monday washing-tub, which had now, as always,
lingered on to the end of the week. Out of that tub had come the day
before--Tess felt it with a dreadful sting of remorse--the very white
frock upon her back which she had so carelessly greened about the
skirt on the damping grass--which had been wrung up and ironed by her
mother's own hands.
As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside the tub,
the other being engaged in the aforesaid business of rocking her
youngest child. The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many
years, under the weight of so many children, on that flagstone floor,
that they were worn nearly flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk
accompanied each swing of the cot, flinging the baby from side to
side like a weaver's shuttle, as Mrs Durbeyfield, excited by her
song, trod the rocker with all the spring that was left in her after
a long day's seething in the suds.
Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame stretched
itself tall, and began jigging up and down; the water dribbled from
the matron's elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the
verse, Mrs Durbeyfield regarding her daughter the while. Even now,
when burdened with a young family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate
lover of tune. No ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer
world but Tess's mother caught up its notation in a week.
There still faintly beamed from the woman's features something of
the freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it
probable that the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in
main part her mother's gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.
"I'll rock the cradle for 'ee, mother," said the daughter gently.
"Or I'll take off my best frock and help you wring up? I thought you
had finished long ago."
Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the housework to her
single-handed efforts for so long; indeed, Joan seldom upbraided
her thereon at any time, feeling but slightly the lack of Tess's
assistance whilst her instinctive plan for relieving herself of her
labours lay in postponing them. To-night, however, she was even in a
blither mood than usual. There was a dreaminess, a pre-occupation,
an exaltation, in the maternal look which the girl could not
understand.
"Well, I'm glad you've come," her mother said, as soon as the last
note had passed out of her. "I want to go and fetch your father;
but what's more'n that, I want to tell 'ee what have happened. Y'll
be fess enough, my poppet, when th'st know!" (Mrs Durbeyfield
habitually spoke the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth
Standard in the National School under a London-trained mistress,
spoke two languages: the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary
English abroad and to persons of quality.)
"Since I've been away?" Tess asked.
"Ay!"
"Had it anything to do with father's making such a mommet of himself
in thik carriage this afternoon? Why did 'er? I felt inclined to
sink into the ground with shame!"
"That wer all a part of the larry! We've been found to be the
greatest gentlefolk in the whole county--reaching all back long
before Oliver Grumble's time--to the days of the Pagan Turks--with
monuments, and vaults, and crests, and 'scutcheons, and the Lord
knows what all. In Saint Charles's days we was made Knights o' the
Royal Oak, our real name being d'Urberville! ... Don't that make
your bosom plim? 'Twas on this account that your father rode home
in the vlee; not because he'd been drinking, as people supposed."
"I'm glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?"
"O yes! 'Tis thoughted that great things may come o't. No doubt a
mampus of volk of our own rank will be down here in their carriages
as soon as 'tis known. Your father learnt it on his way hwome
from Shaston, and he has been telling me the whole pedigree of the
matter."
"Where is father now?" asked Tess suddenly.
Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer: "He called
to see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not consumption at all,
it seems. It is fat round his heart, 'a says. There, it is like
this." Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb
and forefinger to the shape of the letter C, and used the other
forefinger as a pointer. "'At the present moment,' he says to your
father, 'your heart is enclosed all round there, and all round
there; this space is still open,' 'a says. 'As soon as it do
meet, so,'"--Mrs Durbeyfield closed her fingers into a circle
complete--"'off you will go like a shadder, Mr Durbeyfield,' 'a says.
'You mid last ten years; you mid go off in ten months, or ten days.'"
Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the eternal
cloud so soon, notwithstanding this sudden greatness!
"But where IS father?" she asked again.
Her mother put on a deprecating look. "Now don't you be bursting out
angry! The poor man--he felt so rafted after his uplifting by the
pa'son's news--that he went up to Rolliver's half an hour ago. He do
want to get up his strength for his journey to-morrow with that load
of beehives, which must be delivered, family or no. He'll have to
start shortly after twelve to-night, as the distance is so long."
"Get up his strength!" said Tess impetuously, the tears welling to
her eyes. "O my God! Go to a public-house to get up his strength!
And you as well agreed as he, mother!"
Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room, and to impart
a cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and children playing
about, and to her mother's face.
"No," said the latter touchily, "I be not agreed. I have been
waiting for 'ee to bide and keep house while I go fetch him."
"I'll go."
"O no, Tess. You see, it would be no use."
Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother's objection
meant. Mrs Durbeyfield's jacket and bonnet were already hanging
slily upon a chair by her side, in readiness for this contemplated
jaunt, the reason for which the matron deplored more than its
necessity.
"And take the _Compleat Fortune-Teller_ to the outhouse," Joan
continued, rapidly wiping her hands, and donning the garments.
The _Compleat Fortune-Teller_ was an old thick volume, which lay on a
table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached
the edge of the type. Tess took it up, and her mother started.
This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn was one of
Mrs Durbeyfield's still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of
rearing children. To discover him at Rolliver's, to sit there for
an hour or two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the
children during the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an
occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities
took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere
mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as
pressing concretions which chafed body and soul. The youngsters,
not immediately within sight, seemed rather bright and desirable
appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents of daily life were not
without humorousness and jollity in their aspect there. She felt a
little as she had used to feel when she sat by her now wedded husband
in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her eyes to his defects
of character, and regarding him only in his ideal presentation as
lover.
Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the
outhouse with the fortune-telling book, and stuffed it into the
thatch. A curious fetishistic fear of this grimy volume on the part
of her mother prevented her ever allowing it to stay in the house all
night, and hither it was brought back whenever it had been consulted.
Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions,
folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter,
with her trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an
infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as
ordinarily understood. When they were together the Jacobean and the
Victorian ages were juxtaposed.
Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could
have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She
guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not
divine that it solely concerned herself. Dismissing this, however,
she busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried during the
day-time, in company with her nine-year-old brother Abraham, and her
sister Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called "'Liza-Lu," the
youngest ones being put to bed. There was an interval of four years
and more between Tess and the next of the family, the two who had
filled the gap having died in their infancy, and this lent her a
deputy-maternal attitude when she was alone with her juniors. Next
in juvenility to Abraham came two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then
a boy of three, and then the baby, who had just completed his first
year.
All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield
ship--entirely dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield
adults for their pleasures, their necessities, their health, even
their existence. If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose
to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation,
death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches
compelled to sail with them--six helpless creatures, who had never
been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they
wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of
the shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know
whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound
and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority
for speaking of "Nature's holy plan."
It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared. Tess looked
out of the door, and took a mental journey through Marlott. The
village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put
out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the
extended hand.
Her mother's fetching simply meant one more to fetch. Tess began to
perceive that a man in indifferent health, who proposed to start on a
journey before one in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this
late hour celebrating his ancient blood.
"Abraham," she said to her little brother, "do you put on your
hat--you bain't afraid?--and go up to Rolliver's, and see what has
gone wi' father and mother."
The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the door, and the
night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed yet again; neither man,
woman, nor child returned. Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have
been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.
"I must go myself," she said.
'Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in, started on
her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty
progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when
one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.
Rolliver's inn, the single alehouse at this end of the long and
broken village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as
nobody could legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt
accommodation for consumers was strictly limited to a little board
about six inches wide and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings
by pieces of wire, so as to form a ledge. On this board thirsty
strangers deposited their cups as they stood in the road and drank,
and threw the dregs on the dusty ground to the pattern of Polynesia,
and wished they could have a restful seat inside.
Thus the strangers. But there were also local customers who felt the
same wish; and where there's a will there's a way.
In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly
curtained with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the
landlady, Mrs Rolliver, were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen
persons, all seeking beatitude; all old inhabitants of the nearer
end of Marlott, and frequenters of this retreat. Not only did the
distance to the The Pure Drop, the fully-licensed tavern at the
further part of the dispersed village, render its accommodation
practically unavailable for dwellers at this end; but the far more
serious question, the quality of the liquor, confirmed the prevalent
opinion that it was better to drink with Rolliver in a corner of the
housetop than with the other landlord in a wide house.
A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room afforded
sitting-space for several persons gathered round three of its sides;
a couple more men had elevated themselves on a chest of drawers;
another rested on the oak-carved "cwoffer"; two on the wash-stand;
another on the stool; and thus all were, somehow, seated at their
ease. The stage of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this
hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and
spread their personalities warmly through the room. In this process
the chamber and its furniture grew more and more dignified and
luxurious; the shawl hanging at the window took upon itself the
richness of tapestry; the brass handles of the chest of drawers were
as golden knockers; and the carved bedposts seemed to have some
kinship with the magnificent pillars of Solomon's temple.
Mrs Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after parting from
Tess, opened the front door, crossed the downstairs room, which was
in deep gloom, and then unfastened the stair-door like one whose
fingers knew the tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the
crooked staircase was a slower process, and her face, as it rose into
the light above the last stair, encountered the gaze of all the party
assembled in the bedroom.
"--Being a few private friends I've asked in to keep up club-walking
at my own expense," the landlady exclaimed at the sound of footsteps,
as glibly as a child repeating the Catechism, while she peered over
the stairs. "Oh, 'tis you, Mrs Durbeyfield--Lard--how you frightened
me!--I thought it might be some gaffer sent by Gover'ment."
Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the remainder
of the conclave, and turned to where her husband sat. He was humming
absently to himself, in a low tone: "I be as good as some folks here
and there! I've got a great family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,
and finer skillentons than any man in Wessex!"
"I've something to tell 'ee that's come into my head about that--a
grand projick!" whispered his cheerful wife. "Here, John, don't 'ee
see me?" She nudged him, while he, looking through her as through a
window-pane, went on with his recitative.
"Hush! Don't 'ee sing so loud, my good man," said the landlady; "in
case any member of the Gover'ment should be passing, and take away my
licends."
"He's told 'ee what's happened to us, I suppose?" asked Mrs
Durbeyfield.
"Yes--in a way. D'ye think there's any money hanging by it?"
"Ah, that's the secret," said Joan Durbeyfield sagely. "However,
'tis well to be kin to a coach, even if you don't ride in 'en." She
dropped her public voice, and continued in a low tone to her husband:
"I've been thinking since you brought the news that there's a great
rich lady out by Trantridge, on the edge o' The Chase, of the name of
d'Urberville."
"Hey--what's that?" said Sir John.
She repeated the information. "That lady must be our relation," she
said. "And my projick is to send Tess to claim kin."
"There IS a lady of the name, now you mention it," said Durbeyfield.
"Pa'son Tringham didn't think of that. But she's nothing beside
we--a junior branch of us, no doubt, hailing long since King Norman's
day."
While this question was being discussed neither of the pair noticed,
in their preoccupation, that little Abraham had crept into the room,
and was awaiting an opportunity of asking them to return.
"She is rich, and she'd be sure to take notice o' the maid,"
continued Mrs Durbeyfield; "and 'twill be a very good thing. I don't
see why two branches o' one family should not be on visiting terms."
"Yes; and we'll all claim kin!" said Abraham brightly from under the
bedstead. "And we'll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live
with her; and we'll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!"
"How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye talking! Go away,
and play on the stairs till father and mother be ready! ... Well,
Tess ought to go to this other member of our family. She'd be sure
to win the lady--Tess would; and likely enough 'twould lead to some
noble gentleman marrying her. In short, I know it."
"How?"
"I tried her fate in the _Fortune-Teller_, and it brought out that
very thing! ... You should ha' seen how pretty she looked to-day;
her skin is as sumple as a duchess'."
"What says the maid herself to going?"
"I've not asked her. She don't know there is any such lady-relation
yet. But it would certainly put her in the way of a grand marriage,
and she won't say nay to going."
"Tess is queer."
"But she's tractable at bottom. Leave her to me."
Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import
reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that
the Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common
folks had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine
prospects in store.
"Tess is a fine figure o' fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed
her vamping round parish with the rest," observed one of the elderly
boozers in an undertone. "But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she
don't get green malt in floor." It was a local phrase which had a
peculiar meaning, and there was no reply.
The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were
heard crossing the room below.
"--Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up
club-walking at my own expense." The landlady had rapidly re-used
the formula she kept on hand for intruders before she recognized that
the newcomer was Tess.
Even to her mother's gaze the girl's young features looked sadly
out of place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as
no unsuitable medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a
reproachful flash from Tess's dark eyes needed to make her father
and mother rise from their seats, hastily finish their ale, and
descend the stairs behind her, Mrs Rolliver's caution following
their footsteps.
"No noise, please, if ye'll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my
licends, and be summons'd, and I don't know what all! 'Night t'ye!"
They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs
Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth, drunk very little--not a
fourth of the quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to
church on a Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or
genuflections; but the weakness of Sir John's constitution made
mountains of his petty sins in this kind. On reaching the fresh
air he was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row of three at one
moment as if they were marching to London, and at another as if they
were marching to Bath--which produced a comical effect, frequent
enough in families on nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical
effects, not quite so comic after all. The two women valiantly
disguised these forced excursions and countermarches as well as they
could from Durbeyfield, their cause, and from Abraham, and from
themselves; and so they approached by degrees their own door, the
head of the family bursting suddenly into his former refrain as he
drew near, as if to fortify his soul at sight of the smallness of
his present residence--
"I've got a fam--ily vault at Kingsbere!"
"Hush--don't be so silly, Jacky," said his wife. "Yours is not the
only family that was of 'count in wold days. Look at the Anktells,
and Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves--gone to seed a'most as
much as you--though you was bigger folks than they, that's true.
Thank God, I was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed
of in that way!"
"Don't you be so sure o' that. From you nater 'tis my belief you've
disgraced yourselves more than any o' us, and was kings and queens
outright at one time."
Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her
own mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry--"I am afraid
father won't be able to take the journey with the beehives to-morrow
so early."
"I? I shall be all right in an hour or two," said Durbeyfield.
It was eleven o'clock before the family were all in bed, and
two o'clock next morning was the latest hour for starting with
the beehives if they were to be delivered to the retailers in
Casterbridge before the Saturday market began, the way thither lying
by bad roads over a distance of between twenty and thirty miles, and
the horse and waggon being of the slowest. At half-past one Mrs
Durbeyfield came into the large bedroom where Tess and all her
little brothers and sisters slept.
"The poor man can't go," she said to her eldest daughter, whose great
eyes had opened the moment her mother's hand touched the door.
Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a dream and
this information.
"But somebody must go," she replied. "It is late for the hives
already. Swarming will soon be over for the year; and it we put off
taking 'em till next week's market the call for 'em will be past, and
they'll be thrown on our hands."
Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. "Some young feller,
perhaps, would go? One of them who were so much after dancing with
'ee yesterday," she presently suggested.
"O no--I wouldn't have it for the world!" declared Tess proudly.
"And letting everybody know the reason--such a thing to be ashamed
of! I think _I_ could go if Abraham could go with me to kip me
company."
Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement. Little Abraham was
aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the same apartment, and
made to put on his clothes while still mentally in the other world.
Meanwhile Tess had hastily dressed herself; and the twain, lighting
a lantern, went out to the stable. The rickety little waggon was
already laden, and the girl led out the horse, Prince, only a degree
less rickety than the vehicle.
The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night, at the
lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not believe that at
that hour, when every living thing was intended to be in shelter and
at rest, he was called upon to go out and labour. They put a stock
of candle-ends into the lantern, hung the latter to the off-side of
the load, and directed the horse onward, walking at his shoulder at
first during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to overload
an animal of so little vigour. To cheer themselves as well as they
could, they made an artificial morning with the lantern, some bread
and butter, and their own conversation, the real morning being far
from come. Abraham, as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a
sort of trance so far), began to talk of the strange shapes assumed
by the various dark objects against the sky; of this tree that looked
like a raging tiger springing from a lair; of that which resembled a
giant's head.
When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent
under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still
higher, on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow,
well-nigh the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky,
engirdled by its earthen trenches. From hereabout the long road was
fairly level for some distance onward. They mounted in front of the
waggon, and Abraham grew reflective.
"Tess!" he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.
"Yes, Abraham."
"Bain't you glad that we've become gentlefolk?"
"Not particular glad."
"But you be glad that you 'm going to marry a gentleman?"
"What?" said Tess, lifting her face.
"That our great relation will help 'ee to marry a gentleman."
"I? Our great relation? We have no such relation. What has put
that into your head?"
"I heard 'em talking about it up at Rolliver's when I went to find
father. There's a rich lady of our family out at Trantridge, and
mother said that if you claimed kin with the lady, she'd put 'ee in
the way of marrying a gentleman."
His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a pondering
silence. Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance
than for audition, so that his sister's abstraction was of no
account. He leant back against the hives, and with upturned face
made observations on the stars, whose cold pulses were beating
amid the black hollows above, in serene dissociation from these two
wisps of human life. He asked how far away those twinklers were,
and whether God was on the other side of them. But ever and anon
his childish prattle recurred to what impressed his imagination
even more deeply than the wonders of creation. If Tess were made
rich by marrying a gentleman, would she have money enough to buy a
spyglass so large that it would draw the stars as near to her as
Nettlecombe-Tout?
The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole
family, filled Tess with impatience.
"Never mind that now!" she exclaimed.
"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the
apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound--a few
blighted."
"Which do we live on--a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one."
"'Tis very unlucky that we didn't pitch on a sound one, when there
were so many more of 'em!"
"Yes."
"Is it like that REALLY, Tess?" said Abraham, turning to her much
impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. "How would
it have been if we had pitched on a sound one?"
"Well, father wouldn't have coughed and creeped about as he does,
and wouldn't have got too tipsy to go on this journey; and mother
wouldn't have been always washing, and never getting finished."
"And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to
be made rich by marrying a gentleman?"
"O Aby, don't--don't talk of that any more!"
Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy. Tess was not
skilful in the management of a horse, but she thought that she could
take upon herself the entire conduct of the load for the present and
allow Abraham to go to sleep if he wished to do so. She made him a
sort of nest in front of the hives, in such a manner that he could
not fall, and, taking the reins into her own hands, jogged on as
before.
Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy for superfluous
movements of any sort. With no longer a companion to distract her,
Tess fell more deeply into reverie than ever, her back leaning
against the hives. The mute procession past her shoulders of trees
and hedges became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality, and
the occasional heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad
soul, conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in
time.
Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she seemed to see
the vanity of her father's pride; the gentlemanly suitor awaiting
herself in her mother's fancy; to see him as a grimacing personage,
laughing at her poverty and her shrouded knightly ancestry.
Everything grew more and more extravagant, and she no longer knew how
time passed. A sudden jerk shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke
from the sleep into which she, too, had fallen.
They were a long way further on than when she had lost consciousness,
and the waggon had stopped. A hollow groan, unlike anything she had
ever heard in her life, came from the front, followed by a shout of
"Hoi there!"
The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but another was
shining in her face--much brighter than her own had been. Something
terrible had happened. The harness was entangled with an object
which blocked the way.
In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the dreadful truth.
The groan had proceeded from her father's poor horse Prince. The
morning mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along
these lanes like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow
and unlighted equipage. The pointed shaft of the cart had entered
the breast of the unhappy Prince like a sword, and from the wound his
life's blood was spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into
the road.
In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand upon the hole,
with the only result that she became splashed from face to skirt with
the crimson drops. Then she stood helplessly looking on. Prince
also stood firm and motionless as long as he could; till he suddenly
sank down in a heap.
By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and began dragging and
unharnessing the hot form of Prince. But he was already dead, and,
seeing that nothing more could be done immediately, the mail-cart man
returned to his own animal, which was uninjured.
"You was on the wrong side," he said. "I am bound to go on with the
mail-bags, so that the best thing for you to do is bide here with
your load. I'll send somebody to help you as soon as I can. It is
getting daylight, and you have nothing to fear."
He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and waited. The
atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges,
arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and
Tess showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of
her was already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the
sun rose a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay
alongside, still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest
looking scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated
him.
"'Tis all my doing--all mine!" the girl cried, gazing at the
spectacle. "No excuse for me--none. What will mother and father
live on now? Aby, Aby!" She shook the child, who had slept soundly
through the whole disaster. "We can't go on with our load--Prince
is killed!"
When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were
extemporized on his young face.
"Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!" she went on to herself.
"To think that I was such a fool!"
"'Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't
it, Tess?" murmured Abraham through his tears.
In silence they waited through an interval which seemed endless. At
length a sound, and an approaching object, proved to them that the
driver of the mail-car had been as good as his word. A farmer's
man from near Stourcastle came up, leading a strong cob. He was
harnessed to the waggon of beehives in the place of Prince, and the
load taken on towards Casterbridge.
The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach again the
spot of the accident. Prince had lain there in the ditch since the
morning; but the place of the blood-pool was still visible in the
middle of the road, though scratched and scraped over by passing
vehicles. All that was left of Prince was now hoisted into the
waggon he had formerly hauled, and with his hoofs in the air, and his
shoes shining in the setting sunlight, he retraced the eight or nine
miles to Marlott.
Tess had gone back earlier. How to break the news was more than she
could think. It was a relief to her tongue to find from the faces of
her parents that they already knew of their loss, though this did not
lessen the self-reproach which she continued to heap upon herself for
her negligence.
But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the misfortune
a less terrifying one to them than it would have been to a thriving
family, though in the present case it meant ruin, and in the other it
would only have meant inconvenience. In the Durbeyfield countenances
there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the
girl from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess
as she blamed herself.
When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a
very few shillings for Prince's carcase because of his decrepitude,
Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.
"No," said he stoically, "I won't sell his old body. When we
d'Urbervilles was knights in the land, we didn't sell our chargers
for cat's meat. Let 'em keep their shillings! He've served me well
in his lifetime, and I won't part from him now."
He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for Prince in the
garden than he had worked for months to grow a crop for his family.
When the hole was ready, Durbeyfield and his wife tied a rope round
the horse and dragged him up the path towards it, the children
following in funeral train. Abraham and 'Liza-Lu sobbed, Hope and
Modesty discharged their griefs in loud blares which echoed from the
walls; and when Prince was tumbled in they gathered round the grave.
The bread-winner had been taken away from them; what would they do?
"Is he gone to heaven?" asked Abraham, between the sobs.
Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the children cried
anew. All except Tess. Her face was dry and pale, as though she
regarded herself in the light of a murderess.
| 9,918 | Chapters 1-4 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219151046/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary-and-analysis/phase-the-first-the-maiden-chapters-14 | The setting is in Wessex, in the south of England, during the late 1800s. John Durbeyfield is on his way home after working as a higgler/haggler. He encounters a local parson who tells him of his family history: The Durbeyfields are descended from the once famous d'Urbervilles, a wealthy family dating back to the time of William the Conqueror. John, feeling a rush of superiority, hurries home to tell his family of the good news. The family has had a difficult life, with John a poor provider and his wife barely managing to keep the family fed and clothed. There are seven children in all; Tess, or Theresa, is the oldest. Joan, John's wife, hatches a plan to send the 16-year-old Tess to "claim kin" at a nearby relation, a woman of wealth and position. When John has had too much to drink, Tess and her brother Abraham set out with the family horse to deliver beehives at a nearby farmer's market. While en route, Tess and Abraham fall asleep in the wagon, and the horse, Prince, is killed accidentally by the local mail cart. Because Tess had allowed Prince to wander into the oncoming lane and had inadvertently caused the accident between the mail cart and the Durbeyfield wagon, she feels it is her responsibility to make matters right. It is at this point that Joan Durbeyfield introduces the plan for Tess to visit their d'Urberville relations. Tess initially objects to the plan, but with the family horse now dead, she relents and goes to the d'Urberville family to seek money or work. | Several themes appear early on in the novel. First, is the part that fate plays in our lives. Hardy uses the device of a poor family learning of their former circumstances and former history. It is only by chance that Parson Tringham and John Durbeyfield pass on the road, an encounter that gives the parson the opportunity to share information he has about Durbeyfield's ancestors. In fact, it was even chance that led Parson Tringham to suspect that the d'Urbervilles and Durbeyfields were connected at all; he simply happened to see the Durbeyfield name of John's wagon while he was investigating the "vicissitudes of the d'Urberville family." The question becomes, would they have been better off not knowing that they were descended from nobility? Initially, the information seems like a boon to a family that, before the end of these four chapters, is in dire need of help, but it sets off a chain of events that, in the end, bring only tragedy. A second theme appears in Chapter 1 when Parson Tringham mentions "how the mighty are fallen." In this novel, we will see how the mighty have fallen and how the poor arise from their situations in life only to be forced down again by circumstances beyond their control. Hardy here is preaching against the attitudes that Victorian England held at the time, that the wealthy control the lives of others. He seems to be making the argument that social position has a devastating effect upon the lives of those who must endure under the weight of class repression. Hardy's use of the celebration of May Day, or May 1, is also significant. First, this is the where readers get their first glimpse of the young girl Tess. Dressed in white, she is a symbol of innocence and purity and gaiety at the celebration. Tess is among her friends at a May Day dance in Marlott, their hometown. Second, Hardy notes that such clubs, which are forgotten in the cities, still retain their former glory in the country where Tess lives, another indication that Tess is neither sophisticated nor worldly -- a character trait that leaves her unprepared for the advances of a worldly man like Alec d'Urberville. Finally, May Day itself is an ancient celebration, dating back to pagan times, when the Romans celebrated the goddess Floralia, who represented new spring flowers. Maia, the goddess of May, was celebrated for spring growth and replenishment. In this way, Hardy connects the Christian world and pagan world in the celebration of a former pagan holiday that had taken on Christian overtones. In this setting, Hardy describes Tess as "a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experienced . . . for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then." In essence, she is a lovely, innocent young girl on the brink of womanhood. Glossary haggler/higgler a dealer who travels from place to place selling wares or goods, such as fruit. wold old . Women's club-walking A procession by the members of a local club or clubs: esp. the annual festival of a benefit club or friendly society. vamp trudge, tramp, walk . Cerealia celebration in honor of Ceres, Roman goddess of the harvest. Old Style days the time before 1752 when Great Britain replaced the Julian Calendar, old-style dating, with Gregorian, or new-style dating. Market-niche the amount of alcohol that he would normally drink on a market day. Uncribbed, uncabined after murdering Banquo, in Macbeth , Macbeth refers to himself as "cabined, cribbed, confined." Whitsun Holidays the time around the seventh Sunday after Easter, Whitsuntide or Whit Sunday. Club-walking and other festivities were held in parishes at Whitsuntide. clipsing and colling hugging . diment diamond . Cubit's Cupid's. fess pleased . poppet a doll, or puppet. Sixth Standard in the National School the highest level available in school supported by government funds run by the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. The first schools were established in 1811. Mommet a term of abuse or contempt . larry commotion, disturbance . Oliver Grumble's Oliver Cromwell. plim swell . vlee fly; a one-horse hackney-carriage . Mampus crowd . rafted disturbed, unsettled . outhouse a building separate from but near a main building. In nineteenth-century British usage, outhouse probably does not refer to a privy. Revised Code reference to the Education Department's Revised Codes of 1862 and 1867, which linked the funding for schools to their size and to student performance on standardized assessment examinations. "Nature's holy plan" from Wordsworth, "Lines Written in Early Spring" . limed caught with birdlime; here, Abraham is compared to a bird ensnared in bird-lime. off-license without a license; here, Rolliver's is not licensed to sell alcohol for consumption on the premises. gaffer a foreman of a group of workers. sumple supple . "green malt on the floor" the expression refers to pregnancy before marriage. nater nature . Stubbard-tree a kind of apple tree. | 264 | 858 | [
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28,054 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/86.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Brothers Karamazov/section_14_part_7.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 12.chapter 7 | book 12, chapter 7 | null | {"name": "book 12, Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section15/", "summary": "A Historical Survey Kirrillovich says that Dmitri has the temperament of a man who would be capable of such a violent act, and that he is not insane", "analysis": ""} | Chapter VII. An Historical Survey
"The medical experts have striven to convince us that the prisoner is out
of his mind and, in fact, a maniac. I maintain that he is in his right
mind, and that if he had not been, he would have behaved more cleverly. As
for his being a maniac, that I would agree with, but only in one point,
that is, his fixed idea about the three thousand. Yet I think one might
find a much simpler cause than his tendency to insanity. For my part I
agree thoroughly with the young doctor who maintained that the prisoner's
mental faculties have always been normal, and that he has only been
irritable and exasperated. The object of the prisoner's continual and
violent anger was not the sum itself; there was a special motive at the
bottom of it. That motive is jealousy!"
Here Ippolit Kirillovitch described at length the prisoner's fatal passion
for Grushenka. He began from the moment when the prisoner went to the
"young person's" lodgings "to beat her"--"I use his own expression," the
prosecutor explained--"but instead of beating her, he remained there, at
her feet. That was the beginning of the passion. At the same time the
prisoner's father was captivated by the same young person--a strange and
fatal coincidence, for they both lost their hearts to her simultaneously,
though both had known her before. And she inspired in both of them the
most violent, characteristically Karamazov passion. We have her own
confession: 'I was laughing at both of them.' Yes, the sudden desire to
make a jest of them came over her, and she conquered both of them at once.
The old man, who worshiped money, at once set aside three thousand roubles
as a reward for one visit from her, but soon after that, he would have
been happy to lay his property and his name at her feet, if only she would
become his lawful wife. We have good evidence of this. As for the
prisoner, the tragedy of his fate is evident; it is before us. But such
was the young person's 'game.' The enchantress gave the unhappy young man
no hope until the last moment, when he knelt before her, stretching out
hands that were already stained with the blood of his father and rival. It
was in that position that he was arrested. 'Send me to Siberia with him, I
have brought him to this, I am most to blame,' the woman herself cried, in
genuine remorse at the moment of his arrest.
"The talented young man, to whom I have referred already, Mr. Rakitin,
characterized this heroine in brief and impressive terms: 'She was
disillusioned early in life, deceived and ruined by a betrothed, who
seduced and abandoned her. She was left in poverty, cursed by her
respectable family, and taken under the protection of a wealthy old man,
whom she still, however, considers as her benefactor. There was perhaps
much that was good in her young heart, but it was embittered too early.
She became prudent and saved money. She grew sarcastic and resentful
against society.' After this sketch of her character it may well be
understood that she might laugh at both of them simply from mischief, from
malice.
"After a month of hopeless love and moral degradation, during which he
betrayed his betrothed and appropriated money entrusted to his honor, the
prisoner was driven almost to frenzy, almost to madness by continual
jealousy--and of whom? His father! And the worst of it was that the crazy
old man was alluring and enticing the object of his affection by means of
that very three thousand roubles, which the son looked upon as his own
property, part of his inheritance from his mother, of which his father was
cheating him. Yes, I admit it was hard to bear! It might well drive a man
to madness. It was not the money, but the fact that this money was used
with such revolting cynicism to ruin his happiness!"
Then the prosecutor went on to describe how the idea of murdering his
father had entered the prisoner's head, and illustrated his theory with
facts.
"At first he only talked about it in taverns--he was talking about it all
that month. Ah, he likes being always surrounded with company, and he
likes to tell his companions everything, even his most diabolical and
dangerous ideas; he likes to share every thought with others, and expects,
for some reason, that those he confides in will meet him with perfect
sympathy, enter into all his troubles and anxieties, take his part and not
oppose him in anything. If not, he flies into a rage and smashes up
everything in the tavern. [Then followed the anecdote about Captain
Snegiryov.] Those who heard the prisoner began to think at last that he
might mean more than threats, and that such a frenzy might turn threats
into actions."
Here the prosecutor described the meeting of the family at the monastery,
the conversations with Alyosha, and the horrible scene of violence when
the prisoner had rushed into his father's house just after dinner.
"I cannot positively assert," the prosecutor continued, "that the prisoner
fully intended to murder his father before that incident. Yet the idea had
several times presented itself to him, and he had deliberated on it--for
that we have facts, witnesses, and his own words. I confess, gentlemen of
the jury," he added, "that till to-day I have been uncertain whether to
attribute to the prisoner conscious premeditation. I was firmly convinced
that he had pictured the fatal moment beforehand, but had only pictured
it, contemplating it as a possibility. He had not definitely considered
when and how he might commit the crime.
"But I was only uncertain till to-day, till that fatal document was
presented to the court just now. You yourselves heard that young lady's
exclamation, 'It is the plan, the program of the murder!' That is how she
defined that miserable, drunken letter of the unhappy prisoner. And, in
fact, from that letter we see that the whole fact of the murder was
premeditated. It was written two days before, and so we know now for a
fact that, forty-eight hours before the perpetration of his terrible
design, the prisoner swore that, if he could not get money next day, he
would murder his father in order to take the envelope with the notes from
under his pillow, as soon as Ivan had left. 'As soon as Ivan had gone
away'--you hear that; so he had thought everything out, weighing every
circumstance, and he carried it all out just as he had written it. The
proof of premeditation is conclusive; the crime must have been committed
for the sake of the money, that is stated clearly, that is written and
signed. The prisoner does not deny his signature.
"I shall be told he was drunk when he wrote it. But that does not diminish
the value of the letter, quite the contrary; he wrote when drunk what he
had planned when sober. Had he not planned it when sober, he would not
have written it when drunk. I shall be asked: Then why did he talk about
it in taverns? A man who premeditates such a crime is silent and keeps it
to himself. Yes, but he talked about it before he had formed a plan, when
he had only the desire, only the impulse to it. Afterwards he talked less
about it. On the evening he wrote that letter at the 'Metropolis' tavern,
contrary to his custom he was silent, though he had been drinking. He did
not play billiards, he sat in a corner, talked to no one. He did indeed
turn a shopman out of his seat, but that was done almost unconsciously,
because he could never enter a tavern without making a disturbance. It is
true that after he had taken the final decision, he must have felt
apprehensive that he had talked too much about his design beforehand, and
that this might lead to his arrest and prosecution afterwards. But there
was nothing for it; he could not take his words back, but his luck had
served him before, it would serve him again. He believed in his star, you
know! I must confess, too, that he did a great deal to avoid the fatal
catastrophe. 'To-morrow I shall try and borrow the money from every one,'
as he writes in his peculiar language, 'and if they won't give it to me,
there will be bloodshed.' "
Here Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to a detailed description of all Mitya's
efforts to borrow the money. He described his visit to Samsonov, his
journey to Lyagavy. "Harassed, jeered at, hungry, after selling his watch
to pay for the journey (though he tells us he had fifteen hundred roubles
on him--a likely story), tortured by jealousy at having left the object of
his affections in the town, suspecting that she would go to Fyodor
Pavlovitch in his absence, he returned at last to the town, to find, to
his joy, that she had not been near his father. He accompanied her himself
to her protector. (Strange to say, he doesn't seem to have been jealous of
Samsonov, which is psychologically interesting.) Then he hastens back to
his ambush in the back gardens, and there learns that Smerdyakov is in a
fit, that the other servant is ill--the coast is clear and he knows the
'signals'--what a temptation! Still he resists it; he goes off to a lady
who has for some time been residing in the town, and who is highly
esteemed among us, Madame Hohlakov. That lady, who had long watched his
career with compassion, gave him the most judicious advice, to give up his
dissipated life, his unseemly love-affair, the waste of his youth and
vigor in pot-house debauchery, and to set off to Siberia to the gold-
mines: 'that would be an outlet for your turbulent energies, your romantic
character, your thirst for adventure.' "
After describing the result of this conversation and the moment when the
prisoner learnt that Grushenka had not remained at Samsonov's, the sudden
frenzy of the luckless man worn out with jealousy and nervous exhaustion,
at the thought that she had deceived him and was now with his father,
Ippolit Kirillovitch concluded by dwelling upon the fatal influence of
chance. "Had the maid told him that her mistress was at Mokroe with her
former lover, nothing would have happened. But she lost her head, she
could only swear and protest her ignorance, and if the prisoner did not
kill her on the spot, it was only because he flew in pursuit of his false
mistress.
"But note, frantic as he was, he took with him a brass pestle. Why that?
Why not some other weapon? But since he had been contemplating his plan
and preparing himself for it for a whole month, he would snatch up
anything like a weapon that caught his eye. He had realized for a month
past that any object of the kind would serve as a weapon, so he instantly,
without hesitation, recognized that it would serve his purpose. So it was
by no means unconsciously, by no means involuntarily, that he snatched up
that fatal pestle. And then we find him in his father's garden--the coast
is clear, there are no witnesses, darkness and jealousy. The suspicion
that she was there, with him, with his rival, in his arms, and perhaps
laughing at him at that moment--took his breath away. And it was not mere
suspicion, the deception was open, obvious. She must be there, in that
lighted room, she must be behind the screen; and the unhappy man would
have us believe that he stole up to the window, peeped respectfully in,
and discreetly withdrew, for fear something terrible and immoral should
happen. And he tries to persuade us of that, us, who understand his
character, who know his state of mind at the moment, and that he knew the
signals by which he could at once enter the house." At this point Ippolit
Kirillovitch broke off to discuss exhaustively the suspected connection of
Smerdyakov with the murder. He did this very circumstantially, and every
one realized that, although he professed to despise that suspicion, he
thought the subject of great importance.
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5,658 | true | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/chapters_8_to_12.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/Lord Jim/section_3_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapters 8-12 | chapters 8 - 12 | null | {"name": "Chapters 8 - 12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210126121516/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lordjim/section4/", "summary": "Jim tells Marlow the rest of the story of what happened aboard the Patna: Finding himself amidst a crowd of sleeping pilgrims, he realizes that there will be nowhere near enough room in the lifeboats for everyone. Suddenly one of the passengers grabs him and utters the word \"water.\" Thinking that the man is aware of the flooding belowdecks and worried that his shouting will start a panic, Jim attacks the man to silence him. Only then does he realize that the man is not referring to the flooding but is only asking for a drink for his sick child. Jim hands his water bottle to the man and goes to the bridge, where the rest of the officers are trying to launch a lifeboat. They ask him for help and abuse him when he inquires about their plans for patching the ship. Jim describes for Marlow the impossibility of shoring up the failing bulkhead below, then enters into an elaborate meditation on his emotions at the time and the perilous position of the ship, floating head-down in a leaden sea. Marlow recalls the testimony of the Patna's two Malay steersmen at the inquiry: when asked what they thought when the white crew left the ship, one replies, \"Nothing,\" while the other says that he thought the white men must have had \"secret reasons. \" The officers continue to abuse Jim as they struggle to launch the boat. Jim laughs insanely as he tells Marlow this part of the story. Jim finally understands the urgency when one of the officers points to the horizon; a squall is approaching, which will surely sink the damaged ship. Nevertheless, Jim is too paralyzed with the thought of the pilgrims sleeping below to help with the lifeboat. The squall draws nearer, and Jim feels a slight swell pass under the ship, which until now has been in a perfectly calm sea. The third engineer drops dead from a heart attack as the officers continue to work. Finally, the lifeboat rips free of the ship, waking many of the passengers below. Several things seem to happen at once: the squall begins to hit, the crew gets into the boat, the third engineer's corpse slumps sideways as Jim stumbles over its legs, and the officers begin to yell for the dead man to join them in the boat, unaware that he has died. The next moment, that of crucial action, is not described in the narrative. Somehow, Jim finds himself in the boat. He, too, has abandoned ship. The squall hits; the men in the boat struggle to pull away from the sinking Patna. Seeing no lights from the ship, they agree that she has gone down. The men begin to talk of their narrow escape, ridiculing the man they think is the third engineer for his hesitation in jumping. When they discover that it is actually Jim in the boat with them, they accuse him of murdering the engineer by taking his place in the boat. The crew constructs a unified version of events to give to the authorities on shore. Jim ignores them and spends the night clutching a piece of wood, ready to defend himself. At this point in the story, Jim pauses and asks Marlow, \"Don't you believe it?\" Marlow finds himself declaring his faith in Jim and his account. Jim tortures himself and Marlow for several minutes, examining the alternative possibilities available to him and justifying his course of action. Again he makes Marlow state his belief in the tale and in Jim's motives. The men in the lifeboat are picked up by the Avondale, a passing ship, the next morning. They tell the version of the story upon which they agreed during the night; Jim does not dissent, although he feels as if he were \"cheating the dead.\" That he soon finds out that there are no dead, that the Patna has made it into port, is of little account. He admits to Marlow now that he thought he heard shouts after the squall hit, and after the men had declared the ship sunk, although he still attributes the noises to his imagination. Jim recalls learning of the Patna's deliverance upon reaching port. Marlow ponders the question of the disappearing ship's lights, wondering why the men were so quick to assume that they indicated the sinking of the Patna. He recalls Captain Brierly's explanation at the inquest, that the arrival of the squall had caused the ship, dead in the water and listing, to swing about, thus hiding the lights from the men in the lifeboat. The story of the Patna's rescue comes from Marlow, who has gotten it from official reports and from an old French officer he meets many years later in Sydney. Around the same time the crew were picked up, a French gunboat encountered the Patna and attached a tow line. The old man Marlow meets is the officer from the gunboat who stayed onboard the Patna as she was being towed into harbor. Miraculously, the Patna makes it into port. The French officer recalls the boredom of being aboard the ship and complains that, although he was able to eat, he had no wine. He also recalls the great interest shown by both the passengers and the authorities in the corpse of the third engineer, which he found where it fell after Jim stumbled over it. Marlow is amazed that, so many years later and so far away, he continues to encounter Jim's story.", "analysis": "Commentary This section presents a number of figures who serve as alternatives to Jim. The first, of course, is Marlow, who continues to be fascinated, repulsed, and personally involved, and who, although he compulsively makes cruel comments to Jim, is nevertheless willing to declare his faith and sympathy again and again. The second contrast is with the dead third engineer. Overcome with horror and fear, the man simply drops dead rather than deal with the situation. While this is certainly not an option valorized in the narrative, it seems to be slightly better than Jim's paralysis and total lack of action. The Malay steersmen also provide perspective on Jim. Both espouse somewhat simplistic conceptions of duty: one believes it his job not to think at all, while the other holds to a naive faith in the motives of the white officers. Both, of course, do the \"right\" thing by staying on the ship, but neither, it seems, has any thought of becoming a hero by doing so. They are just doing their job. Whereas neither a sense of duty nor the opportunity to fulfill his fantasies of heroism are enough to keep Jim on board the Patna, the two Malays do what Jim longs to have done out of a sense of professionalism skewed by their position in the colonial order. Does Conrad essentialize these two as simplistic natives bound by their lack of intelligence to loyalty to the white \"master\"? Or are these men instead a powerful critique of Jim's professional abilities and his propensity to daydream? The French lieutenant is the most complete and most damning figure of analogy to Jim. He, like the Malays, stays aboard the Patna out of a sense of duty. He doesn't want to be a hero; he only wants to do his job, and if possible be comfortable enough to have a glass of wine with his meal. Yet his experience aboard the ship has left him with a sort of honorable scar, like the saber wound on his temple or the bullet scar on his hand. He and Marlow, strangers otherwise, are somehow drawn to each other and immediately into the story of the Patna. The French lieutenant's actions have not made him a hero, though; as the next chapter reveals, he has not risen far in the French navy, although he is now an old man. There is nothing heroic, it seems, about doing one's duty; perhaps staying on board would not have fulfilled a fantasy for Jim. Although Jim has filled in most of the story of the Patna in this section, he omits the moment where he jumps into the lifeboat. The narrative's use of ellipsis at key moments of decision-making indicates the insecure status of motive and explanation in this world. Jim tries to explain to Marlow why it is okay that he jumped--he would have had to abandon ship sooner or later anyway, the bulkhead was bound to fail, there was nothing he could do alone--but he does not approach the actual moment of his leap. Remember that Captain Brierly's leap overboard is not narrated either. These are the moments around which the text is built, yet they somehow escape the mass of words and explanations that describe them. Another episode that has a parallel in an earlier section of the text is Jim's encounter with the pilgrim asking for water. As he does in the \"cur\" episode, Jim mistakes the meaning of a single word, assuming it contains a depth of knowledge when really the word is only a simple reference . If such simple communications can go so awry, the capacity of words to describe complex emotional states and unclear motives must be highly suspect. This section of the novel, in addition, is one in which Marlow particularly struggles with the fundamental mystery of Jim's actions and his own fascination with them. Marlow even has a difficult time finding a word for what is missing; \"magnificent vagueness,\" \"glorious indefiniteness,\" and \"the Irrational\" are some of the phrases he offers to describe the meaning at the heart of Jim's experiences. The French lieutenant is equally at a loss for words to denote the inexplicability of the actions of the Patna's crew. Notice that Conrad offers many of the man's phrases in the original French, as if the very act of translation would miss some essential meaning that the French word barely captures. Marlow continues to torment Jim, making sarcastic remarks and throwing his words back at him. His encounter with the French lieutenant, though, suggests just how deeply Jim's story has scarred Marlow; it follows him wherever he goes and leads him into encounters with other \"survivors.\""} |
'How long he stood stock-still by the hatch expecting every moment to
feel the ship dip under his feet and the rush of water take him at the
back and toss him like a chip, I cannot say. Not very long--two minutes
perhaps. A couple of men he could not make out began to converse
drowsily, and also, he could not tell where, he detected a curious
noise of shuffling feet. Above these faint sounds there was that awful
stillness preceding a catastrophe, that trying silence of the moment
before the crash; then it came into his head that perhaps he would have
time to rush along and cut all the lanyards of the gripes, so that the
boats would float as the ship went down.
'The Patna had a long bridge, and all the boats were up there, four on
one side and three on the other--the smallest of them on the port-side
and nearly abreast of the steering gear. He assured me, with evident
anxiety to be believed, that he had been most careful to keep them ready
for instant service. He knew his duty. I dare say he was a good enough
mate as far as that went. "I always believed in being prepared for the
worst," he commented, staring anxiously in my face. I nodded my approval
of the sound principle, averting my eyes before the subtle unsoundness
of the man.
'He started unsteadily to run. He had to step over legs, avoid stumbling
against the heads. Suddenly some one caught hold of his coat from below,
and a distressed voice spoke under his elbow. The light of the lamp he
carried in his right hand fell upon an upturned dark face whose eyes
entreated him together with the voice. He had picked up enough of the
language to understand the word water, repeated several times in a tone
of insistence, of prayer, almost of despair. He gave a jerk to get away,
and felt an arm embrace his leg.
'"The beggar clung to me like a drowning man," he said impressively.
"Water, water! What water did he mean? What did he know? As calmly as
I could I ordered him to let go. He was stopping me, time was pressing,
other men began to stir; I wanted time--time to cut the boats adrift.
He got hold of my hand now, and I felt that he would begin to shout. It
flashed upon me it was enough to start a panic, and I hauled off with
my free arm and slung the lamp in his face. The glass jingled, the light
went out, but the blow made him let go, and I ran off--I wanted to get
at the boats; I wanted to get at the boats. He leaped after me from
behind. I turned on him. He would not keep quiet; he tried to shout; I
had half throttled him before I made out what he wanted. He wanted some
water--water to drink; they were on strict allowance, you know, and
he had with him a young boy I had noticed several times. His child was
sick--and thirsty. He had caught sight of me as I passed by, and was
begging for a little water. That's all. We were under the bridge, in
the dark. He kept on snatching at my wrists; there was no getting rid of
him. I dashed into my berth, grabbed my water-bottle, and thrust it into
his hands. He vanished. I didn't find out till then how much I was in
want of a drink myself." He leaned on one elbow with a hand over his
eyes.
'I felt a creepy sensation all down my backbone; there was something
peculiar in all this. The fingers of the hand that shaded his brow
trembled slightly. He broke the short silence.
'"These things happen only once to a man and . . . Ah! well! When I got
on the bridge at last the beggars were getting one of the boats off the
chocks. A boat! I was running up the ladder when a heavy blow fell on
my shoulder, just missing my head. It didn't stop me, and the chief
engineer--they had got him out of his bunk by then--raised the
boat-stretcher again. Somehow I had no mind to be surprised at anything.
All this seemed natural--and awful--and awful. I dodged that miserable
maniac, lifted him off the deck as though he had been a little child,
and he started whispering in my arms: 'Don't! don't! I thought you were
one of them niggers.' I flung him away, he skidded along the bridge and
knocked the legs from under the little chap--the second. The skipper,
busy about the boat, looked round and came at me head down, growling
like a wild beast. I flinched no more than a stone. I was as solid
standing there as this," he tapped lightly with his knuckles the wall
beside his chair. "It was as though I had heard it all, seen it all,
gone through it all twenty times already. I wasn't afraid of them. I
drew back my fist and he stopped short, muttering--
'"'Ah! it's you. Lend a hand quick.'
'"That's what he said. Quick! As if anybody could be quick enough.
'Aren't you going to do something?' I asked. 'Yes. Clear out,' he
snarled over his shoulder.
'"I don't think I understood then what he meant. The other two had
picked themselves up by that time, and they rushed together to the boat.
They tramped, they wheezed, they shoved, they cursed the boat, the ship,
each other--cursed me. All in mutters. I didn't move, I didn't speak.
I watched the slant of the ship. She was as still as if landed on the
blocks in a dry dock--only she was like this," He held up his hand,
palm under, the tips of the fingers inclined downwards. "Like this," he
repeated. "I could see the line of the horizon before me, as clear as a
bell, above her stem-head; I could see the water far off there black
and sparkling, and still--still as a-pond, deadly still, more still than
ever sea was before--more still than I could bear to look at. Have you
watched a ship floating head down, checked in sinking by a sheet of old
iron too rotten to stand being shored up? Have you? Oh yes, shored up? I
thought of that--I thought of every mortal thing; but can you shore up a
bulkhead in five minutes--or in fifty for that matter? Where was I going
to get men that would go down below? And the timber--the timber! Would
you have had the courage to swing the maul for the first blow if you
had seen that bulkhead? Don't say you would: you had not seen it; nobody
would. Hang it--to do a thing like that you must believe there is a
chance, one in a thousand, at least, some ghost of a chance; and you
would not have believed. Nobody would have believed. You think me a
cur for standing there, but what would you have done? What! You can't
tell--nobody can tell. One must have time to turn round. What would you
have me do? Where was the kindness in making crazy with fright all those
people I could not save single-handed--that nothing could save? Look
here! As true as I sit on this chair before you . . ."
'He drew quick breaths at every few words and shot quick glances at my
face, as though in his anguish he were watchful of the effect. He was
not speaking to me, he was only speaking before me, in a dispute with
an invisible personality, an antagonistic and inseparable partner of his
existence--another possessor of his soul. These were issues beyond the
competency of a court of inquiry: it was a subtle and momentous quarrel
as to the true essence of life, and did not want a judge. He wanted
an ally, a helper, an accomplice. I felt the risk I ran of being
circumvented, blinded, decoyed, bullied, perhaps, into taking a definite
part in a dispute impossible of decision if one had to be fair to all
the phantoms in possession--to the reputable that had its claims and
to the disreputable that had its exigencies. I can't explain to you who
haven't seen him and who hear his words only at second hand the mixed
nature of my feelings. It seemed to me I was being made to comprehend
the Inconceivable--and I know of nothing to compare with the discomfort
of such a sensation. I was made to look at the convention that lurks in
all truth and on the essential sincerity of falsehood. He appealed to
all sides at once--to the side turned perpetually to the light of day,
and to that side of us which, like the other hemisphere of the moon,
exists stealthily in perpetual darkness, with only a fearful ashy light
falling at times on the edge. He swayed me. I own to it, I own up. The
occasion was obscure, insignificant--what you will: a lost youngster,
one in a million--but then he was one of us; an incident as completely
devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap, and yet the mystery
of his attitude got hold of me as though he had been an individual
in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were
momentous enough to affect mankind's conception of itself. . . .'
Marlow paused to put new life into his expiring cheroot, seemed to
forget all about the story, and abruptly began again.
'My fault of course. One has no business really to get interested. It's
a weakness of mine. His was of another kind. My weakness consists in not
having a discriminating eye for the incidental--for the externals--no
eye for the hod of the rag-picker or the fine linen of the next man.
Next man--that's it. I have met so many men,' he pursued, with momentary
sadness--'met them too with a certain--certain--impact, let us say; like
this fellow, for instance--and in each case all I could see was merely
the human being. A confounded democratic quality of vision which may be
better than total blindness, but has been of no advantage to me, I can
assure you. Men expect one to take into account their fine linen. But
I never could get up any enthusiasm about these things. Oh! it's a
failing; it's a failing; and then comes a soft evening; a lot of men too
indolent for whist--and a story. . . .'
He paused again to wait for an encouraging remark, perhaps, but nobody
spoke; only the host, as if reluctantly performing a duty, murmured--
'You are so subtle, Marlow.'
'Who? I?' said Marlow in a low voice. 'Oh no! But _he_ was; and try as I
may for the success of this yarn, I am missing innumerable shades--they
were so fine, so difficult to render in colourless words. Because he
complicated matters by being so simple, too--the simplest poor
devil! . . . By Jove! he was amazing. There he sat telling me that just
as I saw him before my eyes he wouldn't be afraid to face anything--and
believing in it too. I tell you it was fabulously innocent and it was
enormous, enormous! I watched him covertly, just as though I had
suspected him of an intention to take a jolly good rise out of me. He
was confident that, on the square, "on the square, mind!" there was
nothing he couldn't meet. Ever since he had been "so high"--"quite a
little chap," he had been preparing himself for all the difficulties
that can beset one on land and water. He confessed proudly to this kind
of foresight. He had been elaborating dangers and defences, expecting
the worst, rehearsing his best. He must have led a most exalted
existence. Can you fancy it? A succession of adventures, so much glory,
such a victorious progress! and the deep sense of his sagacity crowning
every day of his inner life. He forgot himself; his eyes shone; and with
every word my heart, searched by the light of his absurdity, was growing
heavier in my breast. I had no mind to laugh, and lest I should smile I
made for myself a stolid face. He gave signs of irritation.
'"It is always the unexpected that happens," I said in a propitiatory
tone. My obtuseness provoked him into a contemptuous "Pshaw!" I suppose
he meant that the unexpected couldn't touch him; nothing less than the
unconceivable itself could get over his perfect state of preparation. He
had been taken unawares--and he whispered to himself a malediction upon
the waters and the firmament, upon the ship, upon the men. Everything
had betrayed him! He had been tricked into that sort of high-minded
resignation which prevented him lifting as much as his little finger,
while these others who had a very clear perception of the actual
necessity were tumbling against each other and sweating desperately over
that boat business. Something had gone wrong there at the last moment.
It appears that in their flurry they had contrived in some mysterious
way to get the sliding bolt of the foremost boat-chock jammed tight, and
forthwith had gone out of the remnants of their minds over the deadly
nature of that accident. It must have been a pretty sight, the fierce
industry of these beggars toiling on a motionless ship that floated
quietly in the silence of a world asleep, fighting against time for the
freeing of that boat, grovelling on all-fours, standing up in despair,
tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready to kill,
ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each other's throats by
the fear of death that stood silent behind them like an inflexible and
cold-eyed taskmaster. Oh yes! It must have been a pretty sight. He
saw it all, he could talk about it with scorn and bitterness; he had a
minute knowledge of it by means of some sixth sense, I conclude, because
he swore to me he had remained apart without a glance at them and at the
boat--without one single glance. And I believe him. I should think he
was too busy watching the threatening slant of the ship, the suspended
menace discovered in the midst of the most perfect security--fascinated
by the sword hanging by a hair over his imaginative head.
'Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to
himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line,
the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise,
the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the
starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb--the
revolt of his young life--the black end. He could! By Jove! who
couldn't? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that
peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and
forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold
stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there
was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute
thoughts--a whirl of awful cripples. Didn't I tell you he confessed
himself before me as though I had the power to bind and to loose? He
burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of my absolution, which would have been
of no good to him. This was one of those cases which no solemn deception
can palliate, where no man can help; where his very Maker seems to
abandon a sinner to his own devices.
'He stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get
from the struggle for the boat, which went on with the agitation
of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The two Malays had
meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves
the actors in that, thank God! unique, episode of the sea, four beside
themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in
complete immobility, above the awnings covering the profound ignorance
of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams,
with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of
annihilation. For that they were so, makes no doubt to me: given the
state of the ship, this was the deadliest possible description of
accident that could happen. These beggars by the boat had every reason
to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there, I would not have
given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep
above water to the end of each successive second. And still she
floated! These sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their
whole pilgrimage to the bitterness of some other end. It was as if the
Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed had needed their humble testimony
on earth for a while longer, and had looked down to make a sign,
"Thou shalt not!" to the ocean. Their escape would trouble me as a
prodigiously inexplicable event, did I not know how tough old iron can
be--as tough sometimes as the spirit of some men we meet now and then,
worn to a shadow and breasting the weight of life. Not the least
wonder of these twenty minutes, to my mind, is the behaviour of the two
helmsmen. They were amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over
from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry. One of them, labouring under
intense bashfulness, was very young, and with his smooth, yellow,
cheery countenance looked even younger than he was. I remember perfectly
Brierly asking him, through the interpreter, what he thought of it at
the time, and the interpreter, after a short colloquy, turning to the
court with an important air--
'"He says he thought nothing."
'The other, with patient blinking eyes, a blue cotton handkerchief,
faded with much washing, bound with a smart twist over a lot of grey
wisps, his face shrunk into grim hollows, his brown skin made darker by
a mesh of wrinkles, explained that he had a knowledge of some evil thing
befalling the ship, but there had been no order; he could not remember
an order; why should he leave the helm? To some further questions he
jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his
mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through
fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret
reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was
a man of great experience, and he wanted _that_ white Tuan to know--he
turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head--that he had acquired
a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great
number of years--and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon
our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of
dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of
familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at
work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. A silence fell upon
the court,--a silence that remained unbroken for at least a minute, and
passed gently into a deep murmur. This episode was the sensation of
the second day's proceedings--affecting all the audience, affecting
everybody except Jim, who was sitting moodily at the end of the first
bench, and never looked up at this extraordinary and damning witness
that seemed possessed of some mysterious theory of defence.
'So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without
steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their
destiny. The whites did not give them half a glance, had probably
forgotten their existence. Assuredly Jim did not remember it. He
remembered he could do nothing; he could do nothing, now he was alone.
There was nothing to do but to sink with the ship. No use making a
disturbance about it. Was there? He waited upstanding, without a sound,
stiffened in the idea of some sort of heroic discretion. The first
engineer ran cautiously across the bridge to tug at his sleeve.
'"Come and help! For God's sake, come and help!"
'He ran back to the boat on the points of his toes, and returned
directly to worry at his sleeve, begging and cursing at the same time.
'"I believe he would have kissed my hands," said Jim savagely, "and,
next moment, he starts foaming and whispering in my face, 'If I had
the time I would like to crack your skull for you.' I pushed him away.
Suddenly he caught hold of me round the neck. Damn him! I hit him. I
hit out without looking. 'Won't you save your own life--you infernal
coward?' he sobs. Coward! He called me an infernal coward! Ha! ha! ha!
ha! He called me--ha! ha! ha! . . ."
'He had thrown himself back and was shaking with laughter. I had never
in my life heard anything so bitter as that noise. It fell like a blight
on all the merriment about donkeys, pyramids, bazaars, or what not.
Along the whole dim length of the gallery the voices dropped, the pale
blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence
became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on
the tesselated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery
scream.
'"You mustn't laugh like this, with all these people about," I
remonstrated. "It isn't nice for them, you know."
'He gave no sign of having heard at first, but after a while, with a
stare that, missing me altogether, seemed to probe the heart of some
awful vision, he muttered carelessly--"Oh! they'll think I am drunk."
'And after that you would have thought from his appearance he would
never make a sound again. But--no fear! He could no more stop telling
now than he could have stopped living by the mere exertion of his will.'
'"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the
words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left
alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a
tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of
witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still
at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and
the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat
under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if
the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined
the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the
skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood
idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim.
'"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come
and help, man! Man! Look there--look!"
'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal
insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already
one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about
that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no
more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour
lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing
the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and
confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still.
No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in
the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like
undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain
strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through
something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking.
They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising
that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep
afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make
an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the
burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge,
would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the
bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in
which they displayed their extreme aversion to die.
'"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had
sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had
been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was
all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was
angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot,
too, I remember. Not a breath of air."
'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat
and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over
afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that
important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip
clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the
ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he
had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They
thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest
noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned
to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there,
ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as
though he wanted to bite his ear--
'"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all
that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for
you from these boats."
'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a
nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott!
Get a hammer."
'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all,
he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually,
mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it
must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks
like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back
instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself
at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist.
He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock
falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only
then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to
know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between
him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than
probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could
not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm
without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole
breadth of the ship.
'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their
indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common
torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table
rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a
light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs.
They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they
pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if
indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to
be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to
look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention.
The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for
an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their
self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate
exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns
in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed
for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all
the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting
the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and
start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would
swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each
other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce
whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it
again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose
thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business.
"I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said
without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever
there any one so shamefully tried?"
'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to
distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not
explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little
fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times
to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon
his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and
vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a
degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour.
'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of
time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed
wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare
recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude
that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again.
Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of
the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed
to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer
hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed
his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out
for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the
dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They
would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other,
and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you
die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a
moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life
of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet
before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear,"
he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring.
'He roused himself.
'"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I
couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind
of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The
second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the
ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow!
everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for
days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel
upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though,
to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are
sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this
minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap!
By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in
that clump of bushes yonder."
'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held
my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no
mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest
by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about
myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed
to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and
really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you
want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance,
estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of
the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed
short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly
certain.
'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet
remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose
in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around
the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms,
totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a
sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against
the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man.
A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third
engineer," he explained.
'"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court.
'"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I
never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of
sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows.
Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll,
isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself!
Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as
I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to
the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship
was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and
called them names!"
'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down.
'"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured.
'"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak
heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been."
'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes!
Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could
wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance.
This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to
bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was
not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he
had not even heard the twang of the bow.
'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next
minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and
sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the
simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe
he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as
though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the
infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical
joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the
heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body
from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to
the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another
and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that
checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced
as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake,
let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped
through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones
under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were
enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock
of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of
stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook!
Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on
us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the
wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside
started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft
like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all
this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in
voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I
stumbled over his legs."
'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not
restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but
of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility,
he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it
low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the
dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down
his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of
swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast
upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black
magic at work upon a corpse.
'"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I
remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did.
It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking
himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and
drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about
down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!'
Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately:
one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!"
'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady
hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up,
slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand
let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion
of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when
he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for
the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false
effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he
said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare.
"Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead
man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood
by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch
dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go
bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship
under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein
Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain,
and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch
you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like
a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into
my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild
screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first
under me. . . ."
'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions
with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and
afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before
he blurted out--
'"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It
seems," he added.
'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at
him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad
sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of
an old man helpless before a childish disaster.
'"Looks like it," I muttered.
'"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And
that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small
boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never
happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a
thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken;
then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising
above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire
on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a
wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die,"
he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a
well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."'
'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be
more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had
tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat
had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then
for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half
drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through
a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems,
got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or
three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy
blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his
simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust;
and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up
that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a
furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light
high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me
to see it still there," he said. That's what he said. What terrified him
was the thought that the drowning was not over yet. No doubt he wanted
to be done with that abomination as quickly as possible. Nobody in the
boat made a sound. In the dark she seemed to fly, but of course she
could not have had much way. Then the shower swept ahead, and the great,
distracting, hissing noise followed the rain into distance and died out.
There was nothing to be heard then but the slight wash about the boat's
sides. Somebody's teeth were chattering violently. A hand touched his
back. A faint voice said, "You there?" Another cried out shakily,
"She's gone!" and they all stood up together to look astern. They saw no
lights. All was black. A thin cold drizzle was driving into their faces.
The boat lurched slightly. The teeth chattered faster, stopped, and
began again twice before the man could master his shiver sufficiently to
say, "Ju-ju-st in ti-ti-me. . . . Brrrr." He recognised the voice of the
chief engineer saying surlily, "I saw her go down. I happened to turn my
head." The wind had dropped almost completely.
'They watched in the dark with their heads half turned to windward as if
expecting to hear cries. At first he was thankful the night had covered
up the scene before his eyes, and then to know of it and yet to have
seen and heard nothing appeared somehow the culminating point of an
awful misfortune. "Strange, isn't it?" he murmured, interrupting himself
in his disjointed narrative.
'It did not seem so strange to me. He must have had an unconscious
conviction that the reality could not be half as bad, not half as
anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the created terror of his
imagination. I believe that, in this first moment, his heart was wrung
with all the suffering, that his soul knew the accumulated savour of all
the fear, all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human beings
pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death, else why should
he have said, "It seemed to me that I must jump out of that accursed
boat and swim back to see--half a mile--more--any distance--to the very
spot . . ."? Why this impulse? Do you see the significance? Why back to
the very spot? Why not drown alongside--if he meant drowning? Why back
to the very spot, to see--as if his imagination had to be soothed by the
assurance that all was over before death could bring relief? I defy any
one of you to offer another explanation. It was one of those bizarre and
exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure.
He let it out as the most natural thing one could say. He fought down
that impulse and then he became conscious of the silence. He mentioned
this to me. A silence of the sea, of the sky, merged into one indefinite
immensity still as death around these saved, palpitating lives.
"You might have heard a pin drop in the boat," he said with a queer
contraction of his lips, like a man trying to master his sensibilities
while relating some extremely moving fact. A silence! God alone, who had
willed him as he was, knows what he made of it in his heart. "I didn't
think any spot on earth could be so still," he said. "You couldn't
distinguish the sea from the sky; there was nothing to see and nothing
to hear. Not a glimmer, not a shape, not a sound. You could have
believed that every bit of dry land had gone to the bottom; that every
man on earth but I and these beggars in the boat had got drowned." He
leaned over the table with his knuckles propped amongst coffee-cups,
liqueur-glasses, cigar-ends. "I seemed to believe it. Everything was
gone and--all was over . . ." he fetched a deep sigh . . . "with me."'
Marlow sat up abruptly and flung away his cheroot with force. It made
a darting red trail like a toy rocket fired through the drapery of
creepers. Nobody stirred.
'Hey, what do you think of it?' he cried with sudden animation. 'Wasn't
he true to himself, wasn't he? His saved life was over for want of
ground under his feet, for want of sights for his eyes, for want of
voices in his ears. Annihilation--hey! And all the time it was only a
clouded sky, a sea that did not break, the air that did not stir. Only a
night; only a silence.
'It lasted for a while, and then they were suddenly and unanimously
moved to make a noise over their escape. "I knew from the first she
would go." "Not a minute too soon." "A narrow squeak, b'gosh!" He said
nothing, but the breeze that had dropped came back, a gentle draught
freshened steadily, and the sea joined its murmuring voice to this
talkative reaction succeeding the dumb moments of awe. She was gone! She
was gone! Not a doubt of it. Nobody could have helped. They repeated the
same words over and over again as though they couldn't stop themselves.
Never doubted she would go. The lights were gone. No mistake. The
lights were gone. Couldn't expect anything else. She had to go. . . . He
noticed that they talked as though they had left behind them nothing but
an empty ship. They concluded she would not have been long when she once
started. It seemed to cause them some sort of satisfaction. They assured
each other that she couldn't have been long about it--"Just shot down
like a flat-iron." The chief engineer declared that the mast-head light
at the moment of sinking seemed to drop "like a lighted match you throw
down." At this the second laughed hysterically. "I am g-g-glad, I am
gla-a-a-d." His teeth went on "like an electric rattle," said Jim,
"and all at once he began to cry. He wept and blubbered like a child,
catching his breath and sobbing 'Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!' He would
be quiet for a while and start suddenly, 'Oh, my poor arm! oh, my poor
a-a-a-arm!' I felt I could knock him down. Some of them sat in the
stern-sheets. I could just make out their shapes. Voices came to me,
mumble, mumble, grunt, grunt. All this seemed very hard to bear. I was
cold too. And I could do nothing. I thought that if I moved I would have
to go over the side and . . ."
'His hand groped stealthily, came in contact with a liqueur-glass, and
was withdrawn suddenly as if it had touched a red-hot coal. I pushed the
bottle slightly. "Won't you have some more?" I asked. He looked at me
angrily. "Don't you think I can tell you what there is to tell without
screwing myself up?" he asked. The squad of globe-trotters had gone to
bed. We were alone but for a vague white form erect in the shadow, that,
being looked at, cringed forward, hesitated, backed away silently. It
was getting late, but I did not hurry my guest.
'In the midst of his forlorn state he heard his companions begin to
abuse some one. "What kept you from jumping, you lunatic?" said a
scolding voice. The chief engineer left the stern-sheets, and could
be heard clambering forward as if with hostile intentions against "the
greatest idiot that ever was." The skipper shouted with rasping effort
offensive epithets from where he sat at the oar. He lifted his head
at that uproar, and heard the name "George," while a hand in the dark
struck him on the breast. "What have you got to say for yourself, you
fool?" queried somebody, with a sort of virtuous fury. "They were after
me," he said. "They were abusing me--abusing me . . . by the name of
George."
'He paused to stare, tried to smile, turned his eyes away and went on.
"That little second puts his head right under my nose, 'Why, it's that
blasted mate!' 'What!' howls the skipper from the other end of the boat.
'No!' shrieks the chief. And he too stooped to look at my face."
'The wind had left the boat suddenly. The rain began to fall again, and
the soft, uninterrupted, a little mysterious sound with which the sea
receives a shower arose on all sides in the night. "They were too taken
aback to say anything more at first," he narrated steadily, "and what
could I have to say to them?" He faltered for a moment, and made an
effort to go on. "They called me horrible names." His voice, sinking to
a whisper, now and then would leap up suddenly, hardened by the passion
of scorn, as though he had been talking of secret abominations. "Never
mind what they called me," he said grimly. "I could hear hate in their
voices. A good thing too. They could not forgive me for being in that
boat. They hated it. It made them mad. . . ." He laughed short. . . .
"But it kept me from--Look! I was sitting with my arms crossed, on the
gunwale! . . ." He perched himself smartly on the edge of the table and
crossed his arms. . . . "Like this--see? One little tilt backwards and
I would have been gone--after the others. One little tilt--the least
bit--the least bit." He frowned, and tapping his forehead with the tip
of his middle finger, "It was there all the time," he said impressively.
"All the time--that notion. And the rain--cold, thick, cold as melted
snow--colder--on my thin cotton clothes--I'll never be so cold again in
my life, I know. And the sky was black too--all black. Not a star, not
a light anywhere. Nothing outside that confounded boat and those two
yapping before me like a couple of mean mongrels at a tree'd thief. Yap!
yap! 'What you doing here? You're a fine sort! Too much of a bloomin'
gentleman to put your hand to it. Come out of your trance, did you? To
sneak in? Did you?' Yap! yap! 'You ain't fit to live!' Yap! yap! Two of
them together trying to out-bark each other. The other would bay from
the stern through the rain--couldn't see him--couldn't make it out--some
of his filthy jargon. Yap! yap! Bow-ow-ow-ow-ow! Yap! yap! It was sweet
to hear them; it kept me alive, I tell you. It saved my life. At it they
went, as if trying to drive me overboard with the noise! . . . 'I wonder
you had pluck enough to jump. You ain't wanted here. If I had known who
it was, I would have tipped you over--you skunk! What have you done with
the other? Where did you get the pluck to jump--you coward? What's to
prevent us three from firing you overboard?' . . . They were out of
breath; the shower passed away upon the sea. Then nothing. There was
nothing round the boat, not even a sound. Wanted to see me overboard,
did they? Upon my soul! I think they would have had their wish if they
had only kept quiet. Fire me overboard! Would they? 'Try,' I said. 'I
would for twopence.' 'Too good for you,' they screeched together. It was
so dark that it was only when one or the other of them moved that I was
quite sure of seeing him. By heavens! I only wish they had tried."
'I couldn't help exclaiming, "What an extraordinary affair!"
'"Not bad--eh?" he said, as if in some sort astounded. "They pretended
to think I had done away with that donkey-man for some reason or other.
Why should I? And how the devil was I to know? Didn't I get somehow
into that boat? into that boat--I . . ." The muscles round his lips
contracted into an unconscious grimace that tore through the mask of his
usual expression--something violent, short-lived and illuminating like
a twist of lightning that admits the eye for an instant into the secret
convolutions of a cloud. "I did. I was plainly there with them--wasn't
I? Isn't it awful a man should be driven to do a thing like that--and be
responsible? What did I know about their George they were howling after?
I remembered I had seen him curled up on the deck. 'Murdering coward!'
the chief kept on calling me. He didn't seem able to remember any other
two words. I didn't care, only his noise began to worry me. 'Shut up,' I
said. At that he collected himself for a confounded screech. 'You killed
him! You killed him!' 'No,' I shouted, 'but I will kill you directly.' I
jumped up, and he fell backwards over a thwart with an awful loud thump.
I don't know why. Too dark. Tried to step back I suppose. I stood still
facing aft, and the wretched little second began to whine, 'You
ain't going to hit a chap with a broken arm--and you call yourself a
gentleman, too.' I heard a heavy tramp--one--two--and wheezy grunting.
The other beast was coming at me, clattering his oar over the stern. I
saw him moving, big, big--as you see a man in a mist, in a dream. 'Come
on,' I cried. I would have tumbled him over like a bale of shakings. He
stopped, muttered to himself, and went back. Perhaps he had heard the
wind. I didn't. It was the last heavy gust we had. He went back to his
oar. I was sorry. I would have tried to--to . . ."
'He opened and closed his curved fingers, and his hands had an eager and
cruel flutter. "Steady, steady," I murmured.
'"Eh? What? I am not excited," he remonstrated, awfully hurt, and with
a convulsive jerk of his elbow knocked over the cognac bottle. I started
forward, scraping my chair. He bounced off the table as if a mine had
been exploded behind his back, and half turned before he alighted,
crouching on his feet to show me a startled pair of eyes and a face
white about the nostrils. A look of intense annoyance succeeded.
"Awfully sorry. How clumsy of me!" he mumbled, very vexed, while the
pungent odour of spilt alcohol enveloped us suddenly with an atmosphere
of a low drinking-bout in the cool, pure darkness of the night. The
lights had been put out in the dining-hall; our candle glimmered
solitary in the long gallery, and the columns had turned black from
pediment to capital. On the vivid stars the high corner of the Harbour
Office stood out distinct across the Esplanade, as though the sombre
pile had glided nearer to see and hear.
'He assumed an air of indifference.
'"I dare say I am less calm now than I was then. I was ready for
anything. These were trifles. . . ."
'"You had a lively time of it in that boat," I remarked
'"I was ready," he repeated. "After the ship's lights had gone, anything
might have happened in that boat--anything in the world--and the world
no wiser. I felt this, and I was pleased. It was just dark enough too.
We were like men walled up quick in a roomy grave. No concern with
anything on earth. Nobody to pass an opinion. Nothing mattered." For the
third time during this conversation he laughed harshly, but there was
no one about to suspect him of being only drunk. "No fear, no law, no
sounds, no eyes--not even our own, till--till sunrise at least."
'I was struck by the suggestive truth of his words. There is something
peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from
under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world
that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls
of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set
free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. Of course, as
with belief, thought, love, hate, conviction, or even the visual aspect
of material things, there are as many shipwrecks as there are men, and
in this one there was something abject which made the isolation more
complete--there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off
more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had
never undergone the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke. They were
exasperated with him for being a half-hearted shirker: he focussed on
them his hatred of the whole thing; he would have liked to take a signal
revenge for the abhorrent opportunity they had put in his way. Trust
a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the
bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion. It was part of
the burlesque meanness pervading that particular disaster at sea that
they did not come to blows. It was all threats, all a terribly effective
feint, a sham from beginning to end, planned by the tremendous disdain
of the Dark Powers whose real terrors, always on the verge of triumph,
are perpetually foiled by the steadfastness of men. I asked, after
waiting for a while, "Well, what happened?" A futile question. I knew
too much already to hope for the grace of a single uplifting touch, for
the favour of hinted madness, of shadowed horror. "Nothing," he said. "I
meant business, but they meant noise only. Nothing happened."
'And the rising sun found him just as he had jumped up first in the bows
of the boat. What a persistence of readiness! He had been holding the
tiller in his hand, too, all the night. They had dropped the rudder
overboard while attempting to ship it, and I suppose the tiller got
kicked forward somehow while they were rushing up and down that boat
trying to do all sorts of things at once so as to get clear of the
side. It was a long heavy piece of hard wood, and apparently he had been
clutching it for six hours or so. If you don't call that being ready!
Can you imagine him, silent and on his feet half the night, his face to
the gusts of rain, staring at sombre forms watchful of vague movements,
straining his ears to catch rare low murmurs in the stern-sheets!
Firmness of courage or effort of fear? What do you think? And the
endurance is undeniable too. Six hours more or less on the defensive;
six hours of alert immobility while the boat drove slowly or floated
arrested, according to the caprice of the wind; while the sea, calmed,
slept at last; while the clouds passed above his head; while the sky
from an immensity lustreless and black, diminished to a sombre and
lustrous vault, scintillated with a greater brilliance, faded to the
east, paled at the zenith; while the dark shapes blotting the low
stars astern got outlines, relief became shoulders, heads, faces,
features,--confronted him with dreary stares, had dishevelled hair, torn
clothes, blinked red eyelids at the white dawn. "They looked as though
they had been knocking about drunk in gutters for a week," he described
graphically; and then he muttered something about the sunrise being of a
kind that foretells a calm day. You know that sailor habit of referring
to the weather in every connection. And on my side his few mumbled words
were enough to make me see the lower limb of the sun clearing the
line of the horizon, the tremble of a vast ripple running over all the
visible expanse of the sea, as if the waters had shuddered, giving birth
to the globe of light, while the last puff of the breeze would stir the
air in a sigh of relief.
'"They sat in the stern shoulder to shoulder, with the skipper in the
middle, like three dirty owls, and stared at me," I heard him say
with an intention of hate that distilled a corrosive virtue into the
commonplace words like a drop of powerful poison falling into a glass
of water; but my thoughts dwelt upon that sunrise. I could imagine
under the pellucid emptiness of the sky these four men imprisoned in the
solitude of the sea, the lonely sun, regardless of the speck of life,
ascending the clear curve of the heaven as if to gaze ardently from a
greater height at his own splendour reflected in the still ocean. "They
called out to me from aft," said Jim, "as though we had been chums
together. I heard them. They were begging me to be sensible and drop
that 'blooming piece of wood.' Why _would_ I carry on so? They hadn't
done me any harm--had they? There had been no harm. . . . No harm!"
'His face crimsoned as though he could not get rid of the air in his
lungs.
'"No harm!" he burst out. "I leave it to you. You can understand. Can't
you? You see it--don't you? No harm! Good God! What more could they have
done? Oh yes, I know very well--I jumped. Certainly. I jumped! I told
you I jumped; but I tell you they were too much for any man. It was
their doing as plainly as if they had reached up with a boat-hook and
pulled me over. Can't you see it? You must see it. Come. Speak--straight
out."
'His uneasy eyes fastened upon mine, questioned, begged, challenged,
entreated. For the life of me I couldn't help murmuring, "You've been
tried." "More than is fair," he caught up swiftly. "I wasn't given half
a chance--with a gang like that. And now they were friendly--oh, so
damnably friendly! Chums, shipmates. All in the same boat. Make the best
of it. They hadn't meant anything. They didn't care a hang for George.
George had gone back to his berth for something at the last moment and
got caught. The man was a manifest fool. Very sad, of course. . . .
Their eyes looked at me; their lips moved; they wagged their heads at
the other end of the boat--three of them; they beckoned--to me. Why
not? Hadn't I jumped? I said nothing. There are no words for the sort of
things I wanted to say. If I had opened my lips just then I would have
simply howled like an animal. I was asking myself when I would wake up.
They urged me aloud to come aft and hear quietly what the skipper had to
say. We were sure to be picked up before the evening--right in the track
of all the Canal traffic; there was smoke to the north-west now.
'"It gave me an awful shock to see this faint, faint blur, this low
trail of brown mist through which you could see the boundary of sea and
sky. I called out to them that I could hear very well where I was. The
skipper started swearing, as hoarse as a crow. He wasn't going to talk
at the top of his voice for _my_ accommodation. 'Are you afraid they
will hear you on shore?' I asked. He glared as if he would have liked to
claw me to pieces. The chief engineer advised him to humour me. He
said I wasn't right in my head yet. The other rose astern, like a thick
pillar of flesh--and talked--talked. . . ."
'Jim remained thoughtful. "Well?" I said. "What did I care what story
they agreed to make up?" he cried recklessly. "They could tell what they
jolly well liked. It was their business. I knew the story. Nothing
they could make people believe could alter it for me. I let him talk,
argue--talk, argue. He went on and on and on. Suddenly I felt my legs
give way under me. I was sick, tired--tired to death. I let fall the
tiller, turned my back on them, and sat down on the foremost thwart. I
had enough. They called to me to know if I understood--wasn't it true,
every word of it? It was true, by God! after their fashion. I did not
turn my head. I heard them palavering together. 'The silly ass won't say
anything.' 'Oh, he understands well enough.' 'Let him be; he will be all
right.' 'What can he do?' What could I do? Weren't we all in the same
boat? I tried to be deaf. The smoke had disappeared to the northward.
It was a dead calm. They had a drink from the water-breaker, and I drank
too. Afterwards they made a great business of spreading the boat-sail
over the gunwales. Would I keep a look-out? They crept under, out of my
sight, thank God! I felt weary, weary, done up, as if I hadn't had one
hour's sleep since the day I was born. I couldn't see the water for the
glitter of the sunshine. From time to time one of them would creep out,
stand up to take a look all round, and get under again. I could hear
spells of snoring below the sail. Some of them could sleep. One of them
at least. I couldn't! All was light, light, and the boat seemed to be
falling through it. Now and then I would feel quite surprised to find
myself sitting on a thwart. . . ."
'He began to walk with measured steps to and fro before my chair, one
hand in his trousers-pocket, his head bent thoughtfully, and his right
arm at long intervals raised for a gesture that seemed to put out of his
way an invisible intruder.
'"I suppose you think I was going mad," he began in a changed tone. "And
well you may, if you remember I had lost my cap. The sun crept all the
way from east to west over my bare head, but that day I could not come
to any harm, I suppose. The sun could not make me mad. . . ." His right
arm put aside the idea of madness. . . . "Neither could it kill
me. . . ." Again his arm repulsed a shadow. . . . "_That_ rested with
me."
'"Did it?" I said, inexpressibly amazed at this new turn, and I looked
at him with the same sort of feeling I might be fairly conceived to
experience had he, after spinning round on his heel, presented an
altogether new face.
'"I didn't get brain fever, I did not drop dead either," he went on. "I
didn't bother myself at all about the sun over my head. I was thinking
as coolly as any man that ever sat thinking in the shade. That greasy
beast of a skipper poked his big cropped head from under the canvas
and screwed his fishy eyes up at me. 'Donnerwetter! you will die,' he
growled, and drew in like a turtle. I had seen him. I had heard him. He
didn't interrupt me. I was thinking just then that I wouldn't."
'He tried to sound my thought with an attentive glance dropped on me
in passing. "Do you mean to say you had been deliberating with yourself
whether you would die?" I asked in as impenetrable a tone as I could
command. He nodded without stopping. "Yes, it had come to that as I sat
there alone," he said. He passed on a few steps to the imaginary end
of his beat, and when he flung round to come back both his hands were
thrust deep into his pockets. He stopped short in front of my chair and
looked down. "Don't you believe it?" he inquired with tense curiosity.
I was moved to make a solemn declaration of my readiness to believe
implicitly anything he thought fit to tell me.'
'He heard me out with his head on one side, and I had another glimpse
through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being. The dim
candle spluttered within the ball of glass, and that was all I had to
see him by; at his back was the dark night with the clear stars, whose
distant glitter disposed in retreating planes lured the eye into the
depths of a greater darkness; and yet a mysterious light seemed to show
me his boyish head, as if in that moment the youth within him had, for
a moment, glowed and expired. "You are an awful good sort to listen like
this," he said. "It does me good. You don't know what it is to me. You
don't" . . . words seemed to fail him. It was a distinct glimpse. He was
a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like
to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims
the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct,
cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give
a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light . . . of
heat! . . . Yes; I had a glimpse of him then . . . and it was not the
last of that kind. . . . "You don't know what it is for a fellow in my
position to be believed--make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It
is so difficult--so awfully unfair--so hard to understand."
'The mists were closing again. I don't know how old I appeared to
him--and how much wise. Not half as old as I felt just then; not half
as uselessly wise as I knew myself to be. Surely in no other craft as in
that of the sea do the hearts of those already launched to sink or swim
go out so much to the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes upon
that glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his
own glances full of fire. There is such magnificent vagueness in
the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious
indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own
and only reward. What we get--well, we won't talk of that; but can one
of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more
wide of reality--in no other is the beginning _all_ illusion--the
disenchantment more swift--the subjugation more complete. Hadn't we all
commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried
the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of
imprecation? What wonder that when some heavy prod gets home the bond
is found to be close; that besides the fellowship of the craft there is
felt the strength of a wider feeling--the feeling that binds a man to a
child. He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find
a remedy against the pain of truth, giving me a glimpse of himself as a
young fellow in a scrape that is the very devil of a scrape, the sort
of scrape greybeards wag at solemnly while they hide a smile. And he
had been deliberating upon death--confound him! He had found that to
meditate about because he thought he had saved his life, while all its
glamour had gone with the ship in the night. What more natural! It
was tragic enough and funny enough in all conscience to call aloud for
compassion, and in what was I better than the rest of us to refuse him
my pity? And even as I looked at him the mists rolled into the rent, and
his voice spoke--
'"I was so lost, you know. It was the sort of thing one does not expect
to happen to one. It was not like a fight, for instance."
'"It was not," I admitted. He appeared changed, as if he had suddenly
matured.
'"One couldn't be sure," he muttered.
'"Ah! You were not sure," I said, and was placated by the sound of
a faint sigh that passed between us like the flight of a bird in the
night.
'"Well, I wasn't," he said courageously. "It was something like that
wretched story they made up. It was not a lie--but it wasn't truth all
the same. It was something. . . . One knows a downright lie. There was
not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of
this affair."
'"How much more did you want?" I asked; but I think I spoke so low that
he did not catch what I said. He had advanced his argument as though
life had been a network of paths separated by chasms. His voice sounded
reasonable.
'"Suppose I had not--I mean to say, suppose I had stuck to the ship?
Well. How much longer? Say a minute--half a minute. Come. In thirty
seconds, as it seemed certain then, I would have been overboard; and do
you think I would not have laid hold of the first thing that came in my
way--oar, life-buoy, grating--anything? Wouldn't you?"
'"And be saved," I interjected.
'"I would have meant to be," he retorted. "And that's more than I meant
when I" . . . he shivered as if about to swallow some nauseous
drug . . . "jumped," he pronounced with a convulsive effort, whose
stress, as if propagated by the waves of the air, made my body stir a
little in the chair. He fixed me with lowering eyes. "Don't you believe
me?" he cried. "I swear! . . . Confound it! You got me here to talk,
and . . . You must! . . . You said you would believe." "Of course I do,"
I protested, in a matter-of-fact tone which produced a calming effect.
"Forgive me," he said. "Of course I wouldn't have talked to you about
all this if you had not been a gentleman. I ought to have known . . . I
am--I am--a gentleman too . . ." "Yes, yes," I said hastily. He was
looking me squarely in the face, and withdrew his gaze slowly. "Now you
understand why I didn't after all . . . didn't go out in that way. I
wasn't going to be frightened at what I had done. And, anyhow, if I had
stuck to the ship I would have done my best to be saved. Men have been
known to float for hours--in the open sea--and be picked up not much the
worse for it. I might have lasted it out better than many others.
There's nothing the matter with my heart." He withdrew his right fist
from his pocket, and the blow he struck on his chest resounded like a
muffled detonation in the night.
'"No," I said. He meditated, with his legs slightly apart and his
chin sunk. "A hair's-breadth," he muttered. "Not the breadth of a hair
between this and that. And at the time . . ."
'"It is difficult to see a hair at midnight," I put in, a little
viciously I fear. Don't you see what I mean by the solidarity of the
craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me--me!--of
a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as
though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour.
"And so you cleared out--at once."
'"Jumped," he corrected me incisively. "Jumped--mind!" he repeated, and
I wondered at the evident but obscure intention. "Well, yes! Perhaps I
could not see then. But I had plenty of time and any amount of light
in that boat. And I could think, too. Nobody would know, of course, but
this did not make it any easier for me. You've got to believe that, too.
I did not want all this talk. . . . No . . . Yes . . . I won't
lie . . . I wanted it: it is the very thing I wanted--there. Do you
think you or anybody could have made me if I . . . I am--I am not afraid
to tell. And I wasn't afraid to think either. I looked it in the face. I
wasn't going to run away. At first--at night, if it hadn't been for
those fellows I might have . . . No! by heavens! I was not going to give
them that satisfaction. They had done enough. They made up a story, and
believed it for all I know. But I knew the truth, and I would live it
down--alone, with myself. I wasn't going to give in to such a beastly
unfair thing. What did it prove after all? I was confoundedly cut up.
Sick of life--to tell you the truth; but what would have been the good
to shirk it--in--in--that way? That was not the way. I believe--I
believe it would have--it would have ended--nothing."
'He had been walking up and down, but with the last word he turned short
at me.
'"What do _you_ believe?" he asked with violence. A pause ensued, and
suddenly I felt myself overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue, as
though his voice had startled me out of a dream of wandering through
empty spaces whose immensity had harassed my soul and exhausted my body.
'". . . Would have ended nothing," he muttered over me obstinately,
after a little while. "No! the proper thing was to face it out--alone
for myself--wait for another chance--find out . . ."'
'All around everything was still as far as the ear could reach. The mist
of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles,
and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring
eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic
figure in a picture. The chill air of the night seemed to lie on my
limbs as heavy as a slab of marble.
'"I see," I murmured, more to prove to myself that I could break my
state of numbness than for any other reason.
'"The Avondale picked us up just before sunset," he remarked moodily.
"Steamed right straight for us. We had only to sit and wait."
'After a long interval, he said, "They told their story." And again
there was that oppressive silence. "Then only I knew what it was I had
made up my mind to," he added.
'"You said nothing," I whispered.
'"What could I say?" he asked, in the same low tone. . . . "Shock
slight. Stopped the ship. Ascertained the damage. Took measures to get
the boats out without creating a panic. As the first boat was lowered
ship went down in a squall. Sank like lead. . . . What could be more
clear" . . . he hung his head . . . "and more awful?" His lips quivered
while he looked straight into my eyes. "I had jumped--hadn't I?" he
asked, dismayed. "That's what I had to live down. The story didn't
matter." . . . He clasped his hands for an instant, glanced right and
left into the gloom: "It was like cheating the dead," he stammered.
'"And there were no dead," I said.
'He went away from me at this. That is the only way I can describe it.
In a moment I saw his back close to the balustrade. He stood there for
some time, as if admiring the purity and the peace of the night. Some
flowering-shrub in the garden below spread its powerful scent through
the damp air. He returned to me with hasty steps.
'"And that did not matter," he said, as stubbornly as you please.
'"Perhaps not," I admitted. I began to have a notion he was too much for
me. After all, what did _I_ know?
'"Dead or not dead, I could not get clear," he said. "I had to live;
hadn't I?"
'"Well, yes--if you take it in that way," I mumbled.
'"I was glad, of course," he threw out carelessly, with his mind fixed
on something else. "The exposure," he pronounced slowly, and lifted
his head. "Do you know what was my first thought when I heard? I was
relieved. I was relieved to learn that those shouts--did I tell you I
had heard shouts? No? Well, I did. Shouts for help . . . blown along
with the drizzle. Imagination, I suppose. And yet I can hardly . . . How
stupid. . . . The others did not. I asked them afterwards. They all
said No. No? And I was hearing them even then! I might have known--but
I didn't think--I only listened. Very faint screams--day after day. Then
that little half-caste chap here came up and spoke to me. 'The
Patna . . . French gunboat . . . towed successfully to Aden . . .
Investigation . . . Marine Office . . . Sailors' Home . . . arrangements
made for your board and lodging!' I walked along with him, and I enjoyed
the silence. So there had been no shouting. Imagination. I had to
believe him. I could hear nothing any more. I wonder how long I could
have stood it. It was getting worse, too . . . I mean--louder." 'He fell
into thought.
'"And I had heard nothing! Well--so be it. But the lights! The lights
did go! We did not see them. They were not there. If they had been, I
would have swam back--I would have gone back and shouted alongside--I
would have begged them to take me on board. . . . I would have had my
chance. . . . You doubt me? . . . How do you know how I felt? . . . What
right have you to doubt? . . . I very nearly did it as it was--do you
understand?" His voice fell. "There was not a glimmer--not a glimmer,"
he protested mournfully. "Don't you understand that if there had been,
you would not have seen me here? You see me--and you doubt."
'I shook my head negatively. This question of the lights being lost
sight of when the boat could not have been more than a quarter of a mile
from the ship was a matter for much discussion. Jim stuck to it that
there was nothing to be seen after the first shower had cleared away;
and the others had affirmed the same thing to the officers of the
Avondale. Of course people shook their heads and smiled. One old skipper
who sat near me in court tickled my ear with his white beard to murmur,
"Of course they would lie." As a matter of fact nobody lied; not even
the chief engineer with his story of the mast-head light dropping like a
match you throw down. Not consciously, at least. A man with his liver in
such a state might very well have seen a floating spark in the corner of
his eye when stealing a hurried glance over his shoulder. They had seen
no light of any sort though they were well within range, and they could
only explain this in one way: the ship had gone down. It was obvious
and comforting. The foreseen fact coming so swiftly had justified their
haste. No wonder they did not cast about for any other explanation. Yet
the true one was very simple, and as soon as Brierly suggested it the
court ceased to bother about the question. If you remember, the ship had
been stopped, and was lying with her head on the course steered through
the night, with her stern canted high and her bows brought low down in
the water through the filling of the fore-compartment. Being thus out of
trim, when the squall struck her a little on the quarter, she swung head
to wind as sharply as though she had been at anchor. By this change in
her position all her lights were in a very few moments shut off from
the boat to leeward. It may very well be that, had they been seen, they
would have had the effect of a mute appeal--that their glimmer lost in
the darkness of the cloud would have had the mysterious power of the
human glance that can awaken the feelings of remorse and pity. It would
have said, "I am here--still here" . . . and what more can the eye of
the most forsaken of human beings say? But she turned her back on them
as if in disdain of their fate: she had swung round, burdened, to glare
stubbornly at the new danger of the open sea which she so strangely
survived to end her days in a breaking-up yard, as if it had been her
recorded fate to die obscurely under the blows of many hammers. What
were the various ends their destiny provided for the pilgrims I am
unable to say; but the immediate future brought, at about nine o'clock
next morning, a French gunboat homeward bound from Reunion. The report
of her commander was public property. He had swept a little out of
his course to ascertain what was the matter with that steamer floating
dangerously by the head upon a still and hazy sea. There was an ensign,
union down, flying at her main gaff (the serang had the sense to make a
signal of distress at daylight); but the cooks were preparing the food
in the cooking-boxes forward as usual. The decks were packed as close
as a sheep-pen: there were people perched all along the rails, jammed on
the bridge in a solid mass; hundreds of eyes stared, and not a sound was
heard when the gunboat ranged abreast, as if all that multitude of lips
had been sealed by a spell.
'The Frenchman hailed, could get no intelligible reply, and after
ascertaining through his binoculars that the crowd on deck did not look
plague-stricken, decided to send a boat. Two officers came on board,
listened to the serang, tried to talk with the Arab, couldn't make head
or tail of it: but of course the nature of the emergency was obvious
enough. They were also very much struck by discovering a white man, dead
and curled up peacefully on the bridge. "Fort intrigues par ce cadavre,"
as I was informed a long time after by an elderly French lieutenant whom
I came across one afternoon in Sydney, by the merest chance, in a sort
of cafe, and who remembered the affair perfectly. Indeed this affair,
I may notice in passing, had an extraordinary power of defying the
shortness of memories and the length of time: it seemed to live, with
a sort of uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their
tongues. I've had the questionable pleasure of meeting it often, years
afterwards, thousands of miles away, emerging from the remotest possible
talk, coming to the surface of the most distant allusions. Has it not
turned up to-night between us? And I am the only seaman here. I am the
only one to whom it is a memory. And yet it has made its way out! But if
two men who, unknown to each other, knew of this affair met accidentally
on any spot of this earth, the thing would pop up between them as sure
as fate, before they parted. I had never seen that Frenchman before, and
at the end of an hour we had done with each other for life: he did not
seem particularly talkative either; he was a quiet, massive chap in a
creased uniform, sitting drowsily over a tumbler half full of some
dark liquid. His shoulder-straps were a bit tarnished, his clean-shaved
cheeks were large and sallow; he looked like a man who would be given
to taking snuff--don't you know? I won't say he did; but the habit would
have fitted that kind of man. It all began by his handing me a number of
Home News, which I didn't want, across the marble table. I said "Merci."
We exchanged a few apparently innocent remarks, and suddenly, before
I knew how it had come about, we were in the midst of it, and he was
telling me how much they had been "intrigued by that corpse." It turned
out he had been one of the boarding officers.
'In the establishment where we sat one could get a variety of foreign
drinks which were kept for the visiting naval officers, and he took a
sip of the dark medical-looking stuff, which probably was nothing more
nasty than cassis a l'eau, and glancing with one eye into the tumbler,
shook his head slightly. "Impossible de comprendre--vous concevez," he
said, with a curious mixture of unconcern and thoughtfulness. I could
very easily conceive how impossible it had been for them to understand.
Nobody in the gunboat knew enough English to get hold of the story as
told by the serang. There was a good deal of noise, too, round the two
officers. "They crowded upon us. There was a circle round that dead
man (autour de ce mort)," he described. "One had to attend to the most
pressing. These people were beginning to agitate themselves--Parbleu!
A mob like that--don't you see?" he interjected with philosophic
indulgence. As to the bulkhead, he had advised his commander that the
safest thing was to leave it alone, it was so villainous to look at.
They got two hawsers on board promptly (en toute hale) and took the
Patna in tow--stern foremost at that--which, under the circumstances,
was not so foolish, since the rudder was too much out of the water to
be of any great use for steering, and this manoeuvre eased the strain on
the bulkhead, whose state, he expounded with stolid glibness, demanded
the greatest care (exigeait les plus grands menagements). I could not
help thinking that my new acquaintance must have had a voice in most of
these arrangements: he looked a reliable officer, no longer very active,
and he was seamanlike too, in a way, though as he sat there, with his
thick fingers clasped lightly on his stomach, he reminded you of one
of those snuffy, quiet village priests, into whose ears are poured the
sins, the sufferings, the remorse of peasant generations, on whose faces
the placid and simple expression is like a veil thrown over the mystery
of pain and distress. He ought to have had a threadbare black soutane
buttoned smoothly up to his ample chin, instead of a frock-coat with
shoulder-straps and brass buttons. His broad bosom heaved regularly
while he went on telling me that it had been the very devil of a job,
as doubtless (sans doute) I could figure to myself in my quality of a
seaman (en votre qualite de marin). At the end of the period he inclined
his body slightly towards me, and, pursing his shaved lips, allowed the
air to escape with a gentle hiss. "Luckily," he continued, "the sea was
level like this table, and there was no more wind than there is here."
. . . The place struck me as indeed intolerably stuffy, and very hot;
my face burned as though I had been young enough to be embarrassed and
blushing. They had directed their course, he pursued, to the nearest
English port "naturellement," where their responsibility ceased, "Dieu
merci." . . . He blew out his flat cheeks a little. . . . "Because,
mind you (notez bien), all the time of towing we had two quartermasters
stationed with axes by the hawsers, to cut us clear of our tow in case
she . . ." He fluttered downwards his heavy eyelids, making his meaning
as plain as possible. . . . "What would you! One does what one can
(on fait ce qu'on peut)," and for a moment he managed to invest
his ponderous immobility with an air of resignation. "Two
quartermasters--thirty hours--always there. Two!" he repeated, lifting
up his right hand a little, and exhibiting two fingers. This was
absolutely the first gesture I saw him make. It gave me the opportunity
to "note" a starred scar on the back of his hand--effect of a gunshot
clearly; and, as if my sight had been made more acute by this discovery,
I perceived also the seam of an old wound, beginning a little below the
temple and going out of sight under the short grey hair at the side of
his head--the graze of a spear or the cut of a sabre. He clasped his
hands on his stomach again. "I remained on board that--that--my memory
is going (s'en va). Ah! Patt-na. C'est bien ca. Patt-na. Merci. It is
droll how one forgets. I stayed on that ship thirty hours. . . ."
'"You did!" I exclaimed. Still gazing at his hands, he pursed his lips a
little, but this time made no hissing sound. "It was judged proper," he
said, lifting his eyebrows dispassionately, "that one of the officers
should remain to keep an eye open (pour ouvrir l'oeil)" . . . he sighed
idly . . . "and for communicating by signals with the towing ship--do
you see?--and so on. For the rest, it was my opinion too. We made our
boats ready to drop over--and I also on that ship took measures. . . .
Enfin! One has done one's possible. It was a delicate position. Thirty
hours! They prepared me some food. As for the wine--go and whistle for
it--not a drop." In some extraordinary way, without any marked change in
his inert attitude and in the placid expression of his face, he managed
to convey the idea of profound disgust. "I--you know--when it comes to
eating without my glass of wine--I am nowhere."
'I was afraid he would enlarge upon the grievance, for though he didn't
stir a limb or twitch a feature, he made one aware how much he was
irritated by the recollection. But he seemed to forget all about it.
They delivered their charge to the "port authorities," as he expressed
it. He was struck by the calmness with which it had been received. "One
might have thought they had such a droll find (drole de trouvaille)
brought them every day. You are extraordinary--you others," he
commented, with his back propped against the wall, and looking himself
as incapable of an emotional display as a sack of meal. There happened
to be a man-of-war and an Indian Marine steamer in the harbour at the
time, and he did not conceal his admiration of the efficient manner in
which the boats of these two ships cleared the Patna of her passengers.
Indeed his torpid demeanour concealed nothing: it had that mysterious,
almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means
impossible of detection which is the last word of the highest art.
"Twenty-five minutes--watch in hand--twenty-five, no more." . . . He
unclasped and clasped again his fingers without removing his hands from
his stomach, and made it infinitely more effective than if he had thrown
up his arms to heaven in amazement. . . . "All that lot (tout ce monde)
on shore--with their little affairs--nobody left but a guard of
seamen (marins de l'Etat) and that interesting corpse (cet interessant
cadavre). Twenty-five minutes." . . . With downcast eyes and his head
tilted slightly on one side he seemed to roll knowingly on his tongue
the savour of a smart bit of work. He persuaded one without any further
demonstration that his approval was eminently worth having, and resuming
his hardly interrupted immobility, he went on to inform me that, being
under orders to make the best of their way to Toulon, they left in
two hours' time, "so that (de sorte que) there are many things in this
incident of my life (dans cet episode de ma vie) which have remained
obscure."' | 15,400 | Chapters 8 - 12 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210126121516/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lordjim/section4/ | Jim tells Marlow the rest of the story of what happened aboard the Patna: Finding himself amidst a crowd of sleeping pilgrims, he realizes that there will be nowhere near enough room in the lifeboats for everyone. Suddenly one of the passengers grabs him and utters the word "water." Thinking that the man is aware of the flooding belowdecks and worried that his shouting will start a panic, Jim attacks the man to silence him. Only then does he realize that the man is not referring to the flooding but is only asking for a drink for his sick child. Jim hands his water bottle to the man and goes to the bridge, where the rest of the officers are trying to launch a lifeboat. They ask him for help and abuse him when he inquires about their plans for patching the ship. Jim describes for Marlow the impossibility of shoring up the failing bulkhead below, then enters into an elaborate meditation on his emotions at the time and the perilous position of the ship, floating head-down in a leaden sea. Marlow recalls the testimony of the Patna's two Malay steersmen at the inquiry: when asked what they thought when the white crew left the ship, one replies, "Nothing," while the other says that he thought the white men must have had "secret reasons. " The officers continue to abuse Jim as they struggle to launch the boat. Jim laughs insanely as he tells Marlow this part of the story. Jim finally understands the urgency when one of the officers points to the horizon; a squall is approaching, which will surely sink the damaged ship. Nevertheless, Jim is too paralyzed with the thought of the pilgrims sleeping below to help with the lifeboat. The squall draws nearer, and Jim feels a slight swell pass under the ship, which until now has been in a perfectly calm sea. The third engineer drops dead from a heart attack as the officers continue to work. Finally, the lifeboat rips free of the ship, waking many of the passengers below. Several things seem to happen at once: the squall begins to hit, the crew gets into the boat, the third engineer's corpse slumps sideways as Jim stumbles over its legs, and the officers begin to yell for the dead man to join them in the boat, unaware that he has died. The next moment, that of crucial action, is not described in the narrative. Somehow, Jim finds himself in the boat. He, too, has abandoned ship. The squall hits; the men in the boat struggle to pull away from the sinking Patna. Seeing no lights from the ship, they agree that she has gone down. The men begin to talk of their narrow escape, ridiculing the man they think is the third engineer for his hesitation in jumping. When they discover that it is actually Jim in the boat with them, they accuse him of murdering the engineer by taking his place in the boat. The crew constructs a unified version of events to give to the authorities on shore. Jim ignores them and spends the night clutching a piece of wood, ready to defend himself. At this point in the story, Jim pauses and asks Marlow, "Don't you believe it?" Marlow finds himself declaring his faith in Jim and his account. Jim tortures himself and Marlow for several minutes, examining the alternative possibilities available to him and justifying his course of action. Again he makes Marlow state his belief in the tale and in Jim's motives. The men in the lifeboat are picked up by the Avondale, a passing ship, the next morning. They tell the version of the story upon which they agreed during the night; Jim does not dissent, although he feels as if he were "cheating the dead." That he soon finds out that there are no dead, that the Patna has made it into port, is of little account. He admits to Marlow now that he thought he heard shouts after the squall hit, and after the men had declared the ship sunk, although he still attributes the noises to his imagination. Jim recalls learning of the Patna's deliverance upon reaching port. Marlow ponders the question of the disappearing ship's lights, wondering why the men were so quick to assume that they indicated the sinking of the Patna. He recalls Captain Brierly's explanation at the inquest, that the arrival of the squall had caused the ship, dead in the water and listing, to swing about, thus hiding the lights from the men in the lifeboat. The story of the Patna's rescue comes from Marlow, who has gotten it from official reports and from an old French officer he meets many years later in Sydney. Around the same time the crew were picked up, a French gunboat encountered the Patna and attached a tow line. The old man Marlow meets is the officer from the gunboat who stayed onboard the Patna as she was being towed into harbor. Miraculously, the Patna makes it into port. The French officer recalls the boredom of being aboard the ship and complains that, although he was able to eat, he had no wine. He also recalls the great interest shown by both the passengers and the authorities in the corpse of the third engineer, which he found where it fell after Jim stumbled over it. Marlow is amazed that, so many years later and so far away, he continues to encounter Jim's story. | Commentary This section presents a number of figures who serve as alternatives to Jim. The first, of course, is Marlow, who continues to be fascinated, repulsed, and personally involved, and who, although he compulsively makes cruel comments to Jim, is nevertheless willing to declare his faith and sympathy again and again. The second contrast is with the dead third engineer. Overcome with horror and fear, the man simply drops dead rather than deal with the situation. While this is certainly not an option valorized in the narrative, it seems to be slightly better than Jim's paralysis and total lack of action. The Malay steersmen also provide perspective on Jim. Both espouse somewhat simplistic conceptions of duty: one believes it his job not to think at all, while the other holds to a naive faith in the motives of the white officers. Both, of course, do the "right" thing by staying on the ship, but neither, it seems, has any thought of becoming a hero by doing so. They are just doing their job. Whereas neither a sense of duty nor the opportunity to fulfill his fantasies of heroism are enough to keep Jim on board the Patna, the two Malays do what Jim longs to have done out of a sense of professionalism skewed by their position in the colonial order. Does Conrad essentialize these two as simplistic natives bound by their lack of intelligence to loyalty to the white "master"? Or are these men instead a powerful critique of Jim's professional abilities and his propensity to daydream? The French lieutenant is the most complete and most damning figure of analogy to Jim. He, like the Malays, stays aboard the Patna out of a sense of duty. He doesn't want to be a hero; he only wants to do his job, and if possible be comfortable enough to have a glass of wine with his meal. Yet his experience aboard the ship has left him with a sort of honorable scar, like the saber wound on his temple or the bullet scar on his hand. He and Marlow, strangers otherwise, are somehow drawn to each other and immediately into the story of the Patna. The French lieutenant's actions have not made him a hero, though; as the next chapter reveals, he has not risen far in the French navy, although he is now an old man. There is nothing heroic, it seems, about doing one's duty; perhaps staying on board would not have fulfilled a fantasy for Jim. Although Jim has filled in most of the story of the Patna in this section, he omits the moment where he jumps into the lifeboat. The narrative's use of ellipsis at key moments of decision-making indicates the insecure status of motive and explanation in this world. Jim tries to explain to Marlow why it is okay that he jumped--he would have had to abandon ship sooner or later anyway, the bulkhead was bound to fail, there was nothing he could do alone--but he does not approach the actual moment of his leap. Remember that Captain Brierly's leap overboard is not narrated either. These are the moments around which the text is built, yet they somehow escape the mass of words and explanations that describe them. Another episode that has a parallel in an earlier section of the text is Jim's encounter with the pilgrim asking for water. As he does in the "cur" episode, Jim mistakes the meaning of a single word, assuming it contains a depth of knowledge when really the word is only a simple reference . If such simple communications can go so awry, the capacity of words to describe complex emotional states and unclear motives must be highly suspect. This section of the novel, in addition, is one in which Marlow particularly struggles with the fundamental mystery of Jim's actions and his own fascination with them. Marlow even has a difficult time finding a word for what is missing; "magnificent vagueness," "glorious indefiniteness," and "the Irrational" are some of the phrases he offers to describe the meaning at the heart of Jim's experiences. The French lieutenant is equally at a loss for words to denote the inexplicability of the actions of the Patna's crew. Notice that Conrad offers many of the man's phrases in the original French, as if the very act of translation would miss some essential meaning that the French word barely captures. Marlow continues to torment Jim, making sarcastic remarks and throwing his words back at him. His encounter with the French lieutenant, though, suggests just how deeply Jim's story has scarred Marlow; it follows him wherever he goes and leads him into encounters with other "survivors." | 919 | 784 | [
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5,658 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/23.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Lord Jim/section_22_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapter 23 | chapter 23 | null | {"name": "Chapter 23", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim32.asp", "summary": "Jim is very impressed with Stein and stays with him until the next morning. He is even more excited about the opportunity than before; he feels certain that Patusan offers him the chance he has been waiting for. Jim has in his pocket a letter for Cornelius and around his neck the silver ring for Doramin, which will ensure Jim's own protection Since Jim is to sail in about two hours, Marlow helps him pack and get ready. He gives Jim a revolver and a box of cartridges to take to Patusan. When Jim sets off for his boat, Marlow hurries after him and goes on board with his friend. The ships' captain is crazy. He refuses to take Jim up the river in Patusan for he feels the island is too dangerous, \"a cage of beasts\" who are ravenous; instead, he will drop his charge at the mouth of the river, and he must make his own way from there. In reaction, Jim can only smile; the adventure challenges him. Marlow advises Jim to look the island over and then decide whether he wants to come back. Jim is of the opinion that he will never return to England, for he is through with \"civilized\" life. He has been dreaming and waiting for an opportunity like Patusan offers. In such an alien place, his past should never haunt him again. When it is time for the ship to depart, both Jim and Marlow are clearly emotional; there is a \"moment of real and profound intimacy\" between the two. They hide it by shaking hands. Then Marlow calls his friend \"dear boy\" and wishes him well. As the ship leaves, the young sailor calls back to Marlow, who is now on shore; the romantic Jim shouts, \"You shall hear of me.\"", "analysis": "Notes The chapter gives Jim the chance to realize his dream of leaving his past behind. In remote Patusan, no one will know about the Patna. The mystery and strangeness of the island appeal to Jim's romantic side; he is eager to \"jump into the unknown\" and is certain he will prove himself worthy of any challenge. As his ship pulls out, Jim shouts to Marlow that \"you shall hear of me.\" He obviously plans to make a name for himself in Patusan. It is important to note that Conrad gives many negative hints about Patusan. Marlow cannot understand why Jim is so overjoyed about going to the remote, alien island. Marlow, who is much more practical than the romantic Jim, gives him a gun and cartridges for his protection. The captain of Jim's ship presents a really negative picture of the island. He refuses to take his passenger upriver in Patusan, for he says it is much too dangerous. Jim will be dropped at the river's mouth to make his own way inland. The captain tells Marlow that Jim is as much a dead man."} |
'He did not return till next morning. He had been kept to dinner and for
the night. There never had been such a wonderful man as Mr. Stein. He
had in his pocket a letter for Cornelius ("the Johnnie who's going to
get the sack," he explained, with a momentary drop in his elation), and
he exhibited with glee a silver ring, such as natives use, worn down
very thin and showing faint traces of chasing.
'This was his introduction to an old chap called Doramin--one of the
principal men out there--a big pot--who had been Mr. Stein's friend in
that country where he had all these adventures. Mr. Stein called him
"war-comrade." War-comrade was good. Wasn't it? And didn't Mr. Stein
speak English wonderfully well? Said he had learned it in Celebes--of
all places! That was awfully funny. Was it not? He did speak with an
accent--a twang--did I notice? That chap Doramin had given him the ring.
They had exchanged presents when they parted for the last time. Sort of
promising eternal friendship. He called it fine--did I not? They had
to make a dash for dear life out of the country when that
Mohammed--Mohammed--What's-his-name had been killed. I knew the story,
of course. Seemed a beastly shame, didn't it? . . .
'He ran on like this, forgetting his plate, with a knife and fork in
hand (he had found me at tiffin), slightly flushed, and with his eyes
darkened many shades, which was with him a sign of excitement. The ring
was a sort of credential--("It's like something you read of in books,"
he threw in appreciatively)--and Doramin would do his best for him. Mr.
Stein had been the means of saving that chap's life on some occasion;
purely by accident, Mr. Stein had said, but he--Jim--had his own opinion
about that. Mr. Stein was just the man to look out for such accidents.
No matter. Accident or purpose, this would serve his turn immensely.
Hoped to goodness the jolly old beggar had not gone off the hooks
meantime. Mr. Stein could not tell. There had been no news for more
than a year; they were kicking up no end of an all-fired row amongst
themselves, and the river was closed. Jolly awkward, this; but, no fear;
he would manage to find a crack to get in.
'He impressed, almost frightened, me with his elated rattle. He was
voluble like a youngster on the eve of a long holiday with a prospect of
delightful scrapes, and such an attitude of mind in a grown man and in
this connection had in it something phenomenal, a little mad, dangerous,
unsafe. I was on the point of entreating him to take things seriously
when he dropped his knife and fork (he had begun eating, or rather
swallowing food, as it were, unconsciously), and began a search all
round his plate. The ring! The ring! Where the devil . . . Ah! Here it
was . . . He closed his big hand on it, and tried all his pockets one
after another. Jove! wouldn't do to lose the thing. He meditated gravely
over his fist. Had it? Would hang the bally affair round his neck! And
he proceeded to do this immediately, producing a string (which looked
like a bit of a cotton shoe-lace) for the purpose. There! That would do
the trick! It would be the deuce if . . . He seemed to catch sight of my
face for the first time, and it steadied him a little. I probably didn't
realise, he said with a naive gravity, how much importance he attached
to that token. It meant a friend; and it is a good thing to have a
friend. He knew something about that. He nodded at me expressively, but
before my disclaiming gesture he leaned his head on his hand and for
a while sat silent, playing thoughtfully with the bread-crumbs on the
cloth . . . "Slam the door--that was jolly well put," he cried, and
jumping up, began to pace the room, reminding me by the set of the
shoulders, the turn of his head, the headlong and uneven stride, of
that night when he had paced thus, confessing, explaining--what you
will--but, in the last instance, living--living before me, under his
own little cloud, with all his unconscious subtlety which could draw
consolation from the very source of sorrow. It was the same mood, the
same and different, like a fickle companion that to-day guiding you
on the true path, with the same eyes, the same step, the same impulse,
to-morrow will lead you hopelessly astray. His tread was assured, his
straying, darkened eyes seemed to search the room for something. One of
his footfalls somehow sounded louder than the other--the fault of his
boots probably--and gave a curious impression of an invisible halt in
his gait. One of his hands was rammed deep into his trousers' pocket,
the other waved suddenly above his head. "Slam the door!" he shouted.
"I've been waiting for that. I'll show yet . . . I'll . . . I'm ready
for any confounded thing . . . I've been dreaming of it . . . Jove! Get
out of this. Jove! This is luck at last . . . You wait. I'll . . ."
'He tossed his head fearlessly, and I confess that for the first and
last time in our acquaintance I perceived myself unexpectedly to be
thoroughly sick of him. Why these vapourings? He was stumping about
the room flourishing his arm absurdly, and now and then feeling on
his breast for the ring under his clothes. Where was the sense of such
exaltation in a man appointed to be a trading-clerk, and in a place
where there was no trade--at that? Why hurl defiance at the universe?
This was not a proper frame of mind to approach any undertaking; an
improper frame of mind not only for him, I said, but for any man. He
stood still over me. Did I think so? he asked, by no means subdued, and
with a smile in which I seemed to detect suddenly something insolent.
But then I am twenty years his senior. Youth is insolent; it is its
right--its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in
this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence. He went off into a
far corner, and coming back, he, figuratively speaking, turned to rend
me. I spoke like that because I--even I, who had been no end kind
to him--even I remembered--remembered--against him--what--what had
happened. And what about others--the--the--world? Where's the wonder he
wanted to get out, meant to get out, meant to stay out--by heavens! And
I talked about proper frames of mind!
'"It is not I or the world who remember," I shouted. "It is you--you,
who remember."
'He did not flinch, and went on with heat, "Forget everything,
everybody, everybody." . . . His voice fell. . . "But you," he added.
'"Yes--me too--if it would help," I said, also in a low tone. After this
we remained silent and languid for a time as if exhausted. Then he began
again, composedly, and told me that Mr. Stein had instructed him to wait
for a month or so, to see whether it was possible for him to remain,
before he began building a new house for himself, so as to avoid
"vain expense." He did make use of funny expressions--Stein did. "Vain
expense" was good. . . . Remain? Why! of course. He would hang on. Let
him only get in--that's all; he would answer for it he would remain.
Never get out. It was easy enough to remain.
'"Don't be foolhardy," I said, rendered uneasy by his threatening tone.
"If you only live long enough you will want to come back."
'"Come back to what?" he asked absently, with his eyes fixed upon the
face of a clock on the wall.
'I was silent for a while. "Is it to be never, then?" I said. "Never,"
he repeated dreamily without looking at me, and then flew into sudden
activity. "Jove! Two o'clock, and I sail at four!"
'It was true. A brigantine of Stein's was leaving for the westward that
afternoon, and he had been instructed to take his passage in her, only
no orders to delay the sailing had been given. I suppose Stein forgot.
He made a rush to get his things while I went aboard my ship, where
he promised to call on his way to the outer roadstead. He turned up
accordingly in a great hurry and with a small leather valise in his
hand. This wouldn't do, and I offered him an old tin trunk of mine
supposed to be water-tight, or at least damp-tight. He effected the
transfer by the simple process of shooting out the contents of his
valise as you would empty a sack of wheat. I saw three books in the
tumble; two small, in dark covers, and a thick green-and-gold volume--a
half-crown complete Shakespeare. "You read this?" I asked. "Yes. Best
thing to cheer up a fellow," he said hastily. I was struck by this
appreciation, but there was no time for Shakespearian talk. A
heavy revolver and two small boxes of cartridges were lying on the
cuddy-table. "Pray take this," I said. "It may help you to remain."
No sooner were these words out of my mouth than I perceived what grim
meaning they could bear. "May help you to get in," I corrected myself
remorsefully. He however was not troubled by obscure meanings; he
thanked me effusively and bolted out, calling Good-bye over his
shoulder. I heard his voice through the ship's side urging his boatmen
to give way, and looking out of the stern-port I saw the boat rounding
under the counter. He sat in her leaning forward, exciting his men with
voice and gestures; and as he had kept the revolver in his hand and
seemed to be presenting it at their heads, I shall never forget the
scared faces of the four Javanese, and the frantic swing of their stroke
which snatched that vision from under my eyes. Then turning away, the
first thing I saw were the two boxes of cartridges on the cuddy-table.
He had forgotten to take them.
'I ordered my gig manned at once; but Jim's rowers, under the impression
that their lives hung on a thread while they had that madman in the
boat, made such excellent time that before I had traversed half the
distance between the two vessels I caught sight of him clambering over
the rail, and of his box being passed up. All the brigantine's canvas
was loose, her mainsail was set, and the windlass was just beginning to
clink as I stepped upon her deck: her master, a dapper little half-caste
of forty or so, in a blue flannel suit, with lively eyes, his round
face the colour of lemon-peel, and with a thin little black moustache
drooping on each side of his thick, dark lips, came forward smirking. He
turned out, notwithstanding his self-satisfied and cheery exterior, to
be of a careworn temperament. In answer to a remark of mine (while Jim
had gone below for a moment) he said, "Oh yes. Patusan." He was going to
carry the gentleman to the mouth of the river, but would "never ascend."
His flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary compiled by
a lunatic. Had Mr. Stein desired him to "ascend," he would have
"reverentially"--(I think he wanted to say respectfully--but devil only
knows)--"reverentially made objects for the safety of properties."
If disregarded, he would have presented "resignation to quit." Twelve
months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius
"propitiated many offertories" to Mr. Rajah Allang and the "principal
populations," on conditions which made the trade "a snare and ashes
in the mouth," yet his ship had been fired upon from the woods by
"irresponsive parties" all the way down the river; which causing his
crew "from exposure to limb to remain silent in hidings," the brigantine
was nearly stranded on a sandbank at the bar, where she "would have
been perishable beyond the act of man." The angry disgust at the
recollection, the pride of his fluency, to which he turned an attentive
ear, struggled for the possession of his broad simple face. He scowled
and beamed at me, and watched with satisfaction the undeniable effect
of his phraseology. Dark frowns ran swiftly over the placid sea, and
the brigantine, with her fore-topsail to the mast and her main-boom
amidships, seemed bewildered amongst the cat's-paws. He told me further,
gnashing his teeth, that the Rajah was a "laughable hyaena" (can't
imagine how he got hold of hyaenas); while somebody else was many
times falser than the "weapons of a crocodile." Keeping one eye on the
movements of his crew forward, he let loose his volubility--comparing
the place to a "cage of beasts made ravenous by long impenitence." I
fancy he meant impunity. He had no intention, he cried, to "exhibit
himself to be made attached purposefully to robbery." The long-drawn
wails, giving the time for the pull of the men catting the anchor,
came to an end, and he lowered his voice. "Plenty too much enough of
Patusan," he concluded, with energy.
'I heard afterwards he had been so indiscreet as to get himself tied up
by the neck with a rattan halter to a post planted in the middle of a
mud-hole before the Rajah's house. He spent the best part of a day and a
whole night in that unwholesome situation, but there is every reason
to believe the thing had been meant as a sort of joke. He brooded for
a while over that horrid memory, I suppose, and then addressed in a
quarrelsome tone the man coming aft to the helm. When he turned to me
again it was to speak judicially, without passion. He would take the
gentleman to the mouth of the river at Batu Kring (Patusan town "being
situated internally," he remarked, "thirty miles"). But in his eyes,
he continued--a tone of bored, weary conviction replacing his previous
voluble delivery--the gentleman was already "in the similitude of a
corpse." "What? What do you say?" I asked. He assumed a startlingly
ferocious demeanour, and imitated to perfection the act of stabbing from
behind. "Already like the body of one deported," he explained, with the
insufferably conceited air of his kind after what they imagine a display
of cleverness. Behind him I perceived Jim smiling silently at me, and
with a raised hand checking the exclamation on my lips.
'Then, while the half-caste, bursting with importance, shouted his
orders, while the yards swung creaking and the heavy boom came surging
over, Jim and I, alone as it were, to leeward of the mainsail, clasped
each other's hands and exchanged the last hurried words. My heart was
freed from that dull resentment which had existed side by side with
interest in his fate. The absurd chatter of the half-caste had given
more reality to the miserable dangers of his path than Stein's careful
statements. On that occasion the sort of formality that had been always
present in our intercourse vanished from our speech; I believe I
called him "dear boy," and he tacked on the words "old man" to some
half-uttered expression of gratitude, as though his risk set off against
my years had made us more equal in age and in feeling. There was a
moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a
glimpse of some everlasting, of some saving truth. He exerted himself to
soothe me as though he had been the more mature of the two. "All right,
all right," he said, rapidly, and with feeling. "I promise to take care
of myself. Yes; I won't take any risks. Not a single blessed risk. Of
course not. I mean to hang out. Don't you worry. Jove! I feel as if
nothing could touch me. Why! this is luck from the word Go. I wouldn't
spoil such a magnificent chance!" . . . A magnificent chance! Well, it
_was_ magnificent, but chances are what men make them, and how was I
to know? As he had said, even I--even I remembered--his--his misfortune
against him. It was true. And the best thing for him was to go.
'My gig had dropped in the wake of the brigantine, and I saw him aft
detached upon the light of the westering sun, raising his cap high above
his head. I heard an indistinct shout, "You--shall--hear--of--me." Of
me, or from me, I don't know which. I think it must have been of me. My
eyes were too dazzled by the glitter of the sea below his feet to see
him clearly; I am fated never to see him clearly; but I can assure you
no man could have appeared less "in the similitude of a corpse," as that
half-caste croaker had put it. I could see the little wretch's face,
the shape and colour of a ripe pumpkin, poked out somewhere under Jim's
elbow. He, too, raised his arm as if for a downward thrust. Absit omen!'
| 2,655 | Chapter 23 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim32.asp | Jim is very impressed with Stein and stays with him until the next morning. He is even more excited about the opportunity than before; he feels certain that Patusan offers him the chance he has been waiting for. Jim has in his pocket a letter for Cornelius and around his neck the silver ring for Doramin, which will ensure Jim's own protection Since Jim is to sail in about two hours, Marlow helps him pack and get ready. He gives Jim a revolver and a box of cartridges to take to Patusan. When Jim sets off for his boat, Marlow hurries after him and goes on board with his friend. The ships' captain is crazy. He refuses to take Jim up the river in Patusan for he feels the island is too dangerous, "a cage of beasts" who are ravenous; instead, he will drop his charge at the mouth of the river, and he must make his own way from there. In reaction, Jim can only smile; the adventure challenges him. Marlow advises Jim to look the island over and then decide whether he wants to come back. Jim is of the opinion that he will never return to England, for he is through with "civilized" life. He has been dreaming and waiting for an opportunity like Patusan offers. In such an alien place, his past should never haunt him again. When it is time for the ship to depart, both Jim and Marlow are clearly emotional; there is a "moment of real and profound intimacy" between the two. They hide it by shaking hands. Then Marlow calls his friend "dear boy" and wishes him well. As the ship leaves, the young sailor calls back to Marlow, who is now on shore; the romantic Jim shouts, "You shall hear of me." | Notes The chapter gives Jim the chance to realize his dream of leaving his past behind. In remote Patusan, no one will know about the Patna. The mystery and strangeness of the island appeal to Jim's romantic side; he is eager to "jump into the unknown" and is certain he will prove himself worthy of any challenge. As his ship pulls out, Jim shouts to Marlow that "you shall hear of me." He obviously plans to make a name for himself in Patusan. It is important to note that Conrad gives many negative hints about Patusan. Marlow cannot understand why Jim is so overjoyed about going to the remote, alien island. Marlow, who is much more practical than the romantic Jim, gives him a gun and cartridges for his protection. The captain of Jim's ship presents a really negative picture of the island. He refuses to take his passenger upriver in Patusan, for he says it is much too dangerous. Jim will be dropped at the river's mouth to make his own way inland. The captain tells Marlow that Jim is as much a dead man. | 301 | 187 | [
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1,232 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/20.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Prince/section_8_part_1.txt | The Prince.chapter xx | chapter xx | null | {"name": "Chapter XX", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210303115306/https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/prince/section9/", "summary": "Whether Fortresses and Many Other Expedients That Princes Commonly Employ Are Useful or Not To defend against internal insurrection, princes have used a variety of strategies. Some have divided towns, some have disarmed the populace, some have tried to woo disloyal subjects, and others have built or destroyed fortresses. The effectiveness of each of these policies depends on the individual conditions, but a few generalizations can be made. Historically, new princes have never prevented their subjects from having weapons. Arming subjects fosters loyalty among the people and defends the prince. Disarming subjects will breed distrust, which leads to civil animosity. But if a prince annexes a state, he must disarm his new subjects. He can allow his supporters in the new state to keep their arms, but eventually they must also be made weaker. The best arrangement is to have the prince's own soldiers occupying the new state. However, weakening an annexed territory by encouraging factionalism only makes it more easily captured by foreigners, as the Venetians learned. Princes become great by defeating opposition. Thus, one way they can enhance their stature is to cunningly foster opposition that can be easily overcome. Moreover, fostering subversion in a new state will help reveal the motives of potential conspirators. Some princes have chosen to build fortresses to curb rebellion. Others have destroyed them, in order to maintain control in newly acquired states. The usefulness of fortresses depends on the specific circumstances. But a fortress will not be able to protect a prince if he is hated by his subjects. The issue is not whether a prince should build a fortress. Rather, a prince should not put all his trust in a fortress, neglecting the attitudes of his people", "analysis": ""} |
1. Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their
subjects; others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions;
others have fostered enmities against themselves; others have laid
themselves out to gain over those whom they distrusted in the beginning
of their governments; some have built fortresses; some have overthrown
and destroyed them. And although one cannot give a final judgment on all
of these things unless one possesses the particulars of those states
in which a decision has to be made, nevertheless I will speak as
comprehensively as the matter of itself will admit.
2. There never was a new prince who has disarmed his subjects; rather
when he has found them disarmed he has always armed them, because, by
arming them, those arms become yours, those men who were distrusted
become faithful, and those who were faithful are kept so, and your
subjects become your adherents. And whereas all subjects cannot be
armed, yet when those whom you do arm are benefited, the others can be
handled more freely, and this difference in their treatment, which they
quite understand, makes the former your dependents, and the latter,
considering it to be necessary that those who have the most danger and
service should have the most reward, excuse you. But when you disarm
them, you at once offend them by showing that you distrust them, either
for cowardice or for want of loyalty, and either of these opinions
breeds hatred against you. And because you cannot remain unarmed, it
follows that you turn to mercenaries, which are of the character already
shown; even if they should be good they would not be sufficient to
defend you against powerful enemies and distrusted subjects. Therefore,
as I have said, a new prince in a new principality has always
distributed arms. Histories are full of examples. But when a prince
acquires a new state, which he adds as a province to his old one, then
it is necessary to disarm the men of that state, except those who have
been his adherents in acquiring it; and these again, with time and
opportunity, should be rendered soft and effeminate; and matters should
be managed in such a way that all the armed men in the state shall be
your own soldiers who in your old state were living near you.
3. Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed
to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia by factions and Pisa by
fortresses; and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their
tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily.
This may have been well enough in those times when Italy was in a way
balanced, but I do not believe that it can be accepted as a precept
for to-day, because I do not believe that factions can ever be of use;
rather it is certain that when the enemy comes upon you in divided
cities you are quickly lost, because the weakest party will always
assist the outside forces and the other will not be able to resist.
The Venetians, moved, as I believe, by the above reasons, fostered the
Guelph and Ghibelline factions in their tributary cities; and although
they never allowed them to come to bloodshed, yet they nursed these
disputes amongst them, so that the citizens, distracted by their
differences, should not unite against them. Which, as we saw, did not
afterwards turn out as expected, because, after the rout at Vaila, one
party at once took courage and seized the state. Such methods argue,
therefore, weakness in the prince, because these factions will never be
permitted in a vigorous principality; such methods for enabling one the
more easily to manage subjects are only useful in times of peace, but if
war comes this policy proves fallacious.
4. Without doubt princes become great when they overcome the
difficulties and obstacles by which they are confronted, and therefore
fortune, especially when she desires to make a new prince great, who
has a greater necessity to earn renown than an hereditary one, causes
enemies to arise and form designs against him, in order that he may have
the opportunity of overcoming them, and by them to mount higher, as by a
ladder which his enemies have raised. For this reason many consider that
a wise prince, when he has the opportunity, ought with craft to foster
some animosity against himself, so that, having crushed it, his renown
may rise higher.
5. Princes, especially new ones, have found more fidelity and assistance
in those men who in the beginning of their rule were distrusted than
among those who in the beginning were trusted. Pandolfo Petrucci, Prince
of Siena, ruled his state more by those who had been distrusted than by
others. But on this question one cannot speak generally, for it varies
so much with the individual; I will only say this, that those men who
at the commencement of a princedom have been hostile, if they are of
a description to need assistance to support themselves, can always be
gained over with the greatest ease, and they will be tightly held to
serve the prince with fidelity, inasmuch as they know it to be very
necessary for them to cancel by deeds the bad impression which he had
formed of them; and thus the prince always extracts more profit from
them than from those who, serving him in too much security, may neglect
his affairs. And since the matter demands it, I must not fail to warn a
prince, who by means of secret favours has acquired a new state, that he
must well consider the reasons which induced those to favour him who
did so; and if it be not a natural affection towards him, but only
discontent with their government, then he will only keep them friendly
with great trouble and difficulty, for it will be impossible to satisfy
them. And weighing well the reasons for this in those examples which
can be taken from ancient and modern affairs, we shall find that it is
easier for the prince to make friends of those men who were contented
under the former government, and are therefore his enemies, than of
those who, being discontented with it, were favourable to him and
encouraged him to seize it.
6. It has been a custom with princes, in order to hold their states
more securely, to build fortresses that may serve as a bridle and bit
to those who might design to work against them, and as a place of refuge
from a first attack. I praise this system because it has been made use
of formerly. Notwithstanding that, Messer Nicolo Vitelli in our times
has been seen to demolish two fortresses in Citta di Castello so that he
might keep that state; Guido Ubaldo, Duke of Urbino, on returning to
his dominion, whence he had been driven by Cesare Borgia, razed to the
foundations all the fortresses in that province, and considered that
without them it would be more difficult to lose it; the Bentivogli
returning to Bologna came to a similar decision. Fortresses, therefore,
are useful or not according to circumstances; if they do you good in one
way they injure you in another. And this question can be reasoned thus:
the prince who has more to fear from the people than from foreigners
ought to build fortresses, but he who has more to fear from foreigners
than from the people ought to leave them alone. The castle of Milan,
built by Francesco Sforza, has made, and will make, more trouble for the
house of Sforza than any other disorder in the state. For this reason
the best possible fortress is--not to be hated by the people, because,
although you may hold the fortresses, yet they will not save you if the
people hate you, for there will never be wanting foreigners to assist
a people who have taken arms against you. It has not been seen in our
times that such fortresses have been of use to any prince, unless to the
Countess of Forli,(*) when the Count Girolamo, her consort, was killed;
for by that means she was able to withstand the popular attack and wait
for assistance from Milan, and thus recover her state; and the posture
of affairs was such at that time that the foreigners could not assist
the people. But fortresses were of little value to her afterwards when
Cesare Borgia attacked her, and when the people, her enemy, were allied
with foreigners. Therefore, it would have been safer for her, both then
and before, not to have been hated by the people than to have had the
fortresses. All these things considered then, I shall praise him
who builds fortresses as well as him who does not, and I shall blame
whoever, trusting in them, cares little about being hated by the people.
(*) Catherine Sforza, a daughter of Galeazzo Sforza and
Lucrezia Landriani, born 1463, died 1509. It was to the
Countess of Forli that Machiavelli was sent as envoy on 1499.
A letter from Fortunati to the countess announces the
appointment: "I have been with the signori," wrote
Fortunati, "to learn whom they would send and when. They
tell me that Nicolo Machiavelli, a learned young Florentine
noble, secretary to my Lords of the Ten, is to leave with me
at once." Cf. "Catherine Sforza," by Count Pasolini,
translated by P. Sylvester, 1898.
| 1,503 | Chapter XX | https://web.archive.org/web/20210303115306/https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/prince/section9/ | Whether Fortresses and Many Other Expedients That Princes Commonly Employ Are Useful or Not To defend against internal insurrection, princes have used a variety of strategies. Some have divided towns, some have disarmed the populace, some have tried to woo disloyal subjects, and others have built or destroyed fortresses. The effectiveness of each of these policies depends on the individual conditions, but a few generalizations can be made. Historically, new princes have never prevented their subjects from having weapons. Arming subjects fosters loyalty among the people and defends the prince. Disarming subjects will breed distrust, which leads to civil animosity. But if a prince annexes a state, he must disarm his new subjects. He can allow his supporters in the new state to keep their arms, but eventually they must also be made weaker. The best arrangement is to have the prince's own soldiers occupying the new state. However, weakening an annexed territory by encouraging factionalism only makes it more easily captured by foreigners, as the Venetians learned. Princes become great by defeating opposition. Thus, one way they can enhance their stature is to cunningly foster opposition that can be easily overcome. Moreover, fostering subversion in a new state will help reveal the motives of potential conspirators. Some princes have chosen to build fortresses to curb rebellion. Others have destroyed them, in order to maintain control in newly acquired states. The usefulness of fortresses depends on the specific circumstances. But a fortress will not be able to protect a prince if he is hated by his subjects. The issue is not whether a prince should build a fortress. Rather, a prince should not put all his trust in a fortress, neglecting the attitudes of his people | null | 286 | 1 | [
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28,054 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/19.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Brothers Karamazov/section_18_part_0.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 3.chapter 6 | book 3, chapter 6 | null | {"name": "Book 3, Chapter 6", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-3-chapter-6", "summary": "When Alyosha enters his father's home, his father and brother Ivan are finishing dinner and the servants attend them in the dining room. Here we're given a little background on Smerdyakov, Stinking Lizaveta's son. A quiet, sullen child, Smerdyakov was discovered to have the \"falling sickness\" ; he would fall into fits every month or so. For some reason Fyodor grew quite fond of the boy after his illness was discovered. One day, Smerdyakov was found picking through his soup, and Fyodor decided that Smerdyakov should be trained as a chef. After training in Moscow, Smerdyakov came back to be Fyodor's cook. Now 24, he is just as sullen and silent as ever.", "analysis": ""} | Chapter VI. Smerdyakov
He did in fact find his father still at table. Though there was a dining-
room in the house, the table was laid as usual in the drawing-room, which
was the largest room, and furnished with old-fashioned ostentation. The
furniture was white and very old, upholstered in old, red, silky material.
In the spaces between the windows there were mirrors in elaborate white
and gilt frames, of old-fashioned carving. On the walls, covered with
white paper, which was torn in many places, there hung two large
portraits--one of some prince who had been governor of the district thirty
years before, and the other of some bishop, also long since dead. In the
corner opposite the door there were several ikons, before which a lamp was
lighted at nightfall ... not so much for devotional purposes as to light
the room. Fyodor Pavlovitch used to go to bed very late, at three or four
o'clock in the morning, and would wander about the room at night or sit in
an arm-chair, thinking. This had become a habit with him. He often slept
quite alone in the house, sending his servants to the lodge; but usually
Smerdyakov remained, sleeping on a bench in the hall.
When Alyosha came in, dinner was over, but coffee and preserves had been
served. Fyodor Pavlovitch liked sweet things with brandy after dinner.
Ivan was also at table, sipping coffee. The servants, Grigory and
Smerdyakov, were standing by. Both the gentlemen and the servants seemed
in singularly good spirits. Fyodor Pavlovitch was roaring with laughter.
Before he entered the room, Alyosha heard the shrill laugh he knew so
well, and could tell from the sound of it that his father had only reached
the good-humored stage, and was far from being completely drunk.
"Here he is! Here he is!" yelled Fyodor Pavlovitch, highly delighted at
seeing Alyosha. "Join us. Sit down. Coffee is a lenten dish, but it's hot
and good. I don't offer you brandy, you're keeping the fast. But would you
like some? No; I'd better give you some of our famous liqueur. Smerdyakov,
go to the cupboard, the second shelf on the right. Here are the keys. Look
sharp!"
Alyosha began refusing the liqueur.
"Never mind. If you won't have it, we will," said Fyodor Pavlovitch,
beaming. "But stay--have you dined?"
"Yes," answered Alyosha, who had in truth only eaten a piece of bread and
drunk a glass of kvas in the Father Superior's kitchen. "Though I should
be pleased to have some hot coffee."
"Bravo, my darling! He'll have some coffee. Does it want warming? No, it's
boiling. It's capital coffee: Smerdyakov's making. My Smerdyakov's an
artist at coffee and at fish patties, and at fish soup, too. You must come
one day and have some fish soup. Let me know beforehand.... But, stay;
didn't I tell you this morning to come home with your mattress and pillow
and all? Have you brought your mattress? He he he!"
"No, I haven't," said Alyosha, smiling, too.
"Ah, but you were frightened, you were frightened this morning, weren't
you? There, my darling, I couldn't do anything to vex you. Do you know,
Ivan, I can't resist the way he looks one straight in the face and laughs?
It makes me laugh all over. I'm so fond of him. Alyosha, let me give you
my blessing--a father's blessing."
Alyosha rose, but Fyodor Pavlovitch had already changed his mind.
"No, no," he said. "I'll just make the sign of the cross over you, for
now. Sit still. Now we've a treat for you, in your own line, too. It'll
make you laugh. Balaam's ass has begun talking to us here--and how he
talks! How he talks!"
Balaam's ass, it appeared, was the valet, Smerdyakov. He was a young man
of about four and twenty, remarkably unsociable and taciturn. Not that he
was shy or bashful. On the contrary, he was conceited and seemed to
despise everybody.
But we must pause to say a few words about him now. He was brought up by
Grigory and Marfa, but the boy grew up "with no sense of gratitude," as
Grigory expressed it; he was an unfriendly boy, and seemed to look at the
world mistrustfully. In his childhood he was very fond of hanging cats,
and burying them with great ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet as
though it were a surplice, and sang, and waved some object over the dead
cat as though it were a censer. All this he did on the sly, with the
greatest secrecy. Grigory caught him once at this diversion and gave him a
sound beating. He shrank into a corner and sulked there for a week. "He
doesn't care for you or me, the monster," Grigory used to say to Marfa,
"and he doesn't care for any one. Are you a human being?" he said,
addressing the boy directly. "You're not a human being. You grew from the
mildew in the bath-house.(2) That's what you are." Smerdyakov, it appeared
afterwards, could never forgive him those words. Grigory taught him to
read and write, and when he was twelve years old, began teaching him the
Scriptures. But this teaching came to nothing. At the second or third
lesson the boy suddenly grinned.
"What's that for?" asked Grigory, looking at him threateningly from under
his spectacles.
"Oh, nothing. God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon, and
stars on the fourth day. Where did the light come from on the first day?"
Grigory was thunderstruck. The boy looked sarcastically at his teacher.
There was something positively condescending in his expression. Grigory
could not restrain himself. "I'll show you where!" he cried, and gave the
boy a violent slap on the cheek. The boy took the slap without a word, but
withdrew into his corner again for some days. A week later he had his
first attack of the disease to which he was subject all the rest of his
life--epilepsy. When Fyodor Pavlovitch heard of it, his attitude to the boy
seemed changed at once. Till then he had taken no notice of him, though he
never scolded him, and always gave him a copeck when he met him.
Sometimes, when he was in good humor, he would send the boy something
sweet from his table. But as soon as he heard of his illness, he showed an
active interest in him, sent for a doctor, and tried remedies, but the
disease turned out to be incurable. The fits occurred, on an average, once
a month, but at various intervals. The fits varied too, in violence: some
were light and some were very severe. Fyodor Pavlovitch strictly forbade
Grigory to use corporal punishment to the boy, and began allowing him to
come upstairs to him. He forbade him to be taught anything whatever for a
time, too. One day when the boy was about fifteen, Fyodor Pavlovitch
noticed him lingering by the bookcase, and reading the titles through the
glass. Fyodor Pavlovitch had a fair number of books--over a hundred--but no
one ever saw him reading. He at once gave Smerdyakov the key of the
bookcase. "Come, read. You shall be my librarian. You'll be better sitting
reading than hanging about the courtyard. Come, read this," and Fyodor
Pavlovitch gave him _Evenings in a Cottage near Dikanka_.
He read a little but didn't like it. He did not once smile, and ended by
frowning.
"Why? Isn't it funny?" asked Fyodor Pavlovitch.
Smerdyakov did not speak.
"Answer, stupid!"
"It's all untrue," mumbled the boy, with a grin.
"Then go to the devil! You have the soul of a lackey. Stay, here's
Smaragdov's _Universal History_. That's all true. Read that."
But Smerdyakov did not get through ten pages of Smaragdov. He thought it
dull. So the bookcase was closed again.
Shortly afterwards Marfa and Grigory reported to Fyodor Pavlovitch that
Smerdyakov was gradually beginning to show an extraordinary
fastidiousness. He would sit before his soup, take up his spoon and look
into the soup, bend over it, examine it, take a spoonful and hold it to
the light.
"What is it? A beetle?" Grigory would ask.
"A fly, perhaps," observed Marfa.
The squeamish youth never answered, but he did the same with his bread,
his meat, and everything he ate. He would hold a piece on his fork to the
light, scrutinize it microscopically, and only after long deliberation
decide to put it in his mouth.
"Ach! What fine gentlemen's airs!" Grigory muttered, looking at him.
When Fyodor Pavlovitch heard of this development in Smerdyakov he
determined to make him his cook, and sent him to Moscow to be trained. He
spent some years there and came back remarkably changed in appearance. He
looked extraordinarily old for his age. His face had grown wrinkled,
yellow, and strangely emasculate. In character he seemed almost exactly
the same as before he went away. He was just as unsociable, and showed not
the slightest inclination for any companionship. In Moscow, too, as we
heard afterwards, he had always been silent. Moscow itself had little
interest for him; he saw very little there, and took scarcely any notice
of anything. He went once to the theater, but returned silent and
displeased with it. On the other hand, he came back to us from Moscow well
dressed, in a clean coat and clean linen. He brushed his clothes most
scrupulously twice a day invariably, and was very fond of cleaning his
smart calf boots with a special English polish, so that they shone like
mirrors. He turned out a first-rate cook. Fyodor Pavlovitch paid him a
salary, almost the whole of which Smerdyakov spent on clothes, pomade,
perfumes, and such things. But he seemed to have as much contempt for the
female sex as for men; he was discreet, almost unapproachable, with them.
Fyodor Pavlovitch began to regard him rather differently. His fits were
becoming more frequent, and on the days he was ill Marfa cooked, which did
not suit Fyodor Pavlovitch at all.
"Why are your fits getting worse?" asked Fyodor Pavlovitch, looking
askance at his new cook. "Would you like to get married? Shall I find you
a wife?"
But Smerdyakov turned pale with anger, and made no reply. Fyodor
Pavlovitch left him with an impatient gesture. The great thing was that he
had absolute confidence in his honesty. It happened once, when Fyodor
Pavlovitch was drunk, that he dropped in the muddy courtyard three
hundred-rouble notes which he had only just received. He only missed them
next day, and was just hastening to search his pockets when he saw the
notes lying on the table. Where had they come from? Smerdyakov had picked
them up and brought them in the day before.
"Well, my lad, I've never met any one like you," Fyodor Pavlovitch said
shortly, and gave him ten roubles. We may add that he not only believed in
his honesty, but had, for some reason, a liking for him, although the
young man looked as morosely at him as at every one and was always silent.
He rarely spoke. If it had occurred to any one to wonder at the time what
the young man was interested in, and what was in his mind, it would have
been impossible to tell by looking at him. Yet he used sometimes to stop
suddenly in the house, or even in the yard or street, and would stand
still for ten minutes, lost in thought. A physiognomist studying his face
would have said that there was no thought in it, no reflection, but only a
sort of contemplation. There is a remarkable picture by the painter
Kramskoy, called "Contemplation." There is a forest in winter, and on a
roadway through the forest, in absolute solitude, stands a peasant in a
torn kaftan and bark shoes. He stands, as it were, lost in thought. Yet he
is not thinking; he is "contemplating." If any one touched him he would
start and look at one as though awakening and bewildered. It's true he
would come to himself immediately; but if he were asked what he had been
thinking about, he would remember nothing. Yet probably he has, hidden
within himself, the impression which had dominated him during the period
of contemplation. Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards
them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he
does not know either. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many
years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his
soul's salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native
village, and perhaps do both. There are a good many "contemplatives" among
the peasantry. Well, Smerdyakov was probably one of them, and he probably
was greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.
| 1,968 | Book 3, Chapter 6 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-3-chapter-6 | When Alyosha enters his father's home, his father and brother Ivan are finishing dinner and the servants attend them in the dining room. Here we're given a little background on Smerdyakov, Stinking Lizaveta's son. A quiet, sullen child, Smerdyakov was discovered to have the "falling sickness" ; he would fall into fits every month or so. For some reason Fyodor grew quite fond of the boy after his illness was discovered. One day, Smerdyakov was found picking through his soup, and Fyodor decided that Smerdyakov should be trained as a chef. After training in Moscow, Smerdyakov came back to be Fyodor's cook. Now 24, he is just as sullen and silent as ever. | null | 113 | 1 | [
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110 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/03.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_0_part_3.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 3 | chapter 3 | null | {"name": "CHAPTER 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD11.asp", "summary": "This chapter has Tess rushing back home to check on her father after having seen his earlier peculiar behavior. She learns from her mother, Joan that her father's odd behavior is because of the D'Urberville connection and not due to excessive drinking. Her mother also tells Tess that her father has just learned he has a problem with his heart, and has gone to Rolliver's Inn to gather strength from drinking. Tess is upset that her mother has let him go and offers to go and bring him home. Joan says she wants to go out and will fetch John from the Inn. Tess is left to watch after her younger brothers and sisters. She also thinks about Angel Clare, the suave young man at the dance. When it grows late and her parents fail to return, she goes out to find them.", "analysis": "Notes The readers are further introduced to the Durbeyfields. They are obviously a poor family lacking many basic amenities of life. The father is not very responsible, choosing to call a carriage in order to feel aristocratic and going to the Inn to gain strength from drinking. The mother is not much more intelligent or responsible. She is superstitious and often consults her fortune-telling book. She also goes to retrieve her husband and obviously stays at the Inn to drink with him. In contrast to her irresponsible parents, Tess is portrayed as loyal , concerned , and responsible. It is important to note that this entire chapter, set in the dark, somber house, is a complete contrast to the previous chapter where all is white, bright, gay, and elegant as the young ladies dance at the May-Day Dance. Throughout the book, Hardy will use such contrasts to develop his plot, mood, and theme"} |
As for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge the incident
from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long
time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but ah! they did
not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not
till the rays of the sun had absorbed the young stranger's retreating
figure on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and
answered her would-be partner in the affirmative.
She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a
certain zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she
enjoyed treading a measure purely for its own sake; little divining
when she saw "the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing
pains, and the agreeable distresses" of those girls who had been
wooed and won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The
struggles and wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an
amusement to her--no more; and when they became fierce she rebuked
them.
She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father's
odd appearance and manner returned upon the girl's mind to make her
anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from
the dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at
which the parental cottage lay.
While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she
had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well--so
well. They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of
the house, occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone
floor, to which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a
vigorous gallopade, the favourite ditty of "The Spotted Cow"--
I saw her lie do'-own in yon'-der green gro'-ove;
Come, love!' and I'll tell' you where!'
The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a
moment, and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take the
place of the melody.
"God bless thy diment eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy cherry
mouth! And thy Cubit's thighs! And every bit o' thy blessed body!"
After this invocation the rocking and the singing would recommence,
and the "Spotted Cow" proceed as before. So matters stood when Tess
opened the door and paused upon the mat within it, surveying the
scene.
The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl's senses
with an unspeakable dreariness. From the holiday gaieties of the
field--the white gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling
movements on the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the
stranger--to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled spectacle,
what a step! Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill
self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother
in these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.
There stood her mother amid the group of children, as Tess had left
her, hanging over the Monday washing-tub, which had now, as always,
lingered on to the end of the week. Out of that tub had come the day
before--Tess felt it with a dreadful sting of remorse--the very white
frock upon her back which she had so carelessly greened about the
skirt on the damping grass--which had been wrung up and ironed by her
mother's own hands.
As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside the tub,
the other being engaged in the aforesaid business of rocking her
youngest child. The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many
years, under the weight of so many children, on that flagstone floor,
that they were worn nearly flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk
accompanied each swing of the cot, flinging the baby from side to
side like a weaver's shuttle, as Mrs Durbeyfield, excited by her
song, trod the rocker with all the spring that was left in her after
a long day's seething in the suds.
Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame stretched
itself tall, and began jigging up and down; the water dribbled from
the matron's elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the
verse, Mrs Durbeyfield regarding her daughter the while. Even now,
when burdened with a young family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate
lover of tune. No ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer
world but Tess's mother caught up its notation in a week.
There still faintly beamed from the woman's features something of
the freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it
probable that the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in
main part her mother's gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.
"I'll rock the cradle for 'ee, mother," said the daughter gently.
"Or I'll take off my best frock and help you wring up? I thought you
had finished long ago."
Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the housework to her
single-handed efforts for so long; indeed, Joan seldom upbraided
her thereon at any time, feeling but slightly the lack of Tess's
assistance whilst her instinctive plan for relieving herself of her
labours lay in postponing them. To-night, however, she was even in a
blither mood than usual. There was a dreaminess, a pre-occupation,
an exaltation, in the maternal look which the girl could not
understand.
"Well, I'm glad you've come," her mother said, as soon as the last
note had passed out of her. "I want to go and fetch your father;
but what's more'n that, I want to tell 'ee what have happened. Y'll
be fess enough, my poppet, when th'st know!" (Mrs Durbeyfield
habitually spoke the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth
Standard in the National School under a London-trained mistress,
spoke two languages: the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary
English abroad and to persons of quality.)
"Since I've been away?" Tess asked.
"Ay!"
"Had it anything to do with father's making such a mommet of himself
in thik carriage this afternoon? Why did 'er? I felt inclined to
sink into the ground with shame!"
"That wer all a part of the larry! We've been found to be the
greatest gentlefolk in the whole county--reaching all back long
before Oliver Grumble's time--to the days of the Pagan Turks--with
monuments, and vaults, and crests, and 'scutcheons, and the Lord
knows what all. In Saint Charles's days we was made Knights o' the
Royal Oak, our real name being d'Urberville! ... Don't that make
your bosom plim? 'Twas on this account that your father rode home
in the vlee; not because he'd been drinking, as people supposed."
"I'm glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?"
"O yes! 'Tis thoughted that great things may come o't. No doubt a
mampus of volk of our own rank will be down here in their carriages
as soon as 'tis known. Your father learnt it on his way hwome
from Shaston, and he has been telling me the whole pedigree of the
matter."
"Where is father now?" asked Tess suddenly.
Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer: "He called
to see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not consumption at all,
it seems. It is fat round his heart, 'a says. There, it is like
this." Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb
and forefinger to the shape of the letter C, and used the other
forefinger as a pointer. "'At the present moment,' he says to your
father, 'your heart is enclosed all round there, and all round
there; this space is still open,' 'a says. 'As soon as it do
meet, so,'"--Mrs Durbeyfield closed her fingers into a circle
complete--"'off you will go like a shadder, Mr Durbeyfield,' 'a says.
'You mid last ten years; you mid go off in ten months, or ten days.'"
Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the eternal
cloud so soon, notwithstanding this sudden greatness!
"But where IS father?" she asked again.
Her mother put on a deprecating look. "Now don't you be bursting out
angry! The poor man--he felt so rafted after his uplifting by the
pa'son's news--that he went up to Rolliver's half an hour ago. He do
want to get up his strength for his journey to-morrow with that load
of beehives, which must be delivered, family or no. He'll have to
start shortly after twelve to-night, as the distance is so long."
"Get up his strength!" said Tess impetuously, the tears welling to
her eyes. "O my God! Go to a public-house to get up his strength!
And you as well agreed as he, mother!"
Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room, and to impart
a cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and children playing
about, and to her mother's face.
"No," said the latter touchily, "I be not agreed. I have been
waiting for 'ee to bide and keep house while I go fetch him."
"I'll go."
"O no, Tess. You see, it would be no use."
Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother's objection
meant. Mrs Durbeyfield's jacket and bonnet were already hanging
slily upon a chair by her side, in readiness for this contemplated
jaunt, the reason for which the matron deplored more than its
necessity.
"And take the _Compleat Fortune-Teller_ to the outhouse," Joan
continued, rapidly wiping her hands, and donning the garments.
The _Compleat Fortune-Teller_ was an old thick volume, which lay on a
table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached
the edge of the type. Tess took it up, and her mother started.
This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn was one of
Mrs Durbeyfield's still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of
rearing children. To discover him at Rolliver's, to sit there for
an hour or two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the
children during the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an
occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities
took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere
mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as
pressing concretions which chafed body and soul. The youngsters,
not immediately within sight, seemed rather bright and desirable
appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents of daily life were not
without humorousness and jollity in their aspect there. She felt a
little as she had used to feel when she sat by her now wedded husband
in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her eyes to his defects
of character, and regarding him only in his ideal presentation as
lover.
Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the
outhouse with the fortune-telling book, and stuffed it into the
thatch. A curious fetishistic fear of this grimy volume on the part
of her mother prevented her ever allowing it to stay in the house all
night, and hither it was brought back whenever it had been consulted.
Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions,
folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter,
with her trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an
infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as
ordinarily understood. When they were together the Jacobean and the
Victorian ages were juxtaposed.
Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could
have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She
guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not
divine that it solely concerned herself. Dismissing this, however,
she busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried during the
day-time, in company with her nine-year-old brother Abraham, and her
sister Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called "'Liza-Lu," the
youngest ones being put to bed. There was an interval of four years
and more between Tess and the next of the family, the two who had
filled the gap having died in their infancy, and this lent her a
deputy-maternal attitude when she was alone with her juniors. Next
in juvenility to Abraham came two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then
a boy of three, and then the baby, who had just completed his first
year.
All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield
ship--entirely dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield
adults for their pleasures, their necessities, their health, even
their existence. If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose
to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation,
death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches
compelled to sail with them--six helpless creatures, who had never
been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they
wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of
the shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know
whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound
and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority
for speaking of "Nature's holy plan."
It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared. Tess looked
out of the door, and took a mental journey through Marlott. The
village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put
out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the
extended hand.
Her mother's fetching simply meant one more to fetch. Tess began to
perceive that a man in indifferent health, who proposed to start on a
journey before one in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this
late hour celebrating his ancient blood.
"Abraham," she said to her little brother, "do you put on your
hat--you bain't afraid?--and go up to Rolliver's, and see what has
gone wi' father and mother."
The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the door, and the
night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed yet again; neither man,
woman, nor child returned. Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have
been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.
"I must go myself," she said.
'Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in, started on
her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty
progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when
one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.
| 2,249 | CHAPTER 3 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD11.asp | This chapter has Tess rushing back home to check on her father after having seen his earlier peculiar behavior. She learns from her mother, Joan that her father's odd behavior is because of the D'Urberville connection and not due to excessive drinking. Her mother also tells Tess that her father has just learned he has a problem with his heart, and has gone to Rolliver's Inn to gather strength from drinking. Tess is upset that her mother has let him go and offers to go and bring him home. Joan says she wants to go out and will fetch John from the Inn. Tess is left to watch after her younger brothers and sisters. She also thinks about Angel Clare, the suave young man at the dance. When it grows late and her parents fail to return, she goes out to find them. | Notes The readers are further introduced to the Durbeyfields. They are obviously a poor family lacking many basic amenities of life. The father is not very responsible, choosing to call a carriage in order to feel aristocratic and going to the Inn to gain strength from drinking. The mother is not much more intelligent or responsible. She is superstitious and often consults her fortune-telling book. She also goes to retrieve her husband and obviously stays at the Inn to drink with him. In contrast to her irresponsible parents, Tess is portrayed as loyal , concerned , and responsible. It is important to note that this entire chapter, set in the dark, somber house, is a complete contrast to the previous chapter where all is white, bright, gay, and elegant as the young ladies dance at the May-Day Dance. Throughout the book, Hardy will use such contrasts to develop his plot, mood, and theme | 143 | 153 | [
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28,054 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/23.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Brothers Karamazov/section_3_part_10.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 3.chapter 10 | book 3, chapter 10 | null | {"name": "book 3, Chapter 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section4/", "summary": "The Two Together Alyosha visits Katerina at Madame Khokhlakov's house and is surprised to find that Grushenka is also there. Grushenka has just promised Katerina that she is going to leave Dmitri for a former lover, and Katerina will have him back soon. Katerina is grateful and overjoyed, but when she tells Alyosha what has happened, Grushenka insults her and says that she may decide to stay with Dmitri after all. On his way out of the house, Alyosha is stopped by a maid, who gives him a letter from Lise", "analysis": ""} | Chapter X. Both Together
Alyosha left his father's house feeling even more exhausted and dejected
in spirit than when he had entered it. His mind too seemed shattered and
unhinged, while he felt that he was afraid to put together the disjointed
fragments and form a general idea from all the agonizing and conflicting
experiences of the day. He felt something bordering upon despair, which he
had never known till then. Towering like a mountain above all the rest
stood the fatal, insoluble question: How would things end between his
father and his brother Dmitri with this terrible woman? Now he had himself
been a witness of it, he had been present and seen them face to face. Yet
only his brother Dmitri could be made unhappy, terribly, completely
unhappy: there was trouble awaiting him. It appeared too that there were
other people concerned, far more so than Alyosha could have supposed
before. There was something positively mysterious in it, too. Ivan had
made a step towards him, which was what Alyosha had been long desiring.
Yet now he felt for some reason that he was frightened at it. And these
women? Strange to say, that morning he had set out for Katerina Ivanovna's
in the greatest embarrassment; now he felt nothing of the kind. On the
contrary, he was hastening there as though expecting to find guidance from
her. Yet to give her this message was obviously more difficult than
before. The matter of the three thousand was decided irrevocably, and
Dmitri, feeling himself dishonored and losing his last hope, might sink to
any depth. He had, moreover, told him to describe to Katerina Ivanovna the
scene which had just taken place with his father.
It was by now seven o'clock, and it was getting dark as Alyosha entered
the very spacious and convenient house in the High Street occupied by
Katerina Ivanovna. Alyosha knew that she lived with two aunts. One of
them, a woman of little education, was that aunt of her half-sister Agafya
Ivanovna who had looked after her in her father's house when she came from
boarding-school. The other aunt was a Moscow lady of style and
consequence, though in straitened circumstances. It was said that they
both gave way in everything to Katerina Ivanovna, and that she only kept
them with her as chaperons. Katerina Ivanovna herself gave way to no one
but her benefactress, the general's widow, who had been kept by illness in
Moscow, and to whom she was obliged to write twice a week a full account
of all her doings.
When Alyosha entered the hall and asked the maid who opened the door to
him to take his name up, it was evident that they were already aware of
his arrival. Possibly he had been noticed from the window. At least,
Alyosha heard a noise, caught the sound of flying footsteps and rustling
skirts. Two or three women, perhaps, had run out of the room.
Alyosha thought it strange that his arrival should cause such excitement.
He was conducted however to the drawing-room at once. It was a large room,
elegantly and amply furnished, not at all in provincial style. There were
many sofas, lounges, settees, big and little tables. There were pictures
on the walls, vases and lamps on the tables, masses of flowers, and even
an aquarium in the window. It was twilight and rather dark. Alyosha made
out a silk mantle thrown down on the sofa, where people had evidently just
been sitting; and on a table in front of the sofa were two unfinished cups
of chocolate, cakes, a glass saucer with blue raisins, and another with
sweetmeats. Alyosha saw that he had interrupted visitors, and frowned. But
at that instant the portiere was raised, and with rapid, hurrying
footsteps Katerina Ivanovna came in, holding out both hands to Alyosha
with a radiant smile of delight. At the same instant a servant brought in
two lighted candles and set them on the table.
"Thank God! At last you have come too! I've been simply praying for you
all day! Sit down."
Alyosha had been struck by Katerina Ivanovna's beauty when, three weeks
before, Dmitri had first brought him, at Katerina Ivanovna's special
request, to be introduced to her. There had been no conversation between
them at that interview, however. Supposing Alyosha to be very shy,
Katerina Ivanovna had talked all the time to Dmitri to spare him. Alyosha
had been silent, but he had seen a great deal very clearly. He was struck
by the imperiousness, proud ease, and self-confidence of the haughty girl.
And all that was certain, Alyosha felt that he was not exaggerating it. He
thought her great glowing black eyes were very fine, especially with her
pale, even rather sallow, longish face. But in those eyes and in the lines
of her exquisite lips there was something with which his brother might
well be passionately in love, but which perhaps could not be loved for
long. He expressed this thought almost plainly to Dmitri when, after the
visit, his brother besought and insisted that he should not conceal his
impressions on seeing his betrothed.
"You'll be happy with her, but perhaps--not tranquilly happy."
"Quite so, brother. Such people remain always the same. They don't yield
to fate. So you think I shan't love her for ever."
"No; perhaps you will love her for ever. But perhaps you won't always be
happy with her."
Alyosha had given his opinion at the time, blushing, and angry with
himself for having yielded to his brother's entreaties and put such
"foolish" ideas into words. For his opinion had struck him as awfully
foolish immediately after he had uttered it. He felt ashamed too of having
given so confident an opinion about a woman. It was with the more
amazement that he felt now, at the first glance at Katerina Ivanovna as
she ran in to him, that he had perhaps been utterly mistaken. This time
her face was beaming with spontaneous good-natured kindliness, and direct
warm-hearted sincerity. The "pride and haughtiness," which had struck
Alyosha so much before, was only betrayed now in a frank, generous energy
and a sort of bright, strong faith in herself. Alyosha realized at the
first glance, at the first word, that all the tragedy of her position in
relation to the man she loved so dearly was no secret to her; that she
perhaps already knew everything, positively everything. And yet, in spite
of that, there was such brightness in her face, such faith in the future.
Alyosha felt at once that he had gravely wronged her in his thoughts. He
was conquered and captivated immediately. Besides all this, he noticed at
her first words that she was in great excitement, an excitement perhaps
quite exceptional and almost approaching ecstasy.
"I was so eager to see you, because I can learn from you the whole
truth--from you and no one else."
"I have come," muttered Alyosha confusedly, "I--he sent me."
"Ah, he sent you! I foresaw that. Now I know everything--everything!" cried
Katerina Ivanovna, her eyes flashing. "Wait a moment, Alexey Fyodorovitch,
I'll tell you why I've been so longing to see you. You see, I know perhaps
far more than you do yourself, and there's no need for you to tell me
anything. I'll tell you what I want from you. I want to know your own last
impression of him. I want you to tell me most directly, plainly, coarsely
even (oh, as coarsely as you like!), what you thought of him just now and
of his position after your meeting with him to-day. That will perhaps be
better than if I had a personal explanation with him, as he does not want
to come to me. Do you understand what I want from you? Now, tell me
simply, tell me every word of the message he sent you with (I knew he
would send you)."
"He told me to give you his compliments--and to say that he would never
come again--but to give you his compliments."
"His compliments? Was that what he said--his own expression?"
"Yes."
"Accidentally perhaps he made a mistake in the word, perhaps he did not
use the right word?"
"No; he told me precisely to repeat that word. He begged me two or three
times not to forget to say so."
Katerina Ivanovna flushed hotly.
"Help me now, Alexey Fyodorovitch. Now I really need your help. I'll tell
you what I think, and you must simply say whether it's right or not.
Listen! If he had sent me his compliments in passing, without insisting on
your repeating the words, without emphasizing them, that would be the end
of everything! But if he particularly insisted on those words, if he
particularly told you not to forget to repeat them to me, then perhaps he
was in excitement, beside himself. He had made his decision and was
frightened at it. He wasn't walking away from me with a resolute step, but
leaping headlong. The emphasis on that phrase may have been simply
bravado."
"Yes, yes!" cried Alyosha warmly. "I believe that is it."
"And, if so, he's not altogether lost. I can still save him. Stay! Did he
not tell you anything about money--about three thousand roubles?"
"He did speak about it, and it's that more than anything that's crushing
him. He said he had lost his honor and that nothing matters now," Alyosha
answered warmly, feeling a rush of hope in his heart and believing that
there really might be a way of escape and salvation for his brother. "But
do you know about the money?" he added, and suddenly broke off.
"I've known of it a long time; I telegraphed to Moscow to inquire, and
heard long ago that the money had not arrived. He hadn't sent the money,
but I said nothing. Last week I learnt that he was still in need of money.
My only object in all this was that he should know to whom to turn, and
who was his true friend. No, he won't recognize that I am his truest
friend; he won't know me, and looks on me merely as a woman. I've been
tormented all the week, trying to think how to prevent him from being
ashamed to face me because he spent that three thousand. Let him feel
ashamed of himself, let him be ashamed of other people's knowing, but not
of my knowing. He can tell God everything without shame. Why is it he
still does not understand how much I am ready to bear for his sake? Why,
why doesn't he know me? How dare he not know me after all that has
happened? I want to save him for ever. Let him forget me as his betrothed.
And here he fears that he is dishonored in my eyes. Why, he wasn't afraid
to be open with you, Alexey Fyodorovitch. How is it that I don't deserve
the same?"
The last words she uttered in tears. Tears gushed from her eyes.
"I must tell you," Alyosha began, his voice trembling too, "what happened
just now between him and my father."
And he described the whole scene, how Dmitri had sent him to get the
money, how he had broken in, knocked his father down, and after that had
again specially and emphatically begged him to take his compliments and
farewell. "He went to that woman," Alyosha added softly.
"And do you suppose that I can't put up with that woman? Does he think I
can't? But he won't marry her," she suddenly laughed nervously. "Could
such a passion last for ever in a Karamazov? It's passion, not love. He
won't marry her because she won't marry him." Again Katerina Ivanovna
laughed strangely.
"He may marry her," said Alyosha mournfully, looking down.
"He won't marry her, I tell you. That girl is an angel. Do you know that?
Do you know that?" Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed suddenly with extraordinary
warmth. "She is one of the most fantastic of fantastic creatures. I know
how bewitching she is, but I know too that she is kind, firm and noble.
Why do you look at me like that, Alexey Fyodorovitch? Perhaps you are
wondering at my words, perhaps you don't believe me? Agrafena
Alexandrovna, my angel!" she cried suddenly to some one, peeping into the
next room, "come in to us. This is a friend. This is Alyosha. He knows all
about our affairs. Show yourself to him."
"I've only been waiting behind the curtain for you to call me," said a
soft, one might even say sugary, feminine voice.
The portiere was raised and Grushenka herself, smiling and beaming, came
up to the table. A violent revulsion passed over Alyosha. He fixed his
eyes on her and could not take them off. Here she was, that awful woman,
the "beast," as Ivan had called her half an hour before. And yet one would
have thought the creature standing before him most simple and ordinary, a
good-natured, kind woman, handsome certainly, but so like other handsome
ordinary women! It is true she was very, very good-looking with that
Russian beauty so passionately loved by many men. She was a rather tall
woman, though a little shorter than Katerina Ivanovna, who was
exceptionally tall. She had a full figure, with soft, as it were,
noiseless, movements, softened to a peculiar over-sweetness, like her
voice. She moved, not like Katerina Ivanovna, with a vigorous, bold step,
but noiselessly. Her feet made absolutely no sound on the floor. She sank
softly into a low chair, softly rustling her sumptuous black silk dress,
and delicately nestling her milk-white neck and broad shoulders in a
costly cashmere shawl. She was twenty-two years old, and her face looked
exactly that age. She was very white in the face, with a pale pink tint on
her cheeks. The modeling of her face might be said to be too broad, and
the lower jaw was set a trifle forward. Her upper lip was thin, but the
slightly prominent lower lip was at least twice as full, and looked
pouting. But her magnificent, abundant dark brown hair, her sable-colored
eyebrows and charming gray-blue eyes with their long lashes would have
made the most indifferent person, meeting her casually in a crowd in the
street, stop at the sight of her face and remember it long after. What
struck Alyosha most in that face was its expression of childlike good
nature. There was a childlike look in her eyes, a look of childish
delight. She came up to the table, beaming with delight and seeming to
expect something with childish, impatient, and confiding curiosity. The
light in her eyes gladdened the soul--Alyosha felt that. There was
something else in her which he could not understand, or would not have
been able to define, and which yet perhaps unconsciously affected him. It
was that softness, that voluptuousness of her bodily movements, that
catlike noiselessness. Yet it was a vigorous, ample body. Under the shawl
could be seen full broad shoulders, a high, still quite girlish bosom. Her
figure suggested the lines of the Venus of Milo, though already in
somewhat exaggerated proportions. That could be divined. Connoisseurs of
Russian beauty could have foretold with certainty that this fresh, still
youthful beauty would lose its harmony by the age of thirty, would
"spread"; that the face would become puffy, and that wrinkles would very
soon appear upon her forehead and round the eyes; the complexion would
grow coarse and red perhaps--in fact, that it was the beauty of the moment,
the fleeting beauty which is so often met with in Russian women. Alyosha,
of course, did not think of this; but though he was fascinated, yet he
wondered with an unpleasant sensation, and as it were regretfully, why she
drawled in that way and could not speak naturally. She did so evidently
feeling there was a charm in the exaggerated, honeyed modulation of the
syllables. It was, of course, only a bad, underbred habit that showed bad
education and a false idea of good manners. And yet this intonation and
manner of speaking impressed Alyosha as almost incredibly incongruous with
the childishly simple and happy expression of her face, the soft, babyish
joy in her eyes. Katerina Ivanovna at once made her sit down in an arm-
chair facing Alyosha, and ecstatically kissed her several times on her
smiling lips. She seemed quite in love with her.
"This is the first time we've met, Alexey Fyodorovitch," she said
rapturously. "I wanted to know her, to see her. I wanted to go to her, but
I'd no sooner expressed the wish than she came to me. I knew we should
settle everything together--everything. My heart told me so--I was begged
not to take the step, but I foresaw it would be a way out of the
difficulty, and I was not mistaken. Grushenka has explained everything to
me, told me all she means to do. She flew here like an angel of goodness
and brought us peace and joy."
"You did not disdain me, sweet, excellent young lady," drawled Grushenka
in her sing-song voice, still with the same charming smile of delight.
"Don't dare to speak to me like that, you sorceress, you witch! Disdain
you! Here, I must kiss your lower lip once more. It looks as though it
were swollen, and now it will be more so, and more and more. Look how she
laughs, Alexey Fyodorovitch! It does one's heart good to see the angel."
Alyosha flushed, and faint, imperceptible shivers kept running down him.
"You make so much of me, dear young lady, and perhaps I am not at all
worthy of your kindness."
"Not worthy! She's not worthy of it!" Katerina Ivanovna cried again with
the same warmth. "You know, Alexey Fyodorovitch, we're fanciful, we're
self-willed, but proudest of the proud in our little heart. We're noble,
we're generous, Alexey Fyodorovitch, let me tell you. We have only been
unfortunate. We were too ready to make every sacrifice for an unworthy,
perhaps, or fickle man. There was one man--one, an officer too, we loved
him, we sacrificed everything to him. That was long ago, five years ago,
and he has forgotten us, he has married. Now he is a widower, he has
written, he is coming here, and, do you know, we've loved him, none but
him, all this time, and we've loved him all our life! He will come, and
Grushenka will be happy again. For the last five years she's been
wretched. But who can reproach her, who can boast of her favor? Only that
bedridden old merchant, but he is more like her father, her friend, her
protector. He found her then in despair, in agony, deserted by the man she
loved. She was ready to drown herself then, but the old merchant saved
her--saved her!"
"You defend me very kindly, dear young lady. You are in a great hurry
about everything," Grushenka drawled again.
"Defend you! Is it for me to defend you? Should I dare to defend you?
Grushenka, angel, give me your hand. Look at that charming soft little
hand, Alexey Fyodorovitch! Look at it! It has brought me happiness and has
lifted me up, and I'm going to kiss it, outside and inside, here, here,
here!"
And three times she kissed the certainly charming, though rather fat, hand
of Grushenka in a sort of rapture. She held out her hand with a charming
musical, nervous little laugh, watched the "sweet young lady," and
obviously liked having her hand kissed.
"Perhaps there's rather too much rapture," thought Alyosha. He blushed. He
felt a peculiar uneasiness at heart the whole time.
"You won't make me blush, dear young lady, kissing my hand like this
before Alexey Fyodorovitch."
"Do you think I meant to make you blush?" said Katerina Ivanovna, somewhat
surprised. "Ah, my dear, how little you understand me!"
"Yes, and you too perhaps quite misunderstand me, dear young lady. Maybe
I'm not so good as I seem to you. I've a bad heart; I will have my own
way. I fascinated poor Dmitri Fyodorovitch that day simply for fun."
"But now you'll save him. You've given me your word. You'll explain it all
to him. You'll break to him that you have long loved another man, who is
now offering you his hand."
"Oh, no! I didn't give you my word to do that. It was you kept talking
about that. I didn't give you my word."
"Then I didn't quite understand you," said Katerina Ivanovna slowly,
turning a little pale. "You promised--"
"Oh, no, angel lady, I've promised nothing," Grushenka interrupted softly
and evenly, still with the same gay and simple expression. "You see at
once, dear young lady, what a willful wretch I am compared with you. If I
want to do a thing I do it. I may have made you some promise just now. But
now again I'm thinking: I may take to Mitya again. I liked him very much
once--liked him for almost a whole hour. Now maybe I shall go and tell him
to stay with me from this day forward. You see, I'm so changeable."
"Just now you said--something quite different," Katerina Ivanovna whispered
faintly.
"Ah, just now! But, you know. I'm such a soft-hearted, silly creature.
Only think what he's gone through on my account! What if when I go home I
feel sorry for him? What then?"
"I never expected--"
"Ah, young lady, how good and generous you are compared with me! Now
perhaps you won't care for a silly creature like me, now you know my
character. Give me your sweet little hand, angelic lady," she said
tenderly, and with a sort of reverence took Katerina Ivanovna's hand.
"Here, dear young lady, I'll take your hand and kiss it as you did mine.
You kissed mine three times, but I ought to kiss yours three hundred times
to be even with you. Well, but let that pass. And then it shall be as God
wills. Perhaps I shall be your slave entirely and want to do your bidding
like a slave. Let it be as God wills, without any agreements and promises.
What a sweet hand--what a sweet hand you have! You sweet young lady, you
incredible beauty!"
She slowly raised the hands to her lips, with the strange object indeed of
"being even" with her in kisses.
Katerina Ivanovna did not take her hand away. She listened with timid hope
to the last words, though Grushenka's promise to do her bidding like a
slave was very strangely expressed. She looked intently into her eyes; she
still saw in those eyes the same simple-hearted, confiding expression, the
same bright gayety.
"She's perhaps too naive," thought Katerina Ivanovna, with a gleam of
hope.
Grushenka meanwhile seemed enthusiastic over the "sweet hand." She raised
it deliberately to her lips. But she held it for two or three minutes near
her lips, as though reconsidering something.
"Do you know, angel lady," she suddenly drawled in an even more soft and
sugary voice, "do you know, after all, I think I won't kiss your hand?"
And she laughed a little merry laugh.
"As you please. What's the matter with you?" said Katerina Ivanovna,
starting suddenly.
"So that you may be left to remember that you kissed my hand, but I didn't
kiss yours."
There was a sudden gleam in her eyes. She looked with awful intentness at
Katerina Ivanovna.
"Insolent creature!" cried Katerina Ivanovna, as though suddenly grasping
something. She flushed all over and leapt up from her seat.
Grushenka too got up, but without haste.
"So I shall tell Mitya how you kissed my hand, but I didn't kiss yours at
all. And how he will laugh!"
"Vile slut! Go away!"
"Ah, for shame, young lady! Ah, for shame! That's unbecoming for you, dear
young lady, a word like that."
"Go away! You're a creature for sale!" screamed Katerina Ivanovna. Every
feature was working in her utterly distorted face.
"For sale indeed! You used to visit gentlemen in the dusk for money once;
you brought your beauty for sale. You see, I know."
Katerina Ivanovna shrieked, and would have rushed at her, but Alyosha held
her with all his strength.
"Not a step, not a word! Don't speak, don't answer her. She'll go
away--she'll go at once."
At that instant Katerina Ivanovna's two aunts ran in at her cry, and with
them a maid-servant. All hurried to her.
"I will go away," said Grushenka, taking up her mantle from the sofa.
"Alyosha, darling, see me home!"
"Go away--go away, make haste!" cried Alyosha, clasping his hands
imploringly.
"Dear little Alyosha, see me home! I've got a pretty little story to tell
you on the way. I got up this scene for your benefit, Alyosha. See me
home, dear, you'll be glad of it afterwards."
Alyosha turned away, wringing his hands. Grushenka ran out of the house,
laughing musically.
Katerina Ivanovna went into a fit of hysterics. She sobbed, and was shaken
with convulsions. Every one fussed round her.
"I warned you," said the elder of her aunts. "I tried to prevent your
doing this. You're too impulsive. How could you do such a thing? You don't
know these creatures, and they say she's worse than any of them. You are
too self-willed."
"She's a tigress!" yelled Katerina Ivanovna. "Why did you hold me, Alexey
Fyodorovitch? I'd have beaten her--beaten her!"
She could not control herself before Alyosha; perhaps she did not care to,
indeed.
"She ought to be flogged in public on a scaffold!"
Alyosha withdrew towards the door.
"But, my God!" cried Katerina Ivanovna, clasping her hands. "He! He! He
could be so dishonorable, so inhuman! Why, he told that creature what
happened on that fatal, accursed day! 'You brought your beauty for sale,
dear young lady.' She knows it! Your brother's a scoundrel, Alexey
Fyodorovitch."
Alyosha wanted to say something, but he couldn't find a word. His heart
ached.
"Go away, Alexey Fyodorovitch! It's shameful, it's awful for me! To-
morrow, I beg you on my knees, come to-morrow. Don't condemn me. Forgive
me. I don't know what I shall do with myself now!"
Alyosha walked out into the street reeling. He could have wept as she did.
Suddenly he was overtaken by the maid.
"The young lady forgot to give you this letter from Madame Hohlakov; it's
been left with us since dinner-time."
Alyosha took the little pink envelope mechanically and put it, almost
unconsciously, into his pocket.
| 4,058 | book 3, Chapter 10 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section4/ | The Two Together Alyosha visits Katerina at Madame Khokhlakov's house and is surprised to find that Grushenka is also there. Grushenka has just promised Katerina that she is going to leave Dmitri for a former lover, and Katerina will have him back soon. Katerina is grateful and overjoyed, but when she tells Alyosha what has happened, Grushenka insults her and says that she may decide to stay with Dmitri after all. On his way out of the house, Alyosha is stopped by a maid, who gives him a letter from Lise | null | 91 | 1 | [
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110 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/60.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_58_part_0.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 59 | chapter 59 | null | {"name": "Phase VII: \"Fulfillment,\" Chapter Fifty-Nine", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210424232301/http://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary/chapter-59", "summary": "Angel and 'Liza-Lu are in the county capitol of Wintoncester, looking completely anguished and walking hand in hand. They stand in the street outside the prison, staring at an empty flagpole in the ugly tower. A few minutes past the hour, a black flag is raised on the pole, indicating that \"justice\" had been done Angel and 'Liza-Lu both kneel on the ground to pray. After a while, they stand, join hands again, and walk slowly away.", "analysis": ""} |
The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime capital
of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the
brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and
freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument
of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping
High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediaeval cross, and from
the mediaeval cross to the bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping
was in progress which usually ushers in an old-fashioned market-day.
From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every Wintoncestrian
knows, ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a
measured mile, leaving the houses gradually behind. Up this road
from the precincts of the city two persons were walking rapidly,
as if unconscious of the trying ascent--unconscious through
preoccupation and not through buoyancy. They had emerged upon this
road through a narrow, barred wicket in a high wall a little lower
down. They seemed anxious to get out of the sight of the houses and
of their kind, and this road appeared to offer the quickest means
of doing so. Though they were young, they walked with bowed heads,
which gait of grief the sun's rays smiled on pitilessly.
One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall budding
creature--half girl, half woman--a spiritualized image of Tess,
slighter than she, but with the same beautiful eyes--Clare's
sister-in-law, 'Liza-Lu. Their pale faces seemed to have shrunk
to half their natural size. They moved on hand in hand, and never
spoke a word, the drooping of their heads being that of Giotto's
"Two Apostles".
When they had nearly reached the top of the great West Hill the
clocks in the town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes,
and, walking onward yet a few steps, they reached the first
milestone, standing whitely on the green margin of the grass, and
backed by the down, which here was open to the road. They entered
upon the turf, and, impelled by a force that seemed to overrule their
will, suddenly stood still, turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense
beside the stone.
The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In the valley
beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings
showing as in an isometric drawing--among them the broad cathedral
tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave,
the spires of St Thomas's, the pinnacled tower of the College, and,
more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice,
where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.
Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine's Hill;
further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost
in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.
Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other
city edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs,
and rows of short barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole
contrasting greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities
of the Gothic erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in
passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible enough up
here. The wicket from which the pair had lately emerged was in the
wall of this structure. From the middle of the building an ugly
flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east horizon, and
viewed from this spot, on its shady side and against the light, it
seemed the one blot on the city's beauty. Yet it was with this blot,
and not with the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.
Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes
were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck
something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the
breeze. It was a black flag.
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean
phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights
and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless
gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and
remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued
to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined
hands again, and went on.
| 685 | Phase VII: "Fulfillment," Chapter Fifty-Nine | https://web.archive.org/web/20210424232301/http://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary/chapter-59 | Angel and 'Liza-Lu are in the county capitol of Wintoncester, looking completely anguished and walking hand in hand. They stand in the street outside the prison, staring at an empty flagpole in the ugly tower. A few minutes past the hour, a black flag is raised on the pole, indicating that "justice" had been done Angel and 'Liza-Lu both kneel on the ground to pray. After a while, they stand, join hands again, and walk slowly away. | null | 77 | 1 | [
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161 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/37.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Sense and Sensibility/section_36_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 37 | chapter 37 | null | {"name": "Chapter 37", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility52.asp", "summary": "Elinor has met Mrs. Ferrars and finds nothing to commend her. She is happy that she will no longer have to associate with her. Lucy is impressed by both Mrs. Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood. She is delighted to earn their favor and hopes that she will be accepted as the new daughter of their house. Just as the two girls are exchanging views about Mrs. Ferrars, Edward enters the room. Both Edward and Elinor feel awkward. Lucy does nothing to ease the situation. Elinor plays the part of a good hostess by exchanging polite remarks with him. She also calls Marianne so that she can speak with Edward. Marianne is overly effusive and asks him to spend some more time with them. Edward, however, takes his leave.", "analysis": "Notes Jane Austen creates an uncomfortable situation, in which both Elinor and Lucy are present before the man they love. Edward feels awkward, and Lucy worsens the condition with her silence. It is Elinor who saves the moment through her presence of mind. She welcomes Edward and encourages him to participate in their conversation. She is magnanimous enough to allow Edward to spend a few minutes alone with Lucy. She shows no bitterness towards Edward. Lucy poses a complete contrast to Elinor. She is cold and indifferent to his feelings. She also mocks him. She feels insecure in the presence of Elinor. Instead of taking leave of them, she shamelessly remains on the scene, much to the discomfort of Edward, Elinor and Marianne. It is interesting that with the exception of Edward, all the other people that Lucy likes, Elinor dislikes. Elinor feels disgusted at the snobbish and rude behavior of both Mrs. Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood, while Lucy finds the mother and daughter delightful company. Elinor is relieved to be spared their company in the future, while Lucy looks forward to a life-long relationship with them. CHAPTER 36 Summary Mrs. Jennings decides to spend more time with her daughter, Charlotte, who has had a baby. Elinor and Marianne are thrown in the compadny of Lady Middleton and the Steele sisters as a result of this. One day they receive an invitation to a musical party. At the party Elinor gets acquainted with Robert Ferrars. She identifies him as the same man who had taken a long time to choose a tooth-pick case at Gray's. She thinks he is a foolish, shallow and conceited man. The Steeles are invited to spend a few days with John Dashwood and his wife. The girls are delighted and inform the Dashwood sisters of the invitation. Shortly afterwards, John Dashwood visits his sisters. He talks about the Misses Steele and how impressed Fanny is with them. Notes This chapter also sparkles with Jane Austen's humor. Speaking of Lady Middleton, Austen writes: \"Though nothing could be more polite than Lady Middleton's behavior to Elinor and Marianne, she did not really like them at all. Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good- natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given.\" Such passages not only showcase Austen's skill as a satirist, but also delineate the ways in which the heroines stand apart from the other characters. One of the most amusing scenes in the chapter is the one in which Fanny Dashwood convinces her husband that it is pointless to invite his sisters to visit them at their house. The scene resembles an earlier one in which Fanny convinces her husband against providing financial help to his sisters. In each case, Fanny tries to make it seem as though logic and propriety, instead of pettiness and malice, influence her decisions. One more character is introduced in the chapter. He is Robert Ferrars. Unlike his brother, he is shallow and conceited and tries to impress young ladies with his limited knowledge. Elinor patiently listens to his prattle. She \"agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.\" CHAPTER 37 Summary Mrs. Jennings informs Elinor of Lucy's engagement to Edward. She also recounts how Fanny reacted when she heard this news. Fanny became hysterical and drove the Steeles out of her house. Later, Mrs. Ferrars summoned Edward and asked him to terminate the engagement. However, Edward stood his ground, and the old lady disinherited him. Elinor relates this information to her sister. Marianne is shocked to hear the news. She condemns both Lucy and Edward for their decision. Notes Two humorous characters describe the scene that occurred in Fanny Dashwood's house when the news of Lucy's engagement to Edward was announced. Mrs. Jennings conveys the gossip of the day with exclamations and imaginary conversations. Talking about Fanny's reaction to the news, she remarks, \"She fell into violent hysterics immediately, with such screams as reached your brother's ears, as he was sitting in his own dressing room downstairs. . . So up he flew directly, and a terrible scene took place, for Lucy was come to them by that time, little dreaming what was going on. Poor Soul!. . . for your sister scolded like any fury, and soon drove her into a fainting fit.\" John Dashwood, however, describes the scene through the eyes of a devoted husband and presents his wife as the offended party.\" Poor Fanny! She was in hysterics all yesterday. . . . She has borne it all with the fortitude of an angel.\" He confounds his wife's devilish rage with an angel's strength. Elinor at last reveals Lucy's secret to Marianne. She controls her own emotions and relates the events cautiously, so as not to shock her sister with the news. She discloses the information without damaging Edward's character. She is generous in excusing his juvenile blunder and wishes him well. Marianne admires her sister's will power and tolerance."} |
Mrs. Palmer was so well at the end of a fortnight, that her mother felt
it no longer necessary to give up the whole of her time to her; and,
contenting herself with visiting her once or twice a day, returned from
that period to her own home, and her own habits, in which she found the
Miss Dashwoods very ready to resume their former share.
About the third or fourth morning after their being thus resettled in
Berkeley Street, Mrs. Jennings, on returning from her ordinary visit to
Mrs. Palmer, entered the drawing-room, where Elinor was sitting by
herself, with an air of such hurrying importance as prepared her to
hear something wonderful; and giving her time only to form that idea,
began directly to justify it, by saying,
"Lord! my dear Miss Dashwood! have you heard the news?"
"No, ma'am. What is it?"
"Something so strange! But you shall hear it all.-- When I got to Mr.
Palmer's, I found Charlotte quite in a fuss about the child. She was
sure it was very ill--it cried, and fretted, and was all over pimples.
So I looked at it directly, and, 'Lord! my dear,' says I, 'it is
nothing in the world, but the red gum--' and nurse said just the same.
But Charlotte, she would not be satisfied, so Mr. Donavan was sent for;
and luckily he happened to just come in from Harley Street, so he
stepped over directly, and as soon as ever Mama, he said
just as we did, that it was nothing in the world but the red gum, and
then Charlotte was easy. And so, just as he was going away again, it
came into my head, I am sure I do not know how I happened to think of
it, but it came into my head to ask him if there was any news. So upon
that, he smirked, and simpered, and looked grave, and seemed to know
something or other, and at last he said in a whisper, 'For fear any
unpleasant report should reach the young ladies under your care as to
their sister's indisposition, I think it advisable to say, that I
believe there is no great reason for alarm; I hope Mrs. Dashwood will
do very well.'"
"What! is Fanny ill?"
"That is exactly what I said, my dear. 'Lord!' says I, 'is Mrs.
Dashwood ill?' So then it all came out; and the long and the short of
the matter, by all I can learn, seems to be this. Mr. Edward Ferrars,
the very young man I used to joke with you about (but however, as it
turns out, I am monstrous glad there was never any thing in it), Mr.
Edward Ferrars, it seems, has been engaged above this twelvemonth to my
cousin Lucy!--There's for you, my dear!--And not a creature knowing a
syllable of the matter, except Nancy!--Could you have believed such a
thing possible?-- There is no great wonder in their liking one another;
but that matters should be brought so forward between them, and nobody
suspect it!--THAT is strange!--I never happened to see them together,
or I am sure I should have found it out directly. Well, and so this
was kept a great secret, for fear of Mrs. Ferrars, and neither she nor
your brother or sister suspected a word of the matter;--till this very
morning, poor Nancy, who, you know, is a well-meaning creature, but no
conjurer, popt it all out. 'Lord!' thinks she to herself, 'they are
all so fond of Lucy, to be sure they will make no difficulty about it;'
and so, away she went to your sister, who was sitting all alone at her
carpet-work, little suspecting what was to come--for she had just been
saying to your brother, only five minutes before, that she thought to
make a match between Edward and some Lord's daughter or other, I forget
who. So you may think what a blow it was to all her vanity and pride.
She fell into violent hysterics immediately, with such screams as
reached your brother's ears, as he was sitting in his own dressing-room
down stairs, thinking about writing a letter to his steward in the
country. So up he flew directly, and a terrible scene took place, for
Lucy was come to them by that time, little dreaming what was going on.
Poor soul! I pity HER. And I must say, I think she was used very
hardly; for your sister scolded like any fury, and soon drove her into
a fainting fit. Nancy, she fell upon her knees, and cried bitterly;
and your brother, he walked about the room, and said he did not know
what to do. Mrs. Dashwood declared they should not stay a minute
longer in the house, and your brother was forced to go down upon HIS
knees too, to persuade her to let them stay till they had packed up
their clothes. THEN she fell into hysterics again, and he was so
frightened that he would send for Mr. Donavan, and Mr. Donavan found
the house in all this uproar. The carriage was at the door ready to
take my poor cousins away, and they were just stepping in as he came
off; poor Lucy in such a condition, he says, she could hardly walk; and
Nancy, she was almost as bad. I declare, I have no patience with your
sister; and I hope, with all my heart, it will be a match in spite of
her. Lord! what a taking poor Mr. Edward will be in when he hears of
it! To have his love used so scornfully! for they say he is monstrous
fond of her, as well he may. I should not wonder, if he was to be in
the greatest passion!--and Mr. Donavan thinks just the same. He and I
had a great deal of talk about it; and the best of all is, that he is
gone back again to Harley Street, that he may be within call when Mrs.
Ferrars is told of it, for she was sent for as soon as ever my cousins
left the house, for your sister was sure SHE would be in hysterics too;
and so she may, for what I care. I have no pity for either of them. I
have no notion of people's making such a to-do about money and
greatness. There is no reason on earth why Mr. Edward and Lucy should
not marry; for I am sure Mrs. Ferrars may afford to do very well by her
son, and though Lucy has next to nothing herself, she knows better than
any body how to make the most of every thing; I dare say, if Mrs.
Ferrars would only allow him five hundred a-year, she would make as
good an appearance with it as any body else would with eight. Lord!
how snug they might live in such another cottage as yours--or a little
bigger--with two maids, and two men; and I believe I could help them to
a housemaid, for my Betty has a sister out of place, that would fit
them exactly."
Here Mrs. Jennings ceased, and as Elinor had had time enough to collect
her thoughts, she was able to give such an answer, and make such
observations, as the subject might naturally be supposed to produce.
Happy to find that she was not suspected of any extraordinary interest
in it; that Mrs. Jennings (as she had of late often hoped might be the
case) had ceased to imagine her at all attached to Edward; and happy
above all the rest, in the absence of Marianne, she felt very well able
to speak of the affair without embarrassment, and to give her judgment,
as she believed, with impartiality on the conduct of every one
concerned in it.
She could hardly determine what her own expectation of its event really
was; though she earnestly tried to drive away the notion of its being
possible to end otherwise at last, than in the marriage of Edward and
Lucy. What Mrs. Ferrars would say and do, though there could not be a
doubt of its nature, she was anxious to hear; and still more anxious to
know how Edward would conduct himself. For HIM she felt much
compassion;--for Lucy very little--and it cost her some pains to
procure that little;--for the rest of the party none at all.
As Mrs. Jennings could talk on no other subject, Elinor soon saw the
necessity of preparing Marianne for its discussion. No time was to be
lost in undeceiving her, in making her acquainted with the real truth,
and in endeavouring to bring her to hear it talked of by others,
without betraying that she felt any uneasiness for her sister, or any
resentment against Edward.
Elinor's office was a painful one.--She was going to remove what she
really believed to be her sister's chief consolation,--to give such
particulars of Edward as she feared would ruin him for ever in her good
opinion,-and to make Marianne, by a resemblance in their situations,
which to HER fancy would seem strong, feel all her own disappointment
over again. But unwelcome as such a task must be, it was necessary to
be done, and Elinor therefore hastened to perform it.
She was very far from wishing to dwell on her own feelings, or to
represent herself as suffering much, any otherwise than as the
self-command she had practised since her first knowledge of Edward's
engagement, might suggest a hint of what was practicable to Marianne.
Her narration was clear and simple; and though it could not be given
without emotion, it was not accompanied by violent agitation, nor
impetuous grief.--THAT belonged rather to the hearer, for Marianne
listened with horror, and cried excessively. Elinor was to be the
comforter of others in her own distresses, no less than in theirs; and
all the comfort that could be given by assurances of her own composure
of mind, and a very earnest vindication of Edward from every charge but
of imprudence, was readily offered.
But Marianne for some time would give credit to neither. Edward seemed
a second Willoughby; and acknowledging as Elinor did, that she HAD
loved him most sincerely, could she feel less than herself! As for
Lucy Steele, she considered her so totally unamiable, so absolutely
incapable of attaching a sensible man, that she could not be persuaded
at first to believe, and afterwards to pardon, any former affection of
Edward for her. She would not even admit it to have been natural; and
Elinor left her to be convinced that it was so, by that which only
could convince her, a better knowledge of mankind.
Her first communication had reached no farther than to state the fact
of the engagement, and the length of time it had existed.--Marianne's
feelings had then broken in, and put an end to all regularity of
detail; and for some time all that could be done was to soothe her
distress, lessen her alarms, and combat her resentment. The first
question on her side, which led to farther particulars, was,--
"How long has this been known to you, Elinor? has he written to you?"
"I have known it these four months. When Lucy first came to Barton
Park last November, she told me in confidence of her engagement."
At these words, Marianne's eyes expressed the astonishment which her
lips could not utter. After a pause of wonder, she exclaimed--
"Four months!--Have you known of this four months?"
Elinor confirmed it.
"What!--while attending me in all my misery, has this been on your
heart?--And I have reproached you for being happy!"--
"It was not fit that you should then know how much I was the reverse!"
"Four months!"--cried Marianne again.--"So calm!--so cheerful!--how
have you been supported?"--
"By feeling that I was doing my duty.--My promise to Lucy, obliged me
to be secret. I owed it to her, therefore, to avoid giving any hint of
the truth; and I owed it to my family and friends, not to create in
them a solicitude about me, which it could not be in my power to
satisfy."
Marianne seemed much struck.
"I have very often wished to undeceive yourself and my mother," added
Elinor; "and once or twice I have attempted it;--but without betraying
my trust, I never could have convinced you."
"Four months!--and yet you loved him!"--
"Yes. But I did not love only him;--and while the comfort of others was
dear to me, I was glad to spare them from knowing how much I felt.
Now, I can think and speak of it with little emotion. I would not have
you suffer on my account; for I assure you I no longer suffer
materially myself. I have many things to support me. I am not
conscious of having provoked the disappointment by any imprudence of my
own, I have borne it as much as possible without spreading it farther.
I acquit Edward of essential misconduct. I wish him very happy; and I
am so sure of his always doing his duty, that though now he may harbour
some regret, in the end he must become so. Lucy does not want sense,
and that is the foundation on which every thing good may be built.--And
after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a
single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one's
happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not
meant--it is not fit--it is not possible that it should be so.-- Edward
will marry Lucy; he will marry a woman superior in person and
understanding to half her sex; and time and habit will teach him to
forget that he ever thought another superior to HER."--
"If such is your way of thinking," said Marianne, "if the loss of what
is most valued is so easily to be made up by something else, your
resolution, your self-command, are, perhaps, a little less to be
wondered at.--They are brought more within my comprehension."
"I understand you.--You do not suppose that I have ever felt much.--For
four months, Marianne, I have had all this hanging on my mind, without
being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature; knowing that it
would make you and my mother most unhappy whenever it were explained to
you, yet unable to prepare you for it in the least.-- It was told
me,--it was in a manner forced on me by the very person herself, whose
prior engagement ruined all my prospects; and told me, as I thought,
with triumph.-- This person's suspicions, therefore, I have had to
oppose, by endeavouring to appear indifferent where I have been most
deeply interested;--and it has not been only once;--I have had her
hopes and exultation to listen to again and again.-- I have known
myself to be divided from Edward for ever, without hearing one
circumstance that could make me less desire the connection.--Nothing
has proved him unworthy; nor has anything declared him indifferent to
me.-- I have had to contend against the unkindness of his sister, and
the insolence of his mother; and have suffered the punishment of an
attachment, without enjoying its advantages.-- And all this has been
going on at a time, when, as you know too well, it has not been my only
unhappiness.-- If you can think me capable of ever feeling--surely you
may suppose that I have suffered NOW. The composure of mind with which
I have brought myself at present to consider the matter, the
consolation that I have been willing to admit, have been the effect of
constant and painful exertion;--they did not spring up of
themselves;--they did not occur to relieve my spirits at first.-- No,
Marianne.--THEN, if I had not been bound to silence, perhaps nothing
could have kept me entirely--not even what I owed to my dearest
friends--from openly shewing that I was VERY unhappy."--
Marianne was quite subdued.--
"Oh! Elinor," she cried, "you have made me hate myself for ever.--How
barbarous have I been to you!--you, who have been my only comfort, who
have borne with me in all my misery, who have seemed to be only
suffering for me!--Is this my gratitude?--Is this the only return I can
make you?--Because your merit cries out upon myself, I have been trying
to do it away."
The tenderest caresses followed this confession. In such a frame of
mind as she was now in, Elinor had no difficulty in obtaining from her
whatever promise she required; and at her request, Marianne engaged
never to speak of the affair to any one with the least appearance of
bitterness;--to meet Lucy without betraying the smallest increase of
dislike to her;--and even to see Edward himself, if chance should bring
them together, without any diminution of her usual cordiality.-- These
were great concessions;--but where Marianne felt that she had injured,
no reparation could be too much for her to make.
She performed her promise of being discreet, to admiration.--She
attended to all that Mrs. Jennings had to say upon the subject, with an
unchanging complexion, dissented from her in nothing, and was heard
three times to say, "Yes, ma'am."--She listened to her praise of Lucy
with only moving from one chair to another, and when Mrs. Jennings
talked of Edward's affection, it cost her only a spasm in her
throat.--Such advances towards heroism in her sister, made Elinor feel
equal to any thing herself.
The next morning brought a farther trial of it, in a visit from their
brother, who came with a most serious aspect to talk over the dreadful
affair, and bring them news of his wife.
"You have heard, I suppose," said he with great solemnity, as soon as
he was seated, "of the very shocking discovery that took place under
our roof yesterday."
They all looked their assent; it seemed too awful a moment for speech.
"Your sister," he continued, "has suffered dreadfully. Mrs. Ferrars
too--in short it has been a scene of such complicated distress--but I
will hope that the storm may be weathered without our being any of us
quite overcome. Poor Fanny! she was in hysterics all yesterday. But I
would not alarm you too much. Donavan says there is nothing materially
to be apprehended; her constitution is a good one, and her resolution
equal to any thing. She has borne it all, with the fortitude of an
angel! She says she never shall think well of anybody again; and one
cannot wonder at it, after being so deceived!--meeting with such
ingratitude, where so much kindness had been shewn, so much confidence
had been placed! It was quite out of the benevolence of her heart,
that she had asked these young women to her house; merely because she
thought they deserved some attention, were harmless, well-behaved
girls, and would be pleasant companions; for otherwise we both wished
very much to have invited you and Marianne to be with us, while your
kind friend there, was attending her daughter. And now to be so
rewarded! 'I wish, with all my heart,' says poor Fanny in her
affectionate way, 'that we had asked your sisters instead of them.'"
Here he stopped to be thanked; which being done, he went on.
"What poor Mrs. Ferrars suffered, when first Fanny broke it to her, is
not to be described. While she with the truest affection had been
planning a most eligible connection for him, was it to be supposed that
he could be all the time secretly engaged to another person!--such a
suspicion could never have entered her head! If she suspected ANY
prepossession elsewhere, it could not be in THAT quarter. 'THERE, to
be sure,' said she, 'I might have thought myself safe.' She was quite
in an agony. We consulted together, however, as to what should be
done, and at last she determined to send for Edward. He came. But I
am sorry to relate what ensued. All that Mrs. Ferrars could say to
make him put an end to the engagement, assisted too as you may well
suppose by my arguments, and Fanny's entreaties, was of no avail.
Duty, affection, every thing was disregarded. I never thought Edward
so stubborn, so unfeeling before. His mother explained to him her
liberal designs, in case of his marrying Miss Morton; told him she
would settle on him the Norfolk estate, which, clear of land-tax,
brings in a good thousand a-year; offered even, when matters grew
desperate, to make it twelve hundred; and in opposition to this, if he
still persisted in this low connection, represented to him the certain
penury that must attend the match. His own two thousand pounds she
protested should be his all; she would never see him again; and so far
would she be from affording him the smallest assistance, that if he
were to enter into any profession with a view of better support, she
would do all in her power to prevent him advancing in it."
Here Marianne, in an ecstasy of indignation, clapped her hands
together, and cried, "Gracious God! can this be possible!"
"Well may you wonder, Marianne," replied her brother, "at the obstinacy
which could resist such arguments as these. Your exclamation is very
natural."
Marianne was going to retort, but she remembered her promises, and
forbore.
"All this, however," he continued, "was urged in vain. Edward said
very little; but what he did say, was in the most determined manner.
Nothing should prevail on him to give up his engagement. He would
stand to it, cost him what it might."
"Then," cried Mrs. Jennings with blunt sincerity, no longer able to be
silent, "he has acted like an honest man! I beg your pardon, Mr.
Dashwood, but if he had done otherwise, I should have thought him a
rascal. I have some little concern in the business, as well as
yourself, for Lucy Steele is my cousin, and I believe there is not a
better kind of girl in the world, nor one who more deserves a good
husband."
John Dashwood was greatly astonished; but his nature was calm, not open
to provocation, and he never wished to offend anybody, especially
anybody of good fortune. He therefore replied, without any resentment,
"I would by no means speak disrespectfully of any relation of yours,
madam. Miss Lucy Steele is, I dare say, a very deserving young woman,
but in the present case you know, the connection must be impossible.
And to have entered into a secret engagement with a young man under her
uncle's care, the son of a woman especially of such very large fortune
as Mrs. Ferrars, is perhaps, altogether a little extraordinary. In
short, I do not mean to reflect upon the behaviour of any person whom
you have a regard for, Mrs. Jennings. We all wish her extremely happy;
and Mrs. Ferrars's conduct throughout the whole, has been such as every
conscientious, good mother, in like circumstances, would adopt. It has
been dignified and liberal. Edward has drawn his own lot, and I fear
it will be a bad one."
Marianne sighed out her similar apprehension; and Elinor's heart wrung
for the feelings of Edward, while braving his mother's threats, for a
woman who could not reward him.
"Well, sir," said Mrs. Jennings, "and how did it end?"
"I am sorry to say, ma'am, in a most unhappy rupture:-- Edward is
dismissed for ever from his mother's notice. He left her house
yesterday, but where he is gone, or whether he is still in town, I do
not know; for WE of course can make no inquiry."
"Poor young man!--and what is to become of him?"
"What, indeed, ma'am! It is a melancholy consideration. Born to the
prospect of such affluence! I cannot conceive a situation more
deplorable. The interest of two thousand pounds--how can a man live on
it?--and when to that is added the recollection, that he might, but for
his own folly, within three months have been in the receipt of two
thousand, five hundred a-year (for Miss Morton has thirty thousand
pounds,) I cannot picture to myself a more wretched condition. We must
all feel for him; and the more so, because it is totally out of our
power to assist him."
"Poor young man!" cried Mrs. Jennings, "I am sure he should be very
welcome to bed and board at my house; and so I would tell him if I
could see him. It is not fit that he should be living about at his own
charge now, at lodgings and taverns."
Elinor's heart thanked her for such kindness towards Edward, though she
could not forbear smiling at the form of it.
"If he would only have done as well by himself," said John Dashwood,
"as all his friends were disposed to do by him, he might now have been
in his proper situation, and would have wanted for nothing. But as it
is, it must be out of anybody's power to assist him. And there is one
thing more preparing against him, which must be worse than all--his
mother has determined, with a very natural kind of spirit, to settle
THAT estate upon Robert immediately, which might have been Edward's, on
proper conditions. I left her this morning with her lawyer, talking
over the business."
"Well!" said Mrs. Jennings, "that is HER revenge. Everybody has a way
of their own. But I don't think mine would be, to make one son
independent, because another had plagued me."
Marianne got up and walked about the room.
"Can anything be more galling to the spirit of a man," continued John,
"than to see his younger brother in possession of an estate which might
have been his own? Poor Edward! I feel for him sincerely."
A few minutes more spent in the same kind of effusion, concluded his
visit; and with repeated assurances to his sisters that he really
believed there was no material danger in Fanny's indisposition, and
that they need not therefore be very uneasy about it, he went away;
leaving the three ladies unanimous in their sentiments on the present
occasion, as far at least as it regarded Mrs. Ferrars's conduct, the
Dashwoods', and Edward's.
Marianne's indignation burst forth as soon as he quitted the room; and
as her vehemence made reserve impossible in Elinor, and unnecessary in
Mrs. Jennings, they all joined in a very spirited critique upon the
party.
| 4,132 | Chapter 37 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility52.asp | Elinor has met Mrs. Ferrars and finds nothing to commend her. She is happy that she will no longer have to associate with her. Lucy is impressed by both Mrs. Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood. She is delighted to earn their favor and hopes that she will be accepted as the new daughter of their house. Just as the two girls are exchanging views about Mrs. Ferrars, Edward enters the room. Both Edward and Elinor feel awkward. Lucy does nothing to ease the situation. Elinor plays the part of a good hostess by exchanging polite remarks with him. She also calls Marianne so that she can speak with Edward. Marianne is overly effusive and asks him to spend some more time with them. Edward, however, takes his leave. | Notes Jane Austen creates an uncomfortable situation, in which both Elinor and Lucy are present before the man they love. Edward feels awkward, and Lucy worsens the condition with her silence. It is Elinor who saves the moment through her presence of mind. She welcomes Edward and encourages him to participate in their conversation. She is magnanimous enough to allow Edward to spend a few minutes alone with Lucy. She shows no bitterness towards Edward. Lucy poses a complete contrast to Elinor. She is cold and indifferent to his feelings. She also mocks him. She feels insecure in the presence of Elinor. Instead of taking leave of them, she shamelessly remains on the scene, much to the discomfort of Edward, Elinor and Marianne. It is interesting that with the exception of Edward, all the other people that Lucy likes, Elinor dislikes. Elinor feels disgusted at the snobbish and rude behavior of both Mrs. Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood, while Lucy finds the mother and daughter delightful company. Elinor is relieved to be spared their company in the future, while Lucy looks forward to a life-long relationship with them. CHAPTER 36 Summary Mrs. Jennings decides to spend more time with her daughter, Charlotte, who has had a baby. Elinor and Marianne are thrown in the compadny of Lady Middleton and the Steele sisters as a result of this. One day they receive an invitation to a musical party. At the party Elinor gets acquainted with Robert Ferrars. She identifies him as the same man who had taken a long time to choose a tooth-pick case at Gray's. She thinks he is a foolish, shallow and conceited man. The Steeles are invited to spend a few days with John Dashwood and his wife. The girls are delighted and inform the Dashwood sisters of the invitation. Shortly afterwards, John Dashwood visits his sisters. He talks about the Misses Steele and how impressed Fanny is with them. Notes This chapter also sparkles with Jane Austen's humor. Speaking of Lady Middleton, Austen writes: "Though nothing could be more polite than Lady Middleton's behavior to Elinor and Marianne, she did not really like them at all. Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good- natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given." Such passages not only showcase Austen's skill as a satirist, but also delineate the ways in which the heroines stand apart from the other characters. One of the most amusing scenes in the chapter is the one in which Fanny Dashwood convinces her husband that it is pointless to invite his sisters to visit them at their house. The scene resembles an earlier one in which Fanny convinces her husband against providing financial help to his sisters. In each case, Fanny tries to make it seem as though logic and propriety, instead of pettiness and malice, influence her decisions. One more character is introduced in the chapter. He is Robert Ferrars. Unlike his brother, he is shallow and conceited and tries to impress young ladies with his limited knowledge. Elinor patiently listens to his prattle. She "agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition." CHAPTER 37 Summary Mrs. Jennings informs Elinor of Lucy's engagement to Edward. She also recounts how Fanny reacted when she heard this news. Fanny became hysterical and drove the Steeles out of her house. Later, Mrs. Ferrars summoned Edward and asked him to terminate the engagement. However, Edward stood his ground, and the old lady disinherited him. Elinor relates this information to her sister. Marianne is shocked to hear the news. She condemns both Lucy and Edward for their decision. Notes Two humorous characters describe the scene that occurred in Fanny Dashwood's house when the news of Lucy's engagement to Edward was announced. Mrs. Jennings conveys the gossip of the day with exclamations and imaginary conversations. Talking about Fanny's reaction to the news, she remarks, "She fell into violent hysterics immediately, with such screams as reached your brother's ears, as he was sitting in his own dressing room downstairs. . . So up he flew directly, and a terrible scene took place, for Lucy was come to them by that time, little dreaming what was going on. Poor Soul!. . . for your sister scolded like any fury, and soon drove her into a fainting fit." John Dashwood, however, describes the scene through the eyes of a devoted husband and presents his wife as the offended party." Poor Fanny! She was in hysterics all yesterday. . . . She has borne it all with the fortitude of an angel." He confounds his wife's devilish rage with an angel's strength. Elinor at last reveals Lucy's secret to Marianne. She controls her own emotions and relates the events cautiously, so as not to shock her sister with the news. She discloses the information without damaging Edward's character. She is generous in excusing his juvenile blunder and wishes him well. Marianne admires her sister's will power and tolerance. | 127 | 866 | [
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110 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/32.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_12_part_3.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 32 | chapter 32 | null | {"name": "CHAPTER 32", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD40.asp", "summary": "With the winter months approaching and the work being less, Angel decides to have the wedding around Christmas and sets the date for December 31. He buys Tess a wedding outfit and makes plans to stay in an old D'Urberville mansion the week after their wedding. He also makes arrangements for the marriage license. Tess still worries about telling Angel the truth. She writes another letter to her mother seeking further advice, but Joan does not reply to this one. As a result, Tess moves forward with the wedding plans but fears that her happiness will not last.", "analysis": "Notes Angel continues to control matters. He sets the date for the wedding and plans the honeymoon. Unfortunately, Angel's choice of the old D'Urberville mansion is the cruel hand of fate at work. Angel also continues to work on making Tess into the woman he wants her to be. He is delighted that she has learned \"his manner and habits, his speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions. Angel feels certain that in a couple of months she will be ready to present to his parents. There also continues to be a constant battle within Tess, who is fearful of lurking dangers. The unanswered letter to Joan makes her apprehensive. Her own silence drives her to distraction. She realizes Angel is a sensitive soul, and an explanation about her past after the wedding is sure to hurt him. Tess fears her happiness will be short-lived, a clear foreshadowing of the tragic fate of this young woman. Tess also remembers Joan's ballad that once a woman loses her chastity she is no longer suitable to become a wife. The words of the song terrify her, and she fears that her wedding robe will betray her as it had betrayed Queen Guinevere. It is important to note that Angel seems to have some reservations about the wedding. He asks Crick to keep the date of the marriage a secret, and he does not publish the banns, as is customary. He also is not ready to take Tess home to meet his parents"} |
This penitential mood kept her from naming the wedding-day. The
beginning of November found its date still in abeyance, though he
asked her at the most tempting times. But Tess's desire seemed to be
for a perpetual betrothal in which everything should remain as it was
then.
The meads were changing now; but it was still warm enough in early
afternoons before milking to idle there awhile, and the state of
dairy-work at this time of year allowed a spare hour for idling.
Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun, a glistening
ripple of gossamer webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary,
like the track of moonlight on the sea. Gnats, knowing nothing
of their brief glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this
pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within them, then passed out
of its line, and were quite extinct. In the presence of these things
he would remind her that the date was still the question.
Or he would ask her at night, when he accompanied her on some mission
invented by Mrs Crick to give him the opportunity. This was mostly a
journey to the farmhouse on the slopes above the vale, to inquire how
the advanced cows were getting on in the straw-barton to which they
were relegated. For it was a time of the year that brought great
changes to the world of kine. Batches of the animals were sent away
daily to this lying-in hospital, where they lived on straw till their
calves were born, after which event, and as soon as the calf could
walk, mother and offspring were driven back to the dairy. In the
interval which elapsed before the calves were sold there was, of
course, little milking to be done, but as soon as the calf had been
taken away the milkmaids would have to set to work as usual.
Returning from one of these dark walks they reached a great
gravel-cliff immediately over the levels, where they stood still and
listened. The water was now high in the streams, squirting through
the weirs, and tinkling under culverts; the smallest gullies were all
full; there was no taking short cuts anywhere, and foot-passengers
were compelled to follow the permanent ways. From the whole extent
of the invisible vale came a multitudinous intonation; it forced upon
their fancy that a great city lay below them, and that the murmur was
the vociferation of its populace.
"It seems like tens of thousands of them," said Tess; "holding
public-meetings in their market-places, arguing, preaching,
quarrelling, sobbing, groaning, praying, and cursing."
Clare was not particularly heeding.
"Did Crick speak to you to-day, dear, about his not wanting much
assistance during the winter months?"
"No."
"The cows are going dry rapidly."
"Yes. Six or seven went to the straw-barton yesterday, and three the
day before, making nearly twenty in the straw already. Ah--is it
that the farmer don't want my help for the calving? O, I am not
wanted here any more! And I have tried so hard to--"
"Crick didn't exactly say that he would no longer require you. But,
knowing what our relations were, he said in the most good-natured
and respectful manner possible that he supposed on my leaving at
Christmas I should take you with me, and on my asking what he would
do without you he merely observed that, as a matter of fact, it was a
time of year when he could do with a very little female help. I am
afraid I was sinner enough to feel rather glad that he was in this
way forcing your hand."
"I don't think you ought to have felt glad, Angel. Because 'tis
always mournful not to be wanted, even if at the same time 'tis
convenient."
"Well, it is convenient--you have admitted that." He put his finger
upon her cheek. "Ah!" he said.
"What?"
"I feel the red rising up at her having been caught! But why should
I trifle so! We will not trifle--life is too serious."
"It is. Perhaps I saw that before you did."
She was seeing it then. To decline to marry him after all--in
obedience to her emotion of last night--and leave the dairy, meant
to go to some strange place, not a dairy; for milkmaids were not in
request now calving-time was coming on; to go to some arable farm
where no divine being like Angel Clare was. She hated the thought,
and she hated more the thought of going home.
"So that, seriously, dearest Tess," he continued, "since you will
probably have to leave at Christmas, it is in every way desirable and
convenient that I should carry you off then as my property. Besides,
if you were not the most uncalculating girl in the world you would
know that we could not go on like this for ever."
"I wish we could. That it would always be summer and autumn, and you
always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have
done through the past summer-time!"
"I always shall."
"O, I know you will!" she cried, with a sudden fervour of faith
in him. "Angel, I will fix the day when I will become yours for
always!"
Thus at last it was arranged between them, during that dark walk
home, amid the myriads of liquid voices on the right and left.
When they reached the dairy Mr and Mrs Crick were promptly told--with
injunctions of secrecy; for each of the lovers was desirous that the
marriage should be kept as private as possible. The dairyman, though
he had thought of dismissing her soon, now made a great concern about
losing her. What should he do about his skimming? Who would make
the ornamental butter-pats for the Anglebury and Sandbourne ladies?
Mrs Crick congratulated Tess on the shilly-shallying having at last
come to an end, and said that directly she set eyes on Tess she
divined that she was to be the chosen one of somebody who was no
common outdoor man; Tess had looked so superior as she walked across
the barton on that afternoon of her arrival; that she was of a good
family she could have sworn. In point of fact Mrs Crick did remember
thinking that Tess was graceful and good-looking as she approached;
but the superiority might have been a growth of the imagination aided
by subsequent knowledge.
Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours, without the
sense of a will. The word had been given; the number of the day
written down. Her naturally bright intelligence had begun to admit
the fatalistic convictions common to field-folk and those who
associate more extensively with natural phenomena than with their
fellow-creatures; and she accordingly drifted into that passive
responsiveness to all things her lover suggested, characteristic of
the frame of mind.
But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify the
wedding-day; really to again implore her advice. It was a gentleman
who had chosen her, which perhaps her mother had not sufficiently
considered. A post-nuptial explanation, which might be accepted with
a light heart by a rougher man, might not be received with the same
feeling by him. But this communication brought no reply from Mrs
Durbeyfield.
Despite Angel Clare's plausible representation to himself and to Tess
of the practical need for their immediate marriage, there was in
truth an element of precipitancy in the step, as became apparent at a
later date. He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and
fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for
him. He had entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to
an unintellectual bucolic life, that such charms as he beheld in this
idyllic creature would be found behind the scenes. Unsophistication
was a thing to talk of; but he had not known how it really struck one
until he came here. Yet he was very far from seeing his future track
clearly, and it might be a year or two before he would be able to
consider himself fairly started in life. The secret lay in the tinge
of recklessness imparted to his career and character by the sense
that he had been made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices
of his family.
"Don't you think 'twould have been better for us to wait till you
were quite settled in your midland farm?" she once asked timidly.
(A midland farm was the idea just then.)
"To tell the truth, my Tess, I don't like you to be left anywhere
away from my protection and sympathy."
The reason was a good one, so far as it went. His influence over her
had been so marked that she had caught his manner and habits, his
speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions. And to leave her
in farmland would be to let her slip back again out of accord with
him. He wished to have her under his charge for another reason.
His parents had naturally desired to see her once at least before he
carried her off to a distant settlement, English or colonial; and
as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his intention,
he judged that a couple of months' life with him in lodgings
whilst seeking for an advantageous opening would be of some social
assistance to her at what she might feel to be a trying ordeal--her
presentation to his mother at the Vicarage.
Next, he wished to see a little of the working of a flour-mill,
having an idea that he might combine the use of one with
corn-growing. The proprietor of a large old water-mill at
Wellbridge--once the mill of an Abbey--had offered him the inspection
of his time-honoured mode of procedure, and a hand in the operations
for a few days, whenever he should choose to come. Clare paid a
visit to the place, some few miles distant, one day at this time,
to inquire particulars, and returned to Talbothays in the evening.
She found him determined to spend a short time at the Wellbridge
flour-mills. And what had determined him? Less the opportunity of an
insight into grinding and bolting than the casual fact that lodgings
were to be obtained in that very farmhouse which, before its
mutilation, had been the mansion of a branch of the d'Urberville
family. This was always how Clare settled practical questions; by
a sentiment which had nothing to do with them. They decided to go
immediately after the wedding, and remain for a fortnight, instead
of journeying to towns and inns.
"Then we will start off to examine some farms on the other side of
London that I have heard of," he said, "and by March or April we will
pay a visit to my father and mother."
Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed, and the day,
the incredible day, on which she was to become his, loomed large in
the near future. The thirty-first of December, New Year's Eve, was
the date. His wife, she said to herself. Could it ever be? Their
two selves together, nothing to divide them, every incident shared
by them; why not? And yet why?
One Sunday morning Izz Huett returned from church, and spoke
privately to Tess.
"You was not called home this morning."
"What?"
"It should ha' been the first time of asking to-day," she answered,
looking quietly at Tess. "You meant to be married New Year's Eve,
deary?"
The other returned a quick affirmative.
"And there must be three times of asking. And now there be only two
Sundays left between."
Tess felt her cheek paling; Izz was right; of course there must be
three. Perhaps he had forgotten! If so, there must be a week's
postponement, and that was unlucky. How could she remind her lover?
She who had been so backward was suddenly fired with impatience and
alarm lest she should lose her dear prize.
A natural incident relieved her anxiety. Izz mentioned the omission
of the banns to Mrs Crick, and Mrs Crick assumed a matron's privilege
of speaking to Angel on the point.
"Have ye forgot 'em, Mr Clare? The banns, I mean."
"No, I have not forgot 'em," says Clare.
As soon as he caught Tess alone he assured her:
"Don't let them tease you about the banns. A licence will be quieter
for us, and I have decided on a licence without consulting you.
So if you go to church on Sunday morning you will not hear your own
name, if you wished to."
"I didn't wish to hear it, dearest," she said proudly.
But to know that things were in train was an immense relief to Tess
notwithstanding, who had well-nigh feared that somebody would stand
up and forbid the banns on the ground of her history. How events
were favouring her!
"I don't quite feel easy," she said to herself. "All this good
fortune may be scourged out of me afterwards by a lot of ill. That's
how Heaven mostly does. I wish I could have had common banns!"
But everything went smoothly. She wondered whether he would like her
to be married in her present best white frock, or if she ought to
buy a new one. The question was set at rest by his forethought,
disclosed by the arrival of some large packages addressed to her.
Inside them she found a whole stock of clothing, from bonnet to
shoes, including a perfect morning costume, such as would well suit
the simple wedding they planned. He entered the house shortly after
the arrival of the packages, and heard her upstairs undoing them.
A minute later she came down with a flush on her face and tears in
her eyes.
"How thoughtful you've been!" she murmured, her cheek upon his
shoulder. "Even to the gloves and handkerchief! My own love--how
good, how kind!"
"No, no, Tess; just an order to a tradeswoman in London--nothing
more."
And to divert her from thinking too highly of him, he told her to go
upstairs, and take her time, and see if it all fitted; and, if not,
to get the village sempstress to make a few alterations.
She did return upstairs, and put on the gown. Alone, she stood for a
moment before the glass looking at the effect of her silk attire; and
then there came into her head her mother's ballad of the mystic
robe--
That never would become that wife
That had once done amiss,
which Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to her as a child, so blithely
and so archly, her foot on the cradle, which she rocked to the tune.
Suppose this robe should betray her by changing colour, as her robe
had betrayed Queen Guinevere. Since she had been at the dairy she
had not once thought of the lines till now.
| 2,338 | CHAPTER 32 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD40.asp | With the winter months approaching and the work being less, Angel decides to have the wedding around Christmas and sets the date for December 31. He buys Tess a wedding outfit and makes plans to stay in an old D'Urberville mansion the week after their wedding. He also makes arrangements for the marriage license. Tess still worries about telling Angel the truth. She writes another letter to her mother seeking further advice, but Joan does not reply to this one. As a result, Tess moves forward with the wedding plans but fears that her happiness will not last. | Notes Angel continues to control matters. He sets the date for the wedding and plans the honeymoon. Unfortunately, Angel's choice of the old D'Urberville mansion is the cruel hand of fate at work. Angel also continues to work on making Tess into the woman he wants her to be. He is delighted that she has learned "his manner and habits, his speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions. Angel feels certain that in a couple of months she will be ready to present to his parents. There also continues to be a constant battle within Tess, who is fearful of lurking dangers. The unanswered letter to Joan makes her apprehensive. Her own silence drives her to distraction. She realizes Angel is a sensitive soul, and an explanation about her past after the wedding is sure to hurt him. Tess fears her happiness will be short-lived, a clear foreshadowing of the tragic fate of this young woman. Tess also remembers Joan's ballad that once a woman loses her chastity she is no longer suitable to become a wife. The words of the song terrify her, and she fears that her wedding robe will betray her as it had betrayed Queen Guinevere. It is important to note that Angel seems to have some reservations about the wedding. He asks Crick to keep the date of the marriage a secret, and he does not publish the banns, as is customary. He also is not ready to take Tess home to meet his parents | 98 | 251 | [
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161 | false | novelguide | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/01.txt | finished_summaries/novelguide/Sense and Sensibility/section_1_part_1.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter i | chapter i | null | {"name": "Chapter I", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201020004256/https://www.novelguide.com/sense-and-sensibility/summaries/volume1-chapter1-11", "summary": "Sense and Sensibility opens by introducing the Dashwood family, whose fortunes the novel follows. The Dashwoods have for many generations owned and occupied the country estate of Norland Park in Sussex, England. The recent owner, Henry Dashwood, inherited the estate from a Dashwood uncle, referred to as \"the old Gentleman. Henry Dashwood has a son, John, from a previous marriage, and three daughters from his current marriage: Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret. John is well provided for by his mother's fortune and his wife's wealth. The old Gentleman stipulated in his will that the estate must pass directly from Henry Dashwood to John and thence to John's son, Harry. This was in accordance with the accepted system of male-line primogeniture , but also because of the old Gentleman's favoritism towards the then two- or three-year-old Harry. Therefore, when Henry Dashwood dies, his widow and daughters are left with a modest income from a lump sum of ten thousand pounds, but no estate. On his deathbed, Henry Dashwood elicits a promise from John to take care of his wife and daughters. Once Henry Dashwood is in his grave, Mrs. Dashwood's house belongs to John and his wife, Fanny. Fanny Dashwood arrives unannounced with her child and servants and installs herself as mistress of Norland. Mrs. Dashwood feels so offended that she wishes to leave immediately, but is advised against it by her eldest daughter, Elinor", "analysis": ""} |
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate
was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of
their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so
respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their
surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single
man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his
life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her
death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great
alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received
into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal
inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to
bequeath it. In the society of his nephew and niece, and their
children, the old Gentleman's days were comfortably spent. His
attachment to them all increased. The constant attention of Mr. and
Mrs. Henry Dashwood to his wishes, which proceeded not merely from
interest, but from goodness of heart, gave him every degree of solid
comfort which his age could receive; and the cheerfulness of the
children added a relish to his existence.
By a former marriage, Mr. Henry Dashwood had one son: by his present
lady, three daughters. The son, a steady respectable young man, was
amply provided for by the fortune of his mother, which had been large,
and half of which devolved on him on his coming of age. By his own
marriage, likewise, which happened soon afterwards, he added to his
wealth. To him therefore the succession to the Norland estate was not
so really important as to his sisters; for their fortune, independent
of what might arise to them from their father's inheriting that
property, could be but small. Their mother had nothing, and their
father only seven thousand pounds in his own disposal; for the
remaining moiety of his first wife's fortune was also secured to her
child, and he had only a life-interest in it.
The old gentleman died: his will was read, and like almost every other
will, gave as much disappointment as pleasure. He was neither so
unjust, nor so ungrateful, as to leave his estate from his nephew;--but
he left it to him on such terms as destroyed half the value of the
bequest. Mr. Dashwood had wished for it more for the sake of his wife
and daughters than for himself or his son;--but to his son, and his
son's son, a child of four years old, it was secured, in such a way, as
to leave to himself no power of providing for those who were most dear
to him, and who most needed a provision by any charge on the estate, or
by any sale of its valuable woods. The whole was tied up for the
benefit of this child, who, in occasional visits with his father and
mother at Norland, had so far gained on the affections of his uncle, by
such attractions as are by no means unusual in children of two or three
years old; an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his
own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise, as to outweigh
all the value of all the attention which, for years, he had received
from his niece and her daughters. He meant not to be unkind, however,
and, as a mark of his affection for the three girls, he left them a
thousand pounds a-piece.
Mr. Dashwood's disappointment was, at first, severe; but his temper was
cheerful and sanguine; and he might reasonably hope to live many years,
and by living economically, lay by a considerable sum from the produce
of an estate already large, and capable of almost immediate
improvement. But the fortune, which had been so tardy in coming, was
his only one twelvemonth. He survived his uncle no longer; and ten
thousand pounds, including the late legacies, was all that remained for
his widow and daughters.
His son was sent for as soon as his danger was known, and to him Mr.
Dashwood recommended, with all the strength and urgency which illness
could command, the interest of his mother-in-law and sisters.
Mr. John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the rest of the
family; but he was affected by a recommendation of such a nature at
such a time, and he promised to do every thing in his power to make
them comfortable. His father was rendered easy by such an assurance,
and Mr. John Dashwood had then leisure to consider how much there might
prudently be in his power to do for them.
He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted
and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well
respected; for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge of
his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might
have been made still more respectable than he was:--he might even have
been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and
very fond of his wife. But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature
of himself;--more narrow-minded and selfish.
When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to
increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand
pounds a-piece. He then really thought himself equal to it. The
prospect of four thousand a-year, in addition to his present income,
besides the remaining half of his own mother's fortune, warmed his
heart, and made him feel capable of generosity.-- "Yes, he would give
them three thousand pounds: it would be liberal and handsome! It would
be enough to make them completely easy. Three thousand pounds! he
could spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience."-- He
thought of it all day long, and for many days successively, and he did
not repent.
No sooner was his father's funeral over, than Mrs. John Dashwood,
without sending any notice of her intention to her mother-in-law,
arrived with her child and their attendants. No one could dispute her
right to come; the house was her husband's from the moment of his
father's decease; but the indelicacy of her conduct was so much the
greater, and to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood's situation, with only common
feelings, must have been highly unpleasing;--but in HER mind there was
a sense of honor so keen, a generosity so romantic, that any offence of
the kind, by whomsoever given or received, was to her a source of
immovable disgust. Mrs. John Dashwood had never been a favourite with
any of her husband's family; but she had had no opportunity, till the
present, of shewing them with how little attention to the comfort of
other people she could act when occasion required it.
So acutely did Mrs. Dashwood feel this ungracious behaviour, and so
earnestly did she despise her daughter-in-law for it, that, on the
arrival of the latter, she would have quitted the house for ever, had
not the entreaty of her eldest girl induced her first to reflect on the
propriety of going, and her own tender love for all her three children
determined her afterwards to stay, and for their sakes avoid a breach
with their brother.
Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed
a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified
her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and
enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all,
that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led
to imprudence. She had an excellent heart;--her disposition was
affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern
them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn; and which
one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.
Marianne's abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor's.
She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything: her sorrows, her
joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable,
interesting: she was everything but prudent. The resemblance between
her and her mother was strikingly great.
Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her sister's sensibility; but
by Mrs. Dashwood it was valued and cherished. They encouraged each
other now in the violence of their affliction. The agony of grief
which overpowered them at first, was voluntarily renewed, was sought
for, was created again and again. They gave themselves up wholly to
their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that
could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in
future. Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but still she could
struggle, she could exert herself. She could consult with her brother,
could receive her sister-in-law on her arrival, and treat her with
proper attention; and could strive to rouse her mother to similar
exertion, and encourage her to similar forbearance.
Margaret, the other sister, was a good-humored, well-disposed girl; but
as she had already imbibed a good deal of Marianne's romance, without
having much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair to equal
her sisters at a more advanced period of life.
| 1,444 | Chapter I | https://web.archive.org/web/20201020004256/https://www.novelguide.com/sense-and-sensibility/summaries/volume1-chapter1-11 | Sense and Sensibility opens by introducing the Dashwood family, whose fortunes the novel follows. The Dashwoods have for many generations owned and occupied the country estate of Norland Park in Sussex, England. The recent owner, Henry Dashwood, inherited the estate from a Dashwood uncle, referred to as "the old Gentleman. Henry Dashwood has a son, John, from a previous marriage, and three daughters from his current marriage: Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret. John is well provided for by his mother's fortune and his wife's wealth. The old Gentleman stipulated in his will that the estate must pass directly from Henry Dashwood to John and thence to John's son, Harry. This was in accordance with the accepted system of male-line primogeniture , but also because of the old Gentleman's favoritism towards the then two- or three-year-old Harry. Therefore, when Henry Dashwood dies, his widow and daughters are left with a modest income from a lump sum of ten thousand pounds, but no estate. On his deathbed, Henry Dashwood elicits a promise from John to take care of his wife and daughters. Once Henry Dashwood is in his grave, Mrs. Dashwood's house belongs to John and his wife, Fanny. Fanny Dashwood arrives unannounced with her child and servants and installs herself as mistress of Norland. Mrs. Dashwood feels so offended that she wishes to leave immediately, but is advised against it by her eldest daughter, Elinor | null | 233 | 1 | [
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161 | false | novelguide | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/05.txt | finished_summaries/novelguide/Sense and Sensibility/section_1_part_5.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter v | chapter v | null | {"name": "Chapter V", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201020004256/https://www.novelguide.com/sense-and-sensibility/summaries/volume1-chapter1-11", "summary": "Edward voices dismay that Mrs. Dashwood and her family are moving so far away. In John and Fanny's hearing, Mrs. Dashwood pointedly invites him to stay with them in Devon whenever he wishes. Just before they depart for Devon, Marianne bids a sad farewell to Norland, reflecting that at least the trees will continue the same, even though she and her family have gone", "analysis": ""} |
No sooner was her answer dispatched, than Mrs. Dashwood indulged herself
in the pleasure of announcing to her son-in-law and his wife that she
was provided with a house, and should incommode them no longer than till
every thing were ready for her inhabiting it. They heard her with
surprise. Mrs. John Dashwood said nothing; but her husband civilly hoped
that she would not be settled far from Norland. She had great
satisfaction in replying that she was going into Devonshire.--Edward
turned hastily towards her, on hearing this, and, in a voice of surprise
and concern, which required no explanation to her, repeated,
"Devonshire! Are you, indeed, going there? So far from hence! And to
what part of it?" She explained the situation. It was within four miles
northward of Exeter.
"It is but a cottage," she continued, "but I hope to see many of my
friends in it. A room or two can easily be added; and if my friends
find no difficulty in travelling so far to see me, I am sure I will
find none in accommodating them."
She concluded with a very kind invitation to Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood
to visit her at Barton; and to Edward she gave one with still greater
affection. Though her late conversation with her daughter-in-law had
made her resolve on remaining at Norland no longer than was
unavoidable, it had not produced the smallest effect on her in that
point to which it principally tended. To separate Edward and Elinor
was as far from being her object as ever; and she wished to show Mrs.
John Dashwood, by this pointed invitation to her brother, how totally
she disregarded her disapprobation of the match.
Mr. John Dashwood told his mother again and again how exceedingly sorry
he was that she had taken a house at such a distance from Norland as to
prevent his being of any service to her in removing her furniture. He
really felt conscientiously vexed on the occasion; for the very
exertion to which he had limited the performance of his promise to his
father was by this arrangement rendered impracticable.-- The furniture
was all sent around by water. It chiefly consisted of household linen,
plate, china, and books, with a handsome pianoforte of Marianne's.
Mrs. John Dashwood saw the packages depart with a sigh: she could not
help feeling it hard that as Mrs. Dashwood's income would be so
trifling in comparison with their own, she should have any handsome
article of furniture.
Mrs. Dashwood took the house for a twelvemonth; it was ready furnished,
and she might have immediate possession. No difficulty arose on either
side in the agreement; and she waited only for the disposal of her
effects at Norland, and to determine her future household, before she
set off for the west; and this, as she was exceedingly rapid in the
performance of everything that interested her, was soon done.--The
horses which were left her by her husband had been sold soon after his
death, and an opportunity now offering of disposing of her carriage,
she agreed to sell that likewise at the earnest advice of her eldest
daughter. For the comfort of her children, had she consulted only her
own wishes, she would have kept it; but the discretion of Elinor
prevailed. HER wisdom too limited the number of their servants to
three; two maids and a man, with whom they were speedily provided from
amongst those who had formed their establishment at Norland.
The man and one of the maids were sent off immediately into Devonshire,
to prepare the house for their mistress's arrival; for as Lady
Middleton was entirely unknown to Mrs. Dashwood, she preferred going
directly to the cottage to being a visitor at Barton Park; and she
relied so undoubtingly on Sir John's description of the house, as to
feel no curiosity to examine it herself till she entered it as her own.
Her eagerness to be gone from Norland was preserved from diminution by
the evident satisfaction of her daughter-in-law in the prospect of her
removal; a satisfaction which was but feebly attempted to be concealed
under a cold invitation to her to defer her departure. Now was the
time when her son-in-law's promise to his father might with particular
propriety be fulfilled. Since he had neglected to do it on first
coming to the estate, their quitting his house might be looked on as
the most suitable period for its accomplishment. But Mrs. Dashwood
began shortly to give over every hope of the kind, and to be convinced,
from the general drift of his discourse, that his assistance extended
no farther than their maintenance for six months at Norland. He so
frequently talked of the increasing expenses of housekeeping, and of
the perpetual demands upon his purse, which a man of any consequence in
the world was beyond calculation exposed to, that he seemed rather to
stand in need of more money himself than to have any design of giving
money away.
In a very few weeks from the day which brought Sir John Middleton's
first letter to Norland, every thing was so far settled in their future
abode as to enable Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters to begin their
journey.
Many were the tears shed by them in their last adieus to a place so
much beloved. "Dear, dear Norland!" said Marianne, as she wandered
alone before the house, on the last evening of their being there; "when
shall I cease to regret you!--when learn to feel a home elsewhere!--Oh!
happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this
spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more!--And you, ye
well-known trees!--but you will continue the same.--No leaf will decay
because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we
can observe you no longer!--No; you will continue the same; unconscious
of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any
change in those who walk under your shade!--But who will remain to
enjoy you?"
| 935 | Chapter V | https://web.archive.org/web/20201020004256/https://www.novelguide.com/sense-and-sensibility/summaries/volume1-chapter1-11 | Edward voices dismay that Mrs. Dashwood and her family are moving so far away. In John and Fanny's hearing, Mrs. Dashwood pointedly invites him to stay with them in Devon whenever he wishes. Just before they depart for Devon, Marianne bids a sad farewell to Norland, reflecting that at least the trees will continue the same, even though she and her family have gone | null | 64 | 1 | [
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23,042 | false | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/23042-chapters/1.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/The Tempest/section_0_part_1.txt | The Tempest.act i.scene i | act i, scene i | null | {"name": "act i, Scene I", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210309152602/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-tempest/study-guide/summary-act-i", "summary": "Sailors try to keep a ship from running aground on the rocks in a stormy sea. The passengers are Alonso, the King of Naples, Alonso's son Ferdinand, Alonso's brother Sebastian, Alonso's advisor Gonzalo, and Antonio. The boatswain says that even kings cannot \"command these elements\" of wind and water, and tells Antonio and Sebastian that they can either \"keep below\" or help the sailors. The noblemen take offense at being ordered around by a mere sailor, and both show a mean-tempered streak in this encounter. Suddenly, a panic seizes the sailors, and they declare \"all lost,\" surrendering themselves, and their ship, to the vicious storm. Antonio and Sebastian also fear the worst, and go below to say goodbye to the king, Alonso", "analysis": ""} | ACT I. SCENE I.
On a ship at sea: a tempestuous noise of thunder
and lightning heard._
_Enter _a Ship-Master_ and _a Boatswain_._
_Mast._ Boatswain!
_Boats._ Here, master: what cheer?
_Mast._ Good, speak to the mariners: fall to't, yarely, or
we run ourselves aground: bestir, bestir. [_Exit._
_Enter _Mariners_._
_Boats._ Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! 5
yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's
whistle. Blow, till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!
_Enter ALONSO, SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, FERDINAND, GONZALO,
and others._
_Alon._ Good boatswain, have care. Where's the master?
Play the men.
_Boats._ I pray now, keep below. 10
_Ant._ Where is the master, boatswain?
_Boats._ Do you not hear him? You mar our labour:
keep your cabins: you do assist the storm.
_Gon._ Nay, good, be patient.
_Boats._ When the sea is. Hence! What cares these 15
roarers for the name of king? To cabin: silence! trouble
us not.
_Gon._ Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboard.
_Boats._ None that I more love than myself. You are a
Counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, 20
and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope
more; use your authority: if you cannot, give thanks you
have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin
for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap. Cheerly, good
hearts! Out of our way, I say. [_Exit._ 25
_Gon._ I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks
he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is
perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging:
make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth
little advantage. If he be not born to be hanged, our case 30
is miserable. [_Exeunt._
_Re-enter Boatswain._
_Boats._ Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower!
Bring her to try with main-course. [_A cry within._] A
plague upon this howling! they are louder than the weather
or our office. 35
_Re-enter SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, and GONZALO._
Yet again! what do you here? Shall we give o'er, and
drown? Have you a mind to sink?
_Seb._ A pox o' your throat, you bawling, blasphemous,
incharitable dog!
_Boats._ Work you, then. 40
_Ant._ Hang, cur! hang, you whoreson, insolent noise-maker.
We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.
_Gon._ I'll warrant him for drowning; though the ship
were no stronger than a nutshell, and as leaky as an unstanched
wench. 45
_Boats._ Lay her a-hold, a-hold! set her two courses off
to sea again; lay her off.
_Enter _Mariners_ wet._
_Mariners._ All lost! to prayers, to prayers! all lost!
_Boats._ What, must our mouths be cold?
_Gon._ The king and prince at prayers! let's assist them, 50
For our case is as theirs.
_Seb._ I'm out of patience.
_Ant._ We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards:
This wide-chapp'd rascal,--would thou mightst lie drowning
The washing of ten tides!
_Gon._ He'll be hang'd yet,
Though every drop of water swear against it, 55
And gape at widest to glut him.
[_A confused noise within:_ "Mercy on us!"--
"We split, we split!"-- "Farewell my wife and children!"--
"Farewell, brother!"-- "We split, we split, we split!"]
_Ant._ Let's all sink with the king. 60
_Seb._ Let's take leave of him. [_Exeunt Ant. and Seb._
_Gon._ Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for
an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any
thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die a
dry death. [_Exeunt._ 65
Notes: I, 1.
SC. I. On a ship at sea] Pope.
Enter ... Boatswain] Collier MS. adds 'shaking off wet.'
3: _Good,_] Rowe. _Good:_ Ff. _Good._ Collier.
7: _till thou burst thy wind_] _till thou burst, wind_ Johnson conj.
_till thou burst thee, wind_ Steevens conj.
8: Capell adds stage direction [Exeunt Mariners aloft.
11: _boatswain_] Pope. _boson_ Ff.
11-18: Verse. S. Walker conj.
15: _cares_] _care_ Rowe. See note (I).
31: [Exeunt] Theobald. [Exit. Ff.
33: _Bring her to try_] F4. _Bring her to Try_ F1 F2 F3.
_Bring her to. Try_ Story conj.
33-35: Text as in Capell. _A plague_--A cry within. Enter Sebastian,
Anthonio, and Gonzalo. _upon this howling._ Ff.
34-37: Verse. S. Walker conj.
43: _for_] _from_ Theobald.
46: _two courses off to sea_] _two courses; off to sea_ Steevens
(Holt conj.).
46: [Enter...] [Re-enter... Dyce.
47: [Exeunt. Theobald.
50: _at_] _are at_ Rowe.
50-54: Printed as prose in Ff.
56: _to glut_] _t' englut_ Johnson conj.
57: See note (II).
59: _Farewell, brother!_] _Brother, farewell!_ Theobald.
60: _with the_] Rowe. _with'_ F1 F2. _with_ F3 F4.
61: [Exeunt A. and S.] [Exit. Ff.
63: _furze_ Rowe. _firrs_ F1 F2 F3. _firs_ F4.
_long heath, brown furze_] _ling, heath, broom, furze_ Hanmer.]
65: [Exeunt] [Exit F1, om. F2 F3 F4.]
| 1,207 | act i, Scene I | https://web.archive.org/web/20210309152602/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-tempest/study-guide/summary-act-i | Sailors try to keep a ship from running aground on the rocks in a stormy sea. The passengers are Alonso, the King of Naples, Alonso's son Ferdinand, Alonso's brother Sebastian, Alonso's advisor Gonzalo, and Antonio. The boatswain says that even kings cannot "command these elements" of wind and water, and tells Antonio and Sebastian that they can either "keep below" or help the sailors. The noblemen take offense at being ordered around by a mere sailor, and both show a mean-tempered streak in this encounter. Suddenly, a panic seizes the sailors, and they declare "all lost," surrendering themselves, and their ship, to the vicious storm. Antonio and Sebastian also fear the worst, and go below to say goodbye to the king, Alonso | null | 122 | 1 | [
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28,054 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/90.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Brothers Karamazov/section_14_part_11.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 12.chapter 11 | book 12, chapter 11 | null | {"name": "book 12, Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section15/", "summary": "There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery Fetyukovich continues his summation. He points out that there is not even any proof that Fyodor Pavlovich kept an envelope full of 3,000 rubles; it is only a rumor. The letter that Dmitri wrote to Katerina was written drunkenly and under extreme emotional torment, and cannot be taken as a statement of Dmitri's real intention", "analysis": ""} | Chapter XI. There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery
There was one point that struck every one in Fetyukovitch's speech. He
flatly denied the existence of the fatal three thousand roubles, and
consequently, the possibility of their having been stolen.
"Gentlemen of the jury," he began. "Every new and unprejudiced observer
must be struck by a characteristic peculiarity in the present case,
namely, the charge of robbery, and the complete impossibility of proving
that there was anything to be stolen. We are told that money was
stolen--three thousand roubles--but whether those roubles ever existed,
nobody knows. Consider, how have we heard of that sum, and who has seen
the notes? The only person who saw them, and stated that they had been put
in the envelope, was the servant, Smerdyakov. He had spoken of it to the
prisoner and his brother, Ivan Fyodorovitch, before the catastrophe.
Madame Svyetlov, too, had been told of it. But not one of these three
persons had actually seen the notes, no one but Smerdyakov had seen them.
"Here the question arises, if it's true that they did exist, and that
Smerdyakov had seen them, when did he see them for the last time? What if
his master had taken the notes from under his bed and put them back in his
cash-box without telling him? Note, that according to Smerdyakov's story
the notes were kept under the mattress; the prisoner must have pulled them
out, and yet the bed was absolutely unrumpled; that is carefully recorded
in the protocol. How could the prisoner have found the notes without
disturbing the bed? How could he have helped soiling with his blood-
stained hands the fine and spotless linen with which the bed had been
purposely made?
"But I shall be asked: What about the envelope on the floor? Yes, it's
worth saying a word or two about that envelope. I was somewhat surprised
just now to hear the highly talented prosecutor declare of himself--of
himself, observe--that but for that envelope, but for its being left on the
floor, no one in the world would have known of the existence of that
envelope and the notes in it, and therefore of the prisoner's having
stolen it. And so that torn scrap of paper is, by the prosecutor's own
admission, the sole proof on which the charge of robbery rests, 'otherwise
no one would have known of the robbery, nor perhaps even of the money.'
But is the mere fact that that scrap of paper was lying on the floor a
proof that there was money in it, and that that money had been stolen?
Yet, it will be objected, Smerdyakov had seen the money in the envelope.
But when, when had he seen it for the last time, I ask you that? I talked
to Smerdyakov, and he told me that he had seen the notes two days before
the catastrophe. Then why not imagine that old Fyodor Pavlovitch, locked
up alone in impatient and hysterical expectation of the object of his
adoration, may have whiled away the time by breaking open the envelope and
taking out the notes. 'What's the use of the envelope?' he may have asked
himself. 'She won't believe the notes are there, but when I show her the
thirty rainbow-colored notes in one roll, it will make more impression,
you may be sure, it will make her mouth water.' And so he tears open the
envelope, takes out the money, and flings the envelope on the floor,
conscious of being the owner and untroubled by any fears of leaving
evidence.
"Listen, gentlemen, could anything be more likely than this theory and
such an action? Why is it out of the question? But if anything of the sort
could have taken place, the charge of robbery falls to the ground; if
there was no money, there was no theft of it. If the envelope on the floor
may be taken as evidence that there had been money in it, why may I not
maintain the opposite, that the envelope was on the floor because the
money had been taken from it by its owner?
"But I shall be asked what became of the money if Fyodor Pavlovitch took
it out of the envelope since it was not found when the police searched the
house? In the first place, part of the money was found in the cash-box,
and secondly, he might have taken it out that morning or the evening
before to make some other use of it, to give or send it away; he may have
changed his idea, his plan of action completely, without thinking it
necessary to announce the fact to Smerdyakov beforehand. And if there is
the barest possibility of such an explanation, how can the prisoner be so
positively accused of having committed murder for the sake of robbery, and
of having actually carried out that robbery? This is encroaching on the
domain of romance. If it is maintained that something has been stolen, the
thing must be produced, or at least its existence must be proved beyond
doubt. Yet no one had ever seen these notes.
"Not long ago in Petersburg a young man of eighteen, hardly more than a
boy, who carried on a small business as a costermonger, went in broad
daylight into a moneychanger's shop with an ax, and with extraordinary,
typical audacity killed the master of the shop and carried off fifteen
hundred roubles. Five hours later he was arrested, and, except fifteen
roubles he had already managed to spend, the whole sum was found on him.
Moreover, the shopman, on his return to the shop after the murder,
informed the police not only of the exact sum stolen, but even of the
notes and gold coins of which that sum was made up, and those very notes
and coins were found on the criminal. This was followed by a full and
genuine confession on the part of the murderer. That's what I call
evidence, gentlemen of the jury! In that case I know, I see, I touch the
money, and cannot deny its existence. Is it the same in the present case?
And yet it is a question of life and death.
"Yes, I shall be told, but he was carousing that night, squandering money;
he was shown to have had fifteen hundred roubles--where did he get the
money? But the very fact that only fifteen hundred could be found, and the
other half of the sum could nowhere be discovered, shows that that money
was not the same, and had never been in any envelope. By strict
calculation of time it was proved at the preliminary inquiry that the
prisoner ran straight from those women servants to Perhotin's without
going home, and that he had been nowhere. So he had been all the time in
company and therefore could not have divided the three thousand in half
and hidden half in the town. It's just this consideration that has led the
prosecutor to assume that the money is hidden in some crevice at Mokroe.
Why not in the dungeons of the castle of Udolpho, gentlemen? Isn't this
supposition really too fantastic and too romantic? And observe, if that
supposition breaks down, the whole charge of robbery is scattered to the
winds, for in that case what could have become of the other fifteen
hundred roubles? By what miracle could they have disappeared, since it's
proved the prisoner went nowhere else? And we are ready to ruin a man's
life with such tales!
"I shall be told that he could not explain where he got the fifteen
hundred that he had, and every one knew that he was without money before
that night. Who knew it, pray? The prisoner has made a clear and
unflinching statement of the source of that money, and if you will have it
so, gentlemen of the jury, nothing can be more probable than that
statement, and more consistent with the temper and spirit of the prisoner.
The prosecutor is charmed with his own romance. A man of weak will, who
had brought himself to take the three thousand so insultingly offered by
his betrothed, could not, we are told, have set aside half and sewn it up,
but would, even if he had done so, have unpicked it every two days and
taken out a hundred, and so would have spent it all in a month. All this,
you will remember, was put forward in a tone that brooked no
contradiction. But what if the thing happened quite differently? What if
you've been weaving a romance, and about quite a different kind of man?
That's just it, you have invented quite a different man!
"I shall be told, perhaps, there are witnesses that he spent on one day
all that three thousand given him by his betrothed a month before the
catastrophe, so he could not have divided the sum in half. But who are
these witnesses? The value of their evidence has been shown in court
already. Besides, in another man's hand a crust always seems larger, and
no one of these witnesses counted that money; they all judged simply at
sight. And the witness Maximov has testified that the prisoner had twenty
thousand in his hand. You see, gentlemen of the jury, psychology is a two-
edged weapon. Let me turn the other edge now and see what comes of it.
"A month before the catastrophe the prisoner was entrusted by Katerina
Ivanovna with three thousand roubles to send off by post. But the question
is: is it true that they were entrusted to him in such an insulting and
degrading way as was proclaimed just now? The first statement made by the
young lady on the subject was different, perfectly different. In the
second statement we heard only cries of resentment and revenge, cries of
long-concealed hatred. And the very fact that the witness gave her first
evidence incorrectly, gives us a right to conclude that her second piece
of evidence may have been incorrect also. The prosecutor will not, dare
not (his own words) touch on that story. So be it. I will not touch on it
either, but will only venture to observe that if a lofty and high-
principled person, such as that highly respected young lady unquestionably
is, if such a person, I say, allows herself suddenly in court to
contradict her first statement, with the obvious motive of ruining the
prisoner, it is clear that this evidence has been given not impartially,
not coolly. Have not we the right to assume that a revengeful woman might
have exaggerated much? Yes, she may well have exaggerated, in particular,
the insult and humiliation of her offering him the money. No, it was
offered in such a way that it was possible to take it, especially for a
man so easy-going as the prisoner, above all, as he expected to receive
shortly from his father the three thousand roubles that he reckoned was
owing to him. It was unreflecting of him, but it was just his
irresponsible want of reflection that made him so confident that his
father would give him the money, that he would get it, and so could always
dispatch the money entrusted to him and repay the debt.
"But the prosecutor refuses to allow that he could the same day have set
aside half the money and sewn it up in a little bag. That's not his
character, he tells us, he couldn't have had such feelings. But yet he
talked himself of the broad Karamazov nature; he cried out about the two
extremes which a Karamazov can contemplate at once. Karamazov is just such
a two-sided nature, fluctuating between two extremes, that even when moved
by the most violent craving for riotous gayety, he can pull himself up, if
something strikes him on the other side. And on the other side is
love--that new love which had flamed up in his heart, and for that love he
needed money; oh, far more than for carousing with his mistress. If she
were to say to him, 'I am yours, I won't have Fyodor Pavlovitch,' then he
must have money to take her away. That was more important than carousing.
Could a Karamazov fail to understand it? That anxiety was just what he was
suffering from--what is there improbable in his laying aside that money and
concealing it in case of emergency?
"But time passed, and Fyodor Pavlovitch did not give the prisoner the
expected three thousand; on the contrary, the latter heard that he meant
to use this sum to seduce the woman he, the prisoner, loved. 'If Fyodor
Pavlovitch doesn't give the money,' he thought, 'I shall be put in the
position of a thief before Katerina Ivanovna.' And then the idea presented
itself to him that he would go to Katerina Ivanovna, lay before her the
fifteen hundred roubles he still carried round his neck, and say, 'I am a
scoundrel, but not a thief.' So here we have already a twofold reason why
he should guard that sum of money as the apple of his eye, why he
shouldn't unpick the little bag, and spend it a hundred at a time. Why
should you deny the prisoner a sense of honor? Yes, he has a sense of
honor, granted that it's misplaced, granted it's often mistaken, yet it
exists and amounts to a passion, and he has proved that.
"But now the affair becomes even more complex; his jealous torments reach
a climax, and those same two questions torture his fevered brain more and
more: 'If I repay Katerina Ivanovna, where can I find the means to go off
with Grushenka?' If he behaved wildly, drank, and made disturbances in the
taverns in the course of that month, it was perhaps because he was
wretched and strained beyond his powers of endurance. These two questions
became so acute that they drove him at last to despair. He sent his
younger brother to beg for the last time for the three thousand roubles,
but without waiting for a reply, burst in himself and ended by beating the
old man in the presence of witnesses. After that he had no prospect of
getting it from any one; his father would not give it him after that
beating.
"The same evening he struck himself on the breast, just on the upper part
of the breast where the little bag was, and swore to his brother that he
had the means of not being a scoundrel, but that still he would remain a
scoundrel, for he foresaw that he would not use that means, that he
wouldn't have the character, that he wouldn't have the will-power to do
it. Why, why does the prosecutor refuse to believe the evidence of Alexey
Karamazov, given so genuinely and sincerely, so spontaneously and
convincingly? And why, on the contrary, does he force me to believe in
money hidden in a crevice, in the dungeons of the castle of Udolpho?
"The same evening, after his talk with his brother, the prisoner wrote
that fatal letter, and that letter is the chief, the most stupendous proof
of the prisoner having committed robbery! 'I shall beg from every one, and
if I don't get it I shall murder my father and shall take the envelope
with the pink ribbon on it from under his mattress as soon as Ivan has
gone.' A full program of the murder, we are told, so it must have been he.
'It has all been done as he wrote,' cries the prosecutor.
"But in the first place, it's the letter of a drunken man and written in
great irritation; secondly, he writes of the envelope from what he has
heard from Smerdyakov again, for he has not seen the envelope himself; and
thirdly, he wrote it indeed, but how can you prove that he did it? Did the
prisoner take the envelope from under the pillow, did he find the money,
did that money exist indeed? And was it to get money that the prisoner ran
off, if you remember? He ran off post-haste not to steal, but to find out
where she was, the woman who had crushed him. He was not running to carry
out a program, to carry out what he had written, that is, not for an act
of premeditated robbery, but he ran suddenly, spontaneously, in a jealous
fury. Yes! I shall be told, but when he got there and murdered him he
seized the money, too. But did he murder him after all? The charge of
robbery I repudiate with indignation. A man cannot be accused of robbery,
if it's impossible to state accurately what he has stolen; that's an
axiom. But did he murder him without robbery, did he murder him at all? Is
that proved? Isn't that, too, a romance?"
| 2,610 | book 12, Chapter 11 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section15/ | There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery Fetyukovich continues his summation. He points out that there is not even any proof that Fyodor Pavlovich kept an envelope full of 3,000 rubles; it is only a rumor. The letter that Dmitri wrote to Katerina was written drunkenly and under extreme emotional torment, and cannot be taken as a statement of Dmitri's real intention | null | 63 | 1 | [
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107 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/11.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_10_part_0.txt | Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 11 | chapter 11 | null | {"name": "Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-11", "summary": "Cut to outside an army barracks building, where a young woman is throwing snowballs at a window and trying to get the attention of someone inside. When someone comes and opens the window, the young woman asks if it's Sergeant Troy. When he asks who's asking, she says that it's his wife, Fanny Robin. Troy is shocked, and he tells Fanny that she can't come see him like this. She asks whether he's glad to see her, and he says of course. Unfortunately, he says he can't come down and meet her because he's not allowed to leave the building at this time of day. Fanny wants to know when Troy is going to make good on his promise to marry her. He says that they can marry as soon as they have good clothes. She asks why he doesn't already have permission from his officers to marry, and he admits that he simply forgot. This guy doesn't sound like the most caring fiance in the world. He sounds like a jerk. When Troy goes back inside the building, Fanny can hear a bunch of men laughing with him, probably about the fact that he has a girl waiting outside his window.", "analysis": ""} |
OUTSIDE THE BARRACKS--SNOW--A MEETING
For dreariness nothing could surpass a prospect in the outskirts of a
certain town and military station, many miles north of Weatherbury,
at a later hour on this same snowy evening--if that may be called a
prospect of which the chief constituent was darkness.
It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing
any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love
becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope:
when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at
opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation
does not prompt to enterprise.
The scene was a public path, bordered on the left hand by a river,
behind which rose a high wall. On the right was a tract of land,
partly meadow and partly moor, reaching, at its remote verge, to a
wide undulating upland.
The changes of the seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this
kind than amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close observer, they
are just as perceptible; the difference is that their media of
manifestation are less trite and familiar than such well-known ones
as the bursting of the buds or the fall of the leaf. Many are not
so stealthy and gradual as we may be apt to imagine in considering
the general torpidity of a moor or waste. Winter, in coming to the
country hereabout, advanced in well-marked stages, wherein might
have been successively observed the retreat of the snakes, the
transformation of the ferns, the filling of the pools, a rising of
fogs, the embrowning by frost, the collapse of the fungi, and an
obliteration by snow.
This climax of the series had been reached to-night on the aforesaid
moor, and for the first time in the season its irregularities were
forms without features; suggestive of anything, proclaiming nothing,
and without more character than that of being the limit of something
else--the lowest layer of a firmament of snow. From this chaotic
skyful of crowding flakes the mead and moor momentarily received
additional clothing, only to appear momentarily more naked thereby.
The vast arch of cloud above was strangely low, and formed as it were
the roof of a large dark cavern, gradually sinking in upon its floor;
for the instinctive thought was that the snow lining the heavens and
that encrusting the earth would soon unite into one mass without any
intervening stratum of air at all.
We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics; which were
flatness in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall
behind it, and darkness as to both. These features made up the mass.
If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if any
thing could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath. The
indistinct summit of the facade was notched and pronged by chimneys
here and there, and upon its face were faintly signified the oblong
shapes of windows, though only in the upper part. Below, down to the
water's edge, the flat was unbroken by hole or projection.
An indescribable succession of dull blows, perplexing in their
regularity, sent their sound with difficulty through the fluffy
atmosphere. It was a neighbouring clock striking ten. The bell was
in the open air, and being overlaid with several inches of muffling
snow, had lost its voice for the time.
About this hour the snow abated: ten flakes fell where twenty had
fallen, then one had the room of ten. Not long after a form moved
by the brink of the river.
By its outline upon the colourless background, a close observer
might have seen that it was small. This was all that was positively
discoverable, though it seemed human.
The shape went slowly along, but without much exertion, for the snow,
though sudden, was not as yet more than two inches deep. At this
time some words were spoken aloud:--
"One. Two. Three. Four. Five."
Between each utterance the little shape advanced about half a dozen
yards. It was evident now that the windows high in the wall were
being counted. The word "Five" represented the fifth window from the
end of the wall.
Here the spot stopped, and dwindled smaller. The figure was
stooping. Then a morsel of snow flew across the river towards the
fifth window. It smacked against the wall at a point several yards
from its mark. The throw was the idea of a man conjoined with the
execution of a woman. No man who had ever seen bird, rabbit, or
squirrel in his childhood, could possibly have thrown with such utter
imbecility as was shown here.
Another attempt, and another; till by degrees the wall must have
become pimpled with the adhering lumps of snow. At last one fragment
struck the fifth window.
The river would have been seen by day to be of that deep smooth sort
which races middle and sides with the same gliding precision, any
irregularities of speed being immediately corrected by a small
whirlpool. Nothing was heard in reply to the signal but the gurgle
and cluck of one of these invisible wheels--together with a few small
sounds which a sad man would have called moans, and a happy man
laughter--caused by the flapping of the waters against trifling
objects in other parts of the stream.
The window was struck again in the same manner.
Then a noise was heard, apparently produced by the opening of the
window. This was followed by a voice from the same quarter.
"Who's there?"
The tones were masculine, and not those of surprise. The high
wall being that of a barrack, and marriage being looked upon with
disfavour in the army, assignations and communications had probably
been made across the river before to-night.
"Is it Sergeant Troy?" said the blurred spot in the snow,
tremulously.
This person was so much like a mere shade upon the earth, and the
other speaker so much a part of the building, that one would have
said the wall was holding a conversation with the snow.
"Yes," came suspiciously from the shadow. "What girl are you?"
"Oh, Frank--don't you know me?" said the spot. "Your wife, Fanny
Robin."
"Fanny!" said the wall, in utter astonishment.
"Yes," said the girl, with a half-suppressed gasp of emotion.
There was something in the woman's tone which is not that of the
wife, and there was a manner in the man which is rarely a husband's.
The dialogue went on:
"How did you come here?"
"I asked which was your window. Forgive me!"
"I did not expect you to-night. Indeed, I did not think you would
come at all. It was a wonder you found me here. I am orderly
to-morrow."
"You said I was to come."
"Well--I said that you might."
"Yes, I mean that I might. You are glad to see me, Frank?"
"Oh yes--of course."
"Can you--come to me!"
"My dear Fan, no! The bugle has sounded, the barrack gates are
closed, and I have no leave. We are all of us as good as in the
county gaol till to-morrow morning."
"Then I shan't see you till then!" The words were in a faltering
tone of disappointment.
"How did you get here from Weatherbury?"
"I walked--some part of the way--the rest by the carriers."
"I am surprised."
"Yes--so am I. And Frank, when will it be?"
"What?"
"That you promised."
"I don't quite recollect."
"O you do! Don't speak like that. It weighs me to the earth. It
makes me say what ought to be said first by you."
"Never mind--say it."
"O, must I?--it is, when shall we be married, Frank?"
"Oh, I see. Well--you have to get proper clothes."
"I have money. Will it be by banns or license?"
"Banns, I should think."
"And we live in two parishes."
"Do we? What then?"
"My lodgings are in St. Mary's, and this is not. So they will have
to be published in both."
"Is that the law?"
"Yes. O Frank--you think me forward, I am afraid! Don't, dear
Frank--will you--for I love you so. And you said lots of times you
would marry me, and--and--I--I--I--"
"Don't cry, now! It is foolish. If I said so, of course I will."
"And shall I put up the banns in my parish, and will you in yours?"
"Yes"
"To-morrow?"
"Not to-morrow. We'll settle in a few days."
"You have the permission of the officers?"
"No, not yet."
"O--how is it? You said you almost had before you left
Casterbridge."
"The fact is, I forgot to ask. Your coming like this is so sudden
and unexpected."
"Yes--yes--it is. It was wrong of me to worry you. I'll go away
now. Will you come and see me to-morrow, at Mrs. Twills's, in North
Street? I don't like to come to the Barracks. There are bad women
about, and they think me one."
"Quite, so. I'll come to you, my dear. Good-night."
"Good-night, Frank--good-night!"
And the noise was again heard of a window closing. The little spot
moved away. When she passed the corner a subdued exclamation was
heard inside the wall.
"Ho--ho--Sergeant--ho--ho!" An expostulation followed, but it was
indistinct; and it became lost amid a low peal of laughter, which was
hardly distinguishable from the gurgle of the tiny whirlpools
outside.
| 1,457 | Chapter 11 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-11 | Cut to outside an army barracks building, where a young woman is throwing snowballs at a window and trying to get the attention of someone inside. When someone comes and opens the window, the young woman asks if it's Sergeant Troy. When he asks who's asking, she says that it's his wife, Fanny Robin. Troy is shocked, and he tells Fanny that she can't come see him like this. She asks whether he's glad to see her, and he says of course. Unfortunately, he says he can't come down and meet her because he's not allowed to leave the building at this time of day. Fanny wants to know when Troy is going to make good on his promise to marry her. He says that they can marry as soon as they have good clothes. She asks why he doesn't already have permission from his officers to marry, and he admits that he simply forgot. This guy doesn't sound like the most caring fiance in the world. He sounds like a jerk. When Troy goes back inside the building, Fanny can hear a bunch of men laughing with him, probably about the fact that he has a girl waiting outside his window. | null | 202 | 1 | [
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28,054 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/92.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Brothers Karamazov/section_91_part_0.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 12.chapter 13 | book 12, chapter 13 | null | {"name": "Book 12, Chapter 13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-12-chapter-13", "summary": "Now Fetyukovich entertains the idea that Dmitri might have killed Fyodor. Even if he had, according to Fetyukovich, it wouldn't even count as parricide because of what a miserable father Fyodor was. Not only did Fyodor's awful parenting result in the mess that Dmitri is today, but Fyodor so completely abandoned his obligations as a father that he doesn't deserve to be called a father at all. Fetyukovich then digresses into a general discussion of how the future of society depends on good fathers. Citing the Gospel, he asks the jury to have mercy on Dmitri and declare him innocent. By this show of mercy, they will be giving Dmitri a chance at redemption and at living a good life, a chance his father never gave him. Fetyukovich is frequently interrupted by applause. He ends his speech not with a runaway troika, as Kirillovich did, but with the image of a magnificent Russian chariot.", "analysis": ""} | Chapter XIII. A Corrupter Of Thought
"It's not only the accumulation of facts that threatens my client with
ruin, gentlemen of the jury," he began, "what is really damning for my
client is one fact--the dead body of his father. Had it been an ordinary
case of murder you would have rejected the charge in view of the
triviality, the incompleteness, and the fantastic character of the
evidence, if you examine each part of it separately; or, at least, you
would have hesitated to ruin a man's life simply from the prejudice
against him which he has, alas! only too well deserved. But it's not an
ordinary case of murder, it's a case of parricide. That impresses men's
minds, and to such a degree that the very triviality and incompleteness of
the evidence becomes less trivial and less incomplete even to an
unprejudiced mind. How can such a prisoner be acquitted? What if he
committed the murder and gets off unpunished? That is what every one,
almost involuntarily, instinctively, feels at heart.
"Yes, it's a fearful thing to shed a father's blood--the father who has
begotten me, loved me, not spared his life for me, grieved over my
illnesses from childhood up, troubled all his life for my happiness, and
has lived in my joys, in my successes. To murder such a father--that's
inconceivable. Gentlemen of the jury, what is a father--a real father? What
is the meaning of that great word? What is the great idea in that name? We
have just indicated in part what a true father is and what he ought to be.
In the case in which we are now so deeply occupied and over which our
hearts are aching--in the present case, the father, Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov, did not correspond to that conception of a father to which we
have just referred. That's the misfortune. And indeed some fathers are a
misfortune. Let us examine this misfortune rather more closely: we must
shrink from nothing, gentlemen of the jury, considering the importance of
the decision you have to make. It's our particular duty not to shrink from
any idea, like children or frightened women, as the talented prosecutor
happily expresses it.
"But in the course of his heated speech my esteemed opponent (and he was
my opponent before I opened my lips) exclaimed several times, 'Oh, I will
not yield the defense of the prisoner to the lawyer who has come down from
Petersburg. I accuse, but I defend also!' He exclaimed that several times,
but forgot to mention that if this terrible prisoner was for twenty-three
years so grateful for a mere pound of nuts given him by the only man who
had been kind to him, as a child in his father's house, might not such a
man well have remembered for twenty-three years how he ran in his father's
back-yard, 'without boots on his feet and with his little trousers hanging
by one button'--to use the expression of the kind-hearted doctor,
Herzenstube?
"Oh, gentlemen of the jury, why need we look more closely at this
misfortune, why repeat what we all know already? What did my client meet
with when he arrived here, at his father's house, and why depict my client
as a heartless egoist and monster? He is uncontrolled, he is wild and
unruly--we are trying him now for that--but who is responsible for his life?
Who is responsible for his having received such an unseemly bringing up,
in spite of his excellent disposition and his grateful and sensitive
heart? Did any one train him to be reasonable? Was he enlightened by
study? Did any one love him ever so little in his childhood? My client was
left to the care of Providence like a beast of the field. He thirsted
perhaps to see his father after long years of separation. A thousand times
perhaps he may, recalling his childhood, have driven away the loathsome
phantoms that haunted his childish dreams and with all his heart he may
have longed to embrace and to forgive his father! And what awaited him? He
was met by cynical taunts, suspicions and wrangling about money. He heard
nothing but revolting talk and vicious precepts uttered daily over the
brandy, and at last he saw his father seducing his mistress from him with
his own money. Oh, gentlemen of the jury, that was cruel and revolting!
And that old man was always complaining of the disrespect and cruelty of
his son. He slandered him in society, injured him, calumniated him, bought
up his unpaid debts to get him thrown into prison.
"Gentlemen of the jury, people like my client, who are fierce, unruly, and
uncontrolled on the surface, are sometimes, most frequently indeed,
exceedingly tender-hearted, only they don't express it. Don't laugh, don't
laugh at my idea! The talented prosecutor laughed mercilessly just now at
my client for loving Schiller--loving the sublime and beautiful! I should
not have laughed at that in his place. Yes, such natures--oh, let me speak
in defense of such natures, so often and so cruelly misunderstood--these
natures often thirst for tenderness, goodness, and justice, as it were, in
contrast to themselves, their unruliness, their ferocity--they thirst for
it unconsciously. Passionate and fierce on the surface, they are painfully
capable of loving woman, for instance, and with a spiritual and elevated
love. Again do not laugh at me, this is very often the case in such
natures. But they cannot hide their passions--sometimes very coarse--and
that is conspicuous and is noticed, but the inner man is unseen. Their
passions are quickly exhausted; but, by the side of a noble and lofty
creature that seemingly coarse and rough man seeks a new life, seeks to
correct himself, to be better, to become noble and honorable, 'sublime and
beautiful,' however much the expression has been ridiculed.
"I said just now that I would not venture to touch upon my client's
engagement. But I may say half a word. What we heard just now was not
evidence, but only the scream of a frenzied and revengeful woman, and it
was not for her--oh, not for her!--to reproach him with treachery, for she
has betrayed him! If she had had but a little time for reflection she
would not have given such evidence. Oh, do not believe her! No, my client
is not a monster, as she called him!
"The Lover of Mankind on the eve of His Crucifixion said: 'I am the Good
Shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep, so that not
one of them might be lost.' Let not a man's soul be lost through us!
"I asked just now what does 'father' mean, and exclaimed that it was a
great word, a precious name. But one must use words honestly, gentlemen,
and I venture to call things by their right names: such a father as old
Karamazov cannot be called a father and does not deserve to be. Filial
love for an unworthy father is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot
be created from nothing: only God can create something from nothing.
" 'Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath,' the apostle writes, from
a heart glowing with love. It's not for the sake of my client that I quote
these sacred words, I mention them for all fathers. Who has authorized me
to preach to fathers? No one. But as a man and a citizen I make my
appeal--_vivos voco!_ We are not long on earth, we do many evil deeds and
say many evil words. So let us all catch a favorable moment when we are
all together to say a good word to each other. That's what I am doing:
while I am in this place I take advantage of my opportunity. Not for
nothing is this tribune given us by the highest authority--all Russia hears
us! I am not speaking only for the fathers here present, I cry aloud to
all fathers: 'Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.' Yes, let us
first fulfill Christ's injunction ourselves and only then venture to
expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of
our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have
made them our enemies ourselves. 'What measure ye mete it shall be
measured unto you again'--it's not I who say that, it's the Gospel precept,
measure to others according as they measure to you. How can we blame
children if they measure us according to our measure?
"Not long ago a servant girl in Finland was suspected of having secretly
given birth to a child. She was watched, and a box of which no one knew
anything was found in the corner of the loft, behind some bricks. It was
opened and inside was found the body of a new-born child which she had
killed. In the same box were found the skeletons of two other babies
which, according to her own confession, she had killed at the moment of
their birth.
"Gentlemen of the jury, was she a mother to her children? She gave birth
to them, indeed; but was she a mother to them? Would any one venture to
give her the sacred name of mother? Let us be bold, gentlemen, let us be
audacious even: it's our duty to be so at this moment and not to be afraid
of certain words and ideas like the Moscow women in Ostrovsky's play, who
are scared at the sound of certain words. No, let us prove that the
progress of the last few years has touched even us, and let us say
plainly, the father is not merely he who begets the child, but he who
begets it and does his duty by it.
"Oh, of course, there is the other meaning, there is the other
interpretation of the word 'father,' which insists that any father, even
though he be a monster, even though he be the enemy of his children, still
remains my father simply because he begot me. But this is, so to say, the
mystical meaning which I cannot comprehend with my intellect, but can only
accept by faith, or, better to say, _on faith_, like many other things
which I do not understand, but which religion bids me believe. But in that
case let it be kept outside the sphere of actual life. In the sphere of
actual life, which has, indeed, its own rights, but also lays upon us
great duties and obligations, in that sphere, if we want to be
humane--Christian, in fact--we must, or ought to, act only upon convictions
justified by reason and experience, which have been passed through the
crucible of analysis; in a word, we must act rationally, and not as though
in dream and delirium, that we may not do harm, that we may not ill-treat
and ruin a man. Then it will be real Christian work, not only mystic, but
rational and philanthropic...."
There was violent applause at this passage from many parts of the court,
but Fetyukovitch waved his hands as though imploring them to let him
finish without interruption. The court relapsed into silence at once. The
orator went on.
"Do you suppose, gentlemen, that our children as they grow up and begin to
reason can avoid such questions? No, they cannot, and we will not impose
on them an impossible restriction. The sight of an unworthy father
involuntarily suggests tormenting questions to a young creature,
especially when he compares him with the excellent fathers of his
companions. The conventional answer to this question is: 'He begot you,
and you are his flesh and blood, and therefore you are bound to love him.'
The youth involuntarily reflects: 'But did he love me when he begot me?'
he asks, wondering more and more. 'Was it for my sake he begot me? He did
not know me, not even my sex, at that moment, at the moment of passion,
perhaps, inflamed by wine, and he has only transmitted to me a propensity
to drunkenness--that's all he's done for me.... Why am I bound to love him
simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all my life
after?'
"Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not
expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. 'Drive nature out of the
door and it will fly in at the window,' and, above all, let us not be
afraid of words, but decide the question according to the dictates of
reason and humanity and not of mystic ideas. How shall it be decided? Why,
like this. Let the son stand before his father and ask him, 'Father, tell
me, why must I love you? Father, show me that I must love you,' and if
that father is able to answer him and show him good reason, we have a
real, normal, parental relation, not resting on mystical prejudice, but on
a rational, responsible and strictly humanitarian basis. But if he does
not, there's an end to the family tie. He is not a father to him, and the
son has a right to look upon him as a stranger, and even an enemy. Our
tribune, gentlemen of the jury, ought to be a school of true and sound
ideas."
(Here the orator was interrupted by irrepressible and almost frantic
applause. Of course, it was not the whole audience, but a good half of it
applauded. The fathers and mothers present applauded. Shrieks and
exclamations were heard from the gallery, where the ladies were sitting.
Handkerchiefs were waved. The President began ringing his bell with all
his might. He was obviously irritated by the behavior of the audience, but
did not venture to clear the court as he had threatened. Even persons of
high position, old men with stars on their breasts, sitting on specially
reserved seats behind the judges, applauded the orator and waved their
handkerchiefs. So that when the noise died down, the President confined
himself to repeating his stern threat to clear the court, and
Fetyukovitch, excited and triumphant, continued his speech.)
"Gentlemen of the jury, you remember that awful night of which so much has
been said to-day, when the son got over the fence and stood face to face
with the enemy and persecutor who had begotten him. I insist most
emphatically it was not for money he ran to his father's house: the charge
of robbery is an absurdity, as I proved before. And it was not to murder
him he broke into the house, oh, no! If he had had that design he would,
at least, have taken the precaution of arming himself beforehand. The
brass pestle he caught up instinctively without knowing why he did it.
Granted that he deceived his father by tapping at the window, granted that
he made his way in--I've said already that I do not for a moment believe
that legend, but let it be so, let us suppose it for a moment. Gentlemen,
I swear to you by all that's holy, if it had not been his father, but an
ordinary enemy, he would, after running through the rooms and satisfying
himself that the woman was not there, have made off, post-haste, without
doing any harm to his rival. He would have struck him, pushed him away
perhaps, nothing more, for he had no thought and no time to spare for
that. What he wanted to know was where she was. But his father, his
father! The mere sight of the father who had hated him from his childhood,
had been his enemy, his persecutor, and now his unnatural rival, was
enough! A feeling of hatred came over him involuntarily, irresistibly,
clouding his reason. It all surged up in one moment! It was an impulse of
madness and insanity, but also an impulse of nature, irresistibly and
unconsciously (like everything in nature) avenging the violation of its
eternal laws.
"But the prisoner even then did not murder him--I maintain that, I cry that
aloud!--no, he only brandished the pestle in a burst of indignant disgust,
not meaning to kill him, not knowing that he would kill him. Had he not
had this fatal pestle in his hand, he would have only knocked his father
down perhaps, but would not have killed him. As he ran away, he did not
know whether he had killed the old man. Such a murder is not a murder.
Such a murder is not a parricide. No, the murder of such a father cannot
be called parricide. Such a murder can only be reckoned parricide by
prejudice.
"But I appeal to you again and again from the depths of my soul; did this
murder actually take place? Gentlemen of the jury, if we convict and
punish him, he will say to himself: 'These people have done nothing for my
bringing up, for my education, nothing to improve my lot, nothing to make
me better, nothing to make me a man. These people have not given me to eat
and to drink, have not visited me in prison and nakedness, and here they
have sent me to penal servitude. I am quits, I owe them nothing now, and
owe no one anything for ever. They are wicked and I will be wicked. They
are cruel and I will be cruel.' That is what he will say, gentlemen of the
jury. And I swear, by finding him guilty you will only make it easier for
him: you will ease his conscience, he will curse the blood he has shed and
will not regret it. At the same time you will destroy in him the
possibility of becoming a new man, for he will remain in his wickedness
and blindness all his life.
"But do you want to punish him fearfully, terribly, with the most awful
punishment that could be imagined, and at the same time to save him and
regenerate his soul? If so, overwhelm him with your mercy! You will see,
you will hear how he will tremble and be horror-struck. 'How can I endure
this mercy? How can I endure so much love? Am I worthy of it?' That's what
he will exclaim.
"Oh, I know, I know that heart, that wild but grateful heart, gentlemen of
the jury! It will bow before your mercy; it thirsts for a great and loving
action, it will melt and mount upwards. There are souls which, in their
limitation, blame the whole world. But subdue such a soul with mercy, show
it love, and it will curse its past, for there are many good impulses in
it. Such a heart will expand and see that God is merciful and that men are
good and just. He will be horror-stricken; he will be crushed by remorse
and the vast obligation laid upon him henceforth. And he will not say
then, 'I am quits,' but will say, 'I am guilty in the sight of all men and
am more unworthy than all.' With tears of penitence and poignant, tender
anguish, he will exclaim: 'Others are better than I, they wanted to save
me, not to ruin me!' Oh, this act of mercy is so easy for you, for in the
absence of anything like real evidence it will be too awful for you to
pronounce: 'Yes, he is guilty.'
"Better acquit ten guilty men than punish one innocent man! Do you hear,
do you hear that majestic voice from the past century of our glorious
history? It is not for an insignificant person like me to remind you that
the Russian court does not exist for the punishment only, but also for the
salvation of the criminal! Let other nations think of retribution and the
letter of the law, we will cling to the spirit and the meaning--the
salvation and the reformation of the lost. If this is true, if Russia and
her justice are such, she may go forward with good cheer! Do not try to
scare us with your frenzied troikas from which all the nations stand aside
in disgust. Not a runaway troika, but the stately chariot of Russia will
move calmly and majestically to its goal. In your hands is the fate of my
client, in your hands is the fate of Russian justice. You will defend it,
you will save it, you will prove that there are men to watch over it, that
it is in good hands!"
| 3,151 | Book 12, Chapter 13 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-12-chapter-13 | Now Fetyukovich entertains the idea that Dmitri might have killed Fyodor. Even if he had, according to Fetyukovich, it wouldn't even count as parricide because of what a miserable father Fyodor was. Not only did Fyodor's awful parenting result in the mess that Dmitri is today, but Fyodor so completely abandoned his obligations as a father that he doesn't deserve to be called a father at all. Fetyukovich then digresses into a general discussion of how the future of society depends on good fathers. Citing the Gospel, he asks the jury to have mercy on Dmitri and declare him innocent. By this show of mercy, they will be giving Dmitri a chance at redemption and at living a good life, a chance his father never gave him. Fetyukovich is frequently interrupted by applause. He ends his speech not with a runaway troika, as Kirillovich did, but with the image of a magnificent Russian chariot. | null | 154 | 1 | [
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161 | false | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/23.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/Sense and Sensibility/section_2_part_3.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 23 | chapter 23 | null | {"name": "Chapter 23", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210419170735/https://www.gradesaver.com/sense-and-sensibility/study-guide/summary-chapters-21-30", "summary": "Elinor does not have the luxury of doubting the truth of Lucy's confession; yet, she is convinced that Edward loves her, and not Lucy. She feels at first that he wronged her by not being forthright about his engagement; but any anger she feels is softened by her considering his situation. Although she is only temporarily disappointed, he will have to marry Lucy; and any affection he once had for her has probably been quenched by the four-year engagement, and Lucy being selfish, unpolished, and uneducated. Elinor does not doubt that her defects have probably become painfully obvious to him, and that he will have even more trouble with his family in marrying Lucy than he would have had in marrying Elinor. Elinor decides to speak to Lucy again, to find if her affection is genuine and to assure her that Elinor has no interest in this matter than as a friend. She gets the opportunity at Barton Park, when they are invited to supper while Sir John is away. She helps Lucy work on a basket for one of Lady Middleton's children, while Marianne's piano playing assures that they will not be overheard.", "analysis": "Again, Elinor is shown to be the rational foil of Marianne; instead of dwelling on her own miseries, she immediately considers what Edward's might be, and is sorry for him. Elinor is very mature in her lack of selfishness, and her ability to understand what the predicaments of others might be; it is this great understanding which helps Elinor to deal more fairly with others than her mother or sisters are able to. But, Marianne too seems to have gained more sense through her disappointments; Austen remarks that she, like Elinor, does not appear to be forlorn, as she too has begun to internalize rather than externalize her feelings. Jealousy becomes apparent as a theme, and as a motive of Lucy's behavior; indeed, Elinor's discovery that Lucy must have confided in her in order to assert her claims to Edward does not reflect well on Lucy. However, any rivalry that might exist between them is dampened by Elinor's unfailing civility, and her successful attempts to reassure Lucy that she and Edward are merely friends"} |
However small Elinor's general dependence on Lucy's veracity might be,
it was impossible for her on serious reflection to suspect it in the
present case, where no temptation could be answerable to the folly of
inventing a falsehood of such a description. What Lucy had asserted to
be true, therefore, Elinor could not, dared not longer doubt; supported
as it was too on every side by such probabilities and proofs, and
contradicted by nothing but her own wishes. Their opportunity of
acquaintance in the house of Mr. Pratt was a foundation for the rest,
at once indisputable and alarming; and Edward's visit near Plymouth,
his melancholy state of mind, his dissatisfaction at his own prospects,
his uncertain behaviour towards herself, the intimate knowledge of the
Miss Steeles as to Norland and their family connections, which had
often surprised her, the picture, the letter, the ring, formed
altogether such a body of evidence, as overcame every fear of
condemning him unfairly, and established as a fact, which no partiality
could set aside, his ill-treatment of herself.--Her resentment of such
behaviour, her indignation at having been its dupe, for a short time
made her feel only for herself; but other ideas, other considerations,
soon arose. Had Edward been intentionally deceiving her? Had he
feigned a regard for her which he did not feel? Was his engagement to
Lucy an engagement of the heart? No; whatever it might once have been,
she could not believe it such at present. His affection was all her
own. She could not be deceived in that. Her mother, sisters, Fanny,
all had been conscious of his regard for her at Norland; it was not an
illusion of her own vanity. He certainly loved her. What a softener
of the heart was this persuasion! How much could it not tempt her to
forgive! He had been blamable, highly blamable, in remaining at
Norland after he first felt her influence over him to be more than it
ought to be. In that, he could not be defended; but if he had injured
her, how much more had he injured himself; if her case were pitiable,
his was hopeless. His imprudence had made her miserable for a while;
but it seemed to have deprived himself of all chance of ever being
otherwise. She might in time regain tranquillity; but HE, what had he
to look forward to? Could he ever be tolerably happy with Lucy Steele;
could he, were his affection for herself out of the question, with his
integrity, his delicacy, and well-informed mind, be satisfied with a
wife like her--illiterate, artful, and selfish?
The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind him to every
thing but her beauty and good nature; but the four succeeding
years--years, which if rationally spent, give such improvement to the
understanding, must have opened his eyes to her defects of education,
while the same period of time, spent on her side in inferior society
and more frivolous pursuits, had perhaps robbed her of that simplicity
which might once have given an interesting character to her beauty.
If in the supposition of his seeking to marry herself, his difficulties
from his mother had seemed great, how much greater were they now likely
to be, when the object of his engagement was undoubtedly inferior in
connections, and probably inferior in fortune to herself. These
difficulties, indeed, with a heart so alienated from Lucy, might not
press very hard upon his patience; but melancholy was the state of the
person by whom the expectation of family opposition and unkindness,
could be felt as a relief!
As these considerations occurred to her in painful succession, she wept
for him, more than for herself. Supported by the conviction of having
done nothing to merit her present unhappiness, and consoled by the
belief that Edward had done nothing to forfeit her esteem, she thought
she could even now, under the first smart of the heavy blow, command
herself enough to guard every suspicion of the truth from her mother
and sisters. And so well was she able to answer her own expectations,
that when she joined them at dinner only two hours after she had first
suffered the extinction of all her dearest hopes, no one would have
supposed from the appearance of the sisters, that Elinor was mourning
in secret over obstacles which must divide her for ever from the object
of her love, and that Marianne was internally dwelling on the
perfections of a man, of whose whole heart she felt thoroughly
possessed, and whom she expected to see in every carriage which drove
near their house.
The necessity of concealing from her mother and Marianne, what had been
entrusted in confidence to herself, though it obliged her to unceasing
exertion, was no aggravation of Elinor's distress. On the contrary it
was a relief to her, to be spared the communication of what would give
such affliction to them, and to be saved likewise from hearing that
condemnation of Edward, which would probably flow from the excess of
their partial affection for herself, and which was more than she felt
equal to support.
From their counsel, or their conversation, she knew she could receive
no assistance, their tenderness and sorrow must add to her distress,
while her self-command would neither receive encouragement from their
example nor from their praise. She was stronger alone, and her own
good sense so well supported her, that her firmness was as unshaken,
her appearance of cheerfulness as invariable, as with regrets so
poignant and so fresh, it was possible for them to be.
Much as she had suffered from her first conversation with Lucy on the
subject, she soon felt an earnest wish of renewing it; and this for
more reasons than one. She wanted to hear many particulars of their
engagement repeated again, she wanted more clearly to understand what
Lucy really felt for Edward, whether there were any sincerity in her
declaration of tender regard for him, and she particularly wanted to
convince Lucy, by her readiness to enter on the matter again, and her
calmness in conversing on it, that she was no otherwise interested in
it than as a friend, which she very much feared her involuntary
agitation, in their morning discourse, must have left at least
doubtful. That Lucy was disposed to be jealous of her appeared very
probable: it was plain that Edward had always spoken highly in her
praise, not merely from Lucy's assertion, but from her venturing to
trust her on so short a personal acquaintance, with a secret so
confessedly and evidently important. And even Sir John's joking
intelligence must have had some weight. But indeed, while Elinor
remained so well assured within herself of being really beloved by
Edward, it required no other consideration of probabilities to make it
natural that Lucy should be jealous; and that she was so, her very
confidence was a proof. What other reason for the disclosure of the
affair could there be, but that Elinor might be informed by it of
Lucy's superior claims on Edward, and be taught to avoid him in future?
She had little difficulty in understanding thus much of her rival's
intentions, and while she was firmly resolved to act by her as every
principle of honour and honesty directed, to combat her own affection
for Edward and to see him as little as possible; she could not deny
herself the comfort of endeavouring to convince Lucy that her heart was
unwounded. And as she could now have nothing more painful to hear on
the subject than had already been told, she did not mistrust her own
ability of going through a repetition of particulars with composure.
But it was not immediately that an opportunity of doing so could be
commanded, though Lucy was as well disposed as herself to take
advantage of any that occurred; for the weather was not often fine
enough to allow of their joining in a walk, where they might most
easily separate themselves from the others; and though they met at
least every other evening either at the park or cottage, and chiefly at
the former, they could not be supposed to meet for the sake of
conversation. Such a thought would never enter either Sir John or Lady
Middleton's head; and therefore very little leisure was ever given for
a general chat, and none at all for particular discourse. They met for
the sake of eating, drinking, and laughing together, playing at cards,
or consequences, or any other game that was sufficiently noisy.
One or two meetings of this kind had taken place, without affording
Elinor any chance of engaging Lucy in private, when Sir John called at
the cottage one morning, to beg, in the name of charity, that they
would all dine with Lady Middleton that day, as he was obliged to
attend the club at Exeter, and she would otherwise be quite alone,
except her mother and the two Miss Steeles. Elinor, who foresaw a
fairer opening for the point she had in view, in such a party as this
was likely to be, more at liberty among themselves under the tranquil
and well-bred direction of Lady Middleton than when her husband united
them together in one noisy purpose, immediately accepted the
invitation; Margaret, with her mother's permission, was equally
compliant, and Marianne, though always unwilling to join any of their
parties, was persuaded by her mother, who could not bear to have her
seclude herself from any chance of amusement, to go likewise.
The young ladies went, and Lady Middleton was happily preserved from
the frightful solitude which had threatened her. The insipidity of the
meeting was exactly such as Elinor had expected; it produced not one
novelty of thought or expression, and nothing could be less interesting
than the whole of their discourse both in the dining parlour and
drawing room: to the latter, the children accompanied them, and while
they remained there, she was too well convinced of the impossibility of
engaging Lucy's attention to attempt it. They quitted it only with the
removal of the tea-things. The card-table was then placed, and Elinor
began to wonder at herself for having ever entertained a hope of
finding time for conversation at the park. They all rose up in
preparation for a round game.
"I am glad," said Lady Middleton to Lucy, "you are not going to finish
poor little Annamaria's basket this evening; for I am sure it must hurt
your eyes to work filigree by candlelight. And we will make the dear
little love some amends for her disappointment to-morrow, and then I
hope she will not much mind it."
This hint was enough, Lucy recollected herself instantly and replied,
"Indeed you are very much mistaken, Lady Middleton; I am only waiting
to know whether you can make your party without me, or I should have
been at my filigree already. I would not disappoint the little angel
for all the world: and if you want me at the card-table now, I am
resolved to finish the basket after supper."
"You are very good, I hope it won't hurt your eyes--will you ring the
bell for some working candles? My poor little girl would be sadly
disappointed, I know, if the basket was not finished tomorrow, for
though I told her it certainly would not, I am sure she depends upon
having it done."
Lucy directly drew her work table near her and reseated herself with an
alacrity and cheerfulness which seemed to infer that she could taste no
greater delight than in making a filigree basket for a spoilt child.
Lady Middleton proposed a rubber of Casino to the others. No one made
any objection but Marianne, who with her usual inattention to the forms
of general civility, exclaimed, "Your Ladyship will have the goodness
to excuse ME--you know I detest cards. I shall go to the piano-forte;
I have not touched it since it was tuned." And without farther
ceremony, she turned away and walked to the instrument.
Lady Middleton looked as if she thanked heaven that SHE had never made
so rude a speech.
"Marianne can never keep long from that instrument you know, ma'am,"
said Elinor, endeavouring to smooth away the offence; "and I do not
much wonder at it; for it is the very best toned piano-forte I ever
heard."
The remaining five were now to draw their cards.
"Perhaps," continued Elinor, "if I should happen to cut out, I may be
of some use to Miss Lucy Steele, in rolling her papers for her; and
there is so much still to be done to the basket, that it must be
impossible I think for her labour singly, to finish it this evening. I
should like the work exceedingly, if she would allow me a share in it."
"Indeed I shall be very much obliged to you for your help," cried Lucy,
"for I find there is more to be done to it than I thought there was;
and it would be a shocking thing to disappoint dear Annamaria after
all."
"Oh! that would be terrible, indeed," said Miss Steele-- "Dear little
soul, how I do love her!"
"You are very kind," said Lady Middleton to Elinor; "and as you really
like the work, perhaps you will be as well pleased not to cut in till
another rubber, or will you take your chance now?"
Elinor joyfully profited by the first of these proposals, and thus by a
little of that address which Marianne could never condescend to
practise, gained her own end, and pleased Lady Middleton at the same
time. Lucy made room for her with ready attention, and the two fair
rivals were thus seated side by side at the same table, and, with the
utmost harmony, engaged in forwarding the same work. The pianoforte at
which Marianne, wrapped up in her own music and her own thoughts, had
by this time forgotten that any body was in the room besides herself,
was luckily so near them that Miss Dashwood now judged she might
safely, under the shelter of its noise, introduce the interesting
subject, without any risk of being heard at the card-table.
| 2,212 | Chapter 23 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210419170735/https://www.gradesaver.com/sense-and-sensibility/study-guide/summary-chapters-21-30 | Elinor does not have the luxury of doubting the truth of Lucy's confession; yet, she is convinced that Edward loves her, and not Lucy. She feels at first that he wronged her by not being forthright about his engagement; but any anger she feels is softened by her considering his situation. Although she is only temporarily disappointed, he will have to marry Lucy; and any affection he once had for her has probably been quenched by the four-year engagement, and Lucy being selfish, unpolished, and uneducated. Elinor does not doubt that her defects have probably become painfully obvious to him, and that he will have even more trouble with his family in marrying Lucy than he would have had in marrying Elinor. Elinor decides to speak to Lucy again, to find if her affection is genuine and to assure her that Elinor has no interest in this matter than as a friend. She gets the opportunity at Barton Park, when they are invited to supper while Sir John is away. She helps Lucy work on a basket for one of Lady Middleton's children, while Marianne's piano playing assures that they will not be overheard. | Again, Elinor is shown to be the rational foil of Marianne; instead of dwelling on her own miseries, she immediately considers what Edward's might be, and is sorry for him. Elinor is very mature in her lack of selfishness, and her ability to understand what the predicaments of others might be; it is this great understanding which helps Elinor to deal more fairly with others than her mother or sisters are able to. But, Marianne too seems to have gained more sense through her disappointments; Austen remarks that she, like Elinor, does not appear to be forlorn, as she too has begun to internalize rather than externalize her feelings. Jealousy becomes apparent as a theme, and as a motive of Lucy's behavior; indeed, Elinor's discovery that Lucy must have confided in her in order to assert her claims to Edward does not reflect well on Lucy. However, any rivalry that might exist between them is dampened by Elinor's unfailing civility, and her successful attempts to reassure Lucy that she and Edward are merely friends | 194 | 174 | [
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44,747 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/44747-chapters/38.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_37_part_0.txt | The Red and the Black.part 2.chapter 8 | part 2, chapter 8 | null | {"name": "Part 2, Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-8", "summary": "Mathilde de La Mole starts crushing on Julien when she realizes that she's reached the age of many heroines in romance novels. She invites Julien to attend a duke's ball and Count Norbert brings him. As Julien wanders around, he hears young men talking about how Mathilde de La Mole is the most beautiful girl at the ball. Mathilde comes over to talk to him, making the young men jealous. She asks him what he thinks of the ball and he tells her he's not sure, having never been to one before. She finds him refreshing because he isn't superficial like the rest of the party. Julien learns that there's a Spanish man at the party named Count Altamira who has been condemned to death in his own country for stirring up revolutionary sentiments. Being a free thinker himself, Julien wants to talk to this guy more than anyone. Mathilde is very aware of how little he thinks about her, and this of course just makes her want him more.", "analysis": ""} | CHAPTER XXXVIII
WHAT IS THE DECORATION WHICH CONFERS DISTINCTION?
"Thy water refreshes me not," said the transformed genie.
"'Tis nevertheless the freshest well in all Diar-Bekir"--_Pellico_.
One day Julien had just returned from the charming estate of Villequier
on the banks of the Seine, which was the especial subject of M. de la
Mole's interest because it was the only one of all his properties which
had belonged to the celebrated Boniface de la Mole.
He found the marquise and her daughter, who had just come back from
Hyeres, in the hotel. Julien was a dandy now, and understood the art of
Paris life. He manifested a perfect coldness towards mademoiselle de la
Mole. He seemed to have retained no recollection of the day when she
had asked him so gaily for details of his fall from his horse.
Mademoiselle de la Mole thought that he had grown taller and paler.
There was no longer anything of the provincial in his figure or his
appearance. It was not so with his conversation. Too much of the
serious and too much of the positive element were still noticeable. In
spite of these sober qualities, his conversation, thanks to his pride,
was destitute of any trace of the subordinate. One simply felt that
there were still too many things which he took seriously. But one saw
that he was the kind of man to stick to his guns.
"He lacks lightness of touch, but not brains," said mademoiselle de la
Mole to her father, as she rallied him on the cross that he had given
Julien. "My brother has been asking you for it for sixteen months, and
he is a La Mole."
"Yes, but Julien has surprises, and that's what the de la Mole, whom
you were referring to, has never been guilty of."
M. the duc de Retz was announced.
Mathilde felt herself seized by an irresistible attack of yawning. She
knew so well the old gildings and the old habitues of her father's
salon. She conjured up an absolutely boring picture of the life which
she was going to take up at Paris, and yet, when at Hyeres, she had
regretted Paris.
"And yet I am nineteen," she thought. "That's the age of happiness, say
all those gilt-edged ninnies."
She looked at eight or ten new volumes of poetry which had accumulated
on the table in the salon during her journey in Provence. She had the
misfortune to have more brains than M.M. de Croisnois, de Caylus, de
Luz, and her other friends. She anticipated all that they were going to
tell her about the fine sky of Provence, poetry, the South, etc., etc.
These fine eyes, which were the home of the deepest ennui, and worse
still, of the despair of ever finding pleasure, lingered on Julien. At
any rate, he was not exactly like the others.
"Monsieur Sorel," she said, in that short, sharp voice, destitute of
all femininity, which is so frequent among young women of the upper
class.
"Monsieur Sorel, are you coming to-night to M. de Retz's ball?"
"Mademoiselle, I have not had the honour of being presented to M. the
duke." (One would have said that these words and that title seared the
mouth of the proud provincial).
"He asked my brother to take you there, and if you go, you could
tell me some details about the Villequier estate. We are thinking of
going there in the spring, and I would like to know if the chateau is
habitable, and if the neighbouring places are as pretty as they say.
There are so many unmerited reputations."
Julien did not answer.
"Come to the ball with my brother," she added, very dryly. Julien bowed
respectfully.
"So I owe my due to the members of the family, even in the middle of a
ball. Am I not paid to be their business man?" His bad temper added,
"God knows, moreover, if what I tell the daughter will not put out the
plans of the father, brother, and mother. It is just like the court of
a sovereign prince. You have to be absolutely negative, and yet give no
one any right to complain."
"How that big girl displeases me!" he thought, as he watched the walk
of Mademoiselle de la Mole, whom her mother had called to present to
several women friends of hers. She exaggerates all the fashions. Her
dress almost falls down to her shoulders, she is even paler than before
she went away. How nondescript her hair has grown as the result of
being blonde! You would say that the light passed through it.
What a haughty way of bowing and of looking at you! What queenly
gestures! Mademoiselle de la Mole had just called her brother at the
moment when he was leaving the salon.
The comte de Norbert approached Julien.
"My dear Sorel," he said to him. "Where would you like me to pick you
up to-night for Monsieur's ball. He expressly asked me to bring you."
"I know well whom I have to thank for so much kindness," answered
Julien bowing to the ground.
His bad temper, being unable to find anything to lay hold of in the
polite and almost sympathetic tone in which Norbert had spoken to
him, set itself to work on the answer he had made to that courteous
invitation. He detected in it a trace of subservience.
When he arrived at the ball in the evening, he was struck with the
magnificence of the Hotel de Retz. The courtyard at the entrance was
covered with an immense tent of crimson with golden stars. Nothing
could have been more elegant. Beyond the tent, the court had been
transformed into a wood of orange trees and of pink laurels in full
flower. As they had been careful to bury the vases sufficiently deep,
the laurel trees and the orange trees appeared to come straight out of
the ground. The road which the carriages traversed was sanded.
All this seemed extraordinary to our provincial. He had never had any
idea of such magnificence. In a single instant his thrilled imagination
had left his bad temper a thousand leagues behind. In the carriage on
their way to the ball Norbert had been happy, while he saw everything
in black colours. They had scarcely entered the courtyard before the
roles changed.
Norbert was only struck by a few details which, in the midst of all
that magnificence, had not been able to be attended to. He calculated
the expense of each item, and Julien remarked that the nearer he got
to a sum total, the more jealous and bad-tempered he appeared.
As for himself, he was fascinated and full of admiration when he
reached the first of the salons where they were dancing. His emotion
was so great that it almost made him nervous. There was a crush at the
door of the second salon, and the crowd was so great that he found it
impossible to advance. The decorations of the second salon presented
the Alhambra of Grenada.
"That's the queen of the ball one must admit," said a young man with a
moustache whose shoulder stuck into Julien's chest.
"Mademoiselle Formant who has been the prettiest all the winter,
realises that she will have to go down to the second place. See how
strange she looks."
"In truth she is straining every nerve to please. Just look at that
gracious smile now that she is doing the figure in that quadrille all
alone. On my honour it is unique."
"Mademoiselle de la Mole looks as if she controlled the pleasure which
she derives from her triumph, of which she is perfectly conscious. One
might say that she fears to please anyone who talks to her."
"Very good. That is the art of alluring."
Julien vainly endeavoured to catch sight of the alluring woman. Seven
or eight men who were taller than he prevented him from seeing her.
"There is quite a lot of coquetry in that noble reserve," said the
young man with a moustache.
"And in those big blue eyes, which are lowered so slowly when one would
think they were on the point of betraying themselves," answered his
neighbour. "On my faith, nothing could be cleverer."
"See the pretty Formant looking quite common next to her," said the
first.
"That air of reserve means how much sweetness would I spend on you if
you were the man who was worthy of me."
"And who could be worthy of the sublime Mathilde," said the first man.
"Some sovereign prince, handsome, witty, well-made, a hero in war, and
twenty years old at the most."
"The natural son of the Emperor of Russia ... who would be made a
sovereign in honour of his marriage, or quite simply the comte de
Thaler, who looks like a dressed-up peasant."
The door was free, and Julien could go in.
"Since these puppets consider her so remarkable, it is worth while
for me to study her," he thought. "I shall then understand what these
people regard as perfection."
As his eyes were trying to find her, Mathilde looked at him. "My duty
calls me," said Julien to himself. But it was only his expression which
was bad-humoured.
His curiosity made him advance with a pleasure which the extremely low
cut dress on Mathilde's shoulder very quickly accentuated, in a manner
which was scarcely flattering for his own self-respect. "Her beauty has
youth," he thought. Five or six people, whom Julien recognised as those
who had been speaking at the door were between her and him.
"Now, Monsieur, you have been here all the winter," she said to him.
"Is it not true that this is the finest ball of the season."
He did not answer.
"This quadrille of Coulon's strikes me as admirable, and those ladies
dance it perfectly." The young men turned round to see who was the
happy man, an answer from whom was positively insisted on. The answer
was not encouraging.
"I shall not be able to be a good judge, mademoiselle, I pass my life
in writing. This is the first ball of this magnificence which I have
ever seen."
The young men with moustaches were scandalised.
"You are a wise man, Monsieur Sorel," came the answer with a more
marked interest. "You look upon all these balls, all these festivities,
like a philosopher, like J. J. Rousseau. All these follies astonish
without alluring you."
Julien's imagination had just hit upon an epigram which banished all
illusions from his mind. His mouth assumed the expression of a perhaps
slightly exaggerated disdain.
"J. J. Rousseau," he answered, "is in my view only a fool when he takes
it upon himself to criticise society. He did not understand it, and
he went into it with the spirit of a lackey who has risen above his
station."
"He wrote the _Contrat Social_," answered Mathilde reverently.
"While he preaches the Republic, and the overthrow of monarchical
dignities, the parvenu was intoxicated with happiness if a duke would
go out of his way after dinner to one of his friends."
"Oh yes, the Duke of Luxembourg at Montmorency, used to accompany a
Coindet from the neighbourhood of Paris," went on Mademoiselle de
la Mole, with all the pleasure and enthusiasm of her first flush of
pedantry. She was intoxicated with her knowledge, almost like the
academician who discovered the existence of King Feretrius.
Julien's look was still penetrating and severe. Mathilde had had
a moment's enthusiasm. Her partner's coldness disconcerted her
profoundly. She was all the more astonished, as it was she who was
accustomed to produce that particular effect on others.
At this moment the marquis de Croisenois was advancing eagerly towards
mademoiselle de la Mole. He was for a moment three yards away from her.
He was unable to get closer because of the crowd. He smiled at the
obstacle. The young marquise de Rouvray was near her. She was a cousin
of Mathilde. She was giving her arm to her husband who had only married
her a fortnight ago. The marquis de Rouvray, who was also very young,
had all the love which seizes a man who, having contracted a marriage
of convenience exclusively arranged by the notaries, finds a person who
is ideally pretty. M. de Rouvray would be a duke on the death of a very
old uncle.
While the marquis de Croisenois was struggling to get through the
crowd, and smiling at Mathilde she fixed her big divinely blue eyes
on him and his neighbours. "Could anything be flatter," she said to
herself. "There is Croisenois who wants to marry me, he is gentle and
polite, he has perfect manners like M. de Rouvray. If they did not
bore, those gentlemen would be quite charming. He too, would accompany
me to the ball with that smug limited expression. One year after the
marriage I shall have my carriage, my horses, my dresses, my chateau
twenty leagues from Paris. All this would be as nice as possible, and
enough to make a Countess de Roiville, for example, die of envy and
afterwards--"
Mathilde bored herself in anticipation. The marquis de Croisenois
managed to approach her and spoke to her, but she was dreaming and
did not listen to him. The noise of his words began to get mixed
with the buzz of the ball. Her eye mechanically followed Julien who
had gone away, with an air which, though respectful, was yet proud
and discontented. She noticed in a corner far from the moving crowd,
the comte Altamira who had been condemned to death in his own country
and whom the reader knows already. One of his relatives had married a
Prince de Conti in the reign of Louis XIV. This historical fact was
some protection against the police of the congregation.
"I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said
Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought."
"Why, that's an epigram, I just said, what a pity it did not come at a
moment when I could have reaped all the credit for it." Mathilde had
too much taste to work into the conversation a prepared epigram but
at the same time she was too vain not to be extremely pleased with
herself. A happy expression succeeded the palpable boredom of her face.
The marquis de Croisenois, who had never left off talking, saw a chance
of success and waxed twice as eloquent.
"What objection could a caviller find with my epigram," said Mathilde
to herself. "I would answer my critic in this way: The title of baron
or vicomte is to be bought; a cross, why it is a gift. My brother
has just got one. What has he done? A promotion, why that can be
obtained by being ten years in a garrison or have the minister of war
for a relative, and you'll be a chief of a squadron like Norbert. A
great fortune! That's rather more difficult, and consequently more
meritorious. It is really quite funny. It's the opposite of what
the books say. Well, to win a fortune why you marry M. Rothschild's
daughter. Really my epigram is quite deep. Being condemned to death is
still the one privilege which one has never thought of canvassing."
"Do you know the comte Altamira," she said to M. de Croisenois.
Her thoughts seemed to have been so far away, and this question had
so little connection with all that the poor marquis had been saying
for the last five minutes, that his good temper was ruffled. He was
nevertheless a man of wit and celebrated for being so.
"Mathilde is eccentric," he thought, "that's a nuisance, but she will
give her husband such a fine social position. I don't know how the
marquis de la Mole manages. He is connected with all that is best in
all parties. He is a man who is bound to come out on top. And, besides,
this eccentricity of Mathilde's may pass for genius. Genius when allied
with good birth and a large fortune, so far from being ridiculous, is
highly distinguished. She has wit, moreover, when she wants to, that
mixture in fact of brains, character, and ready wit which constitute
perfection."
As it is difficult to do two things at the same time, the marquis
answered Mathilde with a vacant expression as though he were reciting a
lesson.
"Who does not know that poor Altamira?" and he told her the history of
his conspiracy, abortive, ridiculous and absurd.
"Very absurd," said Mathilde as if she were talking to herself, "but he
has done something. I want to see a man; bring him to me," she said to
the scandalized marquis.
Comte Altamira was one of the most avowed admirers of mademoiselle de
la Mole's haughty and impertinent manner. In his opinion she was one of
the most beautiful persons in Paris.
"How fine she would be on a throne," he said to M. de Croisenois; and
made no demur at being taken up to Mathilde.
There are a good number of people in society who would like to
establish the fact that nothing is in such bad form as a conspiracy, in
the nineteenth century; it smacks of Jacobinism. And what could be more
sordid than unsuccessful Jacobinism.
Mathilde's expression made fun a little of Altamira and M. de
Croisenois, but she listened to him with pleasure.
"A conspirator at a ball, what a pretty contrast," she thought. She
thought that this man with his black moustache looked like a lion at
rest, but she soon perceived that his mind had only one point of view:
_utility, admiration for utility_.
The young comte thought nothing worthy his attention except what tended
to give his country two chamber government. He left Mathilde, who was
the prettiest person at the ball, with alacrity, because he saw a
Peruvian general come in. Desparing of Europe such as M. de Metternich
had arranged it, poor Altamira had been reduced to thinking that when
the States of South America had become strong and powerful they could
restore to Europe the liberty which Mirabeau has given it.
A crowd of moustachised young men had approached Mathilde. She realized
that Altamira had not felt allured, and was piqued by his departure.
She saw his black eye gleam as he talked to the Peruvian general.
Mademoiselle de la Mole looked at the young Frenchmen with that
profound seriousness which none of her rivals could imitate, "which
of them," she thought, "could get himself condemned to death, even
supposing he had a favourable opportunity?"
This singular look flattered those who were not very intelligent, but
disconcerted the others. They feared the discharge of some stinging
epigram that would be difficult to answer.
"Good birth vouchsafes a hundred qualities whose absence would offend
me. I see as much in the case of Julien," thought Mathilde, "but it
withers up those qualities of soul which make a man get condemned to
death."
At that moment some one was saying near her: "Comte Altamira is the
second son of the Prince of San Nazaro-Pimentel; it was a Pimentel who
tried to save Conradin, was beheaded in 1268. It is one of the noblest
families in Naples."
"So," said Mathilde to herself, "what a pretty proof this is of my
maxim, that good birth deprives a man of that force of character
in default of which a man does not get condemned to death. I seem
doomed to reason falsely to-night. Since I am only a woman like any
other, well I must dance." She yielded to the solicitations of M. de
Croisenois who had been asking for a gallop for the last hour. To
distract herself from her failure in philosophy, Mathilde made a point
of being perfectly fascinating. M. de Croisenois was enchanted. But
neither the dance nor her wish to please one of the handsomest men at
court, nor anything at all, succeeded in distracting Mathilde. She
could not possibly have been more of a success. She was the queen of
the ball. She coldly appreciated the fact.
"What a blank life I shall pass with a person like Croisenois," she
said to herself as he took her back to her place an hour afterwards.
"What pleasure do I get," she added sadly, "if after an absence of
six months I find myself at a ball which all the women of Paris were
mad with jealousy to go to? And what is more I am surrounded by the
homage of an ideally constituted circle of society. The only bourgeois
are some peers and perhaps one or two Juliens. And yet," she added
with increasing sadness, "what advantages has not fate bestowed upon
me! Distinction, fortune, youth, everything except happiness. My most
dubious advantages are the very ones they have been speaking to me
about all the evening. Wit, I believe I have it, because I obviously
frighten everyone. If they venture to tackle a serious subject, they
will arrive after five minutes of conversation and as though they had
made a great discovery at a conclusion which we have been repeating to
them for the last hour. I am beautiful, I have that advantage for which
madame de Stael would have sacrificed everything, and yet I'm dying of
boredom. Shall I have reason to be less bored when I have changed my
name for that of the marquis de Croisenois?
"My God though," she added, while she almost felt as if she would like
to cry, "isn't he really quite perfect? He's a paragon of the education
of the age; you can't look at him without his finding something
charming and even witty to say to you; he is brave. But that Sorel is
strange," she said to herself, and the expression of her eyes changed
from melancholy to anger. "I told him that I had something to say to
him and he hasn't deigned to reappear."
| 3,355 | Part 2, Chapter 8 | https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-8 | Mathilde de La Mole starts crushing on Julien when she realizes that she's reached the age of many heroines in romance novels. She invites Julien to attend a duke's ball and Count Norbert brings him. As Julien wanders around, he hears young men talking about how Mathilde de La Mole is the most beautiful girl at the ball. Mathilde comes over to talk to him, making the young men jealous. She asks him what he thinks of the ball and he tells her he's not sure, having never been to one before. She finds him refreshing because he isn't superficial like the rest of the party. Julien learns that there's a Spanish man at the party named Count Altamira who has been condemned to death in his own country for stirring up revolutionary sentiments. Being a free thinker himself, Julien wants to talk to this guy more than anyone. Mathilde is very aware of how little he thinks about her, and this of course just makes her want him more. | null | 170 | 1 | [
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1,232 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/23.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Prince/section_8_part_4.txt | The Prince.chapter xxiii | chapter xxiii | null | {"name": "Chapter XXIII", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210303115306/https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/prince/section9/", "summary": "How to Avoid Flatterers Flatterers present a danger to any ruler because it is natural for powerful men to become self-absorbed. The best way to defend against such people is to convince them that you are not offended by the truth. But if everyone can speak to the prince, the prince will lose respect. A prince should allow only wise advisers to speak with him, and only when he specifically requests their advice. A prince should not listen to anyone else and should be firm in his decisions. Vacillation will lead to a loss of respect. A prince must always seek advice. But he must seek it only when he wants it, not when others thrust it upon him. Most important, a prince must always be skeptical about the advice he receives, constantly questioning and probing. If he ever discovers that someone is concealing the truth from him, he must punish that person severely. In the end, no matter how intelligent a prince's advisers might be, a prince is doomed if he lacks intelligence of his own. Wise princes should be honored for good actions proceeding from good advice.", "analysis": "Chapter XX returns to the issue of popular insurrection and how a prince should defend against it. Machiavelli argues that a prince must avoid hatred and suppress opposition before it can gain sufficient momentum to disrupt his rule. Also, he does not base his assessment of fortresses on their military value. Fortresses can be worthwhile or worthless depending on the individual circumstances. The attitude of the people outweighs the value of any physical structure. Machiavelli places emphasis on a distinctly nonmilitary aspect in his discussion of fortresses, a building traditionally associated with the military, indicating his broad interpretation of warcraft. Chapters XXI and XXII underscore the importance of appearing honorable and wise. This goal can be achieved partly through the selection of a loyal and competent personal staff. Machiavelli distinguishes between a virtuous appearance and an honorable, wise appearance. Appearing virtuous--generous, benevolent, and pious--is desirable but not necessary. However, appearing honorable and sagacious is crucial. Machiavelli's preference for some good qualities over others--for example, courage and decisiveness over generosity--is grounded in a practical argument. Generosity is undesirable because it wastes capital resources; decisiveness is desirable because it breeds respect among allies and subjects"} |
I do not wish to leave out an important branch of this subject, for it
is a danger from which princes are with difficulty preserved, unless
they are very careful and discriminating. It is that of flatterers, of
whom courts are full, because men are so self-complacent in their own
affairs, and in a way so deceived in them, that they are preserved with
difficulty from this pest, and if they wish to defend themselves they
run the danger of falling into contempt. Because there is no other way
of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that
to tell you the truth does not offend you; but when every one may tell
you the truth, respect for you abates.
Therefore a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the
wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking
the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires,
and of none others; but he ought to question them upon everything, and
listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions.
With these councillors, separately and collectively, he ought to carry
himself in such a way that each of them should know that, the more
freely he shall speak, the more he shall be preferred; outside of
these, he should listen to no one, pursue the thing resolved on, and be
steadfast in his resolutions. He who does otherwise is either overthrown
by flatterers, or is so often changed by varying opinions that he falls
into contempt.
I wish on this subject to adduce a modern example. Fra Luca, the man of
affairs to Maximilian,(*) the present emperor, speaking of his majesty,
said: He consulted with no one, yet never got his own way in anything.
This arose because of his following a practice the opposite to the
above; for the emperor is a secretive man--he does not communicate his
designs to any one, nor does he receive opinions on them. But as in
carrying them into effect they become revealed and known, they are
at once obstructed by those men whom he has around him, and he, being
pliant, is diverted from them. Hence it follows that those things he
does one day he undoes the next, and no one ever understands what he
wishes or intends to do, and no one can rely on his resolutions.
(*) Maximilian I, born in 1459, died 1519, Emperor of the
Holy Roman Empire. He married, first, Mary, daughter of
Charles the Bold; after her death, Bianca Sforza; and thus
became involved in Italian politics.
A prince, therefore, ought always to take counsel, but only when he
wishes and not when others wish; he ought rather to discourage every one
from offering advice unless he asks it; but, however, he ought to be
a constant inquirer, and afterwards a patient listener concerning the
things of which he inquired; also, on learning that any one, on any
consideration, has not told him the truth, he should let his anger be
felt.
And if there are some who think that a prince who conveys an impression
of his wisdom is not so through his own ability, but through the good
advisers that he has around him, beyond doubt they are deceived, because
this is an axiom which never fails: that a prince who is not wise
himself will never take good advice, unless by chance he has yielded his
affairs entirely to one person who happens to be a very prudent man. In
this case indeed he may be well governed, but it would not be for long,
because such a governor would in a short time take away his state from
him.
But if a prince who is not inexperienced should take counsel from more
than one he will never get united counsels, nor will he know how to
unite them. Each of the counsellors will think of his own interests, and
the prince will not know how to control them or to see through them. And
they are not to be found otherwise, because men will always prove untrue
to you unless they are kept honest by constraint. Therefore it must be
inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of
the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good
counsels.
| 688 | Chapter XXIII | https://web.archive.org/web/20210303115306/https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/prince/section9/ | How to Avoid Flatterers Flatterers present a danger to any ruler because it is natural for powerful men to become self-absorbed. The best way to defend against such people is to convince them that you are not offended by the truth. But if everyone can speak to the prince, the prince will lose respect. A prince should allow only wise advisers to speak with him, and only when he specifically requests their advice. A prince should not listen to anyone else and should be firm in his decisions. Vacillation will lead to a loss of respect. A prince must always seek advice. But he must seek it only when he wants it, not when others thrust it upon him. Most important, a prince must always be skeptical about the advice he receives, constantly questioning and probing. If he ever discovers that someone is concealing the truth from him, he must punish that person severely. In the end, no matter how intelligent a prince's advisers might be, a prince is doomed if he lacks intelligence of his own. Wise princes should be honored for good actions proceeding from good advice. | Chapter XX returns to the issue of popular insurrection and how a prince should defend against it. Machiavelli argues that a prince must avoid hatred and suppress opposition before it can gain sufficient momentum to disrupt his rule. Also, he does not base his assessment of fortresses on their military value. Fortresses can be worthwhile or worthless depending on the individual circumstances. The attitude of the people outweighs the value of any physical structure. Machiavelli places emphasis on a distinctly nonmilitary aspect in his discussion of fortresses, a building traditionally associated with the military, indicating his broad interpretation of warcraft. Chapters XXI and XXII underscore the importance of appearing honorable and wise. This goal can be achieved partly through the selection of a loyal and competent personal staff. Machiavelli distinguishes between a virtuous appearance and an honorable, wise appearance. Appearing virtuous--generous, benevolent, and pious--is desirable but not necessary. However, appearing honorable and sagacious is crucial. Machiavelli's preference for some good qualities over others--for example, courage and decisiveness over generosity--is grounded in a practical argument. Generosity is undesirable because it wastes capital resources; decisiveness is desirable because it breeds respect among allies and subjects | 190 | 193 | [
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28,054 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/12.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Brothers Karamazov/section_2_part_3.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 2.chapter 7 | book 2, chapter 7 | null | {"name": "book 2, Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section3/", "summary": "A Seminarist-Careerist When Zosima leaves the room after kneeling before Dmitri, Alyosha follows close behind him. When Alyosha catches up, Zosima tells him that he wants Alyosha to leave the monastery, rejoin the world, and even find a wife. Alyosha is upset, but Zosima, smiling, tells Alyosha that his path lies outside the monastery. Zosima says that he has great faith in Alyosha, and then sends him away. Alyosha walks with Rakitin to meet the Father Superior, and they discuss the meaning of Zosima's strange departure. Rakitin says that the Karamazov dynasty is coming to a violent end, for the Karamazovs are all \"sensualists\" who only love women and money. He says that Dmitri has indeed abandoned his fiancee for Grushenka, and that Ivan is now trying to steal Dmitri's cast-off fiancee, with Dmitri's consent, while Fyodor Pavlovich chases after Dmitri's mistress. Rakitin says that Zosima understands that this drama can only end in bloodshed, and that he bowed to Dmitri so that, after the tragedy occurs, people will think Zosima had foreseen it. Rakitin goes on insulting the Karamazovs and Grushenka, even saying that Grushenka wishes to seduce Alyosha, until Alyosha asks whether Grushenka is not one of Rakitin's relatives. Rakitin, angry and embarrassed, denies this claim", "analysis": ""} | Chapter VII. A Young Man Bent On A Career
Alyosha helped Father Zossima to his bedroom and seated him on his bed. It
was a little room furnished with the bare necessities. There was a narrow
iron bedstead, with a strip of felt for a mattress. In the corner, under
the ikons, was a reading-desk with a cross and the Gospel lying on it. The
elder sank exhausted on the bed. His eyes glittered and he breathed hard.
He looked intently at Alyosha, as though considering something.
"Go, my dear boy, go. Porfiry is enough for me. Make haste, you are needed
there, go and wait at the Father Superior's table."
"Let me stay here," Alyosha entreated.
"You are more needed there. There is no peace there. You will wait, and be
of service. If evil spirits rise up, repeat a prayer. And remember, my
son"--the elder liked to call him that--"this is not the place for you in
the future. When it is God's will to call me, leave the monastery. Go away
for good."
Alyosha started.
"What is it? This is not your place for the time. I bless you for great
service in the world. Yours will be a long pilgrimage. And you will have
to take a wife, too. You will have to bear _all_ before you come back.
There will be much to do. But I don't doubt of you, and so I send you
forth. Christ is with you. Do not abandon Him and He will not abandon you.
You will see great sorrow, and in that sorrow you will be happy. This is
my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness. Work, work unceasingly.
Remember my words, for although I shall talk with you again, not only my
days but my hours are numbered."
Alyosha's face again betrayed strong emotion. The corners of his mouth
quivered.
"What is it again?" Father Zossima asked, smiling gently. "The worldly may
follow the dead with tears, but here we rejoice over the father who is
departing. We rejoice and pray for him. Leave me, I must pray. Go, and
make haste. Be near your brothers. And not near one only, but near both."
Father Zossima raised his hand to bless him. Alyosha could make no
protest, though he had a great longing to remain. He longed, moreover, to
ask the significance of his bowing to Dmitri, the question was on the tip
of his tongue, but he dared not ask it. He knew that the elder would have
explained it unasked if he had thought fit. But evidently it was not his
will. That action had made a terrible impression on Alyosha; he believed
blindly in its mysterious significance. Mysterious, and perhaps awful.
As he hastened out of the hermitage precincts to reach the monastery in
time to serve at the Father Superior's dinner, he felt a sudden pang at
his heart, and stopped short. He seemed to hear again Father Zossima's
words, foretelling his approaching end. What he had foretold so exactly
must infallibly come to pass. Alyosha believed that implicitly. But how
could he be left without him? How could he live without seeing and hearing
him? Where should he go? He had told him not to weep, and to leave the
monastery. Good God! It was long since Alyosha had known such anguish. He
hurried through the copse that divided the monastery from the hermitage,
and unable to bear the burden of his thoughts, he gazed at the ancient
pines beside the path. He had not far to go--about five hundred paces. He
expected to meet no one at that hour, but at the first turn of the path he
noticed Rakitin. He was waiting for some one.
"Are you waiting for me?" asked Alyosha, overtaking him.
"Yes," grinned Rakitin. "You are hurrying to the Father Superior, I know;
he has a banquet. There's not been such a banquet since the Superior
entertained the Bishop and General Pahatov, do you remember? I shan't be
there, but you go and hand the sauces. Tell me one thing, Alexey, what
does that vision mean? That's what I want to ask you."
"What vision?"
"That bowing to your brother, Dmitri. And didn't he tap the ground with
his forehead, too!"
"You speak of Father Zossima?"
"Yes, of Father Zossima."
"Tapped the ground?"
"Ah, an irreverent expression! Well, what of it? Anyway, what does that
vision mean?"
"I don't know what it means, Misha."
"I knew he wouldn't explain it to you! There's nothing wonderful about it,
of course, only the usual holy mummery. But there was an object in the
performance. All the pious people in the town will talk about it and
spread the story through the province, wondering what it meant. To my
thinking the old man really has a keen nose; he sniffed a crime. Your
house stinks of it."
"What crime?"
Rakitin evidently had something he was eager to speak of.
"It'll be in your family, this crime. Between your brothers and your rich
old father. So Father Zossima flopped down to be ready for what may turn
up. If something happens later on, it'll be: 'Ah, the holy man foresaw it,
prophesied it!' though it's a poor sort of prophecy, flopping like that.
'Ah, but it was symbolic,' they'll say, 'an allegory,' and the devil knows
what all! It'll be remembered to his glory: 'He predicted the crime and
marked the criminal!' That's always the way with these crazy fanatics;
they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple. Like
your elder, he takes a stick to a just man and falls at the feet of a
murderer."
"What crime? What murderer? What do you mean?"
Alyosha stopped dead. Rakitin stopped, too.
"What murderer? As though you didn't know! I'll bet you've thought of it
before. That's interesting, too, by the way. Listen, Alyosha, you always
speak the truth, though you're always between two stools. Have you thought
of it or not? Answer."
"I have," answered Alyosha in a low voice. Even Rakitin was taken aback.
"What? Have you really?" he cried.
"I ... I've not exactly thought it," muttered Alyosha, "but directly you
began speaking so strangely, I fancied I had thought of it myself."
"You see? (And how well you expressed it!) Looking at your father and your
brother Mitya to-day you thought of a crime. Then I'm not mistaken?"
"But wait, wait a minute," Alyosha broke in uneasily. "What has led you to
see all this? Why does it interest you? That's the first question."
"Two questions, disconnected, but natural. I'll deal with them separately.
What led me to see it? I shouldn't have seen it, if I hadn't suddenly
understood your brother Dmitri, seen right into the very heart of him all
at once. I caught the whole man from one trait. These very honest but
passionate people have a line which mustn't be crossed. If it were, he'd
run at your father with a knife. But your father's a drunken and abandoned
old sinner, who can never draw the line--if they both let themselves go,
they'll both come to grief."
"No, Misha, no. If that's all, you've reassured me. It won't come to
that."
"But why are you trembling? Let me tell you; he may be honest, our Mitya
(he is stupid, but honest), but he's--a sensualist. That's the very
definition and inner essence of him. It's your father has handed him on
his low sensuality. Do you know, I simply wonder at you, Alyosha, how you
can have kept your purity. You're a Karamazov too, you know! In your
family sensuality is carried to a disease. But now, these three
sensualists are watching one another, with their knives in their belts.
The three of them are knocking their heads together, and you may be the
fourth."
"You are mistaken about that woman. Dmitri--despises her," said Alyosha,
with a sort of shudder.
"Grushenka? No, brother, he doesn't despise her. Since he has openly
abandoned his betrothed for her, he doesn't despise her. There's something
here, my dear boy, that you don't understand yet. A man will fall in love
with some beauty, with a woman's body, or even with a part of a woman's
body (a sensualist can understand that), and he'll abandon his own
children for her, sell his father and mother, and his country, Russia,
too. If he's honest, he'll steal; if he's humane, he'll murder; if he's
faithful, he'll deceive. Pushkin, the poet of women's feet, sung of their
feet in his verse. Others don't sing their praises, but they can't look at
their feet without a thrill--and it's not only their feet. Contempt's no
help here, brother, even if he did despise Grushenka. He does, but he
can't tear himself away."
"I understand that," Alyosha jerked out suddenly.
"Really? Well, I dare say you do understand, since you blurt it out at the
first word," said Rakitin, malignantly. "That escaped you unawares, and
the confession's the more precious. So it's a familiar subject; you've
thought about it already, about sensuality, I mean! Oh, you virgin soul!
You're a quiet one, Alyosha, you're a saint, I know, but the devil only
knows what you've thought about, and what you know already! You are pure,
but you've been down into the depths.... I've been watching you a long
time. You're a Karamazov yourself; you're a thorough Karamazov--no doubt
birth and selection have something to answer for. You're a sensualist from
your father, a crazy saint from your mother. Why do you tremble? Is it
true, then? Do you know, Grushenka has been begging me to bring you along.
'I'll pull off his cassock,' she says. You can't think how she keeps
begging me to bring you. I wondered why she took such an interest in you.
Do you know, she's an extraordinary woman, too!"
"Thank her and say I'm not coming," said Alyosha, with a strained smile.
"Finish what you were saying, Misha. I'll tell you my idea after."
"There's nothing to finish. It's all clear. It's the same old tune,
brother. If even you are a sensualist at heart, what of your brother,
Ivan? He's a Karamazov, too. What is at the root of all you Karamazovs is
that you're all sensual, grasping and crazy! Your brother Ivan writes
theological articles in joke, for some idiotic, unknown motive of his own,
though he's an atheist, and he admits it's a fraud himself--that's your
brother Ivan. He's trying to get Mitya's betrothed for himself, and I
fancy he'll succeed, too. And what's more, it's with Mitya's consent. For
Mitya will surrender his betrothed to him to be rid of her, and escape to
Grushenka. And he's ready to do that in spite of all his nobility and
disinterestedness. Observe that. Those are the most fatal people! Who the
devil can make you out? He recognizes his vileness and goes on with it!
Let me tell you, too, the old man, your father, is standing in Mitya's way
now. He has suddenly gone crazy over Grushenka. His mouth waters at the
sight of her. It's simply on her account he made that scene in the cell
just now, simply because Miuesov called her an 'abandoned creature.' He's
worse than a tom-cat in love. At first she was only employed by him in
connection with his taverns and in some other shady business, but now he
has suddenly realized all she is and has gone wild about her. He keeps
pestering her with his offers, not honorable ones, of course. And they'll
come into collision, the precious father and son, on that path! But
Grushenka favors neither of them, she's still playing with them, and
teasing them both, considering which she can get most out of. For though
she could filch a lot of money from the papa he wouldn't marry her, and
maybe he'll turn stingy in the end, and keep his purse shut. That's where
Mitya's value comes in; he has no money, but he's ready to marry her. Yes,
ready to marry her! to abandon his betrothed, a rare beauty, Katerina
Ivanovna, who's rich, and the daughter of a colonel, and to marry
Grushenka, who has been the mistress of a dissolute old merchant,
Samsonov, a coarse, uneducated, provincial mayor. Some murderous conflict
may well come to pass from all this, and that's what your brother Ivan is
waiting for. It would suit him down to the ground. He'll carry off
Katerina Ivanovna, for whom he is languishing, and pocket her dowry of
sixty thousand. That's very alluring to start with, for a man of no
consequence and a beggar. And, take note, he won't be wronging Mitya, but
doing him the greatest service. For I know as a fact that Mitya only last
week, when he was with some gypsy girls drunk in a tavern, cried out aloud
that he was unworthy of his betrothed, Katya, but that his brother Ivan,
he was the man who deserved her. And Katerina Ivanovna will not in the end
refuse such a fascinating man as Ivan. She's hesitating between the two of
them already. And how has that Ivan won you all, so that you all worship
him? He is laughing at you, and enjoying himself at your expense."
"How do you know? How can you speak so confidently?" Alyosha asked
sharply, frowning.
"Why do you ask, and are frightened at my answer? It shows that you know
I'm speaking the truth."
"You don't like Ivan. Ivan wouldn't be tempted by money."
"Really? And the beauty of Katerina Ivanovna? It's not only the money,
though a fortune of sixty thousand is an attraction."
"Ivan is above that. He wouldn't make up to any one for thousands. It is
not money, it's not comfort Ivan is seeking. Perhaps it's suffering he is
seeking."
"What wild dream now? Oh, you--aristocrats!"
"Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted
by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don't want millions,
but an answer to their questions."
"That's plagiarism, Alyosha. You're quoting your elder's phrases. Ah, Ivan
has set you a problem!" cried Rakitin, with undisguised malice. His face
changed, and his lips twitched. "And the problem's a stupid one. It is no
good guessing it. Rack your brains--you'll understand it. His article is
absurd and ridiculous. And did you hear his stupid theory just now: if
there's no immortality of the soul, then there's no virtue, and everything
is lawful. (And by the way, do you remember how your brother Mitya cried
out: 'I will remember!') An attractive theory for scoundrels!--(I'm being
abusive, that's stupid.) Not for scoundrels, but for pedantic _poseurs_,
'haunted by profound, unsolved doubts.' He's showing off, and what it all
comes to is, 'on the one hand we cannot but admit' and 'on the other it
must be confessed!' His whole theory is a fraud! Humanity will find in
itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality.
It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity."
Rakitin could hardly restrain himself in his heat, but, suddenly, as
though remembering something, he stopped short.
"Well, that's enough," he said, with a still more crooked smile. "Why are
you laughing? Do you think I'm a vulgar fool?"
"No, I never dreamed of thinking you a vulgar fool. You are clever but ...
never mind, I was silly to smile. I understand your getting hot about it,
Misha. I guess from your warmth that you are not indifferent to Katerina
Ivanovna yourself; I've suspected that for a long time, brother, that's
why you don't like my brother Ivan. Are you jealous of him?"
"And jealous of her money, too? Won't you add that?"
"I'll say nothing about money. I am not going to insult you."
"I believe it, since you say so, but confound you, and your brother Ivan
with you. Don't you understand that one might very well dislike him, apart
from Katerina Ivanovna. And why the devil should I like him? He
condescends to abuse me, you know. Why haven't I a right to abuse him?"
"I never heard of his saying anything about you, good or bad. He doesn't
speak of you at all."
"But I heard that the day before yesterday at Katerina Ivanovna's he was
abusing me for all he was worth--you see what an interest he takes in your
humble servant. And which is the jealous one after that, brother, I can't
say. He was so good as to express the opinion that, if I don't go in for
the career of an archimandrite in the immediate future and don't become a
monk, I shall be sure to go to Petersburg and get on to some solid
magazine as a reviewer, that I shall write for the next ten years, and in
the end become the owner of the magazine, and bring it out on the liberal
and atheistic side, with a socialistic tinge, with a tiny gloss of
socialism, but keeping a sharp look out all the time, that is, keeping in
with both sides and hoodwinking the fools. According to your brother's
account, the tinge of socialism won't hinder me from laying by the
proceeds and investing them under the guidance of some Jew, till at the
end of my career I build a great house in Petersburg and move my
publishing offices to it, and let out the upper stories to lodgers. He has
even chosen the place for it, near the new stone bridge across the Neva,
which they say is to be built in Petersburg."
"Ah, Misha, that's just what will really happen, every word of it," cried
Alyosha, unable to restrain a good-humored smile.
"You are pleased to be sarcastic, too, Alexey Fyodorovitch."
"No, no, I'm joking, forgive me. I've something quite different in my
mind. But, excuse me, who can have told you all this? You can't have been
at Katerina Ivanovna's yourself when he was talking about you?"
"I wasn't there, but Dmitri Fyodorovitch was; and I heard him tell it with
my own ears; if you want to know, he didn't tell me, but I overheard him,
unintentionally, of course, for I was sitting in Grushenka's bedroom and I
couldn't go away because Dmitri Fyodorovitch was in the next room."
"Oh, yes, I'd forgotten she was a relation of yours."
"A relation! That Grushenka a relation of mine!" cried Rakitin, turning
crimson. "Are you mad? You're out of your mind!"
"Why, isn't she a relation of yours? I heard so."
"Where can you have heard it? You Karamazovs brag of being an ancient,
noble family, though your father used to run about playing the buffoon at
other men's tables, and was only admitted to the kitchen as a favor. I may
be only a priest's son, and dirt in the eyes of noblemen like you, but
don't insult me so lightly and wantonly. I have a sense of honor, too,
Alexey Fyodorovitch, I couldn't be a relation of Grushenka, a common
harlot. I beg you to understand that!"
Rakitin was intensely irritated.
"Forgive me, for goodness' sake, I had no idea ... besides ... how can you
call her a harlot? Is she ... that sort of woman?" Alyosha flushed
suddenly. "I tell you again, I heard that she was a relation of yours. You
often go to see her, and you told me yourself you're not her lover. I
never dreamed that you of all people had such contempt for her! Does she
really deserve it?"
"I may have reasons of my own for visiting her. That's not your business.
But as for relationship, your brother, or even your father, is more likely
to make her yours than mine. Well, here we are. You'd better go to the
kitchen. Hullo! what's wrong, what is it? Are we late? They can't have
finished dinner so soon! Have the Karamazovs been making trouble again? No
doubt they have. Here's your father and your brother Ivan after him.
They've broken out from the Father Superior's. And look, Father Isidor's
shouting out something after them from the steps. And your father's
shouting and waving his arms. I expect he's swearing. Bah, and there goes
Miuesov driving away in his carriage. You see, he's going. And there's old
Maximov running!--there must have been a row. There can't have been any
dinner. Surely they've not been beating the Father Superior! Or have they,
perhaps, been beaten? It would serve them right!"
There was reason for Rakitin's exclamations. There had been a scandalous,
an unprecedented scene. It had all come from the impulse of a moment.
| 3,175 | book 2, Chapter 7 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210305110438/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/brothersk/section3/ | A Seminarist-Careerist When Zosima leaves the room after kneeling before Dmitri, Alyosha follows close behind him. When Alyosha catches up, Zosima tells him that he wants Alyosha to leave the monastery, rejoin the world, and even find a wife. Alyosha is upset, but Zosima, smiling, tells Alyosha that his path lies outside the monastery. Zosima says that he has great faith in Alyosha, and then sends him away. Alyosha walks with Rakitin to meet the Father Superior, and they discuss the meaning of Zosima's strange departure. Rakitin says that the Karamazov dynasty is coming to a violent end, for the Karamazovs are all "sensualists" who only love women and money. He says that Dmitri has indeed abandoned his fiancee for Grushenka, and that Ivan is now trying to steal Dmitri's cast-off fiancee, with Dmitri's consent, while Fyodor Pavlovich chases after Dmitri's mistress. Rakitin says that Zosima understands that this drama can only end in bloodshed, and that he bowed to Dmitri so that, after the tragedy occurs, people will think Zosima had foreseen it. Rakitin goes on insulting the Karamazovs and Grushenka, even saying that Grushenka wishes to seduce Alyosha, until Alyosha asks whether Grushenka is not one of Rakitin's relatives. Rakitin, angry and embarrassed, denies this claim | null | 208 | 1 | [
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110 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/chapters_25_to_30.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_6_part_0.txt | Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapters 25-30 | chapters 25-30 | null | {"name": "Chapters 25-30", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219151046/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary-and-analysis/phase-the-fourth-the-consequence-chapters-2530", "summary": "Angel has turned a new corner in his life, feeling that he belongs on the dairy as a farmer and that Tess is the right choice as a wife. Angel leaves the dairy to visit his family and to tell his parents about Tess. Angel's brothers, Felix and Cuthbert, disapprove of Angel marrying Tess but do little to discourage him. His parents had intended Angel to marry Miss Mercy Chant, a real \"lady\" and local teacher. Angel is against the union and proposes to his parents that Tess Durbeyfield would be a much better choice. Angel and his father debate the merits of Mercy and Tess as suitable wives for a farmer. Angel's wishes win out with his father's concern expressed by his question, \"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into -- a lady, in short?\" His parents warn Angel not to rush into a hasty marriage with an unknown woman, but his descriptions of her are enough. Reverend Clare relates a story of a convert, one Alec d'Urberville, who has become a lay minister and street preacher. Angel returns to the dairy and asks Tess to marry him. Tess says that she cannot. Angel persists, not being too aggressive in his tactics to convince Tess, but she insists, \"I am not good enough -- not worthy enough.\" Alone, Tess wonders why her past has not caught up to her at Talbothays, and she feels both \"positive pleasure and positive pain\" as she wrestles with her feelings for Angel and the past that is bound to catch up to her. She resolves to give in to Angel's proposal: \"I shall give way -- I shall say yes -- I shall let myself marry him -- I cannot help it.\" Tess rethinks her position, even suggesting that any of the other milkmaids would be worthy wives for Angel. Angel refuses Tess' suggestions, and when Mr. Crick needs a volunteer to drive the milk, now late for delivery, straight to the train station in Egdon Heath, Angel volunteers, and Tess goes along for the ride. It is during this ride, in a downpour of rain, that Angel learns that Tess comes from the d'Urberville family. He suggests that she adopt the \"d'Urberville\" spelling, and he quells her fears about his hating \"old families.\" Relieved, Tess accepts Angel's marriage proposal if \"it is sure to make you happy to have me as your wife and you feel that you wish to marry me, very, very much . . . .\" Then Tess kisses Angel, and he discovers \"what an impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.\" Tess insists that she write her mother in Marlott, and Angel then remembers that day four years earlier, during the May Dance, that he had seen Tess but had not danced with her.", "analysis": "In these chapters, Hardy gives the readers a fine set of juxtaposed characters to consider: Tess versus Mercy; Angel and Reverend Clare versus Angel's brothers Felix and Cuthbert; and Angel versus Alec. The characters are developed as sets of opposites that cause the reader to consider both sides of the argument. These two sides are not a contrast between right or wrong, good or bad, but rather, they are a way to demonstrate that positions have two distinct sides, each with its own viewpoint. Mercy Chant is \"accomplished,\" educated, able to provide a good home for Angel as a wife. Tess is presented clearly as a better choice as a farmer's wife. Of course, should Angel have chosen the life of a minister, Mercy Chant may have been a better choice. Also interesting is the division between Angel and his brothers. Felix Clare is a parish minister described by Hardy as \"all Church,\" while Cuthbert, dean of a college, seems to be \"all College.\" Angel is then seen by his older brothers as \"growing in social ineptness,\" and Angel sees his brothers as \"growing mental limitations.\" Each sees the other not as opposite, but as flawed in ways that can divide families. Cuthbert is \"the more liberal minded,\" though \"he had not much heart.\" Likewise, Felix is \"less self-sacrificing and disinterested.\" Thus both men are not like Angel in many respects when \"either saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.\" Felix asks Angel if he is \"somehow losing intellectual grasp.\" Angel responds, \"f it comes to intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours.\" Thus, Angel feels that \"despite his own heterodoxy, he was nearer to his father on the human side than was either of his brethren.\" Angel's father, Reverend Clare is a \"Pauliad\" or Paulist; that is, his religious attitudes are like those of the biblical Paul, meaning that he believes that conversion is not an intellectual occurrence but an emotional one. Hardy describes Reverend Clare as \"sincere.\" He is an evangelical believer and minister, even suffering beatings and berating to convert sinners to join the church. Thus Reverend Clare and Angel are very similar in their practical religious beliefs. Angel's brothers, on the other hand, are more inclined to use their religious beliefs for their own ends and are even vain in their \"fashionable\" ways. In the consideration of religion, Angel continues to be a contrast to Alec. Angel has a better concept of religion, and he practices what he preaches. Alec, on the other hand, experiences a sudden conversion from his harmful ways; he has abused Reverend Clare when approached on the subject of his Christianity. Reverend Clare is proud to have won a new convert, no matter the consequence. Angel is aghast at his father for taking too many risks, whether they be physical or mental from strangers: \"I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing.\" Angel admires his father's work, even though it has cost him in the past, \"though the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma he revered his practice, and recognized the hero under the pietist.\" The reintroduction of Alec in the story is important for two reasons: First, it indicates that Alec will play a part in later events. Up to this point, although we may have suspected Alec's reappearance, it was possible that his part in Tess' ruin had already been played and that it would simply be the results of the past action that color future events. Now we know that that is not the case. Alec d'Urberville's part in Tess' life is not, unfortunately for Tess, over. Second, Angel's comment that he wishes his father would \"leave such pigs to their wallowing\" indicates both Alec's past nature and the sincerity of his present conversion. Although no one in the novel presently questions Alec's conversion, the reader should. Glossary apostrophizing addressing words to a person or thing, whether absent or present, generally in an exclamatory digression in a speech or literary writing. Dapes inemptae \"unpurchased banquet\" ; refers to the dairyman's self-sufficiency in producing food. black-puddings dark sausages made with meat and seasoned blood. delirium tremens violent delirium resulting chiefly from excessive drinking of alcoholic liquor and characterized by sweating, trembling, anxiety, and frightening hallucinations. flummery meaningless flattery or silly talk. Calvinistic doctrine reference to the teachings of John Calvin , Swiss Protestant theologian, who emphasized salvation through God's grace. pernicious causing great injury, destruction, or ruin; fatal; deadly; wicked; evil. \"as Hamlet puts it\" from Hamlet 2.2.351. \"from St. Luke\" refers to Luke 12:20. \"Being reviled we bless...\" 1 Corinthians 4:12-13. Tractarian derived from the Oxford Movement, which favored a return to early Catholic doctrines in the Church of England. pantheistic relating to pantheism, the doctrine that God is not a personality, but that all laws, forces, manifestations, etc. of the universe are God; the belief that God and the universe are one and the same. \"Sigh gratis\" act or feel without expecting reward; from Hamlet . carking worrying or being worried or anxious. self-immolation suicide, usually by burning oneself in a public place; deliberate self-sacrifice. phlegmatic hard to rouse to action; sluggish; dull; apathetic; calm; cool; stolid. Centurions the commanding officers of an ancient Roman century. Caroline date the seventeenth century, during the reign of Charles I or Charles II ."} |
Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who
had won him having retired to her chamber.
The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark
unless on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the
barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime
temperature into the noctambulist's face.
He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think
of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.
Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept
apart. She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred,
while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance
disquieted him--palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He
could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and
what their mutual bearing should be before third parties
thenceforward.
Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary
existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed
through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which
as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world
without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman--
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
How curious you are to me!--
resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But behold,
the absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the
engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show;
while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty
had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up
elsewhere.
Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear across the
yard each trivial sound of the retiring household. The dairy-house,
so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained
sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance
to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the
landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick gables
breathed forth "Stay!" The windows smiled, the door coaxed and
beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within
it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make
the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning
sensibility. Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid's.
It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the
obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held
partly responsible for this, it was not solely so. Many besides
Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their
external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The
impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life
than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life
was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.
Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with
a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and
dismiss; but a woman living her precious life--a life which, to
herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension
as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations
the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her
fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into
being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which
she was born.
This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single
opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic
First Cause--her all; her every and only chance. How then should he
look upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle
to caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness
with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her--so
fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve--in order
that it might not agonize and wreck her?
To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop
what had begun. Living in such close relations, to meet meant to
fall into endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and,
having arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency,
he decided to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which
they would be mutually engaged. As yet the harm done was small.
But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach
her. He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.
He thought he would go and see his friends. It might be possible
to sound them upon this. In less than five months his term here
would have ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other
farms he would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in
a position to start on his own account. Would not a farmer want a
wife, and should a farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a
woman who understood farming? Notwithstanding the pleasing answer
returned to him by the silence, he resolved to go his journey.
One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some
maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.
"O no," said Dairyman Crick. "Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster
to spend a few days wi' his kinsfolk."
For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the
morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song.
But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness. "He's
getting on towards the end of his time wi' me," added the dairyman,
with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; "and so I suppose he
is beginning to see about his plans elsewhere."
"How much longer is he to bide here?" asked Izz Huett, the only
one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the
question.
The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their lives hung
upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the tablecloth, Marian
with heat added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at
the meads.
"Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my
memorandum-book," replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.
"And even that may be altered a bit. He'll bide to get a little
practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain. He'll
hang on till the end of the year I should say."
Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society--of "pleasure
girdled about with pain". After that the blackness of unutterable
night.
At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow
lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of
his father's Vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could,
a little basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle of
mead, sent by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents. The
white lane stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but they
were staring into next year, and not at the lane. He loved her;
ought he to marry her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother
and his brothers say? What would he himself say a couple of years
after the event? That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch
comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a
sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness.
His father's hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of
red stone, the clump of trees near the Vicarage, came at last into
view beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate.
Casting a glance in the direction of the church before entering his
home, he beheld standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of
ages between twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of
some other one, who in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat
older than the school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and
highly-starched cambric morning-gown, with a couple of books in her
hand.
Clare knew her well. He could not be sure that she observed him; he
hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go
and speak to her, blameless creature that she was. An overpowering
reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him.
The young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his
father's neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents' quiet hope
that he might wed some day. She was great at Antinomianism and
Bible-classes, and was plainly going to hold a class now. Clare's
mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped heathens in the Var
Vale, their rosy faces court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one
the most impassioned of them all.
It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved to trot
over to Emminster, and hence had not written to apprise his mother
and father, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour,
before they should have gone out to their parish duties. He was
a little late, and they had already sat down to the morning meal.
The group at the table jumped up to welcome him as soon as he
entered. They were his father and mother, his brother the Reverend
Felix--curate at a town in the adjoining county, home for the inside
of a fortnight--and his other brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the
classical scholar, and Fellow and Dean of his College, down from
Cambridge for the long vacation. His mother appeared in a cap and
silver spectacles, and his father looked what in fact he was--an
earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in years about sixty-five,
his pale face lined with thought and purpose. Over their heads hung
the picture of Angel's sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen
years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone out to
Africa.
Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty
years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual
descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an
Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic
simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his
mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted
no further reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by
those of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on
the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won
to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he
showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for
applying them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St
James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy,
Titus, and Philemon. The New Testament was less a Christiad then a
Pauliad to his intelligence--less an argument than an intoxication.
His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a
vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative
philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and
Leopardi. He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles,
and deemed himself consistent through the whole category--which in a
way he might have been. One thing he certainly was--sincere.
To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush
womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var
Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had
he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once
upon a time Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in
a moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better for
mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern
civilization, and not Palestine; and his father's grief was of that
blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a
thousandth part of a truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth,
in such a proposition. He had simply preached austerely at Angel for
some time after. But the kindness of his heart was such that he
never resented anything for long, and welcomed his son to-day with a
smile which was as candidly sweet as a child's.
Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much
as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every
time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence,
and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even
more distinctly foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental
aspirations--still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of
things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell--were as foreign to his
own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet.
Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse
of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds
which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to
regulate.
On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing
divergence from the Angel Clare of former times. It was chiefly a
difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly
his brothers. He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his
legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his
eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The
manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner
of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had
lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the
contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and
swains.
After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,
well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest
fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by
the lathe of a systematic tuition. They were both somewhat
short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass
and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the
custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was
the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all
without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own
vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies;
and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on
their shelves. When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they
admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour
of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal
objection.
If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed
their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church;
Cuthbert all College. His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the
mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each
brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score
of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were
neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated
rather than reckoned with and respected.
They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their
visits to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more
recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less
self-sacrificing and disinterested. More tolerant than his father of
a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he
was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own
teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,
though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.
As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived
in him--that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself,
neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as
with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good
as their opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate
conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and
gentle current in which they and their associates floated. Neither
saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what
the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite
a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.
"I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,"
Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as
he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad
austerity. "And, therefore, we must make the best of it. But I do
entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with
moral ideals. Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but
high thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless."
"Of course it may," said Angel. "Was it not proved nineteen hundred
years ago--if I may trespass upon your domain a little? Why should
you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my
moral ideals?"
"Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our
conversation--it may be fancy only--that you were somehow losing
intellectual grasp. Hasn't it struck you, Cuthbert?"
"Now, Felix," said Angel drily, "we are very good friends, you
know; each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to
intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had
better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours."
They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at
which their father's and mother's morning work in the parish usually
concluded. Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last
thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare;
though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to
wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions.
The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now
an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse _dapes inemptae_ of the
dairyman's somewhat coarsely-laden table. But neither of the old
people had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of
waiting that their parents entered. The self-denying pair had been
occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners,
whom they, somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the
flesh, their own appetites being quite forgotten.
The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands
was deposited before them. Angel looked round for Mrs Crick's
black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled as they
did them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother
to appreciate the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did
himself.
"Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy," observed
Clare's mother. "But I am sure you will not mind doing without them
as I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason.
I suggested to him that we should take Mrs Crick's kind present to
the children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his
attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great
pleasure to them; so we did."
"Of course," said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.
"I found the mead so extremely alcoholic," continued his mother,
"that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable
as rum or brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my
medicine-closet."
"We never drink spirits at this table, on principle," added his
father.
"But what shall I tell the dairyman's wife?" said Angel.
"The truth, of course," said his father.
"I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings
very much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me
directly I return."
"You cannot, if we did not," Mr Clare answered lucidly.
"Ah--no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple."
"A what?" said Cuthbert and Felix both.
"Oh--'tis an expression they use down at Talbothays," replied Angel,
blushing. He felt that his parents were right in their practice if
wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more.
It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found
opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his
heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind
his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of
their walking boots. When the service was over they went out of the
room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.
The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the
attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale--either
in England or in the Colonies. His father then told him that, as he
had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he
had felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the
purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel
himself unduly slighted.
"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father, "you will no
doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years."
This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel onward to the
other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was
then six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming
business he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all
matters--some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic
labours of his establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be
well, therefore, for him to marry?
His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel
put the question--
"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty
hard-working farmer?"
"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in
your goings-out and your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters
little. Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend
and neighbour, Dr Chant--"
"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good
butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and
rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and
estimate the value of sheep and calves?"
"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable." Mr
Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before.
"I was going to add," he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you
will not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more
to your mother's mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you
used to show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour
Chant's daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the younger
clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table--altar, as I
was shocked to hear her call it one day--with flowers and other stuff
on festival occasions. But her father, who is quite as opposed to
such flummery as I, says that can be cured. It is a mere girlish
outbreak which, I am sure, will not be permanent."
"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father, don't you
think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant,
but one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments,
understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself,
would suit me infinitely better?"
His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer's
wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the
impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to
advance the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious.
He said that fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who
possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist,
and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say
whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church
School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction
on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith;
honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste
as a vestal, and, in personal appearance, exceptionally beautiful.
"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into--a lady, in
short?" asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study
during the conversation.
"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady," said Angel,
unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to
say. But she IS a lady, nevertheless--in feeling and nature."
"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."
"Pooh!--what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel quickly.
"How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I
have, and shall have to do?"
"Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm,"
returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.
"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the
life I am going to lead?--while as to her reading, I can take that
in hand. She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew
her. She's brim full of poetry--actualized poetry, if I may use the
expression. She LIVES what paper-poets only write... And she is an
unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus,
and species you desire to propagate."
"O Angel, you are mocking!"
"Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend Church almost
every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you
will tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality,
and feel that I may do worse than choose her." Angel waxed quite
earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which
(never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had
been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other
milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially
naturalistic.
In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right
whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and
Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that
she at least was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of
the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never
would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said
finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would
not object to see her.
Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now.
He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents
were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as
middle-class people, which it would require some tact to overcome.
For though legally at liberty to do as he chose, and though their
daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical difference
to their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them,
he wished for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the
most important decision of his life.
He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in
Tess's life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that
he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance--not for her skill
in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for
her simple formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air
existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable
to him. He held that education had as yet but little affected the
beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It
was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral
and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably,
elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human
nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see,
might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those
lives which had been brought under its influence. This belief was
confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been
extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community,
had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the
good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman
of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise
and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.
It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left
the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one
was to return to his college, and the other to his curacy. Angel
might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart
at Talbothays. He would have been an awkward member of the
party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal
religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there
was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness
would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him. To
neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.
His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him,
on his own mare, a little way along the road. Having fairly well
advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as
they jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father's
account of his parish difficulties, and the coldness of brother
clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of
the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious
Calvinistic doctrine.
"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to
recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea.
He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been
the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and
well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.
As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young
upstart squire named d'Urberville, living some forty miles off, in
the neighbourhood of Trantridge.
"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?"
asked his son. "That curiously historic worn-out family with its
ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?"
"O no. The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty
or eighty years ago--at least, I believe so. This seems to be a
new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former
knightly line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure. But it is odd
to hear you express interest in old families. I thought you set less
store by them even than I."
"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel with a
little impatience. "Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of
their being old. Some of the wise even among themselves 'exclaim
against their own succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically,
dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly attached to them."
This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too
subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had
been about to relate; which was that after the death of the senior
so-called d'Urberville, the young man developed the most culpable
passions, though he had a blind mother, whose condition should have
made him know better. A knowledge of his career having come to
the ears of Mr Clare, when he was in that part of the country
preaching missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to
the delinquent on his spiritual state. Though he was a stranger,
occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and
took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be required of thee!" The young man much resented this
directness of attack, and in the war of words which followed when
they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr Clare, without
respect for his gray hairs.
Angel flushed with distress.
"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not expose yourself
to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"
"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of
self-abnegation. "The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor,
foolish young man. Do you suppose his incensed words could give
me any pain, or even his blows? 'Being reviled we bless; being
persecuted we suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we are made as the
filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this
day.' Those ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly
true at this present hour."
"Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?"
"No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state
of intoxication."
"No!"
"A dozen times, my boy. What then? I have saved them from the guilt
of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived
to thank me, and praise God."
"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently. "But I fear
otherwise, from what you say."
"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare. "And I continue to pray
for him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never
meet again. But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may
spring up in his heart as a good seed some day."
Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child; and though
the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma, he revered
his practice and recognized the hero under the pietist. Perhaps he
revered his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that,
in the question of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once
thought of inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless.
The same unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting
a living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the
position of poor parsons for the term of their activities; yet Angel
admired it none the less. Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel
often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than
was either of his brethren.
An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish
mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll
a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that
green trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or
Froom. Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat
alluvial soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume
of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein
a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals,
the very bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with
the spot that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long
distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a
sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here
from its inner side, in a way that had been quite foreign to him in
his student-days; and, much as he loved his parents, he could not
help being aware that to come here, as now, after an experience of
home-life, affected him like throwing off splints and bandages; even
the one customary curb on the humours of English rural societies
being absent in this place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.
Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The denizens were
all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the
exceedingly early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity.
At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite
scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb
of an oak fixed there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry
for the evening milking. Angel entered, and went through the silent
passages of the house to the back quarters, where he listened for a
moment. Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of
the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs
arose from the still further distance. The large-leaved rhubarb and
cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the
sun like half-closed umbrellas.
He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the
clock struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with
the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and
then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess's,
who in another moment came down before his eyes.
She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.
She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it
had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her
coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above
the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung
heavy over their pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed
from her. It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than
at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself
flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.
Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness,
before the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly
compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O
Mr Clare! How you frightened me--I--"
There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed
relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of
the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare's tender
look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.
"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and
his face to her flushed cheek. "Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me
any more. I have hastened back so soon because of you!"
Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there
they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in
by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast;
upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her
naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having
been lying down in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At
first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon
lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with
their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet,
while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have
regarded Adam.
"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have on'y old Deb to
help me to-day. Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty
is not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won't be home
till milking."
As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the
stairs.
"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards. "So I can help
Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you
needn't come down till milking-time."
Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that
afternoon. Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared
as having light and shade and position, but no particular outline.
Every time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the
work her hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable
that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.
Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running
her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned
it in nature's way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy
came convenient now.
"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed gently. "I
wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have
been thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads. I shall
soon want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for
my wife a woman who knows all about the management of farms. Will
you be that woman, Tessy?"
He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an
impulse of which his head would disapprove.
She turned quite careworn. She had bowed to the inevitable result of
proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated
upon this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her
without quite meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was
like the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her
indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.
"O Mr Clare--I cannot be your wife--I cannot be!"
The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and
she bowed her face in her grief.
"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more
greedily close. "Do you say no? Surely you love me?"
"O yes, yes! And I would rather be yours than anybody's in the
world," returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl.
"But I CANNOT marry you!"
"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are engaged to
marry some one else!"
"No, no!"
"Then why do you refuse me?"
"I don't want to marry! I have not thought of doing it. I cannot!
I only want to love you."
"But why?"
Driven to subterfuge, she stammered--
"Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like you to marry
such as me. She will want you to marry a lady."
"Nonsense--I have spoken to them both. That was partly why I went
home."
"I feel I cannot--never, never!" she echoed.
"Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?"
"Yes--I did not expect it."
"If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time," he
said. "It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.
I'll not allude to it again for a while."
She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and
began anew. But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact
under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try
as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes
in the air. She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two
blurring tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend
and dear advocate, she could never explain.
"I can't skim--I can't!" she said, turning away from him.
Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began
talking in a more general way:
You quite misapprehend my parents. They are the most simple-mannered
people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few
remaining Evangelical school. Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"
"I don't know."
"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very
High, they tell me."
Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard
every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had
never heard him at all.
"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I
do," she remarked as a safe generality. "It is often a great sorrow
to me."
She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his
father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she
did not know whether her principles were High, Low or Broad. He
himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held,
apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to
phraseology, and Pantheistic as to essence. Confused or otherwise,
to disturb them was his last desire:
Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but
he gladly conformed to it now.
He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode
of life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the
undulations disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead
after another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down
the milk.
"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she
ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of
herself.
"Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his
troubles and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress
me. He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from
people of a different way of thinking from himself, and I don't
like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age, the more
particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when carried
so far. He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in
which he took part quite recently. He went as the deputy of some
missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a
place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate
with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there--son of some
landowner up that way--and who has a mother afflicted with blindness.
My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there
was quite a disturbance. It was very foolish of my father, I
must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the
probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless. But whatever
he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season;
and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only among the absolutely
vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate being bothered. He says
he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly;
but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and
would leave such pigs to their wallowing."
Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but
she no longer showed any tremulousness. Clare's revived thoughts of
his father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went
on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished
and drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their
pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk. As
Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to her softly--
"And my question, Tessy?"
"O no--no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had
heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec
d'Urberville. "It CAN'T be!"
She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with
a bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad
constraint. All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows
were grazing in the farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold
grace of wild animals--the reckless, unchastened motion of women
accustomed to unlimited space--in which they abandoned themselves to
the air as a swimmer to the wave. It seemed natural enough to him
now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained
Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.
Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently daunt Clare.
His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that
the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the
affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in
the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to
the dallyings of coyness. That she had already permitted him to
make love to her he read as an additional assurance, not fully
trowing that in the fields and pastures to "sigh gratis" is by no
means deemed waste; love-making being here more often accepted
inconsiderately and for its own sweet sake than in the carking,
anxious homes of the ambitious, where a girl's craving for an
establishment paralyzes her healthy thought of a passion as an end.
"Tess, why did you say 'no' in such a positive way?" he asked her in
the course of a few days.
She started.
"Don't ask me. I told you why--partly. I am not good enough--not
worthy enough."
"How? Not fine lady enough?"
"Yes--something like that," murmured she. "Your friends would scorn
me."
"Indeed, you mistake them--my father and mother. As for my brothers,
I don't care--" He clasped his fingers behind her back to keep her
from slipping away. "Now--you did not mean it, sweet?--I am sure you
did not! You have made me so restless that I cannot read, or play,
or do anything. I am in no hurry, Tess, but I want to know--to hear
from your own warm lips--that you will some day be mine--any time you
may choose; but some day?"
She could only shake her head and look away from him.
Clare regarded her attentively, conned the characters of her face as
if they had been hieroglyphics. The denial seemed real.
"Then I ought not to hold you in this way--ought I? I have no
right to you--no right to seek out where you are, or walk with you!
Honestly, Tess, do you love any other man?"
"How can you ask?" she said, with continued self-suppression.
"I almost know that you do not. But then, why do you repulse me?"
"I don't repulse you. I like you to--tell me you love me; and you
may always tell me so as you go about with me--and never offend me."
"But you will not accept me as a husband?"
"Ah--that's different--it is for your good, indeed, my dearest!
O, believe me, it is only for your sake! I don't like to give
myself the great happiness o' promising to be yours in that
way--because--because I am SURE I ought not to do it."
"But you will make me happy!"
"Ah--you think so, but you don't know!"
At such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her refusal to be
her modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he
would say that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile--which
was certainly true, her natural quickness and her admiration for him
having led her to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments
of his knowledge, to a surprising extent. After these tender
contests and her victory she would go away by herself under the
remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge or into her room,
if at a leisure interval, and mourn silently, not a minute after an
apparently phlegmatic negative.
The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the
side of his--two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience--
that she tried to fortify her resolution by every means in her power.
She had come to Talbothays with a made-up mind. On no account could
she agree to a step which might afterwards cause bitter rueing to her
husband for his blindness in wedding her. And she held that what her
conscience had decided for her when her mind was unbiassed ought not
to be overruled now.
"Why don't somebody tell him all about me?" she said. "It was only
forty miles off--why hasn't it reached here? Somebody must know!"
Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.
For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from the sad
countenances of her chamber companions that they regarded her not
only as the favourite, but as the chosen; but they could see for
themselves that she did not put herself in his way.
Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life
was so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and
positive pain. At the next cheese-making the pair were again left
alone together. The dairyman himself had been lending a hand; but
Mr Crick, as well as his wife, seemed latterly to have acquired a
suspicion of mutual interest between these two; though they walked
so circumspectly that suspicion was but of the faintest. Anyhow, the
dairyman left them to themselves.
They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting them into
the vats. The operation resembled the act of crumbling bread on a
large scale; and amid the immaculate whiteness of the curds Tess
Durbeyfield's hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the rose.
Angel, who was filling the vats with his handful, suddenly ceased,
and laid his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were rolled far above
the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of her soft
arm.
Although the early September weather was sultry, her arm, from
her dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his mouth as a
new-gathered mushroom, and tasted of the whey. But she was such
a sheaf of susceptibilities that her pulse was accelerated by the
touch, her blood driven to her finder-ends, and the cool arms
flushed hot. Then, as though her heart had said, "Is coyness longer
necessary? Truth is truth between man and woman, as between man and
man," she lifted her eyes and they beamed devotedly into his, as her
lip rose in a tender half-smile.
"Do you know why I did that, Tess?" he said.
"Because you love me very much!"
"Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty."
"Not AGAIN!"
She looked a sudden fear that her resistance might break down under
her own desire.
"O, Tessy!" he went on, "I CANNOT think why you are so tantalizing.
Why do you disappoint me so? You seem almost like a coquette, upon
my life you do--a coquette of the first urban water! They blow
hot and blow cold, just as you do, and it is the very last sort of
thing to expect to find in a retreat like Talbothays. ... And yet,
dearest," he quickly added, observing now the remark had cut her, "I
know you to be the most honest, spotless creature that ever lived.
So how can I suppose you a flirt? Tess, why don't you like the idea
of being my wife, if you love me as you seem to do?"
"I have never said I don't like the idea, and I never could say it;
because--it isn't true!"
The stress now getting beyond endurance, her lip quivered, and she
was obliged to go away. Clare was so pained and perplexed that he
ran after and caught her in the passage.
"Tell me, tell me!" he said, passionately clasping her, in
forgetfulness of his curdy hands: "do tell me that you won't belong
to anybody but me!"
"I will, I will tell you!" she exclaimed. "And I will give you a
complete answer, if you will let me go now. I will tell you my
experiences--all about myself--all!"
"Your experiences, dear; yes, certainly; any number." He expressed
assent in loving satire, looking into her face. "My Tess, no doubt,
almost as many experiences as that wild convolvulus out there on the
garden hedge, that opened itself this morning for the first time.
Tell me anything, but don't use that wretched expression any more
about not being worthy of me."
"I will try--not! And I'll give you my reasons to-morrow--next
week."
"Say on Sunday?"
"Yes, on Sunday."
At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat till she was in
the thicket of pollard willows at the lower side of the barton, where
she could be quite unseen. Here Tess flung herself down upon the
rustling undergrowth of spear-grass, as upon a bed, and remained
crouching in palpitating misery broken by momentary shoots of joy,
which her fears about the ending could not altogether suppress.
In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence. Every see-saw of her
breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was
a voice that joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness.
Reckless, inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at the
altar, revealing nothing, and chancing discovery; to snatch ripe
pleasure before the iron teeth of pain could have time to shut upon
her: that was what love counselled; and in almost a terror of ecstasy
Tess divined that, despite her many months of lonely self-chastisement,
wrestlings, communings, schemes to lead a future of austere
isolation, love's counsel would prevail.
The afternoon advanced, and still she remained among the willows.
She heard the rattle of taking down the pails from the forked stands;
the "waow-waow!" which accompanied the getting together of the cows.
But she did not go to the milking. They would see her agitation;
and the dairyman, thinking the cause to be love alone, would
good-naturedly tease her; and that harassment could not be borne.
Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and invented some
excuse for her non-appearance, for no inquiries were made or calls
given. At half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels with
the aspect of a great forge in the heavens; and presently a monstrous
pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand. The pollard willows,
tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became
spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it. She went in and
upstairs without a light.
It was now Wednesday. Thursday came, and Angel looked thoughtfully
at her from a distance, but intruded in no way upon her. The indoor
milkmaids, Marian and the rest, seemed to guess that something
definite was afoot, for they did not force any remarks upon her in
the bedchamber. Friday passed; Saturday. To-morrow was the day.
"I shall give way--I shall say yes--I shall let myself marry
him--I cannot help it!" she jealously panted, with her hot face to
the pillow that night, on hearing one of the other girls sigh his
name in her sleep. "I can't bear to let anybody have him but me!
Yet it is a wrong to him, and may kill him when he knows! O my
heart--O--O--O!"
"Now, who mid ye think I've heard news o' this morning?" said
Dairyman Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day, with a riddling
gaze round upon the munching men and maids. "Now, just who mid ye
think?"
One guessed, and another guessed. Mrs Crick did not guess, because
she knew already.
"Well," said the dairyman, "'tis that slack-twisted 'hore's-bird of a
feller, Jack Dollop. He's lately got married to a widow-woman."
"Not Jack Dollop? A villain--to think o' that!" said a milker.
The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield's consciousness, for
it was the name of the lover who had wronged his sweetheart, and had
afterwards been so roughly used by the young woman's mother in the
butter-churn.
"And had he married the valiant matron's daughter, as he promised?"
asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the newspaper he was
reading at the little table to which he was always banished by Mrs
Crick, in her sense of his gentility.
"Not he, sir. Never meant to," replied the dairyman. "As I say, 'tis
a widow-woman, and she had money, it seems--fifty poun' a year or so;
and that was all he was after. They were married in a great hurry;
and then she told him that by marrying she had lost her fifty poun'
a year. Just fancy the state o' my gentleman's mind at that news!
Never such a cat-and-dog life as they've been leading ever since!
Serves him well beright. But onluckily the poor woman gets the worst
o't."
"Well, the silly body should have told en sooner that the ghost of
her first man would trouble him," said Mrs Crick.
"Ay, ay," responded the dairyman indecisively. "Still, you can see
exactly how 'twas. She wanted a home, and didn't like to run the
risk of losing him. Don't ye think that was something like it,
maidens?"
He glanced towards the row of girls.
"She ought to ha' told him just before they went to church, when he
could hardly have backed out," exclaimed Marian.
"Yes, she ought," agreed Izz.
"She must have seen what he was after, and should ha' refused him,"
cried Retty spasmodically.
"And what do you say, my dear?" asked the dairyman of Tess.
"I think she ought--to have told him the true state of things--or
else refused him--I don't know," replied Tess, the bread-and-butter
choking her.
"Be cust if I'd have done either o't," said Beck Knibbs, a married
helper from one of the cottages. "All's fair in love and war. I'd
ha' married en just as she did, and if he'd said two words to me
about not telling him beforehand anything whatsomdever about my first
chap that I hadn't chose to tell, I'd ha' knocked him down wi' the
rolling-pin--a scram little feller like he! Any woman could do it."
The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented only by a
sorry smile, for form's sake, from Tess. What was comedy to them was
tragedy to her; and she could hardly bear their mirth. She soon rose
from table, and, with an impression that Clare would soon follow her,
went along a little wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the
irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by the main
stream of the Var. Men had been cutting the water-weeds higher up
the river, and masses of them were floating past her--moving islands
of green crow-foot, whereon she might almost have ridden; long locks
of which weed had lodged against the piles driven to keep the cows
from crossing.
Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a woman telling her
story--the heaviest of crosses to herself--seemed but amusement to
others. It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.
"Tessy!" came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully,
alighting beside her feet. "My wife--soon!"
"No, no; I cannot. For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your sake, I say
no!"
"Tess!"
"Still I say no!" she repeated.
Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her waist the
moment after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of hair. (The
younger dairymaids, including Tess, breakfasted with their hair loose
on Sunday mornings before building it up extra high for attending
church, a style they could not adopt when milking with their heads
against the cows.) If she had said "Yes" instead of "No" he
would have kissed her; it had evidently been his intention; but
her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart. Their
condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such
disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to
her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have
honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him. He released
her momentarily-imprisoned waist, and withheld the kiss.
It all turned on that release. What had given her strength to refuse
him this time was solely the tale of the widow told by the dairyman;
and that would have been overcome in another moment. But Angel said
no more; his face was perplexed; he went away.
Day after day they met--somewhat less constantly than before; and
thus two or three weeks went by. The end of September drew near, and
she could see in his eye that he might ask her again.
His plan of procedure was different now--as though he had made up
his mind that her negatives were, after all, only coyness and youth
startled by the novelty of the proposal. The fitful evasiveness of
her manner when the subject was under discussion countenanced the
idea. So he played a more coaxing game; and while never going beyond
words, or attempting the renewal of caresses, he did his utmost
orally.
In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones like that of
the purling milk--at the cow's side, at skimmings, at butter-makings,
at cheese-makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs--as
no milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man.
Tess knew that she must break down. Neither a religious sense of a
certain moral validity in the previous union nor a conscientious wish
for candour could hold out against it much longer. She loved him so
passionately, and he was so godlike in her eyes; and being, though
untrained, instinctively refined, her nature cried for his tutelary
guidance. And thus, though Tess kept repeating to herself, "I can
never be his wife," the words were vain. A proof of her weakness lay
in the very utterance of what calm strength would not have taken the
trouble to formulate. Every sound of his voice beginning on the old
subject stirred her with a terrifying bliss, and she coveted the
recantation she feared.
His manner was--what man's is not?--so much that of one who would
love and cherish and defend her under any conditions, changes,
charges, or revelations, that her gloom lessened as she basked in it.
The season meanwhile was drawing onward to the equinox, and though
it was still fine, the days were much shorter. The dairy had again
worked by morning candlelight for a long time; and a fresh renewal
of Clare's pleading occurred one morning between three and four.
She had run up in her bedgown to his door to call him as usual;
then had gone back to dress and call the others; and in ten minutes
was walking to the head of the stairs with the candle in her
hand. At the same moment he came down his steps from above in his
shirt-sleeves and put his arm across the stairway.
"Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down," he said peremptorily. "It is a
fortnight since I spoke, and this won't do any longer. You MUST tell
me what you mean, or I shall have to leave this house. My door was
ajar just now, and I saw you. For your own safety I must go. You
don't know. Well? Is it to be yes at last?"
"I am only just up, Mr Clare, and it is too early to take me to
task!" she pouted. "You need not call me Flirt. 'Tis cruel and
untrue. Wait till by and by. Please wait till by and by! I will
really think seriously about it between now and then. Let me go
downstairs!"
She looked a little like what he said she was as, holding the candle
sideways, she tried to smile away the seriousness of her words.
"Call me Angel, then, and not Mr Clare."
"Angel."
"Angel dearest--why not?"
"'Twould mean that I agree, wouldn't it?"
"It would only mean that you love me, even if you cannot marry me;
and you were so good as to own that long ago."
"Very well, then, 'Angel dearest', if I MUST," she murmured, looking
at her candle, a roguish curl coming upon her mouth, notwithstanding
her suspense.
Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had obtained her
promise; but somehow, as Tess stood there in her prettily tucked-up
milking gown, her hair carelessly heaped upon her head till there
should be leisure to arrange it when skimming and milking were done,
he broke his resolve, and brought his lips to her cheek for one
moment. She passed downstairs very quickly, never looking back at
him or saying another word. The other maids were already down,
and the subject was not pursued. Except Marian, they all looked
wistfully and suspiciously at the pair, in the sad yellow rays which
the morning candles emitted in contrast with the first cold signals
of the dawn without.
When skimming was done--which, as the milk diminished with the
approach of autumn, was a lessening process day by day--Retty and
the rest went out. The lovers followed them.
"Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are they not?" he
musingly observed to her, as he regarded the three figures tripping
before him through the frigid pallor of opening day.
"Not so very different, I think," she said.
"Why do you think that?"
"There are very few women's lives that are not--tremulous," Tess
replied, pausing over the new word as if it impressed her. "There's
more in those three than you think."
"What is in them?"
"Almost either of 'em," she began, "would make--perhaps would
make--a properer wife than I. And perhaps they love you as well
as I--almost."
"O, Tessy!"
There were signs that it was an exquisite relief to her to hear the
impatient exclamation, though she had resolved so intrepidly to let
generosity make one bid against herself. That was now done, and she
had not the power to attempt self-immolation a second time then.
They were joined by a milker from one of the cottages, and no more
was said on that which concerned them so deeply. But Tess knew that
this day would decide it.
In the afternoon several of the dairyman's household and assistants
went down to the meads as usual, a long way from the dairy, where
many of the cows were milked without being driven home. The
supply was getting less as the animals advanced in calf, and the
supernumerary milkers of the lush green season had been dismissed.
The work progressed leisurely. Each pailful was poured into tall
cans that stood in a large spring-waggon which had been brought
upon the scene; and when they were milked, the cows trailed away.
Dairyman Crick, who was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming
miraculously white against a leaden evening sky, suddenly looked
at his heavy watch.
"Why, 'tis later than I thought," he said. "Begad! We shan't be
soon enough with this milk at the station, if we don't mind. There's
no time to-day to take it home and mix it with the bulk afore sending
off. It must go to station straight from here. Who'll drive it
across?"
Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of his business,
asking Tess to accompany him. The evening, though sunless, had
been warm and muggy for the season, and Tess had come out with
her milking-hood only, naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not
dressed for a drive. She therefore replied by glancing over her
scant habiliments; but Clare gently urged her. She assented by
relinquishing her pail and stool to the dairyman to take home, and
mounted the spring-waggon beside Clare.
In the diminishing daylight they went along the level roadway through
the meads, which stretched away into gray miles, and were backed in
the extreme edge of distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of
Egdon Heath. On its summit stood clumps and stretches of fir-trees,
whose notched tips appeared like battlemented towers crowning
black-fronted castles of enchantment.
They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that
they did not begin talking for a long while, the silence being broken
only by the clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them.
The lane they followed was so solitary that the hazel nuts had
remained on the boughs till they slipped from their shells, and the
blackberries hung in heavy clusters. Every now and then Angel would
fling the lash of his whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give
it to his companion.
The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending down
herald-drops of rain, and the stagnant air of the day changed into
a fitful breeze which played about their faces. The quick-silvery
glaze on the rivers and pools vanished; from broad mirrors of light
they changed to lustreless sheets of lead, with a surface like a
rasp. But that spectacle did not affect her preoccupation. Her
countenance, a natural carnation slightly embrowned by the season,
had deepened its tinge with the beating of the rain-drops; and her
hair, which the pressure of the cows' flanks had, as usual, caused to
tumble down from its fastenings and stray beyond the curtain of her
calico bonnet, was made clammy by the moisture, till it hardly was
better than seaweed.
"I ought not to have come, I suppose," she murmured, looking at the
sky.
"I am sorry for the rain," said he. "But how glad I am to have you
here!"
Remote Egdon disappeared by degree behind the liquid gauze. The
evening grew darker, and the roads being crossed by gates, it was
not safe to drive faster than at a walking pace. The air was rather
chill.
"I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon your arms and
shoulders," he said. "Creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle
won't hurt you much. I should be sorrier still if I did not think
that the rain might be helping me."
She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them both a
large piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun
off the milk-cans. Tess held it from slipping off him as well as
herself, Clare's hands being occupied.
"Now we are all right again. Ah--no we are not! It runs down into
my neck a little, and it must still more into yours. That's better.
Your arms are like wet marble, Tess. Wipe them in the cloth. Now,
if you stay quiet, you will not get another drop. Well, dear--about
that question of mine--that long-standing question?"
The only reply that he could hear for a little while was the smack of
the horse's hoofs on the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk
in the cans behind them.
"Do you remember what you said?"
"I do," she replied.
"Before we get home, mind."
"I'll try."
He said no more then. As they drove on, the fragment of an old manor
house of Caroline date rose against the sky, and was in due course
passed and left behind.
"That," he observed, to entertain her, "is an interesting old
place--one of the several seats which belonged to an ancient Norman
family formerly of great influence in this county, the d'Urbervilles.
I never pass one of their residences without thinking of them. There
is something very sad in the extinction of a family of renown, even
if it was fierce, domineering, feudal renown."
"Yes," said Tess.
They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand
at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence, a spot
where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the
dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between
their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its
steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the
native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what
it touched had been uncongenial.
They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a
little railway station; a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one
sense of more importance to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the
celestial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast. The
cans of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little
shelter from a neighbouring holly tree.
Then there was the hissing of a train, which drew up almost silently
upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung can by can into
the truck. The light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess
Durbeyfield's figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No
object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and
wheels than this unsophisticated girl, with the round bare arms, the
rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at
pause, the print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet
drooping on her brow.
She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute obedience
characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when they had
wrapped themselves up over head and ears in the sailcloth again, they
plunged back into the now thick night. Tess was so receptive that
the few minutes of contact with the whirl of material progress
lingered in her thought.
"Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won't they?"
she asked. "Strange people that we have never seen."
"Yes--I suppose they will. Though not as we send it. When its
strength has been lowered, so that it may not get up into their
heads."
"Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and
tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow."
"Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions."
"Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how
we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might
reach 'em in time?"
"We did not drive entirely on account of these precious Londoners; we
drove a little on our own--on account of that anxious matter which
you will, I am sure, set at rest, dear Tess. Now, permit me to put
it in this way. You belong to me already, you know; your heart, I
mean. Does it not?"
"You know as well as I. O yes--yes!"
"Then, if your heart does, why not your hand?"
"My only reason was on account of you--on account of a question. I
have something to tell you--"
"But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my worldly
convenience also?"
"O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly convenience. But my
life before I came here--I want--"
"Well, it is for my convenience as well as my happiness. If I have a
very large farm, either English or colonial, you will be invaluable
as a wife to me; better than a woman out of the largest mansion in
the country. So please--please, dear Tessy, disabuse your mind of
the feeling that you will stand in my way."
"But my history. I want you to know it--you must let me tell
you--you will not like me so well!"
"Tell it if you wish to, dearest. This precious history then. Yes,
I was born at so and so, Anno Domini--"
"I was born at Marlott," she said, catching at his words as a help,
lightly as they were spoken. "And I grew up there. And I was in the
Sixth Standard when I left school, and they said I had great aptness,
and should make a good teacher, so it was settled that I should
be one. But there was trouble in my family; father was not very
industrious, and he drank a little."
"Yes, yes. Poor child! Nothing new." He pressed her more closely
to his side.
"And then--there is something very unusual about it--about me. I--I
was--"
Tess's breath quickened.
"Yes, dearest. Never mind."
"I--I--am not a Durbeyfield, but a d'Urberville--a descendant of the
same family as those that owned the old house we passed. And--we are
all gone to nothing!"
"A d'Urberville!--Indeed! And is that all the trouble, dear Tess?"
"Yes," she answered faintly.
"Well--why should I love you less after knowing this?"
"I was told by the dairyman that you hated old families."
He laughed.
"Well, it is true, in one sense. I do hate the aristocratic
principle of blood before everything, and do think that as reasoners
the only pedigrees we ought to respect are those spiritual ones of
the wise and virtuous, without regard to corporal paternity. But
I am extremely interested in this news--you can have no idea how
interested I am! Are you not interested yourself in being one of
that well-known line?"
"No. I have thought it sad--especially since coming here, and
knowing that many of the hills and fields I see once belonged to
my father's people. But other hills and field belonged to Retty's
people, and perhaps others to Marian's, so that I don't value it
particularly."
"Yes--it is surprising how many of the present tillers of the soil
were once owners of it, and I sometimes wonder that a certain school
of politicians don't make capital of the circumstance; but they don't
seem to know it... I wonder that I did not see the resemblance of
your name to d'Urberville, and trace the manifest corruption. And
this was the carking secret!"
She had not told. At the last moment her courage had failed her;
she feared his blame for not telling him sooner; and her instinct
of self-preservation was stronger than her candour.
"Of course," continued the unwitting Clare, "I should have been glad
to know you to be descended exclusively from the long-suffering,
dumb, unrecorded rank and file of the English nation, and not from
the self-seeking few who made themselves powerful at the expense of
the rest. But I am corrupted away from that by my affection for you,
Tess (he laughed as he spoke), and made selfish likewise. For your
own sake I rejoice in your descent. Society is hopelessly snobbish,
and this fact of your extraction may make an appreciable difference
to its acceptance of you as my wife, after I have made you the
well-read woman that I mean to make you. My mother too, poor soul,
will think so much better of you on account of it. Tess, you must
spell your name correctly--d'Urberville--from this very day."
"I like the other way rather best."
"But you MUST, dearest! Good heavens, why dozens of mushroom
millionaires would jump at such a possession! By the bye, there's
one of that kidney who has taken the name--where have I heard of
him?--Up in the neighbourhood of The Chase, I think. Why, he is the
very man who had that rumpus with my father I told you of. What an
odd coincidence!"
"Angel, I think I would rather not take the name! It is unlucky,
perhaps!"
She was agitated.
"Now then, Mistress Teresa d'Urberville, I have you. Take my name,
and so you will escape yours! The secret is out, so why should you
any longer refuse me?"
"If it is SURE to make you happy to have me as your wife, and you
feel that you do wish to marry me, VERY, VERY much--"
"I do, dearest, of course!"
"I mean, that it is only your wanting me very much, and being hardly
able to keep alive without me, whatever my offences, that would make
me feel I ought to say I will."
"You will--you do say it, I know! You will be mine for ever and
ever."
He clasped her close and kissed her.
"Yes!"
She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry hard sobbing, so
violent that it seemed to rend her. Tess was not a hysterical girl
by any means, and he was surprised.
"Why do you cry, dearest?"
"I can't tell--quite!--I am so glad to think--of being yours, and
making you happy!"
"But this does not seem very much like gladness, my Tessy!"
"I mean--I cry because I have broken down in my vow! I said I would
die unmarried!"
"But, if you love me you would like me to be your husband?"
"Yes, yes, yes! But O, I sometimes wish I had never been born!"
"Now, my dear Tess, if I did not know that you are very much excited,
and very inexperienced, I should say that remark was not very
complimentary. How came you to wish that if you care for me? Do you
care for me? I wish you would prove it in some way."
"How can I prove it more than I have done?" she cried, in a
distraction of tenderness. "Will this prove it more?"
She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learnt what an
impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she
loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him.
"There--now do you believe?" she asked, flushed, and wiping her eyes.
"Yes. I never really doubted--never, never!"
So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the
sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against
them. She had consented. She might as well have agreed at first.
The "appetite for joy" which pervades all creation, that tremendous
force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the
helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over
the social rubric.
"I must write to my mother," she said. "You don't mind my doing
that?"
"Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know
how very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how
wrong it would be in me to object. Where does she live?"
"At the same place--Marlott. On the further side of Blackmoor Vale."
"Ah, then I HAVE seen you before this summer--"
"Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not dance with me.
O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!"
| 13,351 | Chapters 25-30 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219151046/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summary-and-analysis/phase-the-fourth-the-consequence-chapters-2530 | Angel has turned a new corner in his life, feeling that he belongs on the dairy as a farmer and that Tess is the right choice as a wife. Angel leaves the dairy to visit his family and to tell his parents about Tess. Angel's brothers, Felix and Cuthbert, disapprove of Angel marrying Tess but do little to discourage him. His parents had intended Angel to marry Miss Mercy Chant, a real "lady" and local teacher. Angel is against the union and proposes to his parents that Tess Durbeyfield would be a much better choice. Angel and his father debate the merits of Mercy and Tess as suitable wives for a farmer. Angel's wishes win out with his father's concern expressed by his question, "Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into -- a lady, in short?" His parents warn Angel not to rush into a hasty marriage with an unknown woman, but his descriptions of her are enough. Reverend Clare relates a story of a convert, one Alec d'Urberville, who has become a lay minister and street preacher. Angel returns to the dairy and asks Tess to marry him. Tess says that she cannot. Angel persists, not being too aggressive in his tactics to convince Tess, but she insists, "I am not good enough -- not worthy enough." Alone, Tess wonders why her past has not caught up to her at Talbothays, and she feels both "positive pleasure and positive pain" as she wrestles with her feelings for Angel and the past that is bound to catch up to her. She resolves to give in to Angel's proposal: "I shall give way -- I shall say yes -- I shall let myself marry him -- I cannot help it." Tess rethinks her position, even suggesting that any of the other milkmaids would be worthy wives for Angel. Angel refuses Tess' suggestions, and when Mr. Crick needs a volunteer to drive the milk, now late for delivery, straight to the train station in Egdon Heath, Angel volunteers, and Tess goes along for the ride. It is during this ride, in a downpour of rain, that Angel learns that Tess comes from the d'Urberville family. He suggests that she adopt the "d'Urberville" spelling, and he quells her fears about his hating "old families." Relieved, Tess accepts Angel's marriage proposal if "it is sure to make you happy to have me as your wife and you feel that you wish to marry me, very, very much . . . ." Then Tess kisses Angel, and he discovers "what an impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips of one whom she loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess loved him." Tess insists that she write her mother in Marlott, and Angel then remembers that day four years earlier, during the May Dance, that he had seen Tess but had not danced with her. | In these chapters, Hardy gives the readers a fine set of juxtaposed characters to consider: Tess versus Mercy; Angel and Reverend Clare versus Angel's brothers Felix and Cuthbert; and Angel versus Alec. The characters are developed as sets of opposites that cause the reader to consider both sides of the argument. These two sides are not a contrast between right or wrong, good or bad, but rather, they are a way to demonstrate that positions have two distinct sides, each with its own viewpoint. Mercy Chant is "accomplished," educated, able to provide a good home for Angel as a wife. Tess is presented clearly as a better choice as a farmer's wife. Of course, should Angel have chosen the life of a minister, Mercy Chant may have been a better choice. Also interesting is the division between Angel and his brothers. Felix Clare is a parish minister described by Hardy as "all Church," while Cuthbert, dean of a college, seems to be "all College." Angel is then seen by his older brothers as "growing in social ineptness," and Angel sees his brothers as "growing mental limitations." Each sees the other not as opposite, but as flawed in ways that can divide families. Cuthbert is "the more liberal minded," though "he had not much heart." Likewise, Felix is "less self-sacrificing and disinterested." Thus both men are not like Angel in many respects when "either saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking." Felix asks Angel if he is "somehow losing intellectual grasp." Angel responds, "f it comes to intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours." Thus, Angel feels that "despite his own heterodoxy, he was nearer to his father on the human side than was either of his brethren." Angel's father, Reverend Clare is a "Pauliad" or Paulist; that is, his religious attitudes are like those of the biblical Paul, meaning that he believes that conversion is not an intellectual occurrence but an emotional one. Hardy describes Reverend Clare as "sincere." He is an evangelical believer and minister, even suffering beatings and berating to convert sinners to join the church. Thus Reverend Clare and Angel are very similar in their practical religious beliefs. Angel's brothers, on the other hand, are more inclined to use their religious beliefs for their own ends and are even vain in their "fashionable" ways. In the consideration of religion, Angel continues to be a contrast to Alec. Angel has a better concept of religion, and he practices what he preaches. Alec, on the other hand, experiences a sudden conversion from his harmful ways; he has abused Reverend Clare when approached on the subject of his Christianity. Reverend Clare is proud to have won a new convert, no matter the consequence. Angel is aghast at his father for taking too many risks, whether they be physical or mental from strangers: "I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and would leave such pigs to their wallowing." Angel admires his father's work, even though it has cost him in the past, "though the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma he revered his practice, and recognized the hero under the pietist." The reintroduction of Alec in the story is important for two reasons: First, it indicates that Alec will play a part in later events. Up to this point, although we may have suspected Alec's reappearance, it was possible that his part in Tess' ruin had already been played and that it would simply be the results of the past action that color future events. Now we know that that is not the case. Alec d'Urberville's part in Tess' life is not, unfortunately for Tess, over. Second, Angel's comment that he wishes his father would "leave such pigs to their wallowing" indicates both Alec's past nature and the sincerity of his present conversion. Although no one in the novel presently questions Alec's conversion, the reader should. Glossary apostrophizing addressing words to a person or thing, whether absent or present, generally in an exclamatory digression in a speech or literary writing. Dapes inemptae "unpurchased banquet" ; refers to the dairyman's self-sufficiency in producing food. black-puddings dark sausages made with meat and seasoned blood. delirium tremens violent delirium resulting chiefly from excessive drinking of alcoholic liquor and characterized by sweating, trembling, anxiety, and frightening hallucinations. flummery meaningless flattery or silly talk. Calvinistic doctrine reference to the teachings of John Calvin , Swiss Protestant theologian, who emphasized salvation through God's grace. pernicious causing great injury, destruction, or ruin; fatal; deadly; wicked; evil. "as Hamlet puts it" from Hamlet 2.2.351. "from St. Luke" refers to Luke 12:20. "Being reviled we bless..." 1 Corinthians 4:12-13. Tractarian derived from the Oxford Movement, which favored a return to early Catholic doctrines in the Church of England. pantheistic relating to pantheism, the doctrine that God is not a personality, but that all laws, forces, manifestations, etc. of the universe are God; the belief that God and the universe are one and the same. "Sigh gratis" act or feel without expecting reward; from Hamlet . carking worrying or being worried or anxious. self-immolation suicide, usually by burning oneself in a public place; deliberate self-sacrifice. phlegmatic hard to rouse to action; sluggish; dull; apathetic; calm; cool; stolid. Centurions the commanding officers of an ancient Roman century. Caroline date the seventeenth century, during the reign of Charles I or Charles II . | 488 | 942 | [
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161 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/10.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Sense and Sensibility/section_9_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 10 | chapter 10 | null | {"name": "Chapter 10", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210421140324/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sense-and-sensibility/summary/chapter-10", "summary": "The next morning, Willoughby stops by to check on Marianne. Everyone's all in a tizzy about him - the Dashwood ladies, mom included, are quite taken with him. He's also impressed by his new acquaintances, especially Marianne. Elinor, we learn, is very pretty, but Marianne is beautiful. Willoughby is obviously into her. Marianne and her suitor immediately discover that they've got an awful lot in common - they like the same music and books, and by the time he leaves, it's like they're old friends already. Elinor affectionately hassles her sister about her conversation with Willoughby; now that they've talked about all of Marianne's favorite things, what else can they possibly have to talk about? Marianne replies hotly, saying that she was just being open and up front, instead of beating about the bush like a prim, proper young lady. Their mother intervenes and diffuses the tension between sisters. Over the next several days, Willoughby and Marianne become pretty tight. He comes to visit every day, and it's obvious that the pair are made for each other. Mrs. Dashwood is also charmed by this new friend, and even critical Elinor can't find anything wrong with him . To Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood, Willoughby is absolutely the perfect man. In Mrs. Dashwood's eyes, Elinor and Marianne are practically married off already, to Edward Ferrars and Willoughby, respectively. Elinor, however, notices that poor Colonel Brandon really does have feelings for Marianne - feelings that Marianne definitely doesn't return. Even sadder is the fact that he can't possibly compete with the younger, more charismatic Willoughby. To make things worse, Willoughby and Marianne actually take pleasure in making fun of the Colonel, whom they consider to be old and boring. Elinor comes to the Colonel's defense, but Willoughby and Marianne will have none of it. Despite her claims that Colonel Brandon is practical, wise, and experienced, Willoughby insists on disliking him.", "analysis": ""} |
Marianne's preserver, as Margaret, with more elegance than precision,
styled Willoughby, called at the cottage early the next morning to make
his personal enquiries. He was received by Mrs. Dashwood with more
than politeness; with a kindness which Sir John's account of him and
her own gratitude prompted; and every thing that passed during the
visit tended to assure him of the sense, elegance, mutual affection,
and domestic comfort of the family to whom accident had now introduced
him. Of their personal charms he had not required a second interview
to be convinced.
Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a
remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form,
though not so correct as her sister's, in having the advantage of
height, was more striking; and her face was so lovely, that when in the
common cant of praise, she was called a beautiful girl, truth was less
violently outraged than usually happens. Her skin was very brown, but,
from its transparency, her complexion was uncommonly brilliant; her
features were all good; her smile was sweet and attractive; and in her
eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness,
which could hardily be seen without delight. From Willoughby their
expression was at first held back, by the embarrassment which the
remembrance of his assistance created. But when this passed away, when
her spirits became collected, when she saw that to the perfect
good-breeding of the gentleman, he united frankness and vivacity, and
above all, when she heard him declare, that of music and dancing he was
passionately fond, she gave him such a look of approbation as secured
the largest share of his discourse to herself for the rest of his stay.
It was only necessary to mention any favourite amusement to engage her
to talk. She could not be silent when such points were introduced, and
she had neither shyness nor reserve in their discussion. They speedily
discovered that their enjoyment of dancing and music was mutual, and
that it arose from a general conformity of judgment in all that related
to either. Encouraged by this to a further examination of his
opinions, she proceeded to question him on the subject of books; her
favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous
a delight, that any young man of five and twenty must have been
insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence
of such works, however disregarded before. Their taste was strikingly
alike. The same books, the same passages were idolized by each--or if
any difference appeared, any objection arose, it lasted no longer than
till the force of her arguments and the brightness of her eyes could be
displayed. He acquiesced in all her decisions, caught all her
enthusiasm; and long before his visit concluded, they conversed with
the familiarity of a long-established acquaintance.
"Well, Marianne," said Elinor, as soon as he had left them, "for ONE
morning I think you have done pretty well. You have already
ascertained Mr. Willoughby's opinion in almost every matter of
importance. You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are
certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have
received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper.
But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such
extraordinary despatch of every subject for discourse? You will soon
have exhausted each favourite topic. Another meeting will suffice to
explain his sentiments on picturesque beauty, and second marriages, and
then you can have nothing farther to ask."--
"Elinor," cried Marianne, "is this fair? is this just? are my ideas so
scanty? But I see what you mean. I have been too much at my ease, too
happy, too frank. I have erred against every common-place notion of
decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been
reserved, spiritless, dull, and deceitful--had I talked only of the
weather and the roads, and had I spoken only once in ten minutes, this
reproach would have been spared."
"My love," said her mother, "you must not be offended with Elinor--she
was only in jest. I should scold her myself, if she were capable of
wishing to check the delight of your conversation with our new
friend."-- Marianne was softened in a moment.
Willoughby, on his side, gave every proof of his pleasure in their
acquaintance, which an evident wish of improving it could offer. He
came to them every day. To enquire after Marianne was at first his
excuse; but the encouragement of his reception, to which every day gave
greater kindness, made such an excuse unnecessary before it had ceased
to be possible, by Marianne's perfect recovery. She was confined for
some days to the house; but never had any confinement been less
irksome. Willoughby was a young man of good abilities, quick
imagination, lively spirits, and open, affectionate manners. He was
exactly formed to engage Marianne's heart, for with all this, he joined
not only a captivating person, but a natural ardour of mind which was
now roused and increased by the example of her own, and which
recommended him to her affection beyond every thing else.
His society became gradually her most exquisite enjoyment. They read,
they talked, they sang together; his musical talents were considerable;
and he read with all the sensibility and spirit which Edward had
unfortunately wanted.
In Mrs. Dashwood's estimation he was as faultless as in Marianne's; and
Elinor saw nothing to censure in him but a propensity, in which he
strongly resembled and peculiarly delighted her sister, of saying too
much what he thought on every occasion, without attention to persons or
circumstances. In hastily forming and giving his opinion of other
people, in sacrificing general politeness to the enjoyment of undivided
attention where his heart was engaged, and in slighting too easily the
forms of worldly propriety, he displayed a want of caution which Elinor
could not approve, in spite of all that he and Marianne could say in
its support.
Marianne began now to perceive that the desperation which had seized
her at sixteen and a half, of ever seeing a man who could satisfy her
ideas of perfection, had been rash and unjustifiable. Willoughby was
all that her fancy had delineated in that unhappy hour and in every
brighter period, as capable of attaching her; and his behaviour
declared his wishes to be in that respect as earnest, as his abilities
were strong.
Her mother too, in whose mind not one speculative thought of their
marriage had been raised, by his prospect of riches, was led before the
end of a week to hope and expect it; and secretly to congratulate
herself on having gained two such sons-in-law as Edward and Willoughby.
Colonel Brandon's partiality for Marianne, which had so early been
discovered by his friends, now first became perceptible to Elinor, when
it ceased to be noticed by them. Their attention and wit were drawn
off to his more fortunate rival; and the raillery which the other had
incurred before any partiality arose, was removed when his feelings
began really to call for the ridicule so justly annexed to sensibility.
Elinor was obliged, though unwillingly, to believe that the sentiments
which Mrs. Jennings had assigned him for her own satisfaction, were now
actually excited by her sister; and that however a general resemblance
of disposition between the parties might forward the affection of Mr.
Willoughby, an equally striking opposition of character was no
hindrance to the regard of Colonel Brandon. She saw it with concern;
for what could a silent man of five and thirty hope, when opposed to a
very lively one of five and twenty? and as she could not even wish him
successful, she heartily wished him indifferent. She liked him--in
spite of his gravity and reserve, she beheld in him an object of
interest. His manners, though serious, were mild; and his reserve
appeared rather the result of some oppression of spirits than of any
natural gloominess of temper. Sir John had dropped hints of past
injuries and disappointments, which justified her belief of his being
an unfortunate man, and she regarded him with respect and compassion.
Perhaps she pitied and esteemed him the more because he was slighted by
Willoughby and Marianne, who, prejudiced against him for being neither
lively nor young, seemed resolved to undervalue his merits.
"Brandon is just the kind of man," said Willoughby one day, when they
were talking of him together, "whom every body speaks well of, and
nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers
to talk to."
"That is exactly what I think of him," cried Marianne.
"Do not boast of it, however," said Elinor, "for it is injustice in
both of you. He is highly esteemed by all the family at the park, and
I never see him myself without taking pains to converse with him."
"That he is patronised by YOU," replied Willoughby, "is certainly in
his favour; but as for the esteem of the others, it is a reproach in
itself. Who would submit to the indignity of being approved by such a
woman as Lady Middleton and Mrs. Jennings, that could command the
indifference of any body else?"
"But perhaps the abuse of such people as yourself and Marianne will
make amends for the regard of Lady Middleton and her mother. If their
praise is censure, your censure may be praise, for they are not more
undiscerning, than you are prejudiced and unjust."
"In defence of your protege you can even be saucy."
"My protege, as you call him, is a sensible man; and sense will always
have attractions for me. Yes, Marianne, even in a man between thirty
and forty. He has seen a great deal of the world; has been abroad, has
read, and has a thinking mind. I have found him capable of giving me
much information on various subjects; and he has always answered my
inquiries with readiness of good-breeding and good nature."
"That is to say," cried Marianne contemptuously, "he has told you, that
in the East Indies the climate is hot, and the mosquitoes are
troublesome."
"He WOULD have told me so, I doubt not, had I made any such inquiries,
but they happened to be points on which I had been previously informed."
"Perhaps," said Willoughby, "his observations may have extended to the
existence of nabobs, gold mohrs, and palanquins."
"I may venture to say that HIS observations have stretched much further
than your candour. But why should you dislike him?"
"I do not dislike him. I consider him, on the contrary, as a very
respectable man, who has every body's good word, and nobody's notice;
who, has more money than he can spend, more time than he knows how to
employ, and two new coats every year."
"Add to which," cried Marianne, "that he has neither genius, taste, nor
spirit. That his understanding has no brilliancy, his feelings no
ardour, and his voice no expression."
"You decide on his imperfections so much in the mass," replied Elinor,
"and so much on the strength of your own imagination, that the
commendation I am able to give of him is comparatively cold and
insipid. I can only pronounce him to be a sensible man, well-bred,
well-informed, of gentle address, and, I believe, possessing an amiable
heart."
"Miss Dashwood," cried Willoughby, "you are now using me unkindly. You
are endeavouring to disarm me by reason, and to convince me against my
will. But it will not do. You shall find me as stubborn as you can be
artful. I have three unanswerable reasons for disliking Colonel
Brandon; he threatened me with rain when I wanted it to be fine; he has
found fault with the hanging of my curricle, and I cannot persuade him
to buy my brown mare. If it will be any satisfaction to you, however,
to be told, that I believe his character to be in other respects
irreproachable, I am ready to confess it. And in return for an
acknowledgment, which must give me some pain, you cannot deny me the
privilege of disliking him as much as ever."
| 1,910 | Chapter 10 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210421140324/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sense-and-sensibility/summary/chapter-10 | The next morning, Willoughby stops by to check on Marianne. Everyone's all in a tizzy about him - the Dashwood ladies, mom included, are quite taken with him. He's also impressed by his new acquaintances, especially Marianne. Elinor, we learn, is very pretty, but Marianne is beautiful. Willoughby is obviously into her. Marianne and her suitor immediately discover that they've got an awful lot in common - they like the same music and books, and by the time he leaves, it's like they're old friends already. Elinor affectionately hassles her sister about her conversation with Willoughby; now that they've talked about all of Marianne's favorite things, what else can they possibly have to talk about? Marianne replies hotly, saying that she was just being open and up front, instead of beating about the bush like a prim, proper young lady. Their mother intervenes and diffuses the tension between sisters. Over the next several days, Willoughby and Marianne become pretty tight. He comes to visit every day, and it's obvious that the pair are made for each other. Mrs. Dashwood is also charmed by this new friend, and even critical Elinor can't find anything wrong with him . To Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood, Willoughby is absolutely the perfect man. In Mrs. Dashwood's eyes, Elinor and Marianne are practically married off already, to Edward Ferrars and Willoughby, respectively. Elinor, however, notices that poor Colonel Brandon really does have feelings for Marianne - feelings that Marianne definitely doesn't return. Even sadder is the fact that he can't possibly compete with the younger, more charismatic Willoughby. To make things worse, Willoughby and Marianne actually take pleasure in making fun of the Colonel, whom they consider to be old and boring. Elinor comes to the Colonel's defense, but Willoughby and Marianne will have none of it. Despite her claims that Colonel Brandon is practical, wise, and experienced, Willoughby insists on disliking him. | null | 317 | 1 | [
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107 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/38.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_37_part_0.txt | Far from the Madding Crowd.chapter 38 | chapter 38 | null | {"name": "Chapter 38", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-38", "summary": "\"It was now five o'clock, and the dawn was promising to break in hues of drab and ash.\" The wind grew stronger and uncovered some wheat ricks, and Gabriel weighted them down with fence rails. He continued to cover the barley while the rain beat down heavily. He remembered that eight months earlier he had fought a fire in this same spot, for love of the same woman. Two hours later, as Oak was wearily finished, wavering figures emerged from the barn. A scarlet one headed for the house. Not one of them remembered the ricks. On his way home, Gabriel met Boldwood, who remarked that Gabriel looked ill and asked the trouble. Oak explained that he had been working on the ricks, and Boldwood admitted having forgotten his. Once such an oversight would have been impossible for him. \"Oak was just thinking that whatever he himself might have suffered . . . here was a man who had suffered more.\" Boldwood preoccupied with what people thought, said that Bathsheba had not jilted him, that she had never promised him anything. He lamented his fate, his expression wild. Then he roused himself and resumed his reserve, saying, \"Well good morning; I can trust you not to mention to others what has passed between us two here.\"", "analysis": "Bathsheba and her three admirers again appear in the same chapter -- Troy whistling and carefree; Boldwood suffering from deep emotional tension; and Gabriel remaining loyal to Bathsheba and the land and sympathizing with Boldwood."} |
RAIN--ONE SOLITARY MEETS ANOTHER
It was now five o'clock, and the dawn was promising to break in hues
of drab and ash.
The air changed its temperature and stirred itself more vigorously.
Cool breezes coursed in transparent eddies round Oak's face. The
wind shifted yet a point or two and blew stronger. In ten minutes
every wind of heaven seemed to be roaming at large. Some of the
thatching on the wheat-stacks was now whirled fantastically aloft,
and had to be replaced and weighted with some rails that lay near at
hand. This done, Oak slaved away again at the barley. A huge drop
of rain smote his face, the wind snarled round every corner, the
trees rocked to the bases of their trunks, and the twigs clashed in
strife. Driving in spars at any point and on any system, inch by
inch he covered more and more safely from ruin this distracting
impersonation of seven hundred pounds. The rain came on in earnest,
and Oak soon felt the water to be tracking cold and clammy routes
down his back. Ultimately he was reduced well-nigh to a homogeneous
sop, and the dyes of his clothes trickled down and stood in a pool
at the foot of the ladder. The rain stretched obliquely through the
dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between
their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him.
Oak suddenly remembered that eight months before this time he had
been fighting against fire in the same spot as desperately as he
was fighting against water now--and for a futile love of the same
woman. As for her--But Oak was generous and true, and dismissed
his reflections.
It was about seven o'clock in the dark leaden morning when Gabriel
came down from the last stack, and thankfully exclaimed, "It is
done!" He was drenched, weary, and sad, and yet not so sad as
drenched and weary, for he was cheered by a sense of success in a
good cause.
Faint sounds came from the barn, and he looked that way. Figures
stepped singly and in pairs through the doors--all walking awkwardly,
and abashed, save the foremost, who wore a red jacket, and advanced
with his hands in his pockets, whistling. The others shambled after
with a conscience-stricken air: the whole procession was not unlike
Flaxman's group of the suitors tottering on towards the infernal
regions under the conduct of Mercury. The gnarled shapes passed
into the village, Troy, their leader, entering the farmhouse. Not a
single one of them had turned his face to the ricks, or apparently
bestowed one thought upon their condition.
Soon Oak too went homeward, by a different route from theirs. In
front of him against the wet glazed surface of the lane he saw a
person walking yet more slowly than himself under an umbrella. The
man turned and plainly started; he was Boldwood.
"How are you this morning, sir?" said Oak.
"Yes, it is a wet day.--Oh, I am well, very well, I thank you; quite
well."
"I am glad to hear it, sir."
Boldwood seemed to awake to the present by degrees. "You look tired
and ill, Oak," he said then, desultorily regarding his companion.
"I am tired. You look strangely altered, sir."
"I? Not a bit of it: I am well enough. What put that into your
head?"
"I thought you didn't look quite so topping as you used to, that was
all."
"Indeed, then you are mistaken," said Boldwood, shortly. "Nothing
hurts me. My constitution is an iron one."
"I've been working hard to get our ricks covered, and was barely in
time. Never had such a struggle in my life.... Yours of course are
safe, sir."
"Oh yes," Boldwood added, after an interval of silence: "What did you
ask, Oak?"
"Your ricks are all covered before this time?"
"No."
"At any rate, the large ones upon the stone staddles?"
"They are not."
"Them under the hedge?"
"No. I forgot to tell the thatcher to set about it."
"Nor the little one by the stile?"
"Nor the little one by the stile. I overlooked the ricks this year."
"Then not a tenth of your corn will come to measure, sir."
"Possibly not."
"Overlooked them," repeated Gabriel slowly to himself. It is
difficult to describe the intensely dramatic effect that announcement
had upon Oak at such a moment. All the night he had been feeling
that the neglect he was labouring to repair was abnormal and
isolated--the only instance of the kind within the circuit of the
county. Yet at this very time, within the same parish, a greater
waste had been going on, uncomplained of and disregarded. A few
months earlier Boldwood's forgetting his husbandry would have been as
preposterous an idea as a sailor forgetting he was in a ship. Oak
was just thinking that whatever he himself might have suffered from
Bathsheba's marriage, here was a man who had suffered more, when
Boldwood spoke in a changed voice--that of one who yearned to make
a confidence and relieve his heart by an outpouring.
"Oak, you know as well as I that things have gone wrong with me
lately. I may as well own it. I was going to get a little settled
in life; but in some way my plan has come to nothing."
"I thought my mistress would have married you," said Gabriel, not
knowing enough of the full depths of Boldwood's love to keep silence
on the farmer's account, and determined not to evade discipline by
doing so on his own. "However, it is so sometimes, and nothing
happens that we expect," he added, with the repose of a man whom
misfortune had inured rather than subdued.
"I daresay I am a joke about the parish," said Boldwood, as if
the subject came irresistibly to his tongue, and with a miserable
lightness meant to express his indifference.
"Oh no--I don't think that."
"--But the real truth of the matter is that there was not, as some
fancy, any jilting on--her part. No engagement ever existed between
me and Miss Everdene. People say so, but it is untrue: she never
promised me!" Boldwood stood still now and turned his wild face to
Oak. "Oh, Gabriel," he continued, "I am weak and foolish, and I
don't know what, and I can't fend off my miserable grief! ... I had
some faint belief in the mercy of God till I lost that woman. Yes,
He prepared a gourd to shade me, and like the prophet I thanked Him
and was glad. But the next day He prepared a worm to smite the gourd
and wither it; and I feel it is better to die than to live!"
A silence followed. Boldwood aroused himself from the momentary
mood of confidence into which he had drifted, and walked on again,
resuming his usual reserve.
"No, Gabriel," he resumed, with a carelessness which was like
the smile on the countenance of a skull: "it was made more of by
other people than ever it was by us. I do feel a little regret
occasionally, but no woman ever had power over me for any length of
time. Well, good morning; I can trust you not to mention to others
what has passed between us two here."
| 1,145 | Chapter 38 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-38 | "It was now five o'clock, and the dawn was promising to break in hues of drab and ash." The wind grew stronger and uncovered some wheat ricks, and Gabriel weighted them down with fence rails. He continued to cover the barley while the rain beat down heavily. He remembered that eight months earlier he had fought a fire in this same spot, for love of the same woman. Two hours later, as Oak was wearily finished, wavering figures emerged from the barn. A scarlet one headed for the house. Not one of them remembered the ricks. On his way home, Gabriel met Boldwood, who remarked that Gabriel looked ill and asked the trouble. Oak explained that he had been working on the ricks, and Boldwood admitted having forgotten his. Once such an oversight would have been impossible for him. "Oak was just thinking that whatever he himself might have suffered . . . here was a man who had suffered more." Boldwood preoccupied with what people thought, said that Bathsheba had not jilted him, that she had never promised him anything. He lamented his fate, his expression wild. Then he roused himself and resumed his reserve, saying, "Well good morning; I can trust you not to mention to others what has passed between us two here." | Bathsheba and her three admirers again appear in the same chapter -- Troy whistling and carefree; Boldwood suffering from deep emotional tension; and Gabriel remaining loyal to Bathsheba and the land and sympathizing with Boldwood. | 216 | 35 | [
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161 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/18.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Sense and Sensibility/section_17_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 18 | chapter 18 | null | {"name": "Chapter 18", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210421140324/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sense-and-sensibility/summary/chapter-18", "summary": "Elinor notices that Edward is feeling kind of down; she can't enjoy his visit if he can't. She wishes she knew what his deal is. Edward, Marianne, and Elinor find themselves at breakfast together the next day. Marianne, trying to push things along in her sister's relationship, makes a big show of leaving them together, but Edward just responds by leaving to look at his horses . Edward returns from his quality time with the horses seeming somewhat refreshed; he praises the beautiful countryside. Marianne, who's also an admirer of nature, presses him for details on his walk, and he responds somewhat oddly, saying that he has no talent for describing the picturesque. Marianne doesn't really get him, but Elinor does - of course. She explains to her sister that Edward avoids flowery descriptions that have very little meaning, but goes to the opposite extreme of not describing at all. Edward himself steps in to say that he, unlike so many admirers of the romantic landscape, prefers things that are wholesomely beautiful to those that are dramatic - Marianne is shocked, but Elinor understands. Later on, Marianne notices that Edward's wearing a new ring, that's set with a braid of hair. Yes, you read right - human hair. This seems freaky to us, but making jewelry that incorporated a loved one's hair was common practice in Austen's time. Anyway, Edward's got a new ring, and Marianne asks about it. Edward claims that the hair is his sister Fanny's , even though it looks like it's not quite the right color. Who could it belong to? Both Elinor and Marianne assume that the hair is actually Elinor's. Marianne assumes that her sister gave Edward the lock of hair as a gift, while Elinor herself thinks that he must have somehow stolen it. However, she's not offended at all - in fact, she wants to get a better look at it herself to make sure it's hers. Can this mean that Edward is really in love with her? Edward is terribly embarrassed by this whole incident. Marianne feels bad about it, but our knowing narrator tells us that she wouldn't have felt so bad had she known that the conversation about the ring was actually quite welcome to Elinor. Sir John and Mrs. Jennings stop by for a visit, having heard that the cottage has a mysterious gentleman visiting. They are delighted to find that Edward's last name, Ferrars, begins with an \"F\" - if you recall, Margaret let slip earlier on the fact that Elinor's suitor's name begins with that letter. They assume - correctly - that he's the man in question. Fortunately, they don't bring up the subject with Edward himself. Sir John and Mrs. Jennings invite the Dashwoods and their guest over for tea and dinner the next day, and attempt to lure their young friends over with the prospect of a dance. Marianne scoffs at this idea, and asks who will dance; Mrs. Jennings and Sir John rather tactlessly refer to Willoughby's notable absence. Edward unknowingly inquires about Willoughby, and notices Marianne's reactions. Once the visitors have left, he teases Marianne about this new friend, implying that he's the source of Marianne's thoughts about her future household . Marianne smiles, and replies only that she hopes that he and Willoughby will get along . Edward is surprised by her revealing response.", "analysis": ""} |
Elinor saw, with great uneasiness the low spirits of her friend. His
visit afforded her but a very partial satisfaction, while his own
enjoyment in it appeared so imperfect. It was evident that he was
unhappy; she wished it were equally evident that he still distinguished
her by the same affection which once she had felt no doubt of
inspiring; but hitherto the continuance of his preference seemed very
uncertain; and the reservedness of his manner towards her contradicted
one moment what a more animated look had intimated the preceding one.
He joined her and Marianne in the breakfast-room the next morning
before the others were down; and Marianne, who was always eager to
promote their happiness as far as she could, soon left them to
themselves. But before she was half way upstairs she heard the parlour
door open, and, turning round, was astonished to see Edward himself
come out.
"I am going into the village to see my horses," said he, "as you are
not yet ready for breakfast; I shall be back again presently."
***
Edward returned to them with fresh admiration of the surrounding
country; in his walk to the village, he had seen many parts of the
valley to advantage; and the village itself, in a much higher situation
than the cottage, afforded a general view of the whole, which had
exceedingly pleased him. This was a subject which ensured Marianne's
attention, and she was beginning to describe her own admiration of
these scenes, and to question him more minutely on the objects that had
particularly struck him, when Edward interrupted her by saying, "You
must not enquire too far, Marianne--remember I have no knowledge in the
picturesque, and I shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste
if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be
bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and
rugged; and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be
indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere. You must be
satisfied with such admiration as I can honestly give. I call it a
very fine country--the hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine
timber, and the valley looks comfortable and snug--with rich meadows
and several neat farm houses scattered here and there. It exactly
answers my idea of a fine country, because it unites beauty with
utility--and I dare say it is a picturesque one too, because you admire
it; I can easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories, grey
moss and brush wood, but these are all lost on me. I know nothing of
the picturesque."
"I am afraid it is but too true," said Marianne; "but why should you
boast of it?"
"I suspect," said Elinor, "that to avoid one kind of affectation,
Edward here falls into another. Because he believes many people
pretend to more admiration of the beauties of nature than they really
feel, and is disgusted with such pretensions, he affects greater
indifference and less discrimination in viewing them himself than he
possesses. He is fastidious and will have an affectation of his own."
"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of landscape scenery
is become a mere jargon. Every body pretends to feel and tries to
describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what
picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I
have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to
describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and
meaning."
"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the delight in
a fine prospect which you profess to feel. But, in return, your sister
must allow me to feel no more than I profess. I like a fine prospect,
but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked, twisted,
blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight, and
flourishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond
of nettles or thistles, or heath blossoms. I have more pleasure in a
snug farm-house than a watch-tower--and a troop of tidy, happy villages
please me better than the finest banditti in the world."
Marianne looked with amazement at Edward, with compassion at her
sister. Elinor only laughed.
The subject was continued no farther; and Marianne remained
thoughtfully silent, till a new object suddenly engaged her attention.
She was sitting by Edward, and in taking his tea from Mrs. Dashwood,
his hand passed so directly before her, as to make a ring, with a plait
of hair in the centre, very conspicuous on one of his fingers.
"I never saw you wear a ring before, Edward," she cried. "Is that
Fanny's hair? I remember her promising to give you some. But I should
have thought her hair had been darker."
Marianne spoke inconsiderately what she really felt--but when she saw
how much she had pained Edward, her own vexation at her want of thought
could not be surpassed by his. He coloured very deeply, and giving a
momentary glance at Elinor, replied, "Yes; it is my sister's hair. The
setting always casts a different shade on it, you know."
Elinor had met his eye, and looked conscious likewise. That the hair
was her own, she instantaneously felt as well satisfied as Marianne;
the only difference in their conclusions was, that what Marianne
considered as a free gift from her sister, Elinor was conscious must
have been procured by some theft or contrivance unknown to herself.
She was not in a humour, however, to regard it as an affront, and
affecting to take no notice of what passed, by instantly talking of
something else, she internally resolved henceforward to catch every
opportunity of eyeing the hair and of satisfying herself, beyond all
doubt, that it was exactly the shade of her own.
Edward's embarrassment lasted some time, and it ended in an absence of
mind still more settled. He was particularly grave the whole morning.
Marianne severely censured herself for what she had said; but her own
forgiveness might have been more speedy, had she known how little
offence it had given her sister.
Before the middle of the day, they were visited by Sir John and Mrs.
Jennings, who, having heard of the arrival of a gentleman at the
cottage, came to take a survey of the guest. With the assistance of
his mother-in-law, Sir John was not long in discovering that the name
of Ferrars began with an F. and this prepared a future mine of raillery
against the devoted Elinor, which nothing but the newness of their
acquaintance with Edward could have prevented from being immediately
sprung. But, as it was, she only learned, from some very significant
looks, how far their penetration, founded on Margaret's instructions,
extended.
Sir John never came to the Dashwoods without either inviting them to
dine at the park the next day, or to drink tea with them that evening.
On the present occasion, for the better entertainment of their visitor,
towards whose amusement he felt himself bound to contribute, he wished
to engage them for both.
"You MUST drink tea with us to night," said he, "for we shall be quite
alone--and tomorrow you must absolutely dine with us, for we shall be a
large party."
Mrs. Jennings enforced the necessity. "And who knows but you may raise
a dance," said she. "And that will tempt YOU, Miss Marianne."
"A dance!" cried Marianne. "Impossible! Who is to dance?"
"Who! why yourselves, and the Careys, and Whitakers to be sure.--What!
you thought nobody could dance because a certain person that shall be
nameless is gone!"
"I wish with all my soul," cried Sir John, "that Willoughby were among
us again."
This, and Marianne's blushing, gave new suspicions to Edward. "And who
is Willoughby?" said he, in a low voice, to Miss Dashwood, by whom he
was sitting.
She gave him a brief reply. Marianne's countenance was more
communicative. Edward saw enough to comprehend, not only the meaning
of others, but such of Marianne's expressions as had puzzled him
before; and when their visitors left them, he went immediately round
her, and said, in a whisper, "I have been guessing. Shall I tell you
my guess?"
"What do you mean?"
"Shall I tell you."
"Certainly."
"Well then; I guess that Mr. Willoughby hunts."
Marianne was surprised and confused, yet she could not help smiling at
the quiet archness of his manner, and after a moment's silence, said,
"Oh, Edward! How can you?--But the time will come I hope...I am sure
you will like him."
"I do not doubt it," replied he, rather astonished at her earnestness
and warmth; for had he not imagined it to be a joke for the good of her
acquaintance in general, founded only on a something or a nothing
between Mr. Willoughby and herself, he would not have ventured to
mention it.
| 1,419 | Chapter 18 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210421140324/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sense-and-sensibility/summary/chapter-18 | Elinor notices that Edward is feeling kind of down; she can't enjoy his visit if he can't. She wishes she knew what his deal is. Edward, Marianne, and Elinor find themselves at breakfast together the next day. Marianne, trying to push things along in her sister's relationship, makes a big show of leaving them together, but Edward just responds by leaving to look at his horses . Edward returns from his quality time with the horses seeming somewhat refreshed; he praises the beautiful countryside. Marianne, who's also an admirer of nature, presses him for details on his walk, and he responds somewhat oddly, saying that he has no talent for describing the picturesque. Marianne doesn't really get him, but Elinor does - of course. She explains to her sister that Edward avoids flowery descriptions that have very little meaning, but goes to the opposite extreme of not describing at all. Edward himself steps in to say that he, unlike so many admirers of the romantic landscape, prefers things that are wholesomely beautiful to those that are dramatic - Marianne is shocked, but Elinor understands. Later on, Marianne notices that Edward's wearing a new ring, that's set with a braid of hair. Yes, you read right - human hair. This seems freaky to us, but making jewelry that incorporated a loved one's hair was common practice in Austen's time. Anyway, Edward's got a new ring, and Marianne asks about it. Edward claims that the hair is his sister Fanny's , even though it looks like it's not quite the right color. Who could it belong to? Both Elinor and Marianne assume that the hair is actually Elinor's. Marianne assumes that her sister gave Edward the lock of hair as a gift, while Elinor herself thinks that he must have somehow stolen it. However, she's not offended at all - in fact, she wants to get a better look at it herself to make sure it's hers. Can this mean that Edward is really in love with her? Edward is terribly embarrassed by this whole incident. Marianne feels bad about it, but our knowing narrator tells us that she wouldn't have felt so bad had she known that the conversation about the ring was actually quite welcome to Elinor. Sir John and Mrs. Jennings stop by for a visit, having heard that the cottage has a mysterious gentleman visiting. They are delighted to find that Edward's last name, Ferrars, begins with an "F" - if you recall, Margaret let slip earlier on the fact that Elinor's suitor's name begins with that letter. They assume - correctly - that he's the man in question. Fortunately, they don't bring up the subject with Edward himself. Sir John and Mrs. Jennings invite the Dashwoods and their guest over for tea and dinner the next day, and attempt to lure their young friends over with the prospect of a dance. Marianne scoffs at this idea, and asks who will dance; Mrs. Jennings and Sir John rather tactlessly refer to Willoughby's notable absence. Edward unknowingly inquires about Willoughby, and notices Marianne's reactions. Once the visitors have left, he teases Marianne about this new friend, implying that he's the source of Marianne's thoughts about her future household . Marianne smiles, and replies only that she hopes that he and Willoughby will get along . Edward is surprised by her revealing response. | null | 563 | 1 | [
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1,232 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/02.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Prince/section_1_part_2.txt | The Prince.chapter ii | chapter ii | null | {"name": "Chapter II", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210303115306/https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/prince/section2/", "summary": "Hereditary Principalities Chapter II is the first of three chapters focusing on methods to govern and maintain principalities. Machiavelli dismisses any discussion of republics, explaining that he has \"discussed them at length on another occasion\"--a reference to Book 1 of his Discourses. Machiavelli notes that it is easier to govern a hereditary state than a new principality for two main reasons. First, those under the rule of such states are familiar with the prince's family and are therefore accustomed to their rule. The natural prince only has to keep past institutions intact, while adapting these institutions to current events. Second, the natural disposition of subjects in a hereditary state is to love the ruling family, unless the prince commits some horrible act against his people. Even if a strong outsider succeeds in conquering a prince's hereditary state, any setback the outsider encounters will allow the prince to reconquer the state", "analysis": ""} |
I will leave out all discussion on republics, inasmuch as in another
place I have written of them at length, and will address myself only to
principalities. In doing so I will keep to the order indicated above,
and discuss how such principalities are to be ruled and preserved.
I say at once there are fewer difficulties in holding hereditary states,
and those long accustomed to the family of their prince, than new
ones; for it is sufficient only not to transgress the customs of his
ancestors, and to deal prudently with circumstances as they arise, for a
prince of average powers to maintain himself in his state, unless he
be deprived of it by some extraordinary and excessive force; and if he
should be so deprived of it, whenever anything sinister happens to the
usurper, he will regain it.
We have in Italy, for example, the Duke of Ferrara, who could not have
withstood the attacks of the Venetians in '84, nor those of Pope Julius
in '10, unless he had been long established in his dominions. For the
hereditary prince has less cause and less necessity to offend; hence it
happens that he will be more loved; and unless extraordinary vices cause
him to be hated, it is reasonable to expect that his subjects will be
naturally well disposed towards him; and in the antiquity and duration
of his rule the memories and motives that make for change are lost, for
one change always leaves the toothing for another.
| 231 | Chapter II | https://web.archive.org/web/20210303115306/https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/prince/section2/ | Hereditary Principalities Chapter II is the first of three chapters focusing on methods to govern and maintain principalities. Machiavelli dismisses any discussion of republics, explaining that he has "discussed them at length on another occasion"--a reference to Book 1 of his Discourses. Machiavelli notes that it is easier to govern a hereditary state than a new principality for two main reasons. First, those under the rule of such states are familiar with the prince's family and are therefore accustomed to their rule. The natural prince only has to keep past institutions intact, while adapting these institutions to current events. Second, the natural disposition of subjects in a hereditary state is to love the ruling family, unless the prince commits some horrible act against his people. Even if a strong outsider succeeds in conquering a prince's hereditary state, any setback the outsider encounters will allow the prince to reconquer the state | null | 150 | 1 | [
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23,042 | false | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/23042-chapters/3.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/The Tempest/section_1_part_1.txt | The Tempest.act ii.scene i | act ii, scene i | null | {"name": "act ii, Scene I", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210309152602/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-tempest/study-guide/summary-act-ii", "summary": "King Alonso has landed on the island, with his brothers Sebastian and Antonio, noblemen Adrian and Francisco, and the councilor Gonzalo. Gonzalo tries to console Alonso upon their good fortune of surviving the shipwreckbut Alonso is grievednot only because his son Ferdinand is missing and presumed dead, but because he was returning from his daughter's wedding in Africa, and fears he will never see her again because of the distance. Antonio and Sebastian show great skill with mocking wordplay, and use this skill to stifle Gonzalo and Adrian's attempts to speak frankly to the rest of the party. Ariel's magic makes the party fall asleep, with the exception of Antonio and Sebastian. A strange seriousness, of Ariel's doing, falls upon Antonio and Sebastian. Antonio begins to concoct a plan to get his brother the kingship, which will be much easier if Ferdinand, the current heir, really is dead; and since Alonso's daughter is very far away in Tunis, Sebastian might be able to inherit the crown with only two murders, those of Alonso and Gonzalo. Ariel, however, hears to conspirators plan, and wakes Gonzalo with a warning of the danger he is in. Ariel intends to let Prospero know that the conspiracy has indeed been formed as he wished, and Prospero in turn will try to keep Gonzalo safe, out of appreciation for his past help in preserving the lives of Prospero and Miranda", "analysis": ""} | ACT II. SCENE I.
_Another part of the island._
_Enter ALONSO, SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, GONZALO, ADRIAN, FRANCISCO,
and others._
_Gon._ Beseech you, sir, be merry; you have cause,
So have we all, of joy; for our escape
Is much beyond our loss. Our hint of woe
Is common; every day, some sailor's wife,
The masters of some merchant, and the merchant, 5
Have just our theme of woe; but for the miracle,
I mean our preservation, few in millions
Can speak like us: then wisely, good sir, weigh
Our sorrow with our comfort.
_Alon._ Prithee, peace.
_Seb._ He receives comfort like cold porridge. 10
_Ant._ The visitor will not give him o'er so.
_Seb._ Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit; by
and by it will strike.
_Gon._ Sir,--
_Seb._ One: tell. 15
_Gon._ When every grief is entertain'd that's offer'd,
Comes to the entertainer--
_Seb._ A dollar.
_Gon._ Dolour comes to him, indeed: you have spoken
truer than you purposed. 20
_Seb._ You have taken it wiselier than I meant you should.
_Gon._ Therefore, my lord,--
_Ant._ Fie, what a spendthrift is he of his tongue!
_Alon._ I prithee, spare.
_Gon._ Well, I have done: but yet,-- 25
_Seb._ He will be talking.
_Ant._ Which, of he or Adrian, for a good wager, first
begins to crow?
_Seb._ The old cock.
_Ant._ The cockerel. 30
_Seb._ Done. The wager?
_Ant._ A laughter.
_Seb._ A match!
_Adr._ Though this island seem to be desert,--
_Seb._ Ha, ha, ha!--So, you're paid. 35
_Adr._ Uninhabitable, and almost inaccessible,--
_Seb._ Yet,--
_Adr._ Yet,--
_Ant._ He could not miss't.
_Adr._ It must needs be of subtle, tender and delicate 40
temperance.
_Ant._ Temperance was a delicate wench.
_Seb._ Ay, and a subtle; as he most learnedly delivered.
_Adr._ The air breathes upon us here most sweetly.
_Seb._ As if it had lungs, and rotten ones. 45
_Ant._ Or as 'twere perfumed by a fen.
_Gon._ Here is every thing advantageous to life.
_Ant._ True; save means to live.
_Seb._ Of that there's none, or little.
_Gon._ How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green! 50
_Ant._ The ground, indeed, is tawny.
_Seb._ With an eye of green in't.
_Ant._ He misses not much.
_Seb._ No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.
_Gon._ But the rarity of it is,--which is indeed almost 55
beyond credit,--
_Seb._ As many vouched rarities are.
_Gon._ That our garments, being, as they were, drenched
in the sea, hold, notwithstanding, their freshness and glosses,
being rather new-dyed than stained with salt water. 60
_Ant._ If but one of his pockets could speak, would it
not say he lies?
_Seb._ Ay, or very falsely pocket up his report.
_Gon._ Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when
we put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of the king's 65
fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis.
_Seb._ 'Twas a sweet marriage, and we prosper well in
our return.
_Adr._ Tunis was never graced before with such a paragon
to their queen. 70
_Gon._ Not since widow Dido's time.
_Ant._ Widow! a pox o' that! How came that widow
in? widow Dido!
_Seb._ What if he had said 'widower Aeneas' too? Good
Lord, how you take it! 75
_Adr._ 'Widow Dido' said you? you make me study of
that: she was of Carthage, not of Tunis.
_Gon._ This Tunis, sir, was Carthage.
_Adr._ Carthage?
_Gon._ I assure you, Carthage. 80
_Seb._ His word is more than the miraculous harp; he
hath raised the wall, and houses too.
_Ant._ What impossible matter will he make easy next?
_Seb._ I think he will carry this island home in his
pocket, and give it his son for an apple. 85
_Ant._ And, sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring
forth more islands.
_Gon._ Ay.
_Ant._ Why, in good time.
_Gon._ Sir, we were talking that our garments seem now 90
as fresh as when we were at Tunis at the marriage of your
daughter, who is now queen.
_Ant._ And the rarest that e'er came there.
_Seb._ Bate, I beseech you, widow Dido.
_Ant._ O, widow Dido! ay, widow Dido. 95
_Gon._ Is not, sir, my doublet as fresh as the first day I
wore it? I mean, in a sort.
_Ant._ That sort was well fished for.
_Gon._ When I wore it at your daughter's marriage?
_Alon._ You cram these words into mine ears against 100
The stomach of my sense. Would I had never
Married my daughter there! for, coming thence,
My son is lost, and, in my rate, she too.
Who is so far from Italy removed
I ne'er again shall see her. O thou mine heir 105
Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish
Hath made his meal on thee?
_Fran._ Sir, he may live:
I saw him beat the surges under him,
And ride upon their backs; he trod the water.
Whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted 110
The surge most swoln that met him; his bold head
'Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oar'd
Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke
To the shore, that o'er his wave-worn basis bow'd,
As stooping to relieve him: I not doubt 115
He came alive to land.
_Alon._ No, no, he's gone.
_Seb._ Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss,
That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,
But rather lose her to an African;
Where she, at least, is banish'd from your eye, 120
Who hath cause to wet the grief on't.
_Alon._ Prithee, peace.
_Seb._ You were kneel'd to, and importuned otherwise,
By all of us; and the fair soul herself
Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at
Which end o' the beam should bow. We have lost your son, 125
I fear, for ever: Milan and Naples have
More widows in them of this business' making
Than we bring men to comfort them:
The fault's your own.
_Alon._ So is the dear'st o' the loss.
_Gon._ My lord Sebastian, 130
The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness,
And time to speak it in: you rub the sore,
When you should bring the plaster.
_Seb._ Very well.
_Ant._ And most chirurgeonly.
_Gon._ It is foul weather in us all, good sir, 135
When you are cloudy.
_Seb._ Foul weather?
_Ant._ Very foul.
_Gon._ Had I plantation of this isle, my lord,--
_Ant._ He'ld sow't with nettle-seed.
_Seb._ Or docks, or mallows.
_Gon._ And were the king on't, what would I do?
_Seb._ 'Scape being drunk for want of wine. 140
_Gon._ I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession, 145
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;-- 150
_Seb._ Yet he would be king on't.
_Ant._ The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the
beginning.
_Gon._ All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, 155
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
_Seb._ No marrying 'mong his subjects?
_Ant._ None, man; all idle; whores and knaves. 160
_Gon._ I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.
_Seb._ 'Save his majesty!
_Ant._ Long live Gonzalo!
_Gon._ And,--do you mark me, sir?
_Alon._ Prithee, no more: thou dost talk nothing to me.
_Gon._ I do well believe your highness; and did it to minister 165
occasion to these gentlemen, who are of such sensible
and nimble lungs that they always use to laugh at nothing.
_Ant._ 'Twas you we laughed at.
_Gon._ Who in this kind of merry fooling am nothing to
you: so you may continue, and laugh at nothing still. 170
_Ant._ What a blow was there given!
_Seb._ An it had not fallen flat-long.
_Gon._ You are gentlemen of brave mettle; you would
lift the moon out of her sphere, if she would continue in it
five weeks without changing. 175
_Enter ARIEL (invisible) playing solemn music._
_Seb._ We would so, and then go a bat-fowling.
_Ant._ Nay, good my lord, be not angry.
_Gon._ No, I warrant you; I will not adventure my discretion
so weakly. Will you laugh me asleep, for I am very
heavy? 180
_Ant._ Go sleep, and hear us.
[_All sleep except Alon., Seb., and Ant._
_Alon._ What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyes
Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts: I find
They are inclined to do so.
_Seb._ Please you, sir,
Do not omit the heavy offer of it: 185
It seldom visits sorrow; when it doth,
It is a comforter.
_Ant._ We two, my lord,
Will guard your person while you take your rest,
And watch your safety.
_Alon._ Thank you.--Wondrous heavy.
[_Alonso sleeps. Exit Ariel._
_Seb._ What a strange drowsiness possesses them! 190
_Ant._ It is the quality o' the climate.
_Seb._ Why
Doth it not then our eyelids sink? I find not
Myself disposed to sleep.
_Ant._ Nor I; my spirits are nimble.
They fell together all, as by consent;
They dropp'd, as by a thunder-stroke. What might, 195
Worthy Sebastian?--O, what might?--No more:--
And yet methinks I see it in thy face,
What thou shouldst be: the occasion speaks thee; and
My strong imagination sees a crown
Dropping upon thy head.
_Seb._ What, art thou waking? 200
_Ant._ Do you not hear me speak?
_Seb._ I do; and surely
It is a sleepy language, and thou speak'st
Out of thy sleep. What is it thou didst say?
This is a strange repose, to be asleep
With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving, 205
And yet so fast asleep.
_Ant._ Noble Sebastian,
Thou let'st thy fortune sleep--die, rather; wink'st
Whiles thou art waking.
_Seb._ Thou dost snore distinctly;
There's meaning in thy snores.
_Ant._ I am more serious than my custom: you 210
Must be so too, if heed me; which to do
Trebles thee o'er.
_Seb._ Well, I am standing water.
_Ant._ I'll teach you how to flow.
_Seb._ Do so: to ebb
Hereditary sloth instructs me.
_Ant._ O,
If you but knew how you the purpose cherish 215
Whiles thus you mock it! how, in stripping it,
You more invest it! Ebbing men, indeed,
Most often do so near the bottom run
By their own fear or sloth.
_Seb._ Prithee, say on:
The setting of thine eye and cheek proclaim 220
A matter from thee; and a birth, indeed,
Which throes thee much to yield.
_Ant._ Thus, sir:
Although this lord of weak remembrance, this,
Who shall be of as little memory
When he is earth'd, hath here almost persuaded,-- 225
For he's a spirit of persuasion, only
Professes to persuade,--the king his son's alive,
'Tis as impossible that he's undrown'd
As he that sleeps here swims.
_Seb._ I have no hope
That he's undrown'd.
_Ant._ O, out of that 'no hope' 230
What great hope have you! no hope that way is
Another way so high a hope that even
Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond,
But doubt discovery there. Will you grant with me
That Ferdinand is drown'd?
_Seb._ He's gone.
_Ant._ Then, tell me, 235
Who's the next heir of Naples?
_Seb._ Claribel.
_Ant._ She that is queen of Tunis; she that dwells
Ten leagues beyond man's life; she that from Naples
Can have no note, unless the sun were post,--
The man i' the moon's too slow,--till new-born chins 240
Be rough and razorable; she that from whom
We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again,
And by that destiny, to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come,
In yours and my discharge.
_Seb._ What stuff is this! How say you? 245
'Tis true, my brother's daughter's queen of Tunis;
So is she heir of Naples; 'twixt which regions
There is some space.
_Ant._ A space whose every cubit
Seems to cry out, "How shall that Claribel
Measure us back to Naples? Keep in Tunis, 250
And let Sebastian wake." Say, this were death
That now hath seized them; why, they were no worse
Than now they are. There be that can rule Naples
As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate
As amply and unnecessarily 255
As this Gonzalo; I myself could make
A chough of as deep chat. O, that you bore
The mind that I do! what a sleep were this
For your advancement! Do you understand me?
_Seb._ Methinks I do.
_Ant._ And how does your content 260
Tender your own good fortune?
_Seb._ I remember
You did supplant your brother Prospero.
_Ant._ True:
And look how well my garments sit upon me;
Much feater than before: my brother's servants
Were then my fellows; now they are my men. 265
_Seb._ But for your conscience.
_Ant._ Ay, sir; where lies that? if 'twere a kibe,
'Twould put me to my slipper: but I feel not
This deity in my bosom: twenty consciences,
That stand 'twixt me and Milan, candied be they, 270
And melt, ere they molest! Here lies your brother,
No better than the earth he lies upon,
If he were that which now he's like, that's dead;
Whom I, with this obedient steel, three inches of it,
Can lay to bed for ever; whiles you, doing thus, 275
To the perpetual wink for aye might put
This ancient morsel, this Sir Prudence, who
Should not upbraid our course. For all the rest,
They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk;
They'll tell the clock to any business that 280
We say befits the hour.
_Seb._ Thy case, dear friend,
Shall be my precedent; as thou got'st Milan,
I'll come by Naples. Draw thy sword: one stroke
Shall free thee from the tribute which thou payest;
And I the king shall love thee.
_Ant._ Draw together; 285
And when I rear my hand, do you the like,
To fall it on Gonzalo.
_Seb._ O, but one word. [_They talk apart._
_Re-enter ARIEL invisible._
_Ari._ My master through his art foresees the danger
That you, his friend, are in; and sends me forth,--
For else his project dies,--to keep them living. 290
[_Sings in Gonzalo's ear._
While you here do snoring lie,
Open-eyed conspiracy
His time doth take.
If of life you keep a care,
Shake off slumber, and beware: 295
Awake, awake!
_Ant._ Then let us both be sudden.
_Gon._ Now, good angels
Preserve the king! [_They wake._
_Alon._ Why, how now? ho, awake!--Why are you drawn?
Wherefore this ghastly looking?
_Gon._ What's the matter? 300
_Seb._ Whiles we stood here securing your repose,
Even now, we heard a hollow burst of bellowing
Like bulls, or rather lions: did't not wake you?
It struck mine ear most terribly.
_Alon._ I heard nothing.
_Ant._ O, 'twas a din to fright a monster's ear, 305
To make an earthquake! sure, it was the roar
Of a whole herd of lions.
_Alon._ Heard you this, Gonzalo?
_Gon._ Upon mine honour, sir, I heard a humming,
And that a strange one too, which did awake me:
I shaked you, sir, and cried: as mine eyes open'd, 310
I saw their weapons drawn:--there was a noise,
That's verily. 'Tis best we stand upon our guard,
Or that we quit this place: let's draw our weapons.
_Alon._ Lead off this ground; and let's make further search
For my poor son.
_Gon._ Heavens keep him from these beasts! 315
For he is, sure, i' th' island.
_Alon._ Lead away.
_Ari._ Prospero my lord shall know what I have done:
So, king, go safely on to seek thy son. [_Exeunt._
Notes: II, 1.
3: _hint_] _stint_ Warburton.
5: _masters_] _master_ Johnson. _mistress_ Steevens conj.
_master's_ Edd. conj.
6: _of woe_] om. Steevens conj.
11-99: Marked as interpolated by Pope.
11: _visitor_] _'viser_ Warburton.
_him_] om. Rowe.
15: _one_] F1. _on_ F2 F3 F4.
16: _entertain'd ... Comes_] Capell. _entertain'd, That's offer'd
comes_] Ff. Printed as prose by Pope.
27: _of he_] Ff. _of them, he_ Pope. _or he_ Collier MS.
See note (VII).
35: Seb. _Ha, ha, ha!--So you're paid_] Theobald. Seb. _Ha, ha, ha!_
Ant. _So you'r paid_ Ff. Ant. _So you've paid_ Capell.
81, 82: Seb. _His ... too_] Edd. Ant. _His ... harp._
Seb. _He ... too_ Ff.
88: _Ay._] I. Ff. _Ay?_ Pope.
96: _sir, my doublet_] F1. _my doublet, sir_ F2 F3 F4.
113: _stroke_] F1 F2 F3. _strokes_ F4.
124: _Weigh'd_] _Sway'd_ S. Verges conj.
_at_] _as_ Collier MS.]
125: _o' the_] _the_ Pope.
_should_] _she'd_ Malone.
129: _The fault's your own_] _the fault's your own_ (at the end
of 128) Capell. _the fault's Your own_ Malone.
137: _plantation_] _the plantation_ Rowe. _the planting_ Hanmer.
139: _on't_] _of it_ Hanmer.
144: _riches, poverty_] _wealth, poverty_ Pope. _poverty, riches_
Capell.
145: _contract, succession_] _succession, Contract_ Malone conj.
_succession, None_ id. conj.
146: _none_] _olives, none_ Hanmer.
157: _its_] F3 F4. _it_ F1 F2. See note (VIII).
162: _'Save_] F1 F2 F3. _Save_ F4. _God save_ Edd. conj.
175: Enter ... invisible ... music.] Malone. Enter Ariel, playing
solemn music. Ff. om. Pope. [Solemn music. Capell.
181: [All sleep ... Ant.] Stage direction to the same effect,
first inserted by Capell.
182-189: Text as in Pope. In Ff. the lines begin _Would ... I find
... Do not ... It seldom ... We two ... While ... Thank._
189: [Exit Ariel] Malone.
192: _find not_ Pope. _find Not_ Ff.
211: _so too, if heed_] _so too, if you heed_ Rowe.
_so, if you heed_ Pope.
212: _Trebles thee o'er_] _Troubles thee o'er_ Pope.
_Troubles thee not_ Hanmer.
222: _throes_] Pope. _throwes_ F1 F2 F3. _throws_ F4.
_Thus, sir_] _Why then thus Sir_ Hanmer.
226: _he's_] _he'as_ Hanmer. _he_ Johnson conj.
227: _Professes to persuade_] om. Steevens.
234: _doubt_] _drops_ Hanmer. _doubts_ Capell.
241: _she that from whom_] Ff. _she from whom_ Rowe.
_she for whom_ Pope. _she from whom coming_ Singer.
_she that--from whom?_ Spedding conj. See note (IX).
242: _all_] om. Pope.
243: _And ... to perform_] _May ... perform_ Pope. _And by that
destin'd to perform_ Musgrave conj. _(And that by destiny)
to perform_ Staunton conj.
244: _is_] F1. _in_ F2 F3 F4.
245: _In_] _Is_ Pope.
250: _to_] F1. _by_ F2 F3 F4.
_Keep_] _Sleep_ Johnson conj.
251: See note (X).
267: _'twere_] _it were_ Singer.
267-271: Pope ends the lines with _that? ... slipper ... bosom ...
Milan ... molest ... brother._
267: See note (XI).
269: _twenty_] _Ten_ Pope.
270: _stand_] _stood_ Hanmer.
_candied_] _Discandy'd_ Upton conj.
271: _And melt_] _Would melt_ Johnson conj. _Or melt_ id. conj.
273, 274: _like, that's dead; Whom I, with_] _like, whom I With_
Steevens (Farmer conj.).
275: _whiles_] om. Pope.
277: _morsel_] _Moral_ Warburton.
280, 281: _business ... hour._] _hour ... business._ Farmer conj.
282: _precedent_] Pope. _president_ Ff.
_O_] om. Pope.
[They talk apart] Capell.
Re-enter Ariel invisible.] Capell. Enter Ariel with music and
song. Ff.
289: _you, his friend,_] _these, his friends_ Steevens
(Johnson conj.).
289, 290: _friend ... project dies ... them_] _friend ... projects
dies ... you_ Hanmer. _friend ... projects die ... them_
Malone conj. _friend ... project dies ... thee_ Dyce.
298: [They wake.] Rowe.
300: _this_] _thus_ Collier MS.
307: _Gonzalo_] om. Pope.
312: _verily_] _verity_ Pope.
_upon our guard_] _on guard_ Pope.
| 5,527 | act ii, Scene I | https://web.archive.org/web/20210309152602/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-tempest/study-guide/summary-act-ii | King Alonso has landed on the island, with his brothers Sebastian and Antonio, noblemen Adrian and Francisco, and the councilor Gonzalo. Gonzalo tries to console Alonso upon their good fortune of surviving the shipwreckbut Alonso is grievednot only because his son Ferdinand is missing and presumed dead, but because he was returning from his daughter's wedding in Africa, and fears he will never see her again because of the distance. Antonio and Sebastian show great skill with mocking wordplay, and use this skill to stifle Gonzalo and Adrian's attempts to speak frankly to the rest of the party. Ariel's magic makes the party fall asleep, with the exception of Antonio and Sebastian. A strange seriousness, of Ariel's doing, falls upon Antonio and Sebastian. Antonio begins to concoct a plan to get his brother the kingship, which will be much easier if Ferdinand, the current heir, really is dead; and since Alonso's daughter is very far away in Tunis, Sebastian might be able to inherit the crown with only two murders, those of Alonso and Gonzalo. Ariel, however, hears to conspirators plan, and wakes Gonzalo with a warning of the danger he is in. Ariel intends to let Prospero know that the conspiracy has indeed been formed as he wished, and Prospero in turn will try to keep Gonzalo safe, out of appreciation for his past help in preserving the lives of Prospero and Miranda | null | 234 | 1 | [
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107 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/35.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_34_part_0.txt | Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 35 | chapter 35 | null | {"name": "Chapter 35", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-35", "summary": "While walking past Bathsheba's house, Gabriel Oak and Jan Coggan see Sergeant Troy poke his head out of Bathsheba's window. Instantly, they both know that Bathsheba has married Troy. Troy sees them and makes some small talk about the house and the weather. This is all kind of like a knife in Oak's stomach. Seemingly out of nowhere, Troy asks Coggan whether there is any history of mental illness in Farmer Boldwood's family. Coggan says there might be some, though he's not sure why Troy is asking this. Oak is finding it difficult to speak to Troy, but Coggan warns him that Troy will soon be their new boss if he's married to Bathsheba. While Coggan and Oak walk away, they see Boldwood walking by himself. Oak suddenly realizes that his own grief is not even close to being as bad as Boldwood's.", "analysis": ""} |
AT AN UPPER WINDOW
It was very early the next morning--a time of sun and dew. The
confused beginnings of many birds' songs spread into the healthy air,
and the wan blue of the heaven was here and there coated with thin
webs of incorporeal cloud which were of no effect in obscuring day.
All the lights in the scene were yellow as to colour, and all the
shadows were attenuated as to form. The creeping plants about the
old manor-house were bowed with rows of heavy water drops, which
had upon objects behind them the effect of minute lenses of high
magnifying power.
Just before the clock struck five Gabriel Oak and Coggan passed the
village cross, and went on together to the fields. They were yet
barely in view of their mistress's house, when Oak fancied he saw the
opening of a casement in one of the upper windows. The two men were
at this moment partially screened by an elder bush, now beginning
to be enriched with black bunches of fruit, and they paused before
emerging from its shade.
A handsome man leaned idly from the lattice. He looked east and then
west, in the manner of one who makes a first morning survey. The
man was Sergeant Troy. His red jacket was loosely thrown on, but
not buttoned, and he had altogether the relaxed bearing of a soldier
taking his ease.
Coggan spoke first, looking quietly at the window.
"She has married him!" he said.
Gabriel had previously beheld the sight, and he now stood with his
back turned, making no reply.
"I fancied we should know something to-day," continued Coggan. "I
heard wheels pass my door just after dark--you were out somewhere."
He glanced round upon Gabriel. "Good heavens above us, Oak, how
white your face is; you look like a corpse!"
"Do I?" said Oak, with a faint smile.
"Lean on the gate: I'll wait a bit."
"All right, all right."
They stood by the gate awhile, Gabriel listlessly staring at the
ground. His mind sped into the future, and saw there enacted in
years of leisure the scenes of repentance that would ensue from this
work of haste. That they were married he had instantly decided. Why
had it been so mysteriously managed? It had become known that she
had had a fearful journey to Bath, owing to her miscalculating the
distance: that the horse had broken down, and that she had been more
than two days getting there. It was not Bathsheba's way to do things
furtively. With all her faults, she was candour itself. Could she
have been entrapped? The union was not only an unutterable grief to
him: it amazed him, notwithstanding that he had passed the preceding
week in a suspicion that such might be the issue of Troy's meeting
her away from home. Her quiet return with Liddy had to some extent
dispersed the dread. Just as that imperceptible motion which appears
like stillness is infinitely divided in its properties from stillness
itself, so had his hope undistinguishable from despair differed from
despair indeed.
In a few minutes they moved on again towards the house. The sergeant
still looked from the window.
"Morning, comrades!" he shouted, in a cheery voice, when they came
up.
Coggan replied to the greeting. "Bain't ye going to answer the man?"
he then said to Gabriel. "I'd say good morning--you needn't spend a
hapenny of meaning upon it, and yet keep the man civil."
Gabriel soon decided too that, since the deed was done, to put the
best face upon the matter would be the greatest kindness to her he
loved.
"Good morning, Sergeant Troy," he returned, in a ghastly voice.
"A rambling, gloomy house this," said Troy, smiling.
"Why--they MAY not be married!" suggested Coggan. "Perhaps she's not
there."
Gabriel shook his head. The soldier turned a little towards the
east, and the sun kindled his scarlet coat to an orange glow.
"But it is a nice old house," responded Gabriel.
"Yes--I suppose so; but I feel like new wine in an old bottle here.
My notion is that sash-windows should be put throughout, and these
old wainscoted walls brightened up a bit; or the oak cleared quite
away, and the walls papered."
"It would be a pity, I think."
"Well, no. A philosopher once said in my hearing that the old
builders, who worked when art was a living thing, had no respect
for the work of builders who went before them, but pulled down and
altered as they thought fit; and why shouldn't we? 'Creation and
preservation don't do well together,' says he, 'and a million of
antiquarians can't invent a style.' My mind exactly. I am for making
this place more modern, that we may be cheerful whilst we can."
The military man turned and surveyed the interior of the room, to
assist his ideas of improvement in this direction. Gabriel and
Coggan began to move on.
"Oh, Coggan," said Troy, as if inspired by a recollection "do you
know if insanity has ever appeared in Mr. Boldwood's family?"
Jan reflected for a moment.
"I once heard that an uncle of his was queer in his head, but I don't
know the rights o't," he said.
"It is of no importance," said Troy, lightly. "Well, I shall be down
in the fields with you some time this week; but I have a few matters
to attend to first. So good-day to you. We shall, of course, keep
on just as friendly terms as usual. I'm not a proud man: nobody is
ever able to say that of Sergeant Troy. However, what is must be,
and here's half-a-crown to drink my health, men."
Troy threw the coin dexterously across the front plot and over the
fence towards Gabriel, who shunned it in its fall, his face turning
to an angry red. Coggan twirled his eye, edged forward, and caught
the money in its ricochet upon the road.
"Very well--you keep it, Coggan," said Gabriel with disdain and
almost fiercely. "As for me, I'll do without gifts from him!"
"Don't show it too much," said Coggan, musingly. "For if he's
married to her, mark my words, he'll buy his discharge and be our
master here. Therefore 'tis well to say 'Friend' outwardly, though
you say 'Troublehouse' within."
"Well--perhaps it is best to be silent; but I can't go further than
that. I can't flatter, and if my place here is only to be kept by
smoothing him down, my place must be lost."
A horseman, whom they had for some time seen in the distance, now
appeared close beside them.
"There's Mr. Boldwood," said Oak. "I wonder what Troy meant by his
question."
Coggan and Oak nodded respectfully to the farmer, just checked their
paces to discover if they were wanted, and finding they were not
stood back to let him pass on.
The only signs of the terrible sorrow Boldwood had been combating
through the night, and was combating now, were the want of colour
in his well-defined face, the enlarged appearance of the veins in
his forehead and temples, and the sharper lines about his mouth.
The horse bore him away, and the very step of the animal seemed
significant of dogged despair. Gabriel, for a minute, rose above his
own grief in noticing Boldwood's. He saw the square figure sitting
erect upon the horse, the head turned to neither side, the elbows
steady by the hips, the brim of the hat level and undisturbed in
its onward glide, until the keen edges of Boldwood's shape sank by
degrees over the hill. To one who knew the man and his story there
was something more striking in this immobility than in a collapse.
The clash of discord between mood and matter here was forced
painfully home to the heart; and, as in laughter there are more
dreadful phases than in tears, so was there in the steadiness of
this agonized man an expression deeper than a cry.
| 1,252 | Chapter 35 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-35 | While walking past Bathsheba's house, Gabriel Oak and Jan Coggan see Sergeant Troy poke his head out of Bathsheba's window. Instantly, they both know that Bathsheba has married Troy. Troy sees them and makes some small talk about the house and the weather. This is all kind of like a knife in Oak's stomach. Seemingly out of nowhere, Troy asks Coggan whether there is any history of mental illness in Farmer Boldwood's family. Coggan says there might be some, though he's not sure why Troy is asking this. Oak is finding it difficult to speak to Troy, but Coggan warns him that Troy will soon be their new boss if he's married to Bathsheba. While Coggan and Oak walk away, they see Boldwood walking by himself. Oak suddenly realizes that his own grief is not even close to being as bad as Boldwood's. | null | 143 | 1 | [
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12,915 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/12915-chapters/13.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The White Devil/section_12_part_0.txt | The White Devil.act 5.scene 3 | act 5, scene 3 | null | {"name": "Act 5, Scene 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210510044810/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/the-white-devil/summary/act-5-scene-3", "summary": "There's a staged fight at the barrier, before the Brachiano enters, along with Flamineo and others . He realizes his helmet's been poisoned and cries for the armorer. When the armorer arrives, Brachiano orders him sent to torture. Vittoria enters and laments. Flamineo calls for physicians who arrive and state the obvious: Brachiano's been poisoned. Giovanni cries and exits on Brachiano's orders. The Duke lashes out at the physicians and tells Vittoria not to kiss him so she won't be poisoned. Brachiano says that horrible deaths are reserved for nobles like him--never peaceful, natural deaths. Lodovico and Gasparo enter as monks, pretending to bring the sacrament of extreme unction. Brachiano is terrified of death. All exit except for Francisco and Flamineo. Flamineo says that the people acting upset about the Duke's death are insincere flatterers. When Mulinassar asks him what he really thought of the Duke, Flamineo says he's the kind of guy who would count expenses in terms of how many cannonballs he'd fired on a town, as opposed to how many of his soldiers lives he'd lost. He says he means this as a compliment! Lodovico enters and tells them that the Duke is babbling in insanity. They bring Brachiano in on a bed, with Vittoria and others following. The Duke babbles about his dinner and sins in an incoherent way, but also seems to suspect the Duke of Florence of being behind the plot. He says he sees the devil, who wears a cod-piece stuck with pins and hides his cloven foot with a rose. Brachiano mentions weird hallucinations, one featuring Flamineo. When he calls for Flamineo, Flamineo feels nervous--thinking that a man on his deathbed naming him so often might be a bad omen. Lodovico and Gasparo stand before him with a crucifix speaking in Latin--they ask the others to leave so they can speak words secret to their order to him. When the rest leave, they reveal that they're Lodovico and Gasparo--they've poisoned him as vengeance for Isabella and are sending him to hell, without the last rites. Brachiano cries out for Vittoria. Gasparo stops Vittoria and her attendants at the door, telling them Brachiano needs peace, while Lodovico strangles him to death. Brachiano dies. When everyone's allowed to re-enter, Vittoria is upset. Flamineo says that women's tears are cheap, and her grief doesn't mean anything. Mulinassar mentions that this was probably Florence's doing . Flamineo laments the Duke's death and says it's better to be a thresher than a noble. He wishes he could meet the dead Duke's ghost and shake his hand. Flamineo exits . With Lodovico in private, Francisco compliments him on a job well done. Zanche enters. Zanche tells \"Mulinassar\" she had a dream last night, in which he came to her bed. Francisco/Mulinassar tells Lodovico he'll play along. He says he had the same dream--he thought he saw her naked and covered her with a blanket. As she remembers it, she said he was pretty \"bold\" with her . Mulinassar says he remembers her laughing and being tickled by the blanket. Finally, Zanche reveals the secret she's been keeping: Brachiano had Isabella poisoned, and Flamineo murdered Camillo. Zanche regretfully says she kept their secret, but now plans to make up for it by robbing Vittoria and leaving with Mulinassar. Zanche says that she'll give him a ton of the money she's stolen as a dowry. Mulinassar agrees and promises to meet her. Zanche exits and then re-enters, saying they should meet at the chapel at midnight. They agree and she exits again. Francisco is extremely glad they know this, now, because it gives them perfect justification for the revenge they've been pursuing. He and Lodovico exit.", "analysis": ""} | SCENE III
Charges and shouts. They fight at barriers; first single pairs, then
three to three
Enter Brachiano and Flamineo, with others
Brach. An armourer! ud's death, an armourer!
Flam. Armourer! where 's the armourer?
Brach. Tear off my beaver.
Flam. Are you hurt, my lord?
Brach. Oh, my brain 's on fire! [Enter Armourer.
The helmet is poison'd.
Armourer. My lord, upon my soul----
Brach. Away with him to torture.
There are some great ones that have hand in this,
And near about me.
Enter Vittoria Corombona
Vit. Oh, my lov'd lord! poison'd!
Flam. Remove the bar. Here 's unfortunate revels!
Call the physicians. [Enter two Physicians.
A plague upon you!
We have too much of your cunning here already:
I fear the ambassadors are likewise poison'd.
Brach. Oh, I am gone already! the infection
Flies to the brain and heart. O thou strong heart!
There 's such a covenant 'tween the world and it,
They 're loath to break.
Giov. Oh, my most loved father!
Brach. Remove the boy away.
Where 's this good woman? Had I infinite worlds,
They were too little for thee: must I leave thee?
What say you, screech-owls, is the venom mortal?
Physicians. Most deadly.
Brach. Most corrupted politic hangman,
You kill without book; but your art to save
Fails you as oft as great men's needy friends.
I that have given life to offending slaves,
And wretched murderers, have I not power
To lengthen mine own a twelvemonth?
[To Vittoria.] Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee.
This unctions 's sent from the great Duke of Florence.
Fran. Sir, be of comfort.
Brach. O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl
Bears not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion: pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes'.
Vit. I am lost for ever.
Brach. How miserable a thing it is to die
'Mongst women howling! [Enter Lodovico and Gasparo, as Capuchins.
What are those?
Flam. Franciscans:
They have brought the extreme unction.
Brach. On pain of death, let no man name death to me:
It is a word infinitely terrible.
Withdraw into our cabinet.
[Exeunt all but Francisco and Flamineo.
Flam. To see what solitariness is about dying princes! as heretofore
they have unpeopled towns, divorced friends, and made great houses
unhospitable, so now, O justice! where are their flatterers now?
flatterers are but the shadows of princes' bodies; the least thick
cloud makes them invisible.
Fran. There 's great moan made for him.
Flam. 'Faith, for some few hours salt-water will run most plentifully
in every office o' th' court; but, believe it, most of them do weep
over their stepmothers' graves.
Fran. How mean you?
Flam. Why, they dissemble; as some men do that live without compass o'
th' verge.
Fran. Come, you have thrived well under him.
Flam. 'Faith, like a wolf in a woman's breast; I have been fed with
poultry: but for money, understand me, I had as good a will to cozen
him as e'er an officer of them all; but I had not cunning enough to do
it.
Fran. What didst thou think of him? 'faith, speak freely.
Flam. He was a kind of statesman, that would sooner have reckoned how
many cannon-bullets he had discharged against a town, to count his
expense that way, than think how many of his valiant and deserving
subjects he lost before it.
Fran. Oh, speak well of the duke!
Flam. I have done. [Enter Lodovico.
Wilt hear some of my court-wisdom? To reprehend princes is dangerous;
and to over-commend some of them is palpable lying.
Fran. How is it with the duke?
Lodo. Most deadly ill.
He 's fallen into a strange distraction:
He talks of battles and monopolies,
Levying of taxes; and from that descends
To the most brain-sick language. His mind fastens
On twenty several objects, which confound
Deep sense with folly. Such a fearful end
May teach some men that bear too lofty crest,
Though they live happiest yet they die not best.
He hath conferr'd the whole state of the dukedom
Upon your sister, till the prince arrive
At mature age.
Flam. There 's some good luck in that yet.
Fran. See, here he comes.
[Enter Brachiano, presented in a bed, Vittoria and others.
There 's death in 's face already.
Vit. Oh, my good lord!
Brach. Away, you have abus'd me:
[These speeches are several kinds of distractions, and in the action
should appear so.
You have convey'd coin forth our territories,
Bought and sold offices, oppress'd the poor,
And I ne'er dreamt on 't. Make up your accounts,
I 'll now be mine own steward.
Flam. Sir, have patience.
Brach. Indeed, I am to blame:
For did you ever hear the dusky raven
Chide blackness? or was 't ever known the devil
Rail'd against cloven creatures?
Vit. Oh, my lord!
Brach. Let me have some quails to supper.
Flam. Sir, you shall.
Brach. No, some fried dog-fish; your quails feed on poison.
That old dog-fox, that politician, Florence!
I 'll forswear hunting, and turn dog-killer.
Rare! I 'll be friends with him; for, mark you, sir, one dog
Still sets another a-barking. Peace, peace!
Yonder 's a fine slave come in now.
Flam. Where?
Brach. Why, there,
In a blue bonnet, and a pair of breeches
With a great cod-piece: ha, ha, ha!
Look you, his cod-piece is stuck full of pins,
With pearls o' th' head of them. Do you not know him?
Flam. No, my lord.
Brach. Why, 'tis the devil.
I know him by a great rose he wears on 's shoe,
To hide his cloven foot. I 'll dispute with him;
He 's a rare linguist.
Vit. My lord, here 's nothing.
Brach. Nothing! rare! nothing! when I want money,
Our treasury is empty, there is nothing:
I 'll not be use'd thus.
Vit. Oh, lie still, my lord!
Brach. See, see Flamineo, that kill'd his brother,
Is dancing on the ropes there, and he carries
A money-bag in each hand, to keep him even,
For fear of breaking 's neck: and there 's a lawyer,
In a gown whipped with velvet, stares and gapes
When the money will fall. How the rogue cuts capers!
It should have been in a halter. 'Tis there; what 's she?
Flam. Vittoria, my lord.
Brach. Ha, ha, ha! her hair is sprinkl'd with orris powder,
That makes her look as if she had sinn'd in the pastry.
What 's he?
Flam. A divine, my lord.
[Brachiano seems here near his end; Lodovico and Gasparo, in the habit
of Capuchins, present him in his bed with a crucifix and hallowed
candle.
Brach. He will be drunk; avoid him: th' argument
Is fearful, when churchmen stagger in 't.
Look you, six grey rats that have lost their tails
Crawl upon the pillow; send for a rat-catcher:
I 'll do a miracle, I 'll free the court
From all foul vermin. Where 's Flamineo?
Flam. I do not like that he names me so often,
Especially on 's death-bed; 'tis a sign
I shall not live long. See, he 's near his end.
Lodo. Pray, give us leave. Attende, domine Brachiane.
Flam. See how firmly he doth fix his eye
Upon the crucifix.
Vit. Oh, hold it constant!
It settles his wild spirits; and so his eyes
Melt into tears.
Lodo. Domine Brachiane, solebas in bello tutus esse tuo clypeo; nunc
hunc clypeum hosti tuo opponas infernali. [By the crucifix.
Gas. Olim hasta valuisti in bello; nunc hanc sacram hastam vibrabis
contra hostem animarum. [By the hallowed taper.
Lodo. Attende, Domine Brachiane, si nunc quoque probes ea, quae acta
sunt inter nos, flecte caput in dextrum.
Gas. Esto securus, Domine Brachiane; cogita, quantum habeas meritorum;
denique memineris mean animam pro tua oppignoratum si quid esset
periculi.
Lodo. Si nunc quoque probas ea, quae acta sunt inter nos, flecte caput
in loevum.
He is departing: pray stand all apart,
And let us only whisper in his ears
Some private meditations, which our order
Permits you not to hear.
[Here, the rest being departed, Lodovico and Gasparo discover themselves.
Gas. Brachiano.
Lodo. Devil Brachiano, thou art damn'd.
Gas. Perpetually.
Lodo. A slave condemn'd and given up to the gallows,
Is thy great lord and master.
Gas. True; for thou
Art given up to the devil.
Lodo. Oh, you slave!
You that were held the famous politician,
Whose art was poison.
Gas. And whose conscience, murder.
Lodo. That would have broke your wife's neck down the stairs,
Ere she was poison'd.
Gas. That had your villainous sallets.
Lodo. And fine embroider'd bottles, and perfumes,
Equally mortal with a winter plague.
Gas. Now there 's mercury----
Lodo. And copperas----
Gas. And quicksilver----
Lodo. With other devilish 'pothecary stuff,
A-melting in your politic brains: dost hear?
Gas. This is Count Lodovico.
Lodo. This, Gasparo:
And thou shalt die like a poor rogue.
Gas. And stink
Like a dead fly-blown dog.
Lodo. And be forgotten
Before the funeral sermon.
Brach. Vittoria! Vittoria!
Lodo. Oh, the cursed devil
Comes to himself a gain! we are undone.
Gas. Strangle him in private. [Enter Vittoria and the Attendants.
Lodo. You would prate, sir? This is a true-love knot
Sent from the Duke of Florence. [Brachiano is strangled.
Gas. What, is it done?
Lodo. The snuff is out. No woman-keeper i' th' world,
Though she had practis'd seven year at the pest-house,
Could have done 't quaintlier. My lords, he 's dead.
Vittoria and the others come forward
Omnes. Rest to his soul!
Vit. Oh me! this place is hell.
Fran. How heavily she takes it!
Flam. Oh, yes, yes;
Had women navigable rivers in their eyes,
They would dispend them all. Surely, I wonder
Why we should wish more rivers to the city,
When they sell water so good cheap. I 'll tell theen
These are but Moorish shades of griefs or fears;
There 's nothing sooner dry than women's tears.
Why, here 's an end of all my harvest; he has given me nothing.
Court promises! let wise men count them curs'd;
For while you live, he that scores best, pays worst.
Fran. Sure this was Florence' doing.
Flam. Very likely:
Those are found weighty strokes which come from th' hand,
But those are killing strokes which come from th' head.
Oh, the rare tricks of a Machiavellian!
He doth not come, like a gross plodding slave,
And buffet you to death; no, my quaint knave,
He tickles you to death, makes you die laughing,
As if you had swallow'd down a pound of saffron.
You see the feat, 'tis practis'd in a trice;
To teach court honesty, it jumps on ice.
Fran. Now have the people liberty to talk,
And descant on his vices.
Flam. Misery of princes,
That must of force be censur'd by their slaves!
Not only blam'd for doing things are ill,
But for not doing all that all men will:
One were better be a thresher.
Ud's death! I would fain speak with this duke yet.
Fran. Now he 's dead?
Flam. I cannot conjure; but if prayers or oaths
Will get to th' speech of him, though forty devils
Wait on him in his livery of flames,
I 'll speak to him, and shake him by the hand,
Though I be blasted. [Exit.
Fran. Excellent Lodovico!
What! did you terrify him at the last gasp?
Lodo. Yes, and so idly, that the duke had like
T' have terrified us.
Fran. How?
Enter the Moor
Lodo. You shall hear that hereafter.
See, yon 's the infernal, that would make up sport.
Now to the revelation of that secret
She promis'd when she fell in love with you.
Fran. You 're passionately met in this sad world.
Zan. I would have you look up, sir; these court tears
Claim not your tribute to them: let those weep,
That guiltily partake in the sad cause.
I knew last night, by a sad dream I had,
Some mischief would ensue: yet, to say truth,
My dream most concern'd you.
Lodo. Shall 's fall a-dreaming?
Fran. Yes, and for fashion sake I 'll dream with her.
Zan. Methought, sir, you came stealing to my bed.
Fran. Wilt thou believe me, sweeting? by this light
I was a-dreamt on thee too; for methought
I saw thee naked.
Zan. Fie, sir! as I told you,
Methought you lay down by me.
Fran. So dreamt I;
And lest thou shouldst take cold, I cover'd thee
With this Irish mantle.
Zan. Verily I did dream
You were somewhat bold with me: but to come to 't----
Lodo. How! how! I hope you will not got to 't here.
Fran. Nay, you must hear my dream out.
Zan. Well, sir, forth.
Fran. When I threw the mantle o'er thee, thou didst laugh
Exceedingly, methought.
Zan. Laugh!
Fran. And criedst out, the hair did tickle thee.
Zan. There was a dream indeed!
Lodo. Mark her, I pray thee, she simpers like the suds
A collier hath been wash'd in.
Zan. Come, sir; good fortune tends you. I did tell you
I would reveal a secret: Isabella,
The Duke of Florence' sister, was empoisone'd
By a fum'd picture; and Camillo's neck
Was broke by damn'd Flamineo, the mischance
Laid on a vaulting-horse.
Fran. Most strange!
Zan. Most true.
Lodo. The bed of snakes is broke.
Zan. I sadly do confess, I had a hand
In the black deed.
Fran. Thou kept'st their counsel.
Zan. Right;
For which, urg'd with contrition, I intend
This night to rob Vittoria.
Lodo. Excellent penitence!
Usurers dream on 't while they sleep out sermons.
Zan. To further our escape, I have entreated
Leave to retire me, till the funeral,
Unto a friend i' th' country: that excuse
Will further our escape. In coin and jewels
I shall at least make good unto your use
An hundred thousand crowns.
Fran. Oh, noble wench!
Lodo. Those crowns we 'll share.
Zan. It is a dowry,
Methinks, should make that sun-burnt proverb false,
And was the AEthiop white.
Fran. It shall; away.
Zan. Be ready for our flight.
Fran. An hour 'fore day. [Exit Zanche.
Oh, strange discovery! why, till now we knew not
The circumstances of either of their deaths.
Re-enter Zanche
Zan. You 'll wait about midnight in the chapel?
Fran. There. [Exit Zanche.
Lodo. Why, now our action 's justified.
Fran. Tush for justice!
What harms it justice? we now, like the partridge,
Purge the disease with laurel; for the fame
Shall crown the enterprise, and quit the shame. [Exeunt.
| 3,139 | Act 5, Scene 3 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210510044810/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/the-white-devil/summary/act-5-scene-3 | There's a staged fight at the barrier, before the Brachiano enters, along with Flamineo and others . He realizes his helmet's been poisoned and cries for the armorer. When the armorer arrives, Brachiano orders him sent to torture. Vittoria enters and laments. Flamineo calls for physicians who arrive and state the obvious: Brachiano's been poisoned. Giovanni cries and exits on Brachiano's orders. The Duke lashes out at the physicians and tells Vittoria not to kiss him so she won't be poisoned. Brachiano says that horrible deaths are reserved for nobles like him--never peaceful, natural deaths. Lodovico and Gasparo enter as monks, pretending to bring the sacrament of extreme unction. Brachiano is terrified of death. All exit except for Francisco and Flamineo. Flamineo says that the people acting upset about the Duke's death are insincere flatterers. When Mulinassar asks him what he really thought of the Duke, Flamineo says he's the kind of guy who would count expenses in terms of how many cannonballs he'd fired on a town, as opposed to how many of his soldiers lives he'd lost. He says he means this as a compliment! Lodovico enters and tells them that the Duke is babbling in insanity. They bring Brachiano in on a bed, with Vittoria and others following. The Duke babbles about his dinner and sins in an incoherent way, but also seems to suspect the Duke of Florence of being behind the plot. He says he sees the devil, who wears a cod-piece stuck with pins and hides his cloven foot with a rose. Brachiano mentions weird hallucinations, one featuring Flamineo. When he calls for Flamineo, Flamineo feels nervous--thinking that a man on his deathbed naming him so often might be a bad omen. Lodovico and Gasparo stand before him with a crucifix speaking in Latin--they ask the others to leave so they can speak words secret to their order to him. When the rest leave, they reveal that they're Lodovico and Gasparo--they've poisoned him as vengeance for Isabella and are sending him to hell, without the last rites. Brachiano cries out for Vittoria. Gasparo stops Vittoria and her attendants at the door, telling them Brachiano needs peace, while Lodovico strangles him to death. Brachiano dies. When everyone's allowed to re-enter, Vittoria is upset. Flamineo says that women's tears are cheap, and her grief doesn't mean anything. Mulinassar mentions that this was probably Florence's doing . Flamineo laments the Duke's death and says it's better to be a thresher than a noble. He wishes he could meet the dead Duke's ghost and shake his hand. Flamineo exits . With Lodovico in private, Francisco compliments him on a job well done. Zanche enters. Zanche tells "Mulinassar" she had a dream last night, in which he came to her bed. Francisco/Mulinassar tells Lodovico he'll play along. He says he had the same dream--he thought he saw her naked and covered her with a blanket. As she remembers it, she said he was pretty "bold" with her . Mulinassar says he remembers her laughing and being tickled by the blanket. Finally, Zanche reveals the secret she's been keeping: Brachiano had Isabella poisoned, and Flamineo murdered Camillo. Zanche regretfully says she kept their secret, but now plans to make up for it by robbing Vittoria and leaving with Mulinassar. Zanche says that she'll give him a ton of the money she's stolen as a dowry. Mulinassar agrees and promises to meet her. Zanche exits and then re-enters, saying they should meet at the chapel at midnight. They agree and she exits again. Francisco is extremely glad they know this, now, because it gives them perfect justification for the revenge they've been pursuing. He and Lodovico exit. | null | 616 | 1 | [
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161 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/27.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Sense and Sensibility/section_26_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 27 | chapter 27 | null | {"name": "Chapter 27", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility42.asp", "summary": "It takes three days for the ladies to complete their journey. The house at Portman Square is cozy and comfortable. Elinor and Marianne are given separate quarters. After settling in, Elinor sits down to write a letter to her mother. Marianne, too, writes a letter, but it is addressed to Willoughby. In the following days she waits eagerly for his visit and his letter. However, she is in for much disappointment. Colonel Brandon visits them the next day. Marianne avoids him, while Elinor engages him in a conversation. In the evening Mrs. Palmer pays them a visit. She is in high spirits and expresses pleasure at meeting the girls. Other guests of Mrs. Jennings also arrive, and they are entertained with a game of whist. Elinor is concerned over her sister's behavior. Marianne neither participates in any activity nor shows enthusiasm in entertaining the guests. Elinor decides to write to her mother regarding her sister.", "analysis": "Notes It is the time for waiting and visiting. Marianne's impatience is revealed when she writes a letter to Willoughby immediately after arriving in London. She cannot think of anyone but him. Her restlessness only increases with time. Thus, when Colonel Brandon pays them a visit, she is disappointed and even disgusted. She also shows no desire to talk to Mrs. Palmer or the other guests of Mrs. Jennings. Through her behavior, she hurts the feelings of people like Colonel Brandon. Elinor observes her sister and is naturally concerned. Marianne's callous attitude towards others disturbs her. When Marianne avoids Colonel Brandon, Mrs. Palmer and the others, Elinor tries to make up for her sister's neglect by engaging them in conversation. She plays the part of a responsible hostess by helping Mrs. Jennings to entertain her guests. Her sensitivity to others is well brought out in this episode. CHAPTER 27 Summary Mrs. Jennings waits for the arrival of the Middletons, while Marianne waits for Willoughby's visit. Colonel Brandon visits them everyday. Elinor keeps him company. One day, after returning from a drive, Marianne finds Willoughby's card on the table. She is excited and waits for his visit. In the meantime Mrs. Jennings receives a letter from Lady Middleton informing her about their visit to the city. The Middletons arrive and host a party. All their friends make an appearance except for Willoughby, who was invited but failed to keep his appointment. Marianne is distressed. She writes another letter to Willoughby. Colonel Brandon visits them again and expresses a desire to speak to Elinor. He questions Elinor about Marianne's engagement in order to ascertain whether he stands any chance of winning her favor. Elinor indicates little hope. Brandon takes his leave after wishing Marianne happiness. Notes Marianne displays her feelings for Willoughby openly. When Mrs. Jennings mentions John Middleton's reluctance to leave the countryside when the weather is so good, Marianne responds excitedly, thinking of her lover and his passion for sports. When she finds Willoughby's card on the table, her hopes soar, and she is excited. However, when she is informed at the Middletons' party that Willoughby will not be in attendance, she feels depressed and reveals her displeasure. Elinor feels helpless in offering any advice to her sister. Instead, she decides to write to her mother about this matter. Whenever Marianne is indiscreet, Elinor tries to compensate for her sister. She feels sorry for Colonel Brandon but thinks it reasonable to lay bare the truth about Marianne's feelings for Willoughby. Elinor is honest but discreet and prudent. CHAPTER 28 Summary Willoughby neither visits nor writes Marianne. One evening, both the girls accompany Mrs. Jennings to a party, where they ultimately meet Willoughby. Elinor notices him talking to a fashionable lady. Marianne is agitated after catching a glimpse of him. A short while afterward, Willoughby comes forward to meet them. He is formal in his manners and fails to reciprocate Marianne's passionate entreaties. When he takes leave of them abruptly, Marianne is shocked and feels faint. Elinor seeks the help of Lady Middleton and takes her home. Notes Marianne gets a shattering blow after meeting Willoughby at the party. All along she had been looking forward to meeting him and when she does, she expects him to apologize for his neglect and express his love for her. Instead, he behaves like a stranger and gives her the cold shoulder. He is formal in his manners and curt in his behavior towards the sisters. His callous attitude breaks Marianne's heart. What Elinor had feared all along comes true. Elinor had never been sure of Willoughby's intentions towards Marianne and had expressed her doubts to her mother. She had been worried when Willoughby failed to respond to Marianne's letters. She had felt disturbed by his negligent attitude. When she meets him and receives a cold response from him, she is disgusted. The scene at the party finally severs the relationship between Marianne and Willoughby. Elinor rightly believes that he had treated her sister in a shameful manner and that he deserves nothing but contempt. Jane Austen has constructed an emotional situation in which to present the confrontation between Marianne and Willoughby. The scene is charged with expectation. Marianne is enraptured to meet Willoughby and openly displays her affection for him, but Willoughby acts reserved and shows restraint in his behavior towards her. He appears indifferent to her feelings. His curt reply to her passionate questions is cruel and shattering."} |
"If this open weather holds much longer," said Mrs. Jennings, when they
met at breakfast the following morning, "Sir John will not like leaving
Barton next week; 'tis a sad thing for sportsmen to lose a day's
pleasure. Poor souls! I always pity them when they do; they seem to
take it so much to heart."
"That is true," cried Marianne, in a cheerful voice, and walking to the
window as she spoke, to examine the day. "I had not thought of that.
This weather will keep many sportsmen in the country."
It was a lucky recollection, all her good spirits were restored by it.
"It is charming weather for THEM indeed," she continued, as she sat
down to the breakfast table with a happy countenance. "How much they
must enjoy it! But" (with a little return of anxiety) "it cannot be
expected to last long. At this time of the year, and after such a
series of rain, we shall certainly have very little more of it. Frosts
will soon set in, and in all probability with severity. In another day
or two perhaps; this extreme mildness can hardly last longer--nay,
perhaps it may freeze tonight!"
"At any rate," said Elinor, wishing to prevent Mrs. Jennings from
seeing her sister's thoughts as clearly as she did, "I dare say we
shall have Sir John and Lady Middleton in town by the end of next week."
"Ay, my dear, I'll warrant you we do. Mary always has her own way."
"And now," silently conjectured Elinor, "she will write to Combe by
this day's post."
But if she DID, the letter was written and sent away with a privacy
which eluded all her watchfulness to ascertain the fact. Whatever the
truth of it might be, and far as Elinor was from feeling thorough
contentment about it, yet while she saw Marianne in spirits, she could
not be very uncomfortable herself. And Marianne was in spirits; happy
in the mildness of the weather, and still happier in her expectation of
a frost.
The morning was chiefly spent in leaving cards at the houses of Mrs.
Jennings's acquaintance to inform them of her being in town; and
Marianne was all the time busy in observing the direction of the wind,
watching the variations of the sky and imagining an alteration in the
air.
"Don't you find it colder than it was in the morning, Elinor? There
seems to me a very decided difference. I can hardly keep my hands warm
even in my muff. It was not so yesterday, I think. The clouds seem
parting too, the sun will be out in a moment, and we shall have a clear
afternoon."
Elinor was alternately diverted and pained; but Marianne persevered,
and saw every night in the brightness of the fire, and every morning in
the appearance of the atmosphere, the certain symptoms of approaching
frost.
The Miss Dashwoods had no greater reason to be dissatisfied with Mrs.
Jennings's style of living, and set of acquaintance, than with her
behaviour to themselves, which was invariably kind. Every thing in her
household arrangements was conducted on the most liberal plan, and
excepting a few old city friends, whom, to Lady Middleton's regret, she
had never dropped, she visited no one to whom an introduction could at
all discompose the feelings of her young companions. Pleased to find
herself more comfortably situated in that particular than she had
expected, Elinor was very willing to compound for the want of much real
enjoyment from any of their evening parties, which, whether at home or
abroad, formed only for cards, could have little to amuse her.
Colonel Brandon, who had a general invitation to the house, was with
them almost every day; he came to look at Marianne and talk to Elinor,
who often derived more satisfaction from conversing with him than from
any other daily occurrence, but who saw at the same time with much
concern his continued regard for her sister. She feared it was a
strengthening regard. It grieved her to see the earnestness with which
he often watched Marianne, and his spirits were certainly worse than
when at Barton.
About a week after their arrival, it became certain that Willoughby was
also arrived. His card was on the table when they came in from the
morning's drive.
"Good God!" cried Marianne, "he has been here while we were out."
Elinor, rejoiced to be assured of his being in London, now ventured to
say, "Depend upon it, he will call again tomorrow." But Marianne
seemed hardly to hear her, and on Mrs. Jennings's entrance, escaped with
the precious card.
This event, while it raised the spirits of Elinor, restored to those of
her sister all, and more than all, their former agitation. From this
moment her mind was never quiet; the expectation of seeing him every
hour of the day, made her unfit for any thing. She insisted on being
left behind, the next morning, when the others went out.
Elinor's thoughts were full of what might be passing in Berkeley Street
during their absence; but a moment's glance at her sister when they
returned was enough to inform her, that Willoughby had paid no second
visit there. A note was just then brought in, and laid on the table.
"For me!" cried Marianne, stepping hastily forward.
"No, ma'am, for my mistress."
But Marianne, not convinced, took it instantly up.
"It is indeed for Mrs. Jennings; how provoking!"
"You are expecting a letter, then?" said Elinor, unable to be longer
silent.
"Yes, a little--not much."
After a short pause. "You have no confidence in me, Marianne."
"Nay, Elinor, this reproach from YOU--you who have confidence in no
one!"
"Me!" returned Elinor in some confusion; "indeed, Marianne, I have
nothing to tell."
"Nor I," answered Marianne with energy, "our situations then are alike.
We have neither of us any thing to tell; you, because you do not
communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing."
Elinor, distressed by this charge of reserve in herself, which she was
not at liberty to do away, knew not how, under such circumstances, to
press for greater openness in Marianne.
Mrs. Jennings soon appeared, and the note being given her, she read it
aloud. It was from Lady Middleton, announcing their arrival in Conduit
Street the night before, and requesting the company of her mother and
cousins the following evening. Business on Sir John's part, and a
violent cold on her own, prevented their calling in Berkeley Street.
The invitation was accepted; but when the hour of appointment drew
near, necessary as it was in common civility to Mrs. Jennings, that
they should both attend her on such a visit, Elinor had some difficulty
in persuading her sister to go, for still she had seen nothing of
Willoughby; and therefore was not more indisposed for amusement abroad,
than unwilling to run the risk of his calling again in her absence.
Elinor found, when the evening was over, that disposition is not
materially altered by a change of abode, for although scarcely settled
in town, Sir John had contrived to collect around him, nearly twenty
young people, and to amuse them with a ball. This was an affair,
however, of which Lady Middleton did not approve. In the country, an
unpremeditated dance was very allowable; but in London, where the
reputation of elegance was more important and less easily attained, it
was risking too much for the gratification of a few girls, to have it
known that Lady Middleton had given a small dance of eight or nine
couple, with two violins, and a mere side-board collation.
Mr. and Mrs. Palmer were of the party; from the former, whom they had
not seen before since their arrival in town, as he was careful to avoid
the appearance of any attention to his mother-in-law, and therefore
never came near her, they received no mark of recognition on their
entrance. He looked at them slightly, without seeming to know who they
were, and merely nodded to Mrs. Jennings from the other side of the
room. Marianne gave one glance round the apartment as she entered: it
was enough--HE was not there--and she sat down, equally ill-disposed to
receive or communicate pleasure. After they had been assembled about
an hour, Mr. Palmer sauntered towards the Miss Dashwoods to express his
surprise on seeing them in town, though Colonel Brandon had been first
informed of their arrival at his house, and he had himself said
something very droll on hearing that they were to come.
"I thought you were both in Devonshire," said he.
"Did you?" replied Elinor.
"When do you go back again?"
"I do not know." And thus ended their discourse.
Never had Marianne been so unwilling to dance in her life, as she was
that evening, and never so much fatigued by the exercise. She
complained of it as they returned to Berkeley Street.
"Aye, aye," said Mrs. Jennings, "we know the reason of all that very
well; if a certain person who shall be nameless, had been there, you
would not have been a bit tired: and to say the truth it was not very
pretty of him not to give you the meeting when he was invited."
"Invited!" cried Marianne.
"So my daughter Middleton told me, for it seems Sir John met him
somewhere in the street this morning." Marianne said no more, but
looked exceedingly hurt. Impatient in this situation to be doing
something that might lead to her sister's relief, Elinor resolved to
write the next morning to her mother, and hoped by awakening her fears
for the health of Marianne, to procure those inquiries which had been
so long delayed; and she was still more eagerly bent on this measure by
perceiving after breakfast on the morrow, that Marianne was again
writing to Willoughby, for she could not suppose it to be to any other
person.
About the middle of the day, Mrs. Jennings went out by herself on
business, and Elinor began her letter directly, while Marianne, too
restless for employment, too anxious for conversation, walked from one
window to the other, or sat down by the fire in melancholy meditation.
Elinor was very earnest in her application to her mother, relating all
that had passed, her suspicions of Willoughby's inconstancy, urging her
by every plea of duty and affection to demand from Marianne an account
of her real situation with respect to him.
Her letter was scarcely finished, when a rap foretold a visitor, and
Colonel Brandon was announced. Marianne, who had seen him from the
window, and who hated company of any kind, left the room before he
entered it. He looked more than usually grave, and though expressing
satisfaction at finding Miss Dashwood alone, as if he had somewhat in
particular to tell her, sat for some time without saying a word.
Elinor, persuaded that he had some communication to make in which her
sister was concerned, impatiently expected its opening. It was not the
first time of her feeling the same kind of conviction; for, more than
once before, beginning with the observation of "your sister looks
unwell to-day," or "your sister seems out of spirits," he had appeared
on the point, either of disclosing, or of inquiring, something
particular about her. After a pause of several minutes, their silence
was broken, by his asking her in a voice of some agitation, when he was
to congratulate her on the acquisition of a brother? Elinor was not
prepared for such a question, and having no answer ready, was obliged
to adopt the simple and common expedient, of asking what he meant? He
tried to smile as he replied, "your sister's engagement to Mr.
Willoughby is very generally known."
"It cannot be generally known," returned Elinor, "for her own family do
not know it."
He looked surprised and said, "I beg your pardon, I am afraid my
inquiry has been impertinent; but I had not supposed any secrecy
intended, as they openly correspond, and their marriage is universally
talked of."
"How can that be? By whom can you have heard it mentioned?"
"By many--by some of whom you know nothing, by others with whom you are
most intimate, Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Palmer, and the Middletons. But
still I might not have believed it, for where the mind is perhaps
rather unwilling to be convinced, it will always find something to
support its doubts, if I had not, when the servant let me in today,
accidentally seen a letter in his hand, directed to Mr. Willoughby in
your sister's writing. I came to inquire, but I was convinced before I
could ask the question. Is every thing finally settled? Is it
impossible to-? But I have no right, and I could have no chance of
succeeding. Excuse me, Miss Dashwood. I believe I have been wrong in
saying so much, but I hardly know what to do, and on your prudence I
have the strongest dependence. Tell me that it is all absolutely
resolved on, that any attempt, that in short concealment, if
concealment be possible, is all that remains."
These words, which conveyed to Elinor a direct avowal of his love for
her sister, affected her very much. She was not immediately able to
say anything, and even when her spirits were recovered, she debated for
a short time, on the answer it would be most proper to give. The real
state of things between Willoughby and her sister was so little known
to herself, that in endeavouring to explain it, she might be as liable
to say too much as too little. Yet as she was convinced that
Marianne's affection for Willoughby, could leave no hope of Colonel
Brandon's success, whatever the event of that affection might be, and
at the same time wished to shield her conduct from censure, she thought
it most prudent and kind, after some consideration, to say more than
she really knew or believed. She acknowledged, therefore, that though
she had never been informed by themselves of the terms on which they
stood with each other, of their mutual affection she had no doubt, and
of their correspondence she was not astonished to hear.
He listened to her with silent attention, and on her ceasing to speak,
rose directly from his seat, and after saying in a voice of emotion,
"to your sister I wish all imaginable happiness; to Willoughby that he
may endeavour to deserve her,"--took leave, and went away.
Elinor derived no comfortable feelings from this conversation, to
lessen the uneasiness of her mind on other points; she was left, on the
contrary, with a melancholy impression of Colonel Brandon's
unhappiness, and was prevented even from wishing it removed, by her
anxiety for the very event that must confirm it.
| 2,299 | Chapter 27 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820034609/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmSenseSensibility42.asp | It takes three days for the ladies to complete their journey. The house at Portman Square is cozy and comfortable. Elinor and Marianne are given separate quarters. After settling in, Elinor sits down to write a letter to her mother. Marianne, too, writes a letter, but it is addressed to Willoughby. In the following days she waits eagerly for his visit and his letter. However, she is in for much disappointment. Colonel Brandon visits them the next day. Marianne avoids him, while Elinor engages him in a conversation. In the evening Mrs. Palmer pays them a visit. She is in high spirits and expresses pleasure at meeting the girls. Other guests of Mrs. Jennings also arrive, and they are entertained with a game of whist. Elinor is concerned over her sister's behavior. Marianne neither participates in any activity nor shows enthusiasm in entertaining the guests. Elinor decides to write to her mother regarding her sister. | Notes It is the time for waiting and visiting. Marianne's impatience is revealed when she writes a letter to Willoughby immediately after arriving in London. She cannot think of anyone but him. Her restlessness only increases with time. Thus, when Colonel Brandon pays them a visit, she is disappointed and even disgusted. She also shows no desire to talk to Mrs. Palmer or the other guests of Mrs. Jennings. Through her behavior, she hurts the feelings of people like Colonel Brandon. Elinor observes her sister and is naturally concerned. Marianne's callous attitude towards others disturbs her. When Marianne avoids Colonel Brandon, Mrs. Palmer and the others, Elinor tries to make up for her sister's neglect by engaging them in conversation. She plays the part of a responsible hostess by helping Mrs. Jennings to entertain her guests. Her sensitivity to others is well brought out in this episode. CHAPTER 27 Summary Mrs. Jennings waits for the arrival of the Middletons, while Marianne waits for Willoughby's visit. Colonel Brandon visits them everyday. Elinor keeps him company. One day, after returning from a drive, Marianne finds Willoughby's card on the table. She is excited and waits for his visit. In the meantime Mrs. Jennings receives a letter from Lady Middleton informing her about their visit to the city. The Middletons arrive and host a party. All their friends make an appearance except for Willoughby, who was invited but failed to keep his appointment. Marianne is distressed. She writes another letter to Willoughby. Colonel Brandon visits them again and expresses a desire to speak to Elinor. He questions Elinor about Marianne's engagement in order to ascertain whether he stands any chance of winning her favor. Elinor indicates little hope. Brandon takes his leave after wishing Marianne happiness. Notes Marianne displays her feelings for Willoughby openly. When Mrs. Jennings mentions John Middleton's reluctance to leave the countryside when the weather is so good, Marianne responds excitedly, thinking of her lover and his passion for sports. When she finds Willoughby's card on the table, her hopes soar, and she is excited. However, when she is informed at the Middletons' party that Willoughby will not be in attendance, she feels depressed and reveals her displeasure. Elinor feels helpless in offering any advice to her sister. Instead, she decides to write to her mother about this matter. Whenever Marianne is indiscreet, Elinor tries to compensate for her sister. She feels sorry for Colonel Brandon but thinks it reasonable to lay bare the truth about Marianne's feelings for Willoughby. Elinor is honest but discreet and prudent. CHAPTER 28 Summary Willoughby neither visits nor writes Marianne. One evening, both the girls accompany Mrs. Jennings to a party, where they ultimately meet Willoughby. Elinor notices him talking to a fashionable lady. Marianne is agitated after catching a glimpse of him. A short while afterward, Willoughby comes forward to meet them. He is formal in his manners and fails to reciprocate Marianne's passionate entreaties. When he takes leave of them abruptly, Marianne is shocked and feels faint. Elinor seeks the help of Lady Middleton and takes her home. Notes Marianne gets a shattering blow after meeting Willoughby at the party. All along she had been looking forward to meeting him and when she does, she expects him to apologize for his neglect and express his love for her. Instead, he behaves like a stranger and gives her the cold shoulder. He is formal in his manners and curt in his behavior towards the sisters. His callous attitude breaks Marianne's heart. What Elinor had feared all along comes true. Elinor had never been sure of Willoughby's intentions towards Marianne and had expressed her doubts to her mother. She had been worried when Willoughby failed to respond to Marianne's letters. She had felt disturbed by his negligent attitude. When she meets him and receives a cold response from him, she is disgusted. The scene at the party finally severs the relationship between Marianne and Willoughby. Elinor rightly believes that he had treated her sister in a shameful manner and that he deserves nothing but contempt. Jane Austen has constructed an emotional situation in which to present the confrontation between Marianne and Willoughby. The scene is charged with expectation. Marianne is enraptured to meet Willoughby and openly displays her affection for him, but Willoughby acts reserved and shows restraint in his behavior towards her. He appears indifferent to her feelings. His curt reply to her passionate questions is cruel and shattering. | 155 | 746 | [
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110 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/14.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_5_part_1.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 14 | chapter 14 | null | {"name": "CHAPTER 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD24.asp", "summary": "After Tess gives birth to a baby boy, she decides that it is time to end her self-imposed seclusion. She decides to help in the fields during the August harvest. Her family brings the infant out to her so she can nurse him. One day when Tess returns home, she finds her son very ill and worries he may die. Since the baby has not been baptized, she wants to call the minister, but her father refuses her request. Worried that her son will not have salvation without a baptism, Tess herself christens him in front of her brothers and sisters and appropriately names the child Sorrow. The next morning, the child dies. Tess is relieved to know from the parson that her baptism is acceptable for the child's salvation. She is, however, denied a Christian burial for the baby; therefore, Tess buries Sorrow in the churchyard at a place where all unbaptized and suicides are laid to rest. Then she decorates the grave.", "analysis": "Notes The mornings are lazy and the nights are gloomy for Tess, and there is no relief in between. Her grief and remorse are insurmountable obstacles for her, and life holds little meaning. When her child is born, she gains courage and goes to the field to work. Then her baby grows ill, and Tess must perform a baptismal service for him, since her father will not allow the parson to come. She appropriately names the child Sorrow, which reflects the grief that Tess feels for her own sinfulness, for the baby's life, and for its early death. When the infant dies, Tess is forced to bury Sorrow in a neglected corner of the cemetery. This chapter reveals new images of Tess. She has been made to feel so ashamed of her pregnancy that she has gone into seclusion, giving her way too much time to punish herself. When the baby is finally born, she bravely goes to the fields to work and even nurses the child there with dignity. It is obvious that she cares about the infant and worries about its salvation. She knows, however, that the illegitimate child will never be accepted, which is one reason she calls the baby Sorrow. After Sorrow's christening and subsequent death, she questions the parson as to whether her baptismal service is adequate for the child's salvation. The parson gives her encouraging words, but will not give Sorrow a Christian burial. Tess must, therefore, lay Sorrow in a neglected corner of the churchyard, but she takes great care to decorate the grave. It is important to notice Hardy's descriptive powers in this chapter. He brings the harvest to life with vivid details, and his description of Sorrow's baptism is one of the most touching in the entire novel. It is also important to notice the part that fate has played in the novel by the end of this chapter. It has certainly been unkind to this sweet, innocent country girl. Tess left home in order to help earn money for her impoverished family, she falls into the hands of the sinister Alec who takes advantage of her naivete, she punishes herself severely for her sinfulness, she finds she is pregnant and ostracized from village life, and she finally loses the baby who has caused her so much sorrow. It is no wonder that Tess feels that there is little to live for in Marlott"} |
It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours,
attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated
fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they
should be dried away to nothing.
The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal
look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression.
His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the
scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could
feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The
luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature,
gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that
was brimming with interest for him.
His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,
throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of
drawers, and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who
were not already astir.
But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad
arms of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield
hard by Marlott village. They, with two others below, formed the
revolving Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been
brought to the field on the previous evening to be ready for
operations this day. The paint with which they were smeared,
intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a look of
having been dipped in liquid fire.
The field had already been "opened"; that is to say, a lane a few
feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole
circumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and
machine.
Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down
the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top
struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were
enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They
disappeared from the lane between the two stone posts which flanked
the nearest field-gate.
Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of
the grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation
of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible
over the gate, a driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses,
and an attendant on the seat of the implement. Along one side of
the field the whole wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper
revolving slowly, till it passed down the hill quite out of sight.
In a minute it came up on the other side of the field at the same
equable pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of the fore
horse first catching the eye as it rose into view over the stubble,
then the bright arms, and then the whole machine.
The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with
each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as
the morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated
inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their
refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when,
their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they
were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of
upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and
they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the
harvesters.
The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,
each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the
active binders in the rear laid their hands--mainly women, but some
of them men in print shirts, and trousers supported round their
waists by leather straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind,
which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each
wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.
But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company
of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when
she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely
an object set down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a
personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had
somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding,
and assimilated herself with it.
The women--or rather girls, for they were mostly young--wore drawn
cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and
gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There
was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured
tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the
reaping-machine; and others, older, in the brown-rough "wropper"
or over-all--the old-established and most appropriate dress of the
field-woman, which the young ones were abandoning. This morning the
eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she
being the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But
her bonnet is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is
disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be guessed from
a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends below the
curtain of her bonnet. Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual
attention is that she never courts it, though the other women often
gaze around them.
Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last
finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her
left palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward,
gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing
her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other
side, holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She
brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while
she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the
breeze. A bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather
of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on
its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.
At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged
apron, or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval
face of a handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy
clinging tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything
they fall against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular,
the red lips thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.
It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat changed--the
same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living
as a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that
she was in. After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to
undertake outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of
the year in the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that
she could do within the house being so remunerative for the time as
harvesting in the fields.
The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's,
the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille
at the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on
end against those of the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as it was
here called, of ten or a dozen was formed.
They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as
before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might
have noticed that every now and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully
to the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing.
On the verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages
ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the
hill.
The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.
The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its
corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first
sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long
clothes. Another brought some lunch. The harvesters ceased working,
took their provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks. Here
they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a
cup.
Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours.
She sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away
from her companions. When she had deposited herself a man in a
rabbit-skin cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt,
held the cup of ale over the top of the shock for her to drink. But
she did not accept his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she
called up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her, who,
glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and
joined the other children playing there. Tess, with a curiously
stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a still rising colour,
unfastened her frock and began suckling the child.
The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with
absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no
longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated
talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.
When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright
in her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a
gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she
fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could
never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which
strangely combined passionateness with contempt.
"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en,
and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,"
observed the woman in the red petticoat.
"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord,
'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"
"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I
reckon. There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in
The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had
come along."
"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that
it should have happened to she, of all others. But 'tis always the
comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches--hey, Jenny?" The
speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined
as plain.
It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy
to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her
flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor
grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises--shade
behind shade--tint beyond tint--around pupils that had no bottom; an
almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.
A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the
fields this week for the first time during many months. After
wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret
that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated
her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again--to taste
anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever
it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences,
time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if
they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.
Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and
the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had
not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.
She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly--the
thought of the world's concern at her situation--was founded on an
illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a
structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind
besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was
no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself
miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to
them--"Ah, she makes herself unhappy." If she tried to be cheerful,
to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers,
the baby, she could only be this idea to them--"Ah, she bears it
very well." Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been
wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could
have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless
mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless
child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would
have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery
had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate
sensations.
Whatever Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress
herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the
fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was
why she had borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly
in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms.
The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their
limbs, and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been
unharnessed and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine.
Tess, having quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest
sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on
the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last
completed sheaf for the tying of the next.
In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were
continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters.
Then they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company
of a broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the
eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some
worm-eaten Tuscan saint. Tess's female companions sang songs, and
showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out
of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing
in a few verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry
green wood and came back a changed state. There are counterpoises
and compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a
social warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting
personage in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still
farther away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and
she became almost gay.
But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached
home it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly
taken ill since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable,
so tender and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock
nevertheless.
The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was
forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that
offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew
clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the
flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which
transcended that of the child's simple loss. Her baby had not been
baptized.
Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,
burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls,
she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully
studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences
to be drawn therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard
to the baby, it had a very different colour. Her darling was about
to die, and no salvation.
It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she
might send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which
her father's sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest,
and his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that
nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly
booze at Rolliver's Inn. No parson should come inside his door, he
declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it
had become more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked the door
and put the key in his pocket.
The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess
retired also. She was continually waking as she lay, and in the
middle of the night found that the baby was still worse. It was
obviously dying--quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.
In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the
solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and
malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of
the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double
doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend
tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for
heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many
other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught the
young in this Christian country. The lurid presentment so powerfully
affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that
her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook
with each throb of her heart.
The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental
tension increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with
kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about
the room.
"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!" she cried.
"Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the
child!"
She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent
supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.
"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just the same!"
She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have
shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit a candle, and went to
a second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young
sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room. Pulling
out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured
some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their
hands together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children,
scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger
and larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her
bed--a child's child--so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient
personality to endow its producer with the maternal title. Tess then
stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next
sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church
held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her
child.
Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her
long white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging
straight down her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak
candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes
which sunlight might have revealed--the stubble scratches upon her
wrists, and the weariness of her eyes--her high enthusiasm having
a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing,
showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity
which was almost regal. The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy
eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended
wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to
become active.
The most impressed of them said:
"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"
The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.
"What's his name going to be?"
She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in
the book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the
baptismal service, and now she pronounced it:
"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost."
She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.
"Say 'Amen,' children."
The tiny voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"
Tess went on:
"We receive this child"--and so forth--"and do sign him with the sign
of the Cross."
Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an
immense cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with
the customary sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin,
the world, and the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant
unto his life's end. She duly went on with the Lord's Prayer, the
children lisping it after her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the
conclusion, raising their voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped
into silence, "Amen!"
Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy
of the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the
thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the
stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in
her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her.
The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a
glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each
cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils
shone like a diamond. The children gazed up at her with more and
more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did
not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and
awful--a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.
Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was
doomed to be of limited brilliancy--luckily perhaps for himself,
considering his beginnings. In the blue of the morning that fragile
soldier and servant breathed his last, and when the other children
awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty
baby.
The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained
with her in the infant's loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her
terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether
well founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that
if Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation
she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the
irregularity--either for herself or for her child.
So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive creature, that
bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law;
a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who
knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom
the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate,
new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human
knowledge.
Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were
doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.
Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a
new-comer, and did not know her. She went to his house after dusk,
and stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in. The
enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met
him coming homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not
mind speaking freely.
"I should like to ask you something, sir."
He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the
baby's illness and the extemporized ordinance. "And now, sir," she
added earnestly, "can you tell me this--will it be just the same for
him as if you had baptized him?"
Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he
should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his
customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no. Yet the
dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined
to affect his nobler impulses--or rather those that he had left in
him after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual
scepticism. The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the
victory fell to the man.
"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."
"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked quickly.
The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he
had conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the
rite, and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess's
father and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity
for its irregular administration.
"Ah--that's another matter," he said.
"Another matter--why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.
"Well--I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I
must not--for certain reasons."
"Just for once, sir!"
"Really I must not."
"O sir!" She seized his hand as she spoke.
He withdrew it, shaking his head.
"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never come to your
church no more!"
"Don't talk so rashly."
"Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't? ... Will it
be just the same? Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but
as you yourself to me myself--poor me!"
How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he
supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman's
power to tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in
this case also--
"It will be just the same."
So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's
shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light,
at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that
shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow,
and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides,
and others of the conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the
untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little cross of
two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers,
she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could
enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also
a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them
alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of
mere observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye of
maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.
| 4,306 | CHAPTER 14 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD24.asp | After Tess gives birth to a baby boy, she decides that it is time to end her self-imposed seclusion. She decides to help in the fields during the August harvest. Her family brings the infant out to her so she can nurse him. One day when Tess returns home, she finds her son very ill and worries he may die. Since the baby has not been baptized, she wants to call the minister, but her father refuses her request. Worried that her son will not have salvation without a baptism, Tess herself christens him in front of her brothers and sisters and appropriately names the child Sorrow. The next morning, the child dies. Tess is relieved to know from the parson that her baptism is acceptable for the child's salvation. She is, however, denied a Christian burial for the baby; therefore, Tess buries Sorrow in the churchyard at a place where all unbaptized and suicides are laid to rest. Then she decorates the grave. | Notes The mornings are lazy and the nights are gloomy for Tess, and there is no relief in between. Her grief and remorse are insurmountable obstacles for her, and life holds little meaning. When her child is born, she gains courage and goes to the field to work. Then her baby grows ill, and Tess must perform a baptismal service for him, since her father will not allow the parson to come. She appropriately names the child Sorrow, which reflects the grief that Tess feels for her own sinfulness, for the baby's life, and for its early death. When the infant dies, Tess is forced to bury Sorrow in a neglected corner of the cemetery. This chapter reveals new images of Tess. She has been made to feel so ashamed of her pregnancy that she has gone into seclusion, giving her way too much time to punish herself. When the baby is finally born, she bravely goes to the fields to work and even nurses the child there with dignity. It is obvious that she cares about the infant and worries about its salvation. She knows, however, that the illegitimate child will never be accepted, which is one reason she calls the baby Sorrow. After Sorrow's christening and subsequent death, she questions the parson as to whether her baptismal service is adequate for the child's salvation. The parson gives her encouraging words, but will not give Sorrow a Christian burial. Tess must, therefore, lay Sorrow in a neglected corner of the churchyard, but she takes great care to decorate the grave. It is important to notice Hardy's descriptive powers in this chapter. He brings the harvest to life with vivid details, and his description of Sorrow's baptism is one of the most touching in the entire novel. It is also important to notice the part that fate has played in the novel by the end of this chapter. It has certainly been unkind to this sweet, innocent country girl. Tess left home in order to help earn money for her impoverished family, she falls into the hands of the sinister Alec who takes advantage of her naivete, she punishes herself severely for her sinfulness, she finds she is pregnant and ostracized from village life, and she finally loses the baby who has caused her so much sorrow. It is no wonder that Tess feels that there is little to live for in Marlott | 164 | 403 | [
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161 | false | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/21.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/Sense and Sensibility/section_2_part_1.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapter 21 | chapter 21 | null | {"name": "Chapter 21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210419170735/https://www.gradesaver.com/sense-and-sensibility/study-guide/summary-chapters-21-30", "summary": "The Palmers leave, but Sir John and Mrs. Jennings manage to find new guests right away. They happen to be cousins of Lady Middleton, though she is displeased to learn that she is to entertain unfamiliar company. The Dashwoods are also invited, though they are in no rush to meet with more of the Middleton's company right away; they find the elder sister, Miss Steele, to be nothing remarkable, while Lucy is very pretty but not much better company. They instantly gain Lady Middleton's admiration by paying endless attention to her obnoxious children, which Elinor and Marianne are too sensible to do. Although Marianne and Elinor do not wish to know the girls better, Sir John sees that they spend a good deal of time together. The Steeles seem to have been acquainted on all the particulars of Elinor and Marianne's lives by Mrs. Jennings, as they know about Willoughby too. It appears they also know Edward Ferrars, though Miss Steele's remarks leave Elinor believing that Miss Steele knows more about Edward than she would announce.", "analysis": "In this chapter, Austen writes a gentle satire on the manners of the upper class. Lady Middleton acts as a \"well-bred wife\" does, resigning herself to having the Steeles as company, but this gracious resignation also means she will \"reprimand five or six times a day\" on the subject. Sir John's tendency toward overstatement and overly generous praise is also poked fun of by Sir John's claims that the Steeles are the \"sweetest girls in the world,\" and Elinor's contrary observation that the \"sweetest girls in the world\" can be met all over England, and often aren't very sweet at all. Lady Middleton's vanity is also shown to be ridiculous, since she is vulnerable to even the most obsequious flattery, and accepts the Miss Steeles immediately because of it. Lady Middleton's ceaseless delight in her children's misbehavior also shows her to be a far too doting mother, to an almost absurd degree. Even Sir John's good-natured tendency to wish everyone friends does not escape, as he pushes the Dashwood girls into an undesired acquaintance with the Miss Steeles"} |
The Palmers returned to Cleveland the next day, and the two families at
Barton were again left to entertain each other. But this did not last
long; Elinor had hardly got their last visitors out of her head, had
hardly done wondering at Charlotte's being so happy without a cause, at
Mr. Palmer's acting so simply, with good abilities, and at the strange
unsuitableness which often existed between husband and wife, before Sir
John's and Mrs. Jennings's active zeal in the cause of society,
procured her some other new acquaintance to see and observe.
In a morning's excursion to Exeter, they had met with two young ladies,
whom Mrs. Jennings had the satisfaction of discovering to be her
relations, and this was enough for Sir John to invite them directly to
the park, as soon as their present engagements at Exeter were over.
Their engagements at Exeter instantly gave way before such an
invitation, and Lady Middleton was thrown into no little alarm on the
return of Sir John, by hearing that she was very soon to receive a
visit from two girls whom she had never seen in her life, and of whose
elegance,--whose tolerable gentility even, she could have no proof; for
the assurances of her husband and mother on that subject went for
nothing at all. Their being her relations too made it so much the
worse; and Mrs. Jennings's attempts at consolation were therefore
unfortunately founded, when she advised her daughter not to care about
their being so fashionable; because they were all cousins and must put
up with one another. As it was impossible, however, now to prevent
their coming, Lady Middleton resigned herself to the idea of it, with
all the philosophy of a well-bred woman, contenting herself with merely
giving her husband a gentle reprimand on the subject five or six times
every day.
The young ladies arrived: their appearance was by no means ungenteel or
unfashionable. Their dress was very smart, their manners very civil,
they were delighted with the house, and in raptures with the furniture,
and they happened to be so doatingly fond of children that Lady
Middleton's good opinion was engaged in their favour before they had
been an hour at the Park. She declared them to be very agreeable girls
indeed, which for her ladyship was enthusiastic admiration. Sir John's
confidence in his own judgment rose with this animated praise, and he
set off directly for the cottage to tell the Miss Dashwoods of the Miss
Steeles' arrival, and to assure them of their being the sweetest girls
in the world. From such commendation as this, however, there was not
much to be learned; Elinor well knew that the sweetest girls in the
world were to be met with in every part of England, under every
possible variation of form, face, temper and understanding. Sir John
wanted the whole family to walk to the Park directly and look at his
guests. Benevolent, philanthropic man! It was painful to him even to
keep a third cousin to himself.
"Do come now," said he--"pray come--you must come--I declare you shall
come--You can't think how you will like them. Lucy is monstrous
pretty, and so good humoured and agreeable! The children are all
hanging about her already, as if she was an old acquaintance. And they
both long to see you of all things, for they have heard at Exeter that
you are the most beautiful creatures in the world; and I have told them
it is all very true, and a great deal more. You will be delighted with
them I am sure. They have brought the whole coach full of playthings
for the children. How can you be so cross as not to come? Why they
are your cousins, you know, after a fashion. YOU are my cousins, and
they are my wife's, so you must be related."
But Sir John could not prevail. He could only obtain a promise of
their calling at the Park within a day or two, and then left them in
amazement at their indifference, to walk home and boast anew of their
attractions to the Miss Steeles, as he had been already boasting of the
Miss Steeles to them.
When their promised visit to the Park and consequent introduction to
these young ladies took place, they found in the appearance of the
eldest, who was nearly thirty, with a very plain and not a sensible
face, nothing to admire; but in the other, who was not more than two or
three and twenty, they acknowledged considerable beauty; her features
were pretty, and she had a sharp quick eye, and a smartness of air,
which though it did not give actual elegance or grace, gave distinction
to her person.-- Their manners were particularly civil, and Elinor soon
allowed them credit for some kind of sense, when she saw with what
constant and judicious attention they were making themselves agreeable
to Lady Middleton. With her children they were in continual raptures,
extolling their beauty, courting their notice, and humouring their
whims; and such of their time as could be spared from the importunate
demands which this politeness made on it, was spent in admiration of
whatever her ladyship was doing, if she happened to be doing any thing,
or in taking patterns of some elegant new dress, in which her
appearance the day before had thrown them into unceasing delight.
Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond
mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most
rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands
are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing; and the excessive
affection and endurance of the Miss Steeles towards her offspring were
viewed therefore by Lady Middleton without the smallest surprise or
distrust. She saw with maternal complacency all the impertinent
encroachments and mischievous tricks to which her cousins submitted.
She saw their sashes untied, their hair pulled about their ears, their
work-bags searched, and their knives and scissors stolen away, and felt
no doubt of its being a reciprocal enjoyment. It suggested no other
surprise than that Elinor and Marianne should sit so composedly by,
without claiming a share in what was passing.
"John is in such spirits today!" said she, on his taking Miss Steeles's
pocket handkerchief, and throwing it out of window--"He is full of
monkey tricks."
And soon afterwards, on the second boy's violently pinching one of the
same lady's fingers, she fondly observed, "How playful William is!"
"And here is my sweet little Annamaria," she added, tenderly caressing
a little girl of three years old, who had not made a noise for the last
two minutes; "And she is always so gentle and quiet--Never was there
such a quiet little thing!"
But unfortunately in bestowing these embraces, a pin in her ladyship's
head dress slightly scratching the child's neck, produced from this
pattern of gentleness such violent screams, as could hardly be outdone
by any creature professedly noisy. The mother's consternation was
excessive; but it could not surpass the alarm of the Miss Steeles, and
every thing was done by all three, in so critical an emergency, which
affection could suggest as likely to assuage the agonies of the little
sufferer. She was seated in her mother's lap, covered with kisses, her
wound bathed with lavender-water, by one of the Miss Steeles, who was
on her knees to attend her, and her mouth stuffed with sugar plums by
the other. With such a reward for her tears, the child was too wise to
cease crying. She still screamed and sobbed lustily, kicked her two
brothers for offering to touch her, and all their united soothings were
ineffectual till Lady Middleton luckily remembering that in a scene of
similar distress last week, some apricot marmalade had been
successfully applied for a bruised temple, the same remedy was eagerly
proposed for this unfortunate scratch, and a slight intermission of
screams in the young lady on hearing it, gave them reason to hope that
it would not be rejected.-- She was carried out of the room therefore
in her mother's arms, in quest of this medicine, and as the two boys
chose to follow, though earnestly entreated by their mother to stay
behind, the four young ladies were left in a quietness which the room
had not known for many hours.
"Poor little creatures!" said Miss Steele, as soon as they were gone.
"It might have been a very sad accident."
"Yet I hardly know how," cried Marianne, "unless it had been under
totally different circumstances. But this is the usual way of
heightening alarm, where there is nothing to be alarmed at in reality."
"What a sweet woman Lady Middleton is!" said Lucy Steele.
Marianne was silent; it was impossible for her to say what she did not
feel, however trivial the occasion; and upon Elinor therefore the whole
task of telling lies when politeness required it, always fell. She did
her best when thus called on, by speaking of Lady Middleton with more
warmth than she felt, though with far less than Miss Lucy.
"And Sir John too," cried the elder sister, "what a charming man he is!"
Here too, Miss Dashwood's commendation, being only simple and just,
came in without any eclat. She merely observed that he was perfectly
good humoured and friendly.
"And what a charming little family they have! I never saw such fine
children in my life.--I declare I quite doat upon them already, and
indeed I am always distractedly fond of children."
"I should guess so," said Elinor, with a smile, "from what I have
witnessed this morning."
"I have a notion," said Lucy, "you think the little Middletons rather
too much indulged; perhaps they may be the outside of enough; but it is
so natural in Lady Middleton; and for my part, I love to see children
full of life and spirits; I cannot bear them if they are tame and
quiet."
"I confess," replied Elinor, "that while I am at Barton Park, I never
think of tame and quiet children with any abhorrence."
A short pause succeeded this speech, which was first broken by Miss
Steele, who seemed very much disposed for conversation, and who now
said rather abruptly, "And how do you like Devonshire, Miss Dashwood?
I suppose you were very sorry to leave Sussex."
In some surprise at the familiarity of this question, or at least of
the manner in which it was spoken, Elinor replied that she was.
"Norland is a prodigious beautiful place, is not it?" added Miss Steele.
"We have heard Sir John admire it excessively," said Lucy, who seemed
to think some apology necessary for the freedom of her sister.
"I think every one MUST admire it," replied Elinor, "who ever saw the
place; though it is not to be supposed that any one can estimate its
beauties as we do."
"And had you a great many smart beaux there? I suppose you have not so
many in this part of the world; for my part, I think they are a vast
addition always."
"But why should you think," said Lucy, looking ashamed of her sister,
"that there are not as many genteel young men in Devonshire as Sussex?"
"Nay, my dear, I'm sure I don't pretend to say that there an't. I'm
sure there's a vast many smart beaux in Exeter; but you know, how could
I tell what smart beaux there might be about Norland; and I was only
afraid the Miss Dashwoods might find it dull at Barton, if they had not
so many as they used to have. But perhaps you young ladies may not
care about the beaux, and had as lief be without them as with them.
For my part, I think they are vastly agreeable, provided they dress
smart and behave civil. But I can't bear to see them dirty and nasty.
Now there's Mr. Rose at Exeter, a prodigious smart young man, quite a
beau, clerk to Mr. Simpson, you know, and yet if you do but meet him of
a morning, he is not fit to be seen.-- I suppose your brother was quite
a beau, Miss Dashwood, before he married, as he was so rich?"
"Upon my word," replied Elinor, "I cannot tell you, for I do not
perfectly comprehend the meaning of the word. But this I can say, that
if he ever was a beau before he married, he is one still for there is
not the smallest alteration in him."
"Oh! dear! one never thinks of married men's being beaux--they have
something else to do."
"Lord! Anne," cried her sister, "you can talk of nothing but
beaux;--you will make Miss Dashwood believe you think of nothing else."
And then to turn the discourse, she began admiring the house and the
furniture.
This specimen of the Miss Steeles was enough. The vulgar freedom and
folly of the eldest left her no recommendation, and as Elinor was not
blinded by the beauty, or the shrewd look of the youngest, to her want
of real elegance and artlessness, she left the house without any wish
of knowing them better.
Not so the Miss Steeles.--They came from Exeter, well provided with
admiration for the use of Sir John Middleton, his family, and all his
relations, and no niggardly proportion was now dealt out to his fair
cousins, whom they declared to be the most beautiful, elegant,
accomplished, and agreeable girls they had ever beheld, and with whom
they were particularly anxious to be better acquainted.-- And to be
better acquainted therefore, Elinor soon found was their inevitable
lot, for as Sir John was entirely on the side of the Miss Steeles,
their party would be too strong for opposition, and that kind of
intimacy must be submitted to, which consists of sitting an hour or two
together in the same room almost every day. Sir John could do no more;
but he did not know that any more was required: to be together was, in
his opinion, to be intimate, and while his continual schemes for their
meeting were effectual, he had not a doubt of their being established
friends.
To do him justice, he did every thing in his power to promote their
unreserve, by making the Miss Steeles acquainted with whatever he knew
or supposed of his cousins' situations in the most delicate
particulars,--and Elinor had not seen them more than twice, before the
eldest of them wished her joy on her sister's having been so lucky as
to make a conquest of a very smart beau since she came to Barton.
"'Twill be a fine thing to have her married so young to be sure," said
she, "and I hear he is quite a beau, and prodigious handsome. And I
hope you may have as good luck yourself soon,--but perhaps you may have
a friend in the corner already."
Elinor could not suppose that Sir John would be more nice in
proclaiming his suspicions of her regard for Edward, than he had been
with respect to Marianne; indeed it was rather his favourite joke of
the two, as being somewhat newer and more conjectural; and since
Edward's visit, they had never dined together without his drinking to
her best affections with so much significancy and so many nods and
winks, as to excite general attention. The letter F--had been likewise
invariably brought forward, and found productive of such countless
jokes, that its character as the wittiest letter in the alphabet had
been long established with Elinor.
The Miss Steeles, as she expected, had now all the benefit of these
jokes, and in the eldest of them they raised a curiosity to know the
name of the gentleman alluded to, which, though often impertinently
expressed, was perfectly of a piece with her general inquisitiveness
into the concerns of their family. But Sir John did not sport long
with the curiosity which he delighted to raise, for he had at least as
much pleasure in telling the name, as Miss Steele had in hearing it.
"His name is Ferrars," said he, in a very audible whisper; "but pray do
not tell it, for it's a great secret."
"Ferrars!" repeated Miss Steele; "Mr. Ferrars is the happy man, is he?
What! your sister-in-law's brother, Miss Dashwood? a very agreeable
young man to be sure; I know him very well."
"How can you say so, Anne?" cried Lucy, who generally made an amendment
to all her sister's assertions. "Though we have seen him once or twice
at my uncle's, it is rather too much to pretend to know him very well."
Elinor heard all this with attention and surprise. "And who was this
uncle? Where did he live? How came they acquainted?" She wished very
much to have the subject continued, though she did not chuse to join in
it herself; but nothing more of it was said, and for the first time in
her life, she thought Mrs. Jennings deficient either in curiosity after
petty information, or in a disposition to communicate it. The manner
in which Miss Steele had spoken of Edward, increased her curiosity; for
it struck her as being rather ill-natured, and suggested the suspicion
of that lady's knowing, or fancying herself to know something to his
disadvantage.--But her curiosity was unavailing, for no farther notice
was taken of Mr. Ferrars's name by Miss Steele when alluded to, or even
openly mentioned by Sir John.
| 2,715 | Chapter 21 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210419170735/https://www.gradesaver.com/sense-and-sensibility/study-guide/summary-chapters-21-30 | The Palmers leave, but Sir John and Mrs. Jennings manage to find new guests right away. They happen to be cousins of Lady Middleton, though she is displeased to learn that she is to entertain unfamiliar company. The Dashwoods are also invited, though they are in no rush to meet with more of the Middleton's company right away; they find the elder sister, Miss Steele, to be nothing remarkable, while Lucy is very pretty but not much better company. They instantly gain Lady Middleton's admiration by paying endless attention to her obnoxious children, which Elinor and Marianne are too sensible to do. Although Marianne and Elinor do not wish to know the girls better, Sir John sees that they spend a good deal of time together. The Steeles seem to have been acquainted on all the particulars of Elinor and Marianne's lives by Mrs. Jennings, as they know about Willoughby too. It appears they also know Edward Ferrars, though Miss Steele's remarks leave Elinor believing that Miss Steele knows more about Edward than she would announce. | In this chapter, Austen writes a gentle satire on the manners of the upper class. Lady Middleton acts as a "well-bred wife" does, resigning herself to having the Steeles as company, but this gracious resignation also means she will "reprimand five or six times a day" on the subject. Sir John's tendency toward overstatement and overly generous praise is also poked fun of by Sir John's claims that the Steeles are the "sweetest girls in the world," and Elinor's contrary observation that the "sweetest girls in the world" can be met all over England, and often aren't very sweet at all. Lady Middleton's vanity is also shown to be ridiculous, since she is vulnerable to even the most obsequious flattery, and accepts the Miss Steeles immediately because of it. Lady Middleton's ceaseless delight in her children's misbehavior also shows her to be a far too doting mother, to an almost absurd degree. Even Sir John's good-natured tendency to wish everyone friends does not escape, as he pushes the Dashwood girls into an undesired acquaintance with the Miss Steeles | 176 | 178 | [
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5,658 | true | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/chapters_19_to_23.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/Lord Jim/section_5_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapters 19-23 | chapters 19 - 23 | null | {"name": "Chapters 19 - 23", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210126121516/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lordjim/section6/", "summary": "Jim continues to wander from job to job, \"fling away daily bread so as to get hands free to grapple with a ghost\" as \"an act of prosaic heroism.\" He becomes well-known as an eccentric in his part of the world; although he runs away every time the Patna is mentioned, everyone knows who he is. After Jim rejects Marlow's suggestion that he go to America, Marlow decides to consult Stein, the proprietor of a large trading company with posts in \"out-of-the-way places\" where Jim could more easily live in peace. Stein, according to Marlow, is extremely trustworthy and wise. We learn a little about Stein's past: he escaped Germany as a young man after getting entangled with revolutionaries, then came to the East Indies with a Dutch naturalist. Stein remained in the area with a Scottish trader he had met, who bequeathed him his trading empire and introduced him to a Malay queen. Stein became an adviser to the queen's son, Mohammed Bonso, who was battling several relatives for the throne. He married Bonso's sister and had a child with her, and began to collect beetles and butterflies. Bonso was assassinated, and Stein's wife and child died from a fever. Stein tells Marlow an anecdote about a particular butterfly specimen in his collection. One morning, he was tricked into leaving his compound by an enemy of Bonso's and was ambushed along the road. After feigning death, he attacked and dispatched his attackers with bullets, but a few escaped. Suddenly, he saw a rare butterfly glide past him. Moving quickly, he captured it in his hat, holding a revolver in his other hand in case the bandits should reappear. Stein describes that day as one of the best of his life; he had defeated his enemy, possessed friendship and love, and acquired a butterfly he had long desired. Marlow tells Stein he has come to him to discuss a \"specimen.\" He recounts Jim's story for Stein, who immediately \"diagnose\" Jim as \"romantic.\" Stein elaborates on Jim's crisis of self-identity, saying that what Jim needs is to learn \"how to live\" in a world that he cannot always ignore. Stein says that he himself has had moments in which he has let heroic dreams slip away, and he tells Marlow that he will help him do something \"practical\" for Jim. Stein suggests that they send Jim to Patusan, a remote territory where he has a trading post. The place will, Marlow says, turn out to offer him \"a totally new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon.\" Patusan seems to be a place no one visits, whose very name stands in for the hidden and unknown. Stein has used Patusan as an exile for those in need before; he tells Marlow of a Dutch-Malay woman with a troubled history married to an odious trading agent named Cornelius whom he wished to help. He made Cornelius the manager of the Patusan post, but the woman has since died, and the woman's daughter, under the guardianship of Cornelius, is the only obstacle to his replacement by Jim. Stein offers Jim the post, with the understanding that Cornelius and the girl be allowed to stay on in Patusan. Marlow jumps forward in time, to a moment when he visits Jim in Patusan. Although it is not yet clear how, Jim has become an incredible success, and Marlow is astonished. He reminds himself that he and Stein had only sought to keep Jim out of the way, and that, on his part, he had just wanted to dispose of Jim before returning to Europe for a time. He admits that he had feared the claim that Jim now has on him because of their acquaintance. Marlow digresses for a moment to describe Patusan more fully: it is a small territory thirty miles inland up a river, which the flow of history has largely bypassed. In the seventeenth century, Dutch traders often visited in order to trade for pepper. Somehow, though, the trade stopped, and now the country is a backwater, ruled by a \"Sultan is an imbecile youth with two thumbs on his left hand.\" The de facto ruler of Patusan, however, is the Sultan's uncle, Rajah Allang, a decaying, power-mad opium fiend whom Marlow encounters when he visits Jim. Stein and Marlow offer Jim the Patusan post, which he accepts. Marlow makes him a gift of a revolver, and Stein, wishing to repay his debt to the Scottish trader who launched him, gives Jim letters of introduction and a silver ring, which he is to present to Doramin, an old comrade of Stein's. Jim returns from receiving Stein's commission full of fire, eager to impress upon Marlow the romantic aspects of the situation, particularly the idea of the ring as a token of friendship and recognition. Marlow finds himself \"thoroughly sick\" of Jim, who is foolish enough to \"hurl defiance\" at the universe. Jim hurriedly packs his possessions, including a volume of Shakespeare and ships for Patusan. The captain of the ship that is to carry him tells Marlow, who comes aboard to offer Jim cartridges for the revolver, that he will carry Jim only to the mouth of the river leading to Patusan, since he was fired upon by the natives the last time he tried to ascend the river. Marlow later learns that the man was publicly humiliated and imprisoned by Rajah Allang. The ship is about to depart, so Marlow takes leave of Jim, who is still ecstatic over the \"magnificent chance\" before him. As Marlow's boat pulls away from the ship, Jim shouts a prediction: \"'You--shall--hear--of--me.'", "analysis": "\" Commentary Stein offers a contrast to both Marlow and Jim. Like Jim, he is, or at least was as a youth, invested in ideas of the heroic, starting out as a revolutionary, then becoming a traveler, a partisan fighter, and finally a conquering capitalist. Despite some self-admitted defeats and the loss of his wife and child, he has constructed a satisfying existence for himself by taking advantage of the opportunities offered him by others . Like Marlow, he feels an immediate sense of identification with Jim. His approach to Jim is quite different from Marlow's, however. While Marlow considers Jim \"one of us,\" Stein sees him, as Marlow suggests he will, as a \"specimen,\" like one of his butterflies. Marlow, and even the members of the court of inquiry, have been considering Jim almost as a sort of mutation--an average man who for some reason displays the worst that lurks inside of all men. The court of inquiry must cast Jim out, symbolically casting the evil out of themselves. Marlow is fascinated, seeing in Jim his own dark side. Stein, however, \"diagnoses\" Jim as displaying one among an infinite variety of \"maladies\" or abnormalities. Stein determines him to be a \"romantic,\" and accordingly sends him to the same place he has sent another damaged romantic, the Dutch-Malay woman. Patusan is an appropriate place for Jim in more ways than one. Notice the resemblance between the words \"Patna\" and \"Patusan\"; we know before he gets there that Jim is destined to repeat in some way the incident aboard the Patna. Patusan, too, is a place where romantic, heroic idealism--the high adventure of the quest for pepper--coexists with pragmatism and harsh reality. The territory was abandoned by history, is difficult to reach, and has degenerated to the point of being ruled by a youth with congenital deformities that would seem to be the result of inbreeding. Jim is thrilled to have another chance, and his hubris is unmistakable: \"You--shall--hear--of--me.\" Marlow and Stein's parting gifts, though, foreshadow the kind of place he will find. The revolver suggests Jim will need to rely, to some extent, on brute force, and the technological superiority of the white man. The ring suggests that Jim is entering a world of suspicion, distrust, and factions, where identity requires physical proof and a man's word is not enough. Both hint that heroic ideals may be irrelevant here. Ironically, Stein and Marlow are burying Jim the way Chester and Robinson suggested. The only escape for Jim, it seems, is to go somewhere where no one has heard of the Patna. Yet in the echo of the name of the ship in the name of the territory, and in Marlow's repeated incursions to see Jim despite being \"sick\" of him and wanting to \"dispose\" of him, it is implied that escape will not be possible, that, no matter what he does, Jim will still be the same man who abandoned the Patna. At this point in the narrative, Marlow's most recent information is that Jim is a total success. Yet Marlow, at the end of Chapter 21, tells his audience that he still awaits \"the last word\" on Jim. He goes further to say, too, that it may be that the \"last word\" cannot be trusted, since it will be open to misinterpretation in the minds of its hearers."} |
'I have told you these two episodes at length to show his manner of
dealing with himself under the new conditions of his life. There were
many others of the sort, more than I could count on the fingers of my
two hands. They were all equally tinged by a high-minded absurdity of
intention which made their futility profound and touching. To fling away
your daily bread so as to get your hands free for a grapple with a ghost
may be an act of prosaic heroism. Men had done it before (though we who
have lived know full well that it is not the haunted soul but the hungry
body that makes an outcast), and men who had eaten and meant to eat
every day had applauded the creditable folly. He was indeed unfortunate,
for all his recklessness could not carry him out from under the shadow.
There was always a doubt of his courage. The truth seems to be that
it is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact. You can face it or shirk
it--and I have come across a man or two who could wink at their familiar
shades. Obviously Jim was not of the winking sort; but what I could
never make up my mind about was whether his line of conduct amounted to
shirking his ghost or to facing him out.
'I strained my mental eyesight only to discover that, as with the
complexion of all our actions, the shade of difference was so delicate
that it was impossible to say. It might have been flight and it might
have been a mode of combat. To the common mind he became known as a
rolling stone, because this was the funniest part: he did after a time
become perfectly known, and even notorious, within the circle of his
wanderings (which had a diameter of, say, three thousand miles), in the
same way as an eccentric character is known to a whole countryside. For
instance, in Bankok, where he found employment with Yucker Brothers,
charterers and teak merchants, it was almost pathetic to see him go
about in sunshine hugging his secret, which was known to the very
up-country logs on the river. Schomberg, the keeper of the hotel where
he boarded, a hirsute Alsatian of manly bearing and an irrepressible
retailer of all the scandalous gossip of the place, would, with both
elbows on the table, impart an adorned version of the story to any guest
who cared to imbibe knowledge along with the more costly liquors. "And,
mind you, the nicest fellow you could meet," would be his generous
conclusion; "quite superior." It says a lot for the casual crowd that
frequented Schomberg's establishment that Jim managed to hang out
in Bankok for a whole six months. I remarked that people, perfect
strangers, took to him as one takes to a nice child. His manner was
reserved, but it was as though his personal appearance, his hair, his
eyes, his smile, made friends for him wherever he went. And, of course,
he was no fool. I heard Siegmund Yucker (native of Switzerland), a
gentle creature ravaged by a cruel dyspepsia, and so frightfully lame
that his head swung through a quarter of a circle at every step he took,
declare appreciatively that for one so young he was "of great gabasidy,"
as though it had been a mere question of cubic contents. "Why not send
him up country?" I suggested anxiously. (Yucker Brothers had concessions
and teak forests in the interior.) "If he has capacity, as you say,
he will soon get hold of the work. And physically he is very fit. His
health is always excellent." "Ach! It's a great ting in dis goundry
to be vree vrom tispep-shia," sighed poor Yucker enviously, casting a
stealthy glance at the pit of his ruined stomach. I left him drumming
pensively on his desk and muttering, "Es ist ein' Idee. Es ist ein'
Idee." Unfortunately, that very evening an unpleasant affair took place
in the hotel.
'I don't know that I blame Jim very much, but it was a truly regrettable
incident. It belonged to the lamentable species of bar-room scuffles,
and the other party to it was a cross-eyed Dane of sorts whose
visiting-card recited, under his misbegotten name: first lieutenant in
the Royal Siamese Navy. The fellow, of course, was utterly hopeless at
billiards, but did not like to be beaten, I suppose. He had had enough
to drink to turn nasty after the sixth game, and make some scornful
remark at Jim's expense. Most of the people there didn't hear what
was said, and those who had heard seemed to have had all precise
recollection scared out of them by the appalling nature of the
consequences that immediately ensued. It was very lucky for the Dane
that he could swim, because the room opened on a verandah and the Menam
flowed below very wide and black. A boat-load of Chinamen, bound, as
likely as not, on some thieving expedition, fished out the officer of
the King of Siam, and Jim turned up at about midnight on board my ship
without a hat. "Everybody in the room seemed to know," he said, gasping
yet from the contest, as it were. He was rather sorry, on general
principles, for what had happened, though in this case there had been,
he said, "no option." But what dismayed him was to find the nature of
his burden as well known to everybody as though he had gone about all
that time carrying it on his shoulders. Naturally after this he couldn't
remain in the place. He was universally condemned for the brutal
violence, so unbecoming a man in his delicate position; some maintained
he had been disgracefully drunk at the time; others criticised his want
of tact. Even Schomberg was very much annoyed. "He is a very nice young
man," he said argumentatively to me, "but the lieutenant is a first-rate
fellow too. He dines every night at my table d'hote, you know. And
there's a billiard-cue broken. I can't allow that. First thing this
morning I went over with my apologies to the lieutenant, and I think
I've made it all right for myself; but only think, captain, if everybody
started such games! Why, the man might have been drowned! And here I
can't run out into the next street and buy a new cue. I've got to write
to Europe for them. No, no! A temper like that won't do!" . . . He was
extremely sore on the subject.
'This was the worst incident of all in his--his retreat. Nobody could
deplore it more than myself; for if, as somebody said hearing him
mentioned, "Oh yes! I know. He has knocked about a good deal out here,"
yet he had somehow avoided being battered and chipped in the process.
This last affair, however, made me seriously uneasy, because if his
exquisite sensibilities were to go the length of involving him in
pot-house shindies, he would lose his name of an inoffensive, if
aggravating, fool, and acquire that of a common loafer. For all my
confidence in him I could not help reflecting that in such cases
from the name to the thing itself is but a step. I suppose you will
understand that by that time I could not think of washing my hands
of him. I took him away from Bankok in my ship, and we had a longish
passage. It was pitiful to see how he shrank within himself. A seaman,
even if a mere passenger, takes an interest in a ship, and looks at
the sea-life around him with the critical enjoyment of a painter,
for instance, looking at another man's work. In every sense of the
expression he is "on deck"; but my Jim, for the most part, skulked down
below as though he had been a stowaway. He infected me so that I avoided
speaking on professional matters, such as would suggest themselves
naturally to two sailors during a passage. For whole days we did
not exchange a word; I felt extremely unwilling to give orders to my
officers in his presence. Often, when alone with him on deck or in the
cabin, we didn't know what to do with our eyes.
'I placed him with De Jongh, as you know, glad enough to dispose of him
in any way, yet persuaded that his position was now growing intolerable.
He had lost some of that elasticity which had enabled him to rebound
back into his uncompromising position after every overthrow. One
day, coming ashore, I saw him standing on the quay; the water of the
roadstead and the sea in the offing made one smooth ascending plane, and
the outermost ships at anchor seemed to ride motionless in the sky.
He was waiting for his boat, which was being loaded at our feet
with packages of small stores for some vessel ready to leave. After
exchanging greetings, we remained silent--side by side. "Jove!" he said
suddenly, "this is killing work."
'He smiled at me; I must say he generally could manage a smile. I made
no reply. I knew very well he was not alluding to his duties; he had an
easy time of it with De Jongh. Nevertheless, as soon as he had spoken
I became completely convinced that the work was killing. I did not even
look at him. "Would you like," said I, "to leave this part of the world
altogether; try California or the West Coast? I'll see what I can
do . . ." He interrupted me a little scornfully. "What difference would
it make?" . . . I felt at once convinced that he was right. It would make
no difference; it was not relief he wanted; I seemed to perceive dimly
that what he wanted, what he was, as it were, waiting for, was something
not easy to define--something in the nature of an opportunity. I had
given him many opportunities, but they had been merely opportunities to
earn his bread. Yet what more could any man do? The position struck me
as hopeless, and poor Brierly's saying recurred to me, "Let him creep
twenty feet underground and stay there." Better that, I thought, than
this waiting above ground for the impossible. Yet one could not be sure
even of that. There and then, before his boat was three oars' lengths
away from the quay, I had made up my mind to go and consult Stein in the
evening.
'This Stein was a wealthy and respected merchant. His "house" (because
it was a house, Stein & Co., and there was some sort of partner who,
as Stein said, "looked after the Moluccas") had a large inter-island
business, with a lot of trading posts established in the most
out-of-the-way places for collecting the produce. His wealth and his
respectability were not exactly the reasons why I was anxious to seek
his advice. I desired to confide my difficulty to him because he was
one of the most trustworthy men I had ever known. The gentle light of a
simple, unwearied, as it were, and intelligent good-nature illumined his
long hairless face. It had deep downward folds, and was pale as of a
man who had always led a sedentary life--which was indeed very far from
being the case. His hair was thin, and brushed back from a massive and
lofty forehead. One fancied that at twenty he must have looked very much
like what he was now at threescore. It was a student's face; only the
eyebrows nearly all white, thick and bushy, together with the resolute
searching glance that came from under them, were not in accord with his,
I may say, learned appearance. He was tall and loose-jointed; his slight
stoop, together with an innocent smile, made him appear benevolently
ready to lend you his ear; his long arms with pale big hands had rare
deliberate gestures of a pointing out, demonstrating kind. I speak of
him at length, because under this exterior, and in conjunction with
an upright and indulgent nature, this man possessed an intrepidity of
spirit and a physical courage that could have been called reckless had
it not been like a natural function of the body--say good digestion, for
instance--completely unconscious of itself. It is sometimes said of a
man that he carries his life in his hand. Such a saying would have been
inadequate if applied to him; during the early part of his existence in
the East he had been playing ball with it. All this was in the past, but
I knew the story of his life and the origin of his fortune. He was also
a naturalist of some distinction, or perhaps I should say a learned
collector. Entomology was his special study. His collection of
Buprestidae and Longicorns--beetles all--horrible miniature monsters,
looking malevolent in death and immobility, and his cabinet of
butterflies, beautiful and hovering under the glass of cases on
lifeless wings, had spread his fame far over the earth. The name of this
merchant, adventurer, sometime adviser of a Malay sultan (to whom he
never alluded otherwise than as "my poor Mohammed Bonso"), had, on
account of a few bushels of dead insects, become known to learned
persons in Europe, who could have had no conception, and certainly would
not have cared to know anything, of his life or character. I, who knew,
considered him an eminently suitable person to receive my confidences
about Jim's difficulties as well as my own.''Late in the evening I entered his study, after traversing an imposing
but empty dining-room very dimly lit. The house was silent. I was
preceded by an elderly grim Javanese servant in a sort of livery of
white jacket and yellow sarong, who, after throwing the door open,
exclaimed low, "O master!" and stepping aside, vanished in a mysterious
way as though he had been a ghost only momentarily embodied for that
particular service. Stein turned round with the chair, and in the same
movement his spectacles seemed to get pushed up on his forehead. He
welcomed me in his quiet and humorous voice. Only one corner of the vast
room, the corner in which stood his writing-desk, was strongly lighted
by a shaded reading-lamp, and the rest of the spacious apartment melted
into shapeless gloom like a cavern. Narrow shelves filled with dark
boxes of uniform shape and colour ran round the walls, not from floor
to ceiling, but in a sombre belt about four feet broad. Catacombs of
beetles. Wooden tablets were hung above at irregular intervals. The
light reached one of them, and the word Coleoptera written in gold
letters glittered mysteriously upon a vast dimness. The glass cases
containing the collection of butterflies were ranged in three long rows
upon slender-legged little tables. One of these cases had been removed
from its place and stood on the desk, which was bestrewn with oblong
slips of paper blackened with minute handwriting.
'"So you see me--so," he said. His hand hovered over the case where
a butterfly in solitary grandeur spread out dark bronze wings, seven
inches or more across, with exquisite white veinings and a gorgeous
border of yellow spots. "Only one specimen like this they have in _your_
London, and then--no more. To my small native town this my collection I
shall bequeath. Something of me. The best."
'He bent forward in the chair and gazed intently, his chin over the
front of the case. I stood at his back. "Marvellous," he whispered, and
seemed to forget my presence. His history was curious. He had been born
in Bavaria, and when a youth of twenty-two had taken an active part in
the revolutionary movement of 1848. Heavily compromised, he managed
to make his escape, and at first found a refuge with a poor republican
watchmaker in Trieste. From there he made his way to Tripoli with a
stock of cheap watches to hawk about,--not a very great opening truly,
but it turned out lucky enough, because it was there he came upon a
Dutch traveller--a rather famous man, I believe, but I don't remember
his name. It was that naturalist who, engaging him as a sort of
assistant, took him to the East. They travelled in the Archipelago
together and separately, collecting insects and birds, for four years or
more. Then the naturalist went home, and Stein, having no home to go to,
remained with an old trader he had come across in his journeys in the
interior of Celebes--if Celebes may be said to have an interior. This
old Scotsman, the only white man allowed to reside in the country at the
time, was a privileged friend of the chief ruler of Wajo States, who
was a woman. I often heard Stein relate how that chap, who was slightly
paralysed on one side, had introduced him to the native court a short
time before another stroke carried him off. He was a heavy man with
a patriarchal white beard, and of imposing stature. He came into
the council-hall where all the rajahs, pangerans, and headmen were
assembled, with the queen, a fat wrinkled woman (very free in her
speech, Stein said), reclining on a high couch under a canopy. He
dragged his leg, thumping with his stick, and grasped Stein's arm,
leading him right up to the couch. "Look, queen, and you rajahs, this is
my son," he proclaimed in a stentorian voice. "I have traded with your
fathers, and when I die he shall trade with you and your sons."
'By means of this simple formality Stein inherited the Scotsman's
privileged position and all his stock-in-trade, together with a
fortified house on the banks of the only navigable river in the country.
Shortly afterwards the old queen, who was so free in her speech, died,
and the country became disturbed by various pretenders to the throne.
Stein joined the party of a younger son, the one of whom thirty years
later he never spoke otherwise but as "my poor Mohammed Bonso." They
both became the heroes of innumerable exploits; they had wonderful
adventures, and once stood a siege in the Scotsman's house for a month,
with only a score of followers against a whole army. I believe the
natives talk of that war to this day. Meantime, it seems, Stein never
failed to annex on his own account every butterfly or beetle he could
lay hands on. After some eight years of war, negotiations, false truces,
sudden outbreaks, reconciliation, treachery, and so on, and just as
peace seemed at last permanently established, his "poor Mohammed
Bonso" was assassinated at the gate of his own royal residence while
dismounting in the highest spirits on his return from a successful
deer-hunt. This event rendered Stein's position extremely insecure,
but he would have stayed perhaps had it not been that a short time
afterwards he lost Mohammed's sister ("my dear wife the princess," he
used to say solemnly), by whom he had had a daughter--mother and child
both dying within three days of each other from some infectious fever.
He left the country, which this cruel loss had made unbearable to
him. Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What
followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which
remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream. He
had a little money; he started life afresh, and in the course of years
acquired a considerable fortune. At first he had travelled a good deal
amongst the islands, but age had stolen upon him, and of late he seldom
left his spacious house three miles out of town, with an extensive
garden, and surrounded by stables, offices, and bamboo cottages for
his servants and dependants, of whom he had many. He drove in his buggy
every morning to town, where he had an office with white and Chinese
clerks. He owned a small fleet of schooners and native craft, and dealt
in island produce on a large scale. For the rest he lived solitary,
but not misanthropic, with his books and his collection, classing and
arranging specimens, corresponding with entomologists in Europe, writing
up a descriptive catalogue of his treasures. Such was the history of
the man whom I had come to consult upon Jim's case without any definite
hope. Simply to hear what he would have to say would have been a relief.
I was very anxious, but I respected the intense, almost passionate,
absorption with which he looked at a butterfly, as though on the bronze
sheen of these frail wings, in the white tracings, in the gorgeous
markings, he could see other things, an image of something as perishable
and defying destruction as these delicate and lifeless tissues
displaying a splendour unmarred by death.
'"Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The beauty--but
that is nothing--look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And
so strong! And so exact! This is Nature--the balance of colossal forces.
Every star is so--and every blade of grass stands so--and the mighty
Kosmos ib perfect equilibrium produces--this. This wonder; this
masterpiece of Nature--the great artist."
'"Never heard an entomologist go on like this," I observed cheerfully.
"Masterpiece! And what of man?"
'"Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece," he said, keeping his
eyes fixed on the glass case. "Perhaps the artist was a little mad. Eh?
What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is
not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should
he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making
a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the
blades of grass? . . ."
'"Catching butterflies," I chimed in.
'He smiled, threw himself back in his chair, and stretched his legs.
"Sit down," he said. "I captured this rare specimen myself one very fine
morning. And I had a very big emotion. You don't know what it is for a
collector to capture such a rare specimen. You can't know."
'I smiled at my ease in a rocking-chair. His eyes seemed to look far
beyond the wall at which they stared; and he narrated how, one night,
a messenger arrived from his "poor Mohammed," requiring his presence
at the "residenz"--as he called it--which was distant some nine or ten
miles by a bridle-path over a cultivated plain, with patches of forest
here and there. Early in the morning he started from his fortified
house, after embracing his little Emma, and leaving the "princess," his
wife, in command. He described how she came with him as far as the
gate, walking with one hand on the neck of his horse; she had on a white
jacket, gold pins in her hair, and a brown leather belt over her left
shoulder with a revolver in it. "She talked as women will talk," he
said, "telling me to be careful, and to try to get back before dark, and
what a great wickedness it was for me to go alone. We were at war, and
the country was not safe; my men were putting up bullet-proof shutters
to the house and loading their rifles, and she begged me to have no fear
for her. She could defend the house against anybody till I returned. And
I laughed with pleasure a little. I liked to see her so brave and young
and strong. I too was young then. At the gate she caught hold of my
hand and gave it one squeeze and fell back. I made my horse stand still
outside till I heard the bars of the gate put up behind me. There was a
great enemy of mine, a great noble--and a great rascal too--roaming with
a band in the neighbourhood. I cantered for four or five miles; there
had been rain in the night, but the musts had gone up, up--and the
face of the earth was clean; it lay smiling to me, so fresh and
innocent--like a little child. Suddenly somebody fires a volley--twenty
shots at least it seemed to me. I hear bullets sing in my ear, and
my hat jumps to the back of my head. It was a little intrigue, you
understand. They got my poor Mohammed to send for me and then laid
that ambush. I see it all in a minute, and I think--This wants a little
management. My pony snort, jump, and stand, and I fall slowly forward
with my head on his mane. He begins to walk, and with one eye I could
see over his neck a faint cloud of smoke hanging in front of a clump
of bamboos to my left. I think--Aha! my friends, why you not wait long
enough before you shoot? This is not yet gelungen. Oh no! I get hold of
my revolver with my right hand--quiet--quiet. After all, there were only
seven of these rascals. They get up from the grass and start running
with their sarongs tucked up, waving spears above their heads, and
yelling to each other to look out and catch the horse, because I was
dead. I let them come as close as the door here, and then bang, bang,
bang--take aim each time too. One more shot I fire at a man's back, but
I miss. Too far already. And then I sit alone on my horse with the clean
earth smiling at me, and there are the bodies of three men lying on the
ground. One was curled up like a dog, another on his back had an arm
over his eyes as if to keep off the sun, and the third man he draws up
his leg very slowly and makes it with one kick straight again. I watch
him very carefully from my horse, but there is no more--bleibt ganz
ruhig--keep still, so. And as I looked at his face for some sign of life
I observed something like a faint shadow pass over his forehead. It was
the shadow of this butterfly. Look at the form of the wing. This species
fly high with a strong flight. I raised my eyes and I saw him fluttering
away. I think--Can it be possible? And then I lost him. I dismounted
and went on very slow, leading my horse and holding my revolver with one
hand and my eyes darting up and down and right and left, everywhere! At
last I saw him sitting on a small heap of dirt ten feet away. At once
my heart began to beat quick. I let go my horse, keep my revolver in one
hand, and with the other snatch my soft felt hat off my head. One step.
Steady. Another step. Flop! I got him! When I got up I shook like a leaf
with excitement, and when I opened these beautiful wings and made sure
what a rare and so extraordinary perfect specimen I had, my head went
round and my legs became so weak with emotion that I had to sit on the
ground. I had greatly desired to possess myself of a specimen of that
species when collecting for the professor. I took long journeys and
underwent great privations; I had dreamed of him in my sleep, and here
suddenly I had him in my fingers--for myself! In the words of the poet"
(he pronounced it "boet")--
"'So halt' ich's endlich denn in meinen Handen,
Und nenn' es in gewissem Sinne mein.'"
He gave to the last word the emphasis of a suddenly lowered voice, and
withdrew his eyes slowly from my face. He began to charge a long-stemmed
pipe busily and in silence, then, pausing with his thumb on the orifice
of the bowl, looked again at me significantly.
'"Yes, my good friend. On that day I had nothing to desire; I had
greatly annoyed my principal enemy; I was young, strong; I had
friendship; I had the love" (he said "lof") "of woman, a child I had,
to make my heart very full--and even what I had once dreamed in my sleep
had come into my hand too!"
'He struck a match, which flared violently. His thoughtful placid face
twitched once.
'"Friend, wife, child," he said slowly, gazing at the small
flame--"phoo!" The match was blown out. He sighed and turned again to
the glass case. The frail and beautiful wings quivered faintly, as if
his breath had for an instant called back to life that gorgeous object
of his dreams.
'"The work," he began suddenly, pointing to the scattered slips, and in
his usual gentle and cheery tone, "is making great progress. I have been
this rare specimen describing. . . . Na! And what is your good news?"
'"To tell you the truth, Stein," I said with an effort that surprised
me, "I came here to describe a specimen. . . ."
'"Butterfly?" he asked, with an unbelieving and humorous eagerness.
'"Nothing so perfect," I answered, feeling suddenly dispirited with all
sorts of doubts. "A man!"
'"Ach so!" he murmured, and his smiling countenance, turned to me,
became grave. Then after looking at me for a while he said slowly,
"Well--I am a man too."
'Here you have him as he was; he knew how to be so generously
encouraging as to make a scrupulous man hesitate on the brink of
confidence; but if I did hesitate it was not for long.
'He heard me out, sitting with crossed legs. Sometimes his head would
disappear completely in a great eruption of smoke, and a sympathetic
growl would come out from the cloud. When I finished he uncrossed his
legs, laid down his pipe, leaned forward towards me earnestly with his
elbows on the arms of his chair, the tips of his fingers together.
'"I understand very well. He is romantic."
'He had diagnosed the case for me, and at first I was quite startled to
find how simple it was; and indeed our conference resembled so much a
medical consultation--Stein, of learned aspect, sitting in an arm-chair
before his desk; I, anxious, in another, facing him, but a little to one
side--that it seemed natural to ask--
'"What's good for it?"
'He lifted up a long forefinger.
'"There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us from being ourselves
cure!" The finger came down on the desk with a smart rap. The case
which he had made to look so simple before became if possible still
simpler--and altogether hopeless. There was a pause. "Yes," said I,
"strictly speaking, the question is not how to get cured, but how to
live."
'He approved with his head, a little sadly as it seemed. "Ja! ja! In
general, adapting the words of your great poet: That is the
question. . . ." He went on nodding sympathetically. . . . "How to be!
Ach! How to be."
'He stood up with the tips of his fingers resting on the desk.
'"We want in so many different ways to be," he began again. "This
magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it;
but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He want to be so,
and again he want to be so. . . ." He moved his hand up, then down. . . .
"He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil--and every time he
shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow--so fine as he can
never be. . . . In a dream. . . ."
'He lowered the glass lid, the automatic lock clicked sharply, and
taking up the case in both hands he bore it religiously away to its
place, passing out of the bright circle of the lamp into the ring of
fainter light--into shapeless dusk at last. It had an odd effect--as
if these few steps had carried him out of this concrete and perplexed
world. His tall form, as though robbed of its substance, hovered
noiselessly over invisible things with stooping and indefinite
movements; his voice, heard in that remoteness where he could be
glimpsed mysteriously busy with immaterial cares, was no longer
incisive, seemed to roll voluminous and grave--mellowed by distance.
'"And because you not always can keep your eyes shut there comes the
real trouble--the heart pain--the world pain. I tell you, my friend, it
is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for
the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. . . .
Ja! . . . And all the time you are such a fine fellow too! Wie? Was?
Gott im Himmel! How can that be? Ha! ha! ha!"
'The shadow prowling amongst the graves of butterflies laughed
boisterously.
'"Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into
a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into
the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns--nicht wahr?
. . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit
yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water
make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me--how to be?"
'His voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, as though away there in
the dusk he had been inspired by some whisper of knowledge. "I will tell
you! For that too there is only one way."
'With a hasty swish-swish of his slippers he loomed up in the ring of
faint light, and suddenly appeared in the bright circle of the lamp. His
extended hand aimed at my breast like a pistol; his deepset eyes seemed
to pierce through me, but his twitching lips uttered no word, and the
austere exaltation of a certitude seen in the dusk vanished from his
face. The hand that had been pointing at my breast fell, and by-and-by,
coming a step nearer, he laid it gently on my shoulder. There were
things, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only he
had lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot--he forgot. The light
had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant
shadows. He sat down and, with both elbows on the desk, rubbed his
forehead. "And yet it is true--it is true. In the destructive element
immerse." . . . He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one
hand on each side of his face. "That was the way. To follow the dream,
and again to follow the dream--and so--ewig--usque ad finem. . . ." The
whisper of his conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain
expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn--or was it,
perchance, at the coming of the night? One had not the courage to
decide; but it was a charming and deceptive light, throwing the
impalpable poesy of its dimness over pitfalls--over graves. His life had
begun in sacrifice, in enthusiasm for generous ideas; he had travelled
very far, on various ways, on strange paths, and whatever he followed
it had been without faltering, and therefore without shame and without
regret. In so far he was right. That was the way, no doubt. Yet for all
that, the great plain on which men wander amongst graves and pitfalls
remained very desolate under the impalpable poesy of its crepuscular
light, overshadowed in the centre, circled with a bright edge as if
surrounded by an abyss full of flames. When at last I broke the silence
it was to express the opinion that no one could be more romantic than
himself.
'He shook his head slowly, and afterwards looked at me with a patient
and inquiring glance. It was a shame, he said. There we were sitting
and talking like two boys, instead of putting our heads together to find
something practical--a practical remedy--for the evil--for the great
evil--he repeated, with a humorous and indulgent smile. For all that,
our talk did not grow more practical. We avoided pronouncing Jim's name
as though we had tried to keep flesh and blood out of our discussion,
or he were nothing but an erring spirit, a suffering and nameless shade.
"Na!" said Stein, rising. "To-night you sleep here, and in the morning
we shall do something practical--practical. . . ." He lit a two-branched
candlestick and led the way. We passed through empty dark rooms,
escorted by gleams from the lights Stein carried. They glided along the
waxed floors, sweeping here and there over the polished surface of
a table, leaped upon a fragmentary curve of a piece of furniture, or
flashed perpendicularly in and out of distant mirrors, while the forms
of two men and the flicker of two flames could be seen for a moment
stealing silently across the depths of a crystalline void. He walked
slowly a pace in advance with stooping courtesy; there was a profound,
as it were a listening, quietude on his face; the long flaxen locks
mixed with white threads were scattered thinly upon his slightly bowed
neck.
'"He is romantic--romantic," he repeated. "And that is very bad--very
bad. . . . Very good, too," he added. "But _is he_?" I queried.
'"Gewiss," he said, and stood still holding up the candelabrum, but
without looking at me. "Evident! What is it that by inward pain makes
him know himself? What is it that for you and me makes him--exist?"
'At that moment it was difficult to believe in Jim's existence--starting
from a country parsonage, blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of
dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material
world--but his imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with
an irresistible force! I saw it vividly, as though in our progress
through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and
the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames
within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to
absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half
submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. "Perhaps he is," I
admitted with a slight laugh, whose unexpectedly loud reverberation
made me lower my voice directly; "but I am sure you are." With his head
dropping on his breast and the light held high he began to walk again.
"Well--I exist, too," he said.
'He preceded me. My eyes followed his movements, but what I did see was
not the head of the firm, the welcome guest at afternoon receptions,
the correspondent of learned societies, the entertainer of stray
naturalists; I saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had known
how to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humble
surroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war--in
all the exalted elements of romance. At the door of my room he faced me.
"Yes," I said, as though carrying on a discussion, "and amongst other
things you dreamed foolishly of a certain butterfly; but when one
fine morning your dream came in your way you did not let the splendid
opportunity escape. Did you? Whereas he . . ." Stein lifted his hand.
"And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams
I had lost that had come in my way?" He shook his head regretfully. "It
seems to me that some would have been very fine--if I had made them come
true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don't know." "Whether his
were fine or not," I said, "he knows of one which he certainly did not
catch." "Everybody knows of one or two like that," said Stein; "and that
is the trouble--the great trouble. . . ."
'He shook hands on the threshold, peered into my room under his
raised arm. "Sleep well. And to-morrow we must do something
practical--practical. . . ."
'Though his own room was beyond mine I saw him return the way he came.
He was going back to his butterflies.'
'I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan?' Marlow resumed,
after a silence occupied in the careful lighting of a cigar. 'It does
not matter; there's many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of
a night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere
of its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to the
astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,
weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of its
light--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering. Thus with Patusan. It
was referred to knowingly in the inner government circles in Batavia,
especially as to its irregularities and aberrations, and it was known
by name to some few, very few, in the mercantile world. Nobody, however,
had been there, and I suspect no one desired to go there in person,
just as an astronomer, I should fancy, would strongly object to being
transported into a distant heavenly body, where, parted from his earthly
emoluments, he would be bewildered by the view of an unfamiliar heavens.
However, neither heavenly bodies nor astronomers have anything to do
with Patusan. It was Jim who went there. I only meant you to understand
that had Stein arranged to send him into a star of the fifth magnitude
the change could not have been greater. He left his earthly failings
behind him and what sort of reputation he had, and there was a totally
new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon. Entirely
new, entirely remarkable. And he got hold of them in a remarkable way.
'Stein was the man who knew more about Patusan than anybody else. More
than was known in the government circles I suspect. I have no doubt he
had been there, either in his butterfly-hunting days or later on, when
he tried in his incorrigible way to season with a pinch of romance the
fattening dishes of his commercial kitchen. There were very few places
in the Archipelago he had not seen in the original dusk of their being,
before light (and even electric light) had been carried into them for
the sake of better morality and--and--well--the greater profit, too.
It was at breakfast of the morning following our talk about Jim that he
mentioned the place, after I had quoted poor Brierly's remark: "Let him
creep twenty feet underground and stay there." He looked up at me with
interested attention, as though I had been a rare insect. "This could be
done, too," he remarked, sipping his coffee. "Bury him in some sort,"
I explained. "One doesn't like to do it of course, but it would be the
best thing, seeing what he is." "Yes; he is young," Stein mused. "The
youngest human being now in existence," I affirmed. "Schon. There's
Patusan," he went on in the same tone. . . . "And the woman is dead
now," he added incomprehensibly.
'Of course I don't know that story; I can only guess that once before
Patusan had been used as a grave for some sin, transgression, or
misfortune. It is impossible to suspect Stein. The only woman that
had ever existed for him was the Malay girl he called "My wife the
princess," or, more rarely, in moments of expansion, "the mother of my
Emma." Who was the woman he had mentioned in connection with Patusan I
can't say; but from his allusions I understand she had been an educated
and very good-looking Dutch-Malay girl, with a tragic or perhaps only a
pitiful history, whose most painful part no doubt was her marriage with
a Malacca Portuguese who had been clerk in some commercial house in
the Dutch colonies. I gathered from Stein that this man was an
unsatisfactory person in more ways than one, all being more or less
indefinite and offensive. It was solely for his wife's sake that Stein
had appointed him manager of Stein & Co.'s trading post in Patusan;
but commercially the arrangement was not a success, at any rate for
the firm, and now the woman had died, Stein was disposed to try another
agent there. The Portuguese, whose name was Cornelius, considered
himself a very deserving but ill-used person, entitled by his abilities
to a better position. This man Jim would have to relieve. "But I don't
think he will go away from the place," remarked Stein. "That has nothing
to do with me. It was only for the sake of the woman that I . . . But as
I think there is a daughter left, I shall let him, if he likes to stay,
keep the old house."
'Patusan is a remote district of a native-ruled state, and the chief
settlement bears the same name. At a point on the river about forty
miles from the sea, where the first houses come into view, there can
be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep
hills very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep
fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the
valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the appearance from the
settlement is of one irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the
two halves leaning slightly apart. On the third day after the full, the
moon, as seen from the open space in front of Jim's house (he had a very
fine house in the native style when I visited him), rose exactly behind
these hills, its diffused light at first throwing the two masses into
intensely black relief, and then the nearly perfect disc, glowing
ruddily, appeared, gliding upwards between the sides of the chasm, till
it floated away above the summits, as if escaping from a yawning grave
in gentle triumph. "Wonderful effect," said Jim by my side. "Worth
seeing. Is it not?"
'And this question was put with a note of personal pride that made me
smile, as though he had had a hand in regulating that unique spectacle.
He had regulated so many things in Patusan--things that would have
appeared as much beyond his control as the motions of the moon and the
stars.
'It was inconceivable. That was the distinctive quality of the part into
which Stein and I had tumbled him unwittingly, with no other notion than
to get him out of the way; out of his own way, be it understood. That
was our main purpose, though, I own, I might have had another motive
which had influenced me a little. I was about to go home for a time;
and it may be I desired, more than I was aware of myself, to dispose of
him--to dispose of him, you understand--before I left. I was going home,
and he had come to me from there, with his miserable trouble and his
shadowy claim, like a man panting under a burden in a mist. I cannot
say I had ever seen him distinctly--not even to this day, after I had
my last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood
the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the
inseparable part of our knowledge. I did not know so much more about
myself. And then, I repeat, I was going home--to that home distant
enough for all its hearthstones to be like one hearthstone, by which the
humblest of us has the right to sit. We wander in our thousands over the
face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the
seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me
that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.
We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--those whom we
obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most
free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,--even those for whom
home holds no dear face, no familiar voice,--even they have to meet the
spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its
valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees--a
mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy,
to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear
conscience. All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed
very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under
the surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love, the men
we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the
pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with
clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. I
think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call
their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to
meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit--it is those who
understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular
right to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes! few of us understand, but
we all feel it though, and I say _all_ without exception, because those
who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth
whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land
from which he draws his faith together with his life. I don't know
how much Jim understood; but I know he felt, he felt confusedly but
powerfully, the demand of some such truth or some such illusion--I don't
care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference
means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered.
He would never go home now. Not he. Never. Had he been capable of
picturesque manifestations he would have shuddered at the thought
and made you shudder too. But he was not of that sort, though he was
expressive enough in his way. Before the idea of going home he would
grow desperately stiff and immovable, with lowered chin and pouted lips,
and with those candid blue eyes of his glowering darkly under a frown,
as if before something unbearable, as if before something revolting.
There was imagination in that hard skull of his, over which the thick
clustering hair fitted like a cap. As to me, I have no imagination (I
would be more certain about him today, if I had), and I do not mean to
imply that I figured to myself the spirit of the land uprising above the
white cliffs of Dover, to ask me what I--returning with no bones broken,
so to speak--had done with my very young brother. I could not make
such a mistake. I knew very well he was of those about whom there is
no inquiry; I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly,
without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. The spirit of
the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of
innumerable lives. Woe to the stragglers! We exist only in so far as we
hang together. He had straggled in a way; he had not hung on; but he was
aware of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a man's
more intense life makes his death more touching than the death of a
tree. I happened to be handy, and I happened to be touched. That's all
there is to it. I was concerned as to the way he would go out. It would
have hurt me if, for instance, he had taken to drink. The earth is so
small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a blear-eyed,
swollen-faced, besmirched loafer, with no soles to his canvas shoes,
and with a flutter of rags about the elbows, who, on the strength of old
acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars. You know the awful
jaunty bearing of these scarecrows coming to you from a decent past,
the rasping careless voice, the half-averted impudent glances--those
meetings more trying to a man who believes in the solidarity of our
lives than the sight of an impenitent death-bed to a priest. That, to
tell you the truth, was the only danger I could see for him and for
me; but I also mistrusted my want of imagination. It might even come
to something worse, in some way it was beyond my powers of fancy to
foresee. He wouldn't let me forget how imaginative he was, and your
imaginative people swing farther in any direction, as if given a longer
scope of cable in the uneasy anchorage of life. They do. They take to
drink too. It may be I was belittling him by such a fear. How could I
tell? Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic. I only
knew he was one of us. And what business had he to be romantic? I
am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused
reflections because there remains so little to be told of him. He
existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for
you. I've led him out by the hand; I have paraded him before you. Were
my commonplace fears unjust? I won't say--not even now. You may be able
to tell better, since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of
the game. At any rate, they were superfluous. He did not go out, not at
all; on the contrary, he came on wonderfully, came on straight as a die
and in excellent form, which showed that he could stay as well as spurt.
I ought to be delighted, for it is a victory in which I had taken my
part; but I am not so pleased as I would have expected to be. I ask
myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in
which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines--a
straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And
besides, the last word is not said,--probably shall never be said. Are
not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our
stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given
up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be
pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to
say our last word--the last word of our love, of our desire, faith,
remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be
shaken, I suppose--at least, not by us who know so many truths about
either. My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved
greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in
the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds.
I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your
imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is
respectable to have no illusions--and safe--and profitable--and dull.
Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that
light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow
of sparks struck from a cold stone--and as short-lived, alas!'
'The conquest of love, honour, men's confidence--the pride of it, the
power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are
struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim's successes there
were no externals. Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of
an indifferent world, and the noise of the white surf along the coast
overpowered the voice of fame. The stream of civilisation, as if divided
on a headland a hundred miles north of Patusan, branches east and
south-east, leaving its plains and valleys, its old trees and its old
mankind, neglected and isolated, such as an insignificant and crumbling
islet between the two branches of a mighty, devouring stream. You find
the name of the country pretty often in collections of old voyages. The
seventeenth-century traders went there for pepper, because the passion
for pepper seemed to burn like a flame of love in the breast of Dutch
and English adventurers about the time of James the First. Where
wouldn't they go for pepper! For a bag of pepper they would cut each
other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls,
of which they were so careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that
desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes--the unknown seas, the
loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence,
and despair. It made them great! By heavens! it made them heroic; and
it made them pathetic too in their craving for trade with the inflexible
death levying its toll on young and old. It seems impossible to believe
that mere greed could hold men to such a steadfastness of purpose, to
such a blind persistence in endeavour and sacrifice. And indeed those
who adventured their persons and lives risked all they had for a slender
reward. They left their bones to lie bleaching on distant shores, so
that wealth might flow to the living at home. To us, their less tried
successors, they appear magnified, not as agents of trade but as
instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into the unknown in
obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a
dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they
were ready for the wonderful. They recorded it complacently in their
sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of strange
nations, in the glory of splendid rulers.
'In Patusan they had found lots of pepper, and had been impressed by the
magnificence and the wisdom of the Sultan; but somehow, after a century
of chequered intercourse, the country seems to drop gradually out of the
trade. Perhaps the pepper had given out. Be it as it may, nobody cares
for it now; the glory has departed, the Sultan is an imbecile youth
with two thumbs on his left hand and an uncertain and beggarly revenue
extorted from a miserable population and stolen from him by his many
uncles.
'This of course I have from Stein. He gave me their names and a short
sketch of the life and character of each. He was as full of information
about native states as an official report, but infinitely more amusing.
He _had_ to know. He traded in so many, and in some districts--as in
Patusan, for instance--his firm was the only one to have an agency by
special permit from the Dutch authorities. The Government trusted his
discretion, and it was understood that he took all the risks. The men
he employed understood that too, but he made it worth their while
apparently. He was perfectly frank with me over the breakfast-table in
the morning. As far as he was aware (the last news was thirteen months
old, he stated precisely), utter insecurity for life and property was
the normal condition. There were in Patusan antagonistic forces, and one
of them was Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan's uncles, the governor
of the river, who did the extorting and the stealing, and ground down
to the point of extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly
defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating--"For indeed," as
Stein remarked, "where could they go, and how could they get away?"
No doubt they did not even desire to get away. The world (which is
circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains) has been given into the
hand of the high-born, and _this_ Rajah they knew: he was of their own
royal house. I had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman later on. He
was a dirty, little, used-up old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth,
who swallowed an opium pill every two hours, and in defiance of common
decency wore his hair uncovered and falling in wild stringy locks about
his wizened grimy face. When giving audience he would clamber upon a
sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a rotten
bamboo floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or
fifteen feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying
under the house. That is where and how he received us when, accompanied
by Jim, I paid him a visit of ceremony. There were about forty people in
the room, and perhaps three times as many in the great courtyard below.
There was constant movement, coming and going, pushing and murmuring,
at our backs. A few youths in gay silks glared from the distance; the
majority, slaves and humble dependants, were half naked, in ragged
sarongs, dirty with ashes and mud-stains. I had never seen Jim look so
grave, so self-possessed, in an impenetrable, impressive way. In the
midst of these dark-faced men, his stalwart figure in white apparel,
the gleaming clusters of his fair hair, seemed to catch all the sunshine
that trickled through the cracks in the closed shutters of that dim
hall, with its walls of mats and a roof of thatch. He appeared like a
creature not only of another kind but of another essence. Had they not
seen him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended
upon them from the clouds. He did, however, come in a crazy dug-out,
sitting (very still and with his knees together, for fear of overturning
the thing)--sitting on a tin box--which I had lent him--nursing on his
lap a revolver of the Navy pattern--presented by me on parting--which,
through an interposition of Providence, or through some wrong-headed
notion, that was just like him, or else from sheer instinctive sagacity,
he had decided to carry unloaded. That's how he ascended the Patusan
river. Nothing could have been more prosaic and more unsafe, more
extravagantly casual, more lonely. Strange, this fatality that would
cast the complexion of a flight upon all his acts, of impulsive
unreflecting desertion of a jump into the unknown.
'It is precisely the casualness of it that strikes me most. Neither
Stein nor I had a clear conception of what might be on the other side
when we, metaphorically speaking, took him up and hove him over the
wall with scant ceremony. At the moment I merely wished to achieve his
disappearance; Stein characteristically enough had a sentimental motive.
He had a notion of paying off (in kind, I suppose) the old debt he had
never forgotten. Indeed he had been all his life especially friendly to
anybody from the British Isles. His late benefactor, it is true, was a
Scot--even to the length of being called Alexander McNeil--and Jim came
from a long way south of the Tweed; but at the distance of six or
seven thousand miles Great Britain, though never diminished, looks
foreshortened enough even to its own children to rob such details of
their importance. Stein was excusable, and his hinted intentions were
so generous that I begged him most earnestly to keep them secret for
a time. I felt that no consideration of personal advantage should be
allowed to influence Jim; that not even the risk of such influence
should be run. We had to deal with another sort of reality. He wanted
a refuge, and a refuge at the cost of danger should be offered
him--nothing more.
'Upon every other point I was perfectly frank with him, and I even (as
I believed at the time) exaggerated the danger of the undertaking. As
a matter of fact I did not do it justice; his first day in Patusan was
nearly his last--would have been his last if he had not been so reckless
or so hard on himself and had condescended to load that revolver. I
remember, as I unfolded our precious scheme for his retreat, how his
stubborn but weary resignation was gradually replaced by surprise,
interest, wonder, and by boyish eagerness. This was a chance he had been
dreaming of. He couldn't think how he merited that I . . . He would be
shot if he could see to what he owed . . . And it was Stein, Stein the
merchant, who . . . but of course it was me he had to . . . I cut him
short. He was not articulate, and his gratitude caused me inexplicable
pain. I told him that if he owed this chance to any one especially, it
was to an old Scot of whom he had never heard, who had died many years
ago, of whom little was remembered besides a roaring voice and a rough
sort of honesty. There was really no one to receive his thanks. Stein
was passing on to a young man the help he had received in his own young
days, and I had done no more than to mention his name. Upon this he
coloured, and, twisting a bit of paper in his fingers, he remarked
bashfully that I had always trusted him.
'I admitted that such was the case, and added after a pause that I
wished he had been able to follow my example. "You think I don't?" he
asked uneasily, and remarked in a mutter that one had to get some sort
of show first; then brightening up, and in a loud voice he protested he
would give me no occasion to regret my confidence, which--which . . .
'"Do not misapprehend," I interrupted. "It is not in your power to make
me regret anything." There would be no regrets; but if there were, it
would be altogether my own affair: on the other hand, I wished him to
understand clearly that this arrangement, this--this--experiment, was
his own doing; he was responsible for it and no one else. "Why? Why," he
stammered, "this is the very thing that I . . ." I begged him not to
be dense, and he looked more puzzled than ever. He was in a fair way
to make life intolerable to himself . . . "Do you think so?" he asked,
disturbed; but in a moment added confidently, "I was going on though.
Was I not?" It was impossible to be angry with him: I could not help a
smile, and told him that in the old days people who went on like
this were on the way of becoming hermits in a wilderness. "Hermits be
hanged!" he commented with engaging impulsiveness. Of course he didn't
mind a wilderness. . . . "I was glad of it," I said. That was where
he would be going to. He would find it lively enough, I ventured to
promise. "Yes, yes," he said, keenly. He had shown a desire, I continued
inflexibly, to go out and shut the door after him. . . . "Did I?" he
interrupted in a strange access of gloom that seemed to envelop him
from head to foot like the shadow of a passing cloud. He was wonderfully
expressive after all. Wonderfully! "Did I?" he repeated bitterly. "You
can't say I made much noise about it. And I can keep it up, too--only,
confound it! you show me a door." . . . "Very well. Pass on," I struck
in. I could make him a solemn promise that it would be shut behind him
with a vengeance. His fate, whatever it was, would be ignored,
because the country, for all its rotten state, was not judged ripe
for interference. Once he got in, it would be for the outside world as
though he had never existed. He would have nothing but the soles of his
two feet to stand upon, and he would have first to find his ground at
that. "Never existed--that's it, by Jove," he murmured to himself. His
eyes, fastened upon my lips, sparkled. If he had thoroughly understood
the conditions, I concluded, he had better jump into the first gharry he
could see and drive on to Stein's house for his final instructions. He
flung out of the room before I had fairly finished speaking.'
'He did not return till next morning. He had been kept to dinner and for
the night. There never had been such a wonderful man as Mr. Stein. He
had in his pocket a letter for Cornelius ("the Johnnie who's going to
get the sack," he explained, with a momentary drop in his elation), and
he exhibited with glee a silver ring, such as natives use, worn down
very thin and showing faint traces of chasing.
'This was his introduction to an old chap called Doramin--one of the
principal men out there--a big pot--who had been Mr. Stein's friend in
that country where he had all these adventures. Mr. Stein called him
"war-comrade." War-comrade was good. Wasn't it? And didn't Mr. Stein
speak English wonderfully well? Said he had learned it in Celebes--of
all places! That was awfully funny. Was it not? He did speak with an
accent--a twang--did I notice? That chap Doramin had given him the ring.
They had exchanged presents when they parted for the last time. Sort of
promising eternal friendship. He called it fine--did I not? They had
to make a dash for dear life out of the country when that
Mohammed--Mohammed--What's-his-name had been killed. I knew the story,
of course. Seemed a beastly shame, didn't it? . . .
'He ran on like this, forgetting his plate, with a knife and fork in
hand (he had found me at tiffin), slightly flushed, and with his eyes
darkened many shades, which was with him a sign of excitement. The ring
was a sort of credential--("It's like something you read of in books,"
he threw in appreciatively)--and Doramin would do his best for him. Mr.
Stein had been the means of saving that chap's life on some occasion;
purely by accident, Mr. Stein had said, but he--Jim--had his own opinion
about that. Mr. Stein was just the man to look out for such accidents.
No matter. Accident or purpose, this would serve his turn immensely.
Hoped to goodness the jolly old beggar had not gone off the hooks
meantime. Mr. Stein could not tell. There had been no news for more
than a year; they were kicking up no end of an all-fired row amongst
themselves, and the river was closed. Jolly awkward, this; but, no fear;
he would manage to find a crack to get in.
'He impressed, almost frightened, me with his elated rattle. He was
voluble like a youngster on the eve of a long holiday with a prospect of
delightful scrapes, and such an attitude of mind in a grown man and in
this connection had in it something phenomenal, a little mad, dangerous,
unsafe. I was on the point of entreating him to take things seriously
when he dropped his knife and fork (he had begun eating, or rather
swallowing food, as it were, unconsciously), and began a search all
round his plate. The ring! The ring! Where the devil . . . Ah! Here it
was . . . He closed his big hand on it, and tried all his pockets one
after another. Jove! wouldn't do to lose the thing. He meditated gravely
over his fist. Had it? Would hang the bally affair round his neck! And
he proceeded to do this immediately, producing a string (which looked
like a bit of a cotton shoe-lace) for the purpose. There! That would do
the trick! It would be the deuce if . . . He seemed to catch sight of my
face for the first time, and it steadied him a little. I probably didn't
realise, he said with a naive gravity, how much importance he attached
to that token. It meant a friend; and it is a good thing to have a
friend. He knew something about that. He nodded at me expressively, but
before my disclaiming gesture he leaned his head on his hand and for
a while sat silent, playing thoughtfully with the bread-crumbs on the
cloth . . . "Slam the door--that was jolly well put," he cried, and
jumping up, began to pace the room, reminding me by the set of the
shoulders, the turn of his head, the headlong and uneven stride, of
that night when he had paced thus, confessing, explaining--what you
will--but, in the last instance, living--living before me, under his
own little cloud, with all his unconscious subtlety which could draw
consolation from the very source of sorrow. It was the same mood, the
same and different, like a fickle companion that to-day guiding you
on the true path, with the same eyes, the same step, the same impulse,
to-morrow will lead you hopelessly astray. His tread was assured, his
straying, darkened eyes seemed to search the room for something. One of
his footfalls somehow sounded louder than the other--the fault of his
boots probably--and gave a curious impression of an invisible halt in
his gait. One of his hands was rammed deep into his trousers' pocket,
the other waved suddenly above his head. "Slam the door!" he shouted.
"I've been waiting for that. I'll show yet . . . I'll . . . I'm ready
for any confounded thing . . . I've been dreaming of it . . . Jove! Get
out of this. Jove! This is luck at last . . . You wait. I'll . . ."
'He tossed his head fearlessly, and I confess that for the first and
last time in our acquaintance I perceived myself unexpectedly to be
thoroughly sick of him. Why these vapourings? He was stumping about
the room flourishing his arm absurdly, and now and then feeling on
his breast for the ring under his clothes. Where was the sense of such
exaltation in a man appointed to be a trading-clerk, and in a place
where there was no trade--at that? Why hurl defiance at the universe?
This was not a proper frame of mind to approach any undertaking; an
improper frame of mind not only for him, I said, but for any man. He
stood still over me. Did I think so? he asked, by no means subdued, and
with a smile in which I seemed to detect suddenly something insolent.
But then I am twenty years his senior. Youth is insolent; it is its
right--its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in
this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence. He went off into a
far corner, and coming back, he, figuratively speaking, turned to rend
me. I spoke like that because I--even I, who had been no end kind
to him--even I remembered--remembered--against him--what--what had
happened. And what about others--the--the--world? Where's the wonder he
wanted to get out, meant to get out, meant to stay out--by heavens! And
I talked about proper frames of mind!
'"It is not I or the world who remember," I shouted. "It is you--you,
who remember."
'He did not flinch, and went on with heat, "Forget everything,
everybody, everybody." . . . His voice fell. . . "But you," he added.
'"Yes--me too--if it would help," I said, also in a low tone. After this
we remained silent and languid for a time as if exhausted. Then he began
again, composedly, and told me that Mr. Stein had instructed him to wait
for a month or so, to see whether it was possible for him to remain,
before he began building a new house for himself, so as to avoid
"vain expense." He did make use of funny expressions--Stein did. "Vain
expense" was good. . . . Remain? Why! of course. He would hang on. Let
him only get in--that's all; he would answer for it he would remain.
Never get out. It was easy enough to remain.
'"Don't be foolhardy," I said, rendered uneasy by his threatening tone.
"If you only live long enough you will want to come back."
'"Come back to what?" he asked absently, with his eyes fixed upon the
face of a clock on the wall.
'I was silent for a while. "Is it to be never, then?" I said. "Never,"
he repeated dreamily without looking at me, and then flew into sudden
activity. "Jove! Two o'clock, and I sail at four!"
'It was true. A brigantine of Stein's was leaving for the westward that
afternoon, and he had been instructed to take his passage in her, only
no orders to delay the sailing had been given. I suppose Stein forgot.
He made a rush to get his things while I went aboard my ship, where
he promised to call on his way to the outer roadstead. He turned up
accordingly in a great hurry and with a small leather valise in his
hand. This wouldn't do, and I offered him an old tin trunk of mine
supposed to be water-tight, or at least damp-tight. He effected the
transfer by the simple process of shooting out the contents of his
valise as you would empty a sack of wheat. I saw three books in the
tumble; two small, in dark covers, and a thick green-and-gold volume--a
half-crown complete Shakespeare. "You read this?" I asked. "Yes. Best
thing to cheer up a fellow," he said hastily. I was struck by this
appreciation, but there was no time for Shakespearian talk. A
heavy revolver and two small boxes of cartridges were lying on the
cuddy-table. "Pray take this," I said. "It may help you to remain."
No sooner were these words out of my mouth than I perceived what grim
meaning they could bear. "May help you to get in," I corrected myself
remorsefully. He however was not troubled by obscure meanings; he
thanked me effusively and bolted out, calling Good-bye over his
shoulder. I heard his voice through the ship's side urging his boatmen
to give way, and looking out of the stern-port I saw the boat rounding
under the counter. He sat in her leaning forward, exciting his men with
voice and gestures; and as he had kept the revolver in his hand and
seemed to be presenting it at their heads, I shall never forget the
scared faces of the four Javanese, and the frantic swing of their stroke
which snatched that vision from under my eyes. Then turning away, the
first thing I saw were the two boxes of cartridges on the cuddy-table.
He had forgotten to take them.
'I ordered my gig manned at once; but Jim's rowers, under the impression
that their lives hung on a thread while they had that madman in the
boat, made such excellent time that before I had traversed half the
distance between the two vessels I caught sight of him clambering over
the rail, and of his box being passed up. All the brigantine's canvas
was loose, her mainsail was set, and the windlass was just beginning to
clink as I stepped upon her deck: her master, a dapper little half-caste
of forty or so, in a blue flannel suit, with lively eyes, his round
face the colour of lemon-peel, and with a thin little black moustache
drooping on each side of his thick, dark lips, came forward smirking. He
turned out, notwithstanding his self-satisfied and cheery exterior, to
be of a careworn temperament. In answer to a remark of mine (while Jim
had gone below for a moment) he said, "Oh yes. Patusan." He was going to
carry the gentleman to the mouth of the river, but would "never ascend."
His flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary compiled by
a lunatic. Had Mr. Stein desired him to "ascend," he would have
"reverentially"--(I think he wanted to say respectfully--but devil only
knows)--"reverentially made objects for the safety of properties."
If disregarded, he would have presented "resignation to quit." Twelve
months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius
"propitiated many offertories" to Mr. Rajah Allang and the "principal
populations," on conditions which made the trade "a snare and ashes
in the mouth," yet his ship had been fired upon from the woods by
"irresponsive parties" all the way down the river; which causing his
crew "from exposure to limb to remain silent in hidings," the brigantine
was nearly stranded on a sandbank at the bar, where she "would have
been perishable beyond the act of man." The angry disgust at the
recollection, the pride of his fluency, to which he turned an attentive
ear, struggled for the possession of his broad simple face. He scowled
and beamed at me, and watched with satisfaction the undeniable effect
of his phraseology. Dark frowns ran swiftly over the placid sea, and
the brigantine, with her fore-topsail to the mast and her main-boom
amidships, seemed bewildered amongst the cat's-paws. He told me further,
gnashing his teeth, that the Rajah was a "laughable hyaena" (can't
imagine how he got hold of hyaenas); while somebody else was many
times falser than the "weapons of a crocodile." Keeping one eye on the
movements of his crew forward, he let loose his volubility--comparing
the place to a "cage of beasts made ravenous by long impenitence." I
fancy he meant impunity. He had no intention, he cried, to "exhibit
himself to be made attached purposefully to robbery." The long-drawn
wails, giving the time for the pull of the men catting the anchor,
came to an end, and he lowered his voice. "Plenty too much enough of
Patusan," he concluded, with energy.
'I heard afterwards he had been so indiscreet as to get himself tied up
by the neck with a rattan halter to a post planted in the middle of a
mud-hole before the Rajah's house. He spent the best part of a day and a
whole night in that unwholesome situation, but there is every reason
to believe the thing had been meant as a sort of joke. He brooded for
a while over that horrid memory, I suppose, and then addressed in a
quarrelsome tone the man coming aft to the helm. When he turned to me
again it was to speak judicially, without passion. He would take the
gentleman to the mouth of the river at Batu Kring (Patusan town "being
situated internally," he remarked, "thirty miles"). But in his eyes,
he continued--a tone of bored, weary conviction replacing his previous
voluble delivery--the gentleman was already "in the similitude of a
corpse." "What? What do you say?" I asked. He assumed a startlingly
ferocious demeanour, and imitated to perfection the act of stabbing from
behind. "Already like the body of one deported," he explained, with the
insufferably conceited air of his kind after what they imagine a display
of cleverness. Behind him I perceived Jim smiling silently at me, and
with a raised hand checking the exclamation on my lips.
'Then, while the half-caste, bursting with importance, shouted his
orders, while the yards swung creaking and the heavy boom came surging
over, Jim and I, alone as it were, to leeward of the mainsail, clasped
each other's hands and exchanged the last hurried words. My heart was
freed from that dull resentment which had existed side by side with
interest in his fate. The absurd chatter of the half-caste had given
more reality to the miserable dangers of his path than Stein's careful
statements. On that occasion the sort of formality that had been always
present in our intercourse vanished from our speech; I believe I
called him "dear boy," and he tacked on the words "old man" to some
half-uttered expression of gratitude, as though his risk set off against
my years had made us more equal in age and in feeling. There was a
moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a
glimpse of some everlasting, of some saving truth. He exerted himself to
soothe me as though he had been the more mature of the two. "All right,
all right," he said, rapidly, and with feeling. "I promise to take care
of myself. Yes; I won't take any risks. Not a single blessed risk. Of
course not. I mean to hang out. Don't you worry. Jove! I feel as if
nothing could touch me. Why! this is luck from the word Go. I wouldn't
spoil such a magnificent chance!" . . . A magnificent chance! Well, it
_was_ magnificent, but chances are what men make them, and how was I
to know? As he had said, even I--even I remembered--his--his misfortune
against him. It was true. And the best thing for him was to go.
'My gig had dropped in the wake of the brigantine, and I saw him aft
detached upon the light of the westering sun, raising his cap high above
his head. I heard an indistinct shout, "You--shall--hear--of--me." Of
me, or from me, I don't know which. I think it must have been of me. My
eyes were too dazzled by the glitter of the sea below his feet to see
him clearly; I am fated never to see him clearly; but I can assure you
no man could have appeared less "in the similitude of a corpse," as that
half-caste croaker had put it. I could see the little wretch's face,
the shape and colour of a ripe pumpkin, poked out somewhere under Jim's
elbow. He, too, raised his arm as if for a downward thrust. Absit omen!'
| 13,198 | Chapters 19 - 23 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210126121516/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/lordjim/section6/ | Jim continues to wander from job to job, "fling away daily bread so as to get hands free to grapple with a ghost" as "an act of prosaic heroism." He becomes well-known as an eccentric in his part of the world; although he runs away every time the Patna is mentioned, everyone knows who he is. After Jim rejects Marlow's suggestion that he go to America, Marlow decides to consult Stein, the proprietor of a large trading company with posts in "out-of-the-way places" where Jim could more easily live in peace. Stein, according to Marlow, is extremely trustworthy and wise. We learn a little about Stein's past: he escaped Germany as a young man after getting entangled with revolutionaries, then came to the East Indies with a Dutch naturalist. Stein remained in the area with a Scottish trader he had met, who bequeathed him his trading empire and introduced him to a Malay queen. Stein became an adviser to the queen's son, Mohammed Bonso, who was battling several relatives for the throne. He married Bonso's sister and had a child with her, and began to collect beetles and butterflies. Bonso was assassinated, and Stein's wife and child died from a fever. Stein tells Marlow an anecdote about a particular butterfly specimen in his collection. One morning, he was tricked into leaving his compound by an enemy of Bonso's and was ambushed along the road. After feigning death, he attacked and dispatched his attackers with bullets, but a few escaped. Suddenly, he saw a rare butterfly glide past him. Moving quickly, he captured it in his hat, holding a revolver in his other hand in case the bandits should reappear. Stein describes that day as one of the best of his life; he had defeated his enemy, possessed friendship and love, and acquired a butterfly he had long desired. Marlow tells Stein he has come to him to discuss a "specimen." He recounts Jim's story for Stein, who immediately "diagnose" Jim as "romantic." Stein elaborates on Jim's crisis of self-identity, saying that what Jim needs is to learn "how to live" in a world that he cannot always ignore. Stein says that he himself has had moments in which he has let heroic dreams slip away, and he tells Marlow that he will help him do something "practical" for Jim. Stein suggests that they send Jim to Patusan, a remote territory where he has a trading post. The place will, Marlow says, turn out to offer him "a totally new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon." Patusan seems to be a place no one visits, whose very name stands in for the hidden and unknown. Stein has used Patusan as an exile for those in need before; he tells Marlow of a Dutch-Malay woman with a troubled history married to an odious trading agent named Cornelius whom he wished to help. He made Cornelius the manager of the Patusan post, but the woman has since died, and the woman's daughter, under the guardianship of Cornelius, is the only obstacle to his replacement by Jim. Stein offers Jim the post, with the understanding that Cornelius and the girl be allowed to stay on in Patusan. Marlow jumps forward in time, to a moment when he visits Jim in Patusan. Although it is not yet clear how, Jim has become an incredible success, and Marlow is astonished. He reminds himself that he and Stein had only sought to keep Jim out of the way, and that, on his part, he had just wanted to dispose of Jim before returning to Europe for a time. He admits that he had feared the claim that Jim now has on him because of their acquaintance. Marlow digresses for a moment to describe Patusan more fully: it is a small territory thirty miles inland up a river, which the flow of history has largely bypassed. In the seventeenth century, Dutch traders often visited in order to trade for pepper. Somehow, though, the trade stopped, and now the country is a backwater, ruled by a "Sultan is an imbecile youth with two thumbs on his left hand." The de facto ruler of Patusan, however, is the Sultan's uncle, Rajah Allang, a decaying, power-mad opium fiend whom Marlow encounters when he visits Jim. Stein and Marlow offer Jim the Patusan post, which he accepts. Marlow makes him a gift of a revolver, and Stein, wishing to repay his debt to the Scottish trader who launched him, gives Jim letters of introduction and a silver ring, which he is to present to Doramin, an old comrade of Stein's. Jim returns from receiving Stein's commission full of fire, eager to impress upon Marlow the romantic aspects of the situation, particularly the idea of the ring as a token of friendship and recognition. Marlow finds himself "thoroughly sick" of Jim, who is foolish enough to "hurl defiance" at the universe. Jim hurriedly packs his possessions, including a volume of Shakespeare and ships for Patusan. The captain of the ship that is to carry him tells Marlow, who comes aboard to offer Jim cartridges for the revolver, that he will carry Jim only to the mouth of the river leading to Patusan, since he was fired upon by the natives the last time he tried to ascend the river. Marlow later learns that the man was publicly humiliated and imprisoned by Rajah Allang. The ship is about to depart, so Marlow takes leave of Jim, who is still ecstatic over the "magnificent chance" before him. As Marlow's boat pulls away from the ship, Jim shouts a prediction: "'You--shall--hear--of--me.' | " Commentary Stein offers a contrast to both Marlow and Jim. Like Jim, he is, or at least was as a youth, invested in ideas of the heroic, starting out as a revolutionary, then becoming a traveler, a partisan fighter, and finally a conquering capitalist. Despite some self-admitted defeats and the loss of his wife and child, he has constructed a satisfying existence for himself by taking advantage of the opportunities offered him by others . Like Marlow, he feels an immediate sense of identification with Jim. His approach to Jim is quite different from Marlow's, however. While Marlow considers Jim "one of us," Stein sees him, as Marlow suggests he will, as a "specimen," like one of his butterflies. Marlow, and even the members of the court of inquiry, have been considering Jim almost as a sort of mutation--an average man who for some reason displays the worst that lurks inside of all men. The court of inquiry must cast Jim out, symbolically casting the evil out of themselves. Marlow is fascinated, seeing in Jim his own dark side. Stein, however, "diagnoses" Jim as displaying one among an infinite variety of "maladies" or abnormalities. Stein determines him to be a "romantic," and accordingly sends him to the same place he has sent another damaged romantic, the Dutch-Malay woman. Patusan is an appropriate place for Jim in more ways than one. Notice the resemblance between the words "Patna" and "Patusan"; we know before he gets there that Jim is destined to repeat in some way the incident aboard the Patna. Patusan, too, is a place where romantic, heroic idealism--the high adventure of the quest for pepper--coexists with pragmatism and harsh reality. The territory was abandoned by history, is difficult to reach, and has degenerated to the point of being ruled by a youth with congenital deformities that would seem to be the result of inbreeding. Jim is thrilled to have another chance, and his hubris is unmistakable: "You--shall--hear--of--me." Marlow and Stein's parting gifts, though, foreshadow the kind of place he will find. The revolver suggests Jim will need to rely, to some extent, on brute force, and the technological superiority of the white man. The ring suggests that Jim is entering a world of suspicion, distrust, and factions, where identity requires physical proof and a man's word is not enough. Both hint that heroic ideals may be irrelevant here. Ironically, Stein and Marlow are burying Jim the way Chester and Robinson suggested. The only escape for Jim, it seems, is to go somewhere where no one has heard of the Patna. Yet in the echo of the name of the ship in the name of the territory, and in Marlow's repeated incursions to see Jim despite being "sick" of him and wanting to "dispose" of him, it is implied that escape will not be possible, that, no matter what he does, Jim will still be the same man who abandoned the Patna. At this point in the narrative, Marlow's most recent information is that Jim is a total success. Yet Marlow, at the end of Chapter 21, tells his audience that he still awaits "the last word" on Jim. He goes further to say, too, that it may be that the "last word" cannot be trusted, since it will be open to misinterpretation in the minds of its hearers. | 943 | 559 | [
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44,747 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/44747-chapters/5.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_4_part_0.txt | The Red and the Black.part 1.chapter 5 | part 1, chapter 5 | null | {"name": "Part 1, Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-5", "summary": "Mr. Sorel tells Julien the details of his new job with the de Renals. Julien says he doesn't want to be a servant though, and if he lives in the de Renals' house, he must eat supper at their table with them. When Sorel goes to discuss things with Julien's older brothers, Julien thinks about running away. We learn that Julien has an incredible memory, and that he has memorized the entire New Testament of the Bible by heart. Monsieur Sorel goes back to the mayor and makes all kinds of new demands for his son, not because he wants what's best for Julien, but because he likes to make the mayor pay as much as possible. All of these demands just confirm the mayor's belief that other rich men in town have offered Julien a position. He's determined not to be outbid. When he gets home, Mr. Sorel can't find Julien. Julien has gone to visit a friend named Fouqe in order to leave his books with him for safekeeping. When he gets back, his father orders him to go to the mayor's house immediately. Julien thinks that he should stop at the Verrieres church on his way to the mayor's house. This isn't because he's religious, but because he likes to keep up appearances. You see, Julien is a really ambitious young man. He used to have dreams of becoming a great soldier, but then he realizes just how much power and influence that priests and bishops actually had in France. So he decided to put himself on the road to becoming a priest. That's how he first started hanging out with Father Chelan, learning theology, and memorizing the Bible. When he kneels inside the church, Julien realizes that he might be taking the coward's way out by giving up on his life as a soldier. Then again, he's too scared to take all the risks involved. Meanwhile, Madame de Renal worries herself sick about her children's new tutor. She can only imagine an ugly, cruel man who will beat her kids for messing up their grammar.", "analysis": ""} | CHAPTER V
A NEGOTIATION
Cunctando restituit rem.--_Ennius_.
"Answer me without lies, if you can, you damned dog, how did you get to
know Madame de Renal? When did you speak to her?"
"I have never spoken to her," answered Julien, "I have only seen that
lady in church."
"You must have looked at her, you impudent rascal."
"Not once! you know, I only see God in church," answered Julien, with
a little hypocritical air, well suited, so he thought, to keep off the
parental claws.
"None the less there's something that does not meet the eye," answered
the cunning peasant. He was then silent for a moment. "But I shall
never get anything out of you, you damned hypocrite," he went on. "As a
matter of fact, I am going to get rid of you, and my saw-mill will go
all the better for it. You have nobbled the curate, or somebody else,
who has got you a good place. Run along and pack your traps, and I
will take you to M. de Renal's, where you are going to be tutor to his
children."
"What shall I get for that?"
"Board, clothing, and three hundred francs salary."
"I do not want to be a servant."
"Who's talking of being a servant, you brute, do you think I want my
son to be a servant?"
"But with whom shall I have my meals?"
This question discomforted old Sorel, who felt he might possibly commit
some imprudence if he went on talking. He burst out against Julien,
flung insult after insult at him, accused him of gluttony, and left him
to go and consult his other sons.
Julien saw them afterwards, each one leaning on his axe and holding
counsel. Having looked at them for a long time, Julien saw that he
could find out nothing, and went and stationed himself on the other
side of the saw in order to avoid being surprised. He wanted to think
over this unexpected piece of news, which changed his whole life,
but he felt himself unable to consider the matter prudently, his
imagination being concentrated in wondering what he would see in M. de
Renal's fine mansion.
"I must give all that up," he said to himself, "rather than let myself
be reduced to eating with the servants. My father would like to force
me to it. I would rather die. I have fifteen francs and eight sous of
savings. I will run away to-night; I will go across country by paths
where there are no gendarmes to be feared, and in two days I shall be
at Besancon. I will enlist as a soldier there, and, if necessary, I
will cross into Switzerland. But in that case, no more advancement, it
will be all up with my being a priest, that fine career which may lead
to anything."
This abhorrence of eating with the servants was not really natural to
Julien; he would have done things quite, if not more, disagreeable in
order to get on. He derived this repugnance from the _Confessions_
of Rousseau. It was the only book by whose help his imagination
endeavoured to construct the world. The collection of the Bulletins of
the Grand Army, and the _Memorial of St. Helena_ completed his Koran.
He would have died for these three works. He never believed in any
other. To use a phrase of the old Surgeon-Major, he regarded all the
other books in the world as packs of lies, written by rogues in order
to get on.
Julien possessed both a fiery soul and one of those astonishing
memories which are so often combined with stupidity.
In order to win over the old cure Chelan, on whose good grace he
realized that his future prospects depended, he had learnt by heart the
New Testament in Latin. He also knew M. de Maistre's book on The Pope,
and believed in one as little as he did in the other.
Sorel and his son avoided talking to each other to-day as though by
mutual consent. In the evening Julien went to take his theology lesson
at the cure's, but he did not consider that it was prudent to say
anything to him about the strange proposal which had been made to his
father. "It is possibly a trap," he said to himself, "I must pretend
that I have forgotten all about it."
Early next morning, M. de Renal had old Sorel summoned to him.
He eventually arrived, after keeping M. de Renal waiting for an
hour-and-a-half, and made, as he entered the room, a hundred apologies
interspersed with as many bows. After having run the gauntlet of all
kinds of objections, Sorel was given to understand that his son would
have his meals with the master and mistress of the house, and that
he would eat alone in a room with the children on the days when they
had company. The more clearly Sorel realized the genuine eagerness of
M. the Mayor, the more difficulties he felt inclined to raise. Being
moreover full of mistrust and astonishment, he asked to see the room
where his son would sleep. It was a big room, quite decently furnished,
into which the servants were already engaged in carrying the beds of
the three children.
This circumstance explained a lot to the old peasant. He asked
immediately, with quite an air of assurance, to see the suit which
would be given to his son. M. de Renal opened his desk and took out one
hundred francs.
"Your son will go to M. Durand, the draper, with this money and will
get a complete black suit."
"And even supposing I take him away from you," said the peasant, who
had suddenly forgotten all his respectful formalities, "will he still
keep this black suit?"
"Certainly!"
"Well," said Sorel, in a drawling voice, "all that remains to do is to
agree on just one thing, the money which you will give him."
"What!" exclaimed M. de Renal, indignantly, "we agreed on that
yesterday. I shall give him three hundred francs, I think that is a
lot, and probably too much."
"That is your offer and I do not deny it," said old Sorel, speaking
still very slowly; and by a stroke of genius which will only astonish
those who do not know the Franche-Comte peasants, he fixed his eyes on
M. de Renal and added, "We shall get better terms elsewhere."
The Mayor's face exhibited the utmost consternation at these words. He
pulled himself together however and after a cunning conversation of
two hours' length, where every single word on both sides was carefully
weighed, the subtlety of the peasant scored a victory over the subtlety
of the rich man, whose livelihood was not so dependent on his faculty
of cunning. All the numerous stipulations which were to regulate
Julien's new existence were duly formulated. Not only was his salary
fixed at four hundred francs, but they were to be paid in advance on
the first of each month.
"Very well, I will give him thirty-five francs," said M. de Renal.
"I am quite sure," said the peasant, in a fawning voice, "that a rich,
generous man like the M. mayor would go as far as thirty-six francs, to
make up a good round sum."
"Agreed!" said M. de Renal, "but let this be final." For the moment his
temper gave him a tone of genuine firmness. The peasant saw that it
would not do to go any further.
Then, on his side, M. de Renal managed to score. He absolutely refused
to give old Sorel, who was very anxious to receive it on behalf of his
son, the thirty-six francs for the first month. It had occurred to M.
de Renal that he would have to tell his wife the figure which he had
cut throughout these negotiations.
"Hand me back the hundred francs which I gave you," he said sharply.
"M. Durand owes me something, I will go with your son to see about a
black cloth suit."
After this manifestation of firmness, Sorel had the prudence to return
to his respectful formulas; they took a good quarter of an hour.
Finally, seeing that there was nothing more to be gained, he took his
leave. He finished his last bow with these words:
"I will send my son to the Chateau." The Mayor's officials called his
house by this designation when they wanted to humour him.
When he got back to his workshop, it was in vain that Sorel sought his
son. Suspicious of what might happen, Julien had gone out in the middle
of the night. He wished to place his Cross of the Legion of Honour and
his books in a place of safety. He had taken everything to a young
wood-merchant named Fouque, who was a friend of his, and who lived in
the high mountain which commands Verrieres.
"God knows, you damned lazy bones," said his father to him when he
re-appeared, "if you will ever be sufficiently honourable to pay me
back the price of your board which I have been advancing to you for so
many years. Take your rags and clear out to M. the Mayor's."
Julien was astonished at not being beaten and hastened to leave. He
had scarcely got out of sight of his terrible father when he slackened
his pace. He considered that it would assist the role played by his
hypocrisy to go and say a prayer in the church.
The word hypocrisy surprises you? The soul of the peasant had had to go
through a great deal before arriving at this horrible word.
Julien had seen in the days of his early childhood certain Dragoons
of the 6th[1] with long white cloaks and hats covered with long black
plumed helmets who were returning from Italy, and tied up their horses
to the grilled window of his father's house. The sight had made him mad
on the military profession. Later on he had listened with ecstasy to
the narrations of the battles of Lodi, Arcola and Rivoli with which the
old surgeon-major had regaled him. He observed the ardent gaze which
the old man used to direct towards his cross.
But when Julien was fourteen years of age they commenced to build a
church at Verrieres which, in view of the smallness of the town, has
some claim to be called magnificent. There were four marble columns in
particular, the sight of which impressed Julien. They became celebrated
in the district owing to the mortal hate which they raised between
the Justice of the Peace and the young vicar who had been sent from
Besancon and who passed for a spy of the congregation. The Justice of
the Peace was on the point of losing his place, so said the public
opinion at any rate. Had he not dared to have a difference with the
priest who went every fortnight to Besancon; where he saw, so they
said, my Lord the Bishop.
In the meanwhile the Justice of the Peace, who was the father of a
numerous family, gave several sentences which seemed unjust: all these
sentences were inflicted on those of the inhabitants who read the
"_Constitutionnel_." The right party triumphed. It is true it was only a
question of sums of three or five francs, but one of these little fines
had to be paid by a nail-maker, who was god-father to Julien. This man
exclaimed in his anger "What a change! and to think that for more than
twenty years the Justice of the Peace has passed for an honest man."
The Surgeon-Major, Julien's friend, died. Suddenly Julien left off
talking about Napoleon. He announced his intention of becoming a
priest, and was always to be seen in his father's workshop occupied
in learning by heart the Latin Bible which the cure had lent him. The
good old man was astonished at his progress, and passed whole evenings
in teaching him theology. In his society Julien did not manifest other
than pious sentiments. Who could not possibly guess that beneath this
girlish face, so pale and so sweet, lurked the unbreakable resolution
to risk a thousand deaths rather than fail to make his fortune. Making
his fortune primarily meant to Julien getting out of Verrieres: he
abhorred his native country; everything that he saw there froze his
imagination.
He had had moments of exultation since his earliest childhood. He would
then dream with gusto of being presented one day to the pretty women
of Paris. He would manage to attract their attention by some dazzling
feat: why should he not be loved by one of them just as Buonaparte,
when still poor, had been loved by the brilliant Madame de Beauharnais.
For many years past Julien had scarcely passed a single year of his
life without reminding himself that Buonaparte, the obscure and
penniless lieutenant, had made himself master of the whole world by the
power of his sword. This idea consoled him for his misfortune, which
he considered to be great, and rendered such joyful moments as he had
doubly intense.
The building of the church and the sentences pronounced by the Justice
of the Peace suddenly enlightened him. An idea came to him which made
him almost mad for some weeks, and finally took complete possession of
him with all the magic that a first idea possesses for a passionate
soul which believes that it is original.
"At the time when Buonaparte got himself talked about, France was
frightened of being invaded; military distinction was necessary and
fashionable. Nowadays, one sees priests of forty with salaries of
100,000 francs, that is to say, three times as much as Napoleon's
famous generals of a division. They need persons to assist them. Look
at that Justice of the Peace, such a good sort and such an honest man
up to the present and so old too; he sacrifices his honour through the
fear of incurring the displeasure of a young vicar of thirty. I must be
a priest."
On one occasion, in the middle of his new-found piety (he had already
been studying theology for two years), he was betrayed by a sudden
burst of fire which consumed his soul. It was at M. Chelan's. The
good cure had invited him to a dinner of priests, and he actually let
himself praise Napoleon with enthusiasm. He bound his right arm over
his breast, pretending that he had dislocated it in moving a trunk of a
pine-tree and carried it for two months in that painful position. After
this painful penance, he forgave himself. This is the young man of
eighteen with a puny physique, and scarcely looking more than seventeen
at the outside, who entered the magnificent church of Verrieres
carrying a little parcel under his arm.
He found it gloomy and deserted. All the transepts in the building had
been covered with crimson cloth in celebration of a feast. The result
was that the sun's rays produced an effect of dazzling light of the
most impressive and religious character. Julien shuddered. Finding
himself alone in the church, he established himself in the pew which
had the most magnificent appearance. It bore the arms of M. de Renal.
Julien noticed a piece of printed paper spread out on the stool, which
was apparently intended to be read, he cast his eyes over it and
saw:--"_Details of the execution and the last moments of Louis Jenrel,
executed at Besancon the...._" The paper was torn. The two first words
of a line were legible on the back, they were, "_The First Step_."
"Who could have put this paper there?" said Julien. "Poor fellow!" he
added with a sigh, "the last syllable of his name is the same as mine,"
and he crumpled up the paper. As he left, Julien thought he saw blood
near the Host, it was holy water which the priests had been sprinkling
on it, the reflection of the red curtains which covered the windows
made it look like blood.
Finally, Julien felt ashamed of his secret terror. "Am I going to play
the coward," he said to himself: "_To Arms!_" This phrase, repeated so
often in the old Surgeon-Major's battle stories, symbolized heroism to
Julien. He got up rapidly and walked to M. de Renal's house. As soon
as he saw it twenty yards in front of him he was seized, in spite of
his fine resolution, with an overwhelming timidity. The iron grill was
open. He thought it was magnificent. He had to go inside.
Julien was not the only person whose heart was troubled by his arrival
in the house. The extreme timidity of Madame de Renal was fluttered
when she thought of this stranger whose functions would necessitate
his coming between her and her children. She was accustomed to seeing
her sons sleep in her own room. She had shed many tears that morning,
when she had seen their beds carried into the apartment intended for
the tutor. It was in vain that she asked her husband to have the bed of
Stanislas-Xavier, the youngest, carried back into her room.
Womanly delicacy was carried in Madame de Renal to the point of excess.
She conjured up in her imagination the most disagreeable personage, who
was coarse, badly groomed and encharged with the duty of scolding her
children simply because he happened to know Latin, and only too ready
to flog her sons for their ignorance of that barbarous language.
[1] The author was sub-lieutenant in the 6th Dragoons in 1800.
| 2,680 | Part 1, Chapter 5 | https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-5 | Mr. Sorel tells Julien the details of his new job with the de Renals. Julien says he doesn't want to be a servant though, and if he lives in the de Renals' house, he must eat supper at their table with them. When Sorel goes to discuss things with Julien's older brothers, Julien thinks about running away. We learn that Julien has an incredible memory, and that he has memorized the entire New Testament of the Bible by heart. Monsieur Sorel goes back to the mayor and makes all kinds of new demands for his son, not because he wants what's best for Julien, but because he likes to make the mayor pay as much as possible. All of these demands just confirm the mayor's belief that other rich men in town have offered Julien a position. He's determined not to be outbid. When he gets home, Mr. Sorel can't find Julien. Julien has gone to visit a friend named Fouqe in order to leave his books with him for safekeeping. When he gets back, his father orders him to go to the mayor's house immediately. Julien thinks that he should stop at the Verrieres church on his way to the mayor's house. This isn't because he's religious, but because he likes to keep up appearances. You see, Julien is a really ambitious young man. He used to have dreams of becoming a great soldier, but then he realizes just how much power and influence that priests and bishops actually had in France. So he decided to put himself on the road to becoming a priest. That's how he first started hanging out with Father Chelan, learning theology, and memorizing the Bible. When he kneels inside the church, Julien realizes that he might be taking the coward's way out by giving up on his life as a soldier. Then again, he's too scared to take all the risks involved. Meanwhile, Madame de Renal worries herself sick about her children's new tutor. She can only imagine an ugly, cruel man who will beat her kids for messing up their grammar. | null | 349 | 1 | [
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44,747 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/44747-chapters/22.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_21_part_0.txt | The Red and the Black.part 1.chapter 22 | part 1, chapter 22 | null | {"name": "Part 1, Chapter 22", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-22", "summary": "Julien reaches Verrieres on his two-week vacation. The first thing he does is visit Father Chelan and build him some bookshelves. On his third day of vacation, Julien gets a visit from a guy named Monsieur de Maugiron who wants to lure Julien away from the de Renals so he can teach de Maugiron's children. Julien is surprised at one point by an invitation to lunch with Monsieur Valenod. Julien would rather beat the man with a stick than lunch with him. But he goes anyway. A bunch of city officials come to lunch, too. They yell for some nearby poor people to shut up and stop singing before settling into their luxurious meals. Julien is understandably disgusted by their upper class behavior. The crowd asks Julien to demonstrates his knowledge of the Bible. He repeats his old performance of reciting from memory any passage the guests start reading. They're all super impressed, which only makes Julien more resentful of them. When he's had enough, he gets up and excuses himself from lunch. He knows that one day, he'll explode and tell these kinds of people what he really thinks of them. Nonetheless, he goes to lots of parties and makes nice with the upper crust of Verrieres because Madame de Renal has told him this is a smart thing to do. One day, he wakes up with a pair of hands covering his eyes. It's Madame de Renal, who is visiting him with her children. While the group lunches, Monsieur de Renal walks in with a gloomy face. He feels like his children are starting to like Julien more than him. Then he leaves to attend some business meetings. The chapter closes by mentioning Monsieur de Renal's insecurity about his reputation as a cheapskate. Mr. Valenod, on the other hand, is famous for giving a lot of money to charity.", "analysis": ""} | CHAPTER XXII
MANNERS OF PROCEDURE IN 1830
Speech has been given to man to conceal his thought.
_R.P. Malagrida_.
Julien had scarcely arrived at Verrieres before he reproached himself
with his injustice towards Madame de Renal. "I should have despised
her for a weakling of a woman if she had not had the strength to go
through with her scene with M. de Renal. But she has acquitted herself
like a diplomatist and I sympathise with the defeat of the man who is
my enemy. There is a bourgeois prejudice in my action; my vanity is
offended because M. de Renal is a man. Men form a vast and illustrious
body to which I have the honour to belong. I am nothing but a fool." M.
Chelan had refused the magnificent apartments which the most important
Liberals in the district had offered him, when his loss of his living
had necessitated his leaving the parsonage. The two rooms which he had
rented were littered with his books. Julien, wishing to show Verrieres
what a priest could do, went and fetched a dozen pinewood planks from
his father, carried them on his back all along the Grande-Rue, borrowed
some tools from an old comrade and soon built a kind of book-case in
which he arranged M. Chelan's books.
"I thought you were corrupted by the vanity of the world," said the
old man to him as he cried with joy, "but this is something which well
redeems all the childishness of that brilliant Guard of Honour uniform
which has made you so many enemies."
M. de Renal had ordered Julien to stay at his house. No one suspected
what had taken place. The third day after his arrival Julien saw no
less a personage than M. the sub-prefect de Maugiron come all the way
up the stairs to his room. It was only after two long hours of fatuous
gossip and long-winded lamentations about the wickedness of man, the
lack of honesty among the people entrusted with the administration
of the public funds, the dangers of his poor France, etc. etc., that
Julien was at last vouchsafed a glimpse of the object of the visit.
They were already on the landing of the staircase and the poor half
disgraced tutor was escorting with all proper deference the future
prefect of some prosperous department, when the latter was pleased to
take an interest in Julien's fortune, to praise his moderation in money
matters, etc., etc. Finally M. de Maugiron, embracing him in the most
paternal way, proposed that he should leave M. de Renal and enter the
household of an official who had children to educate and who, like King
Philippe, thanked Heaven not so much that they had been granted to him,
but for the fact that they had been born in the same neighbourhood as
M. Julien. Their tutor would enjoy a salary of 800 francs, payable
not from month to month, which is not at all aristocratic, said M. de
Maugiron, but quarterly and always in advance.
It was Julien's turn now. After he had been bored for an hour and a
half by waiting for what he had to say, his answer was perfect and,
above all, as long as a bishop's charge. It suggested everything and
yet said nothing clearly. It showed at the same time respect for M.
de Renal, veneration for the public of Verrieres and gratitude to the
distinguished sub-prefect. The sub-prefect, astonished at finding
him more Jesuitical than himself, tried in vain to obtain something
definite. Julien was delighted, seized the opportunity to practise, and
started his answer all over again in different language. Never has an
eloquent minister who wished to make the most of the end of a session
when the Chamber really seemed desirous of waking up, said less in more
words.
M. de Maugiron had scarcely left before Julien began to laugh like
a madman. In order to exploit his Jesuitical smartness, he wrote a
nine-page letter to M. de Renal in which he gave him an account of all
that had been said to him and humbly asked his advice. "But the old
scoundrel has not told me the name of the person who is making the
offer. It is bound to be M. Valenod who, no doubt, sees in my exile at
Verrieres the result of his anonymous letter."
Having sent off his despatch and feeling as satisfied as a hunter who
at six o'clock in the morning on a fine autumn day, comes out into
a plain that abounds with game, he went out to go and ask advice of
M. Chelan. But before he had arrived at the good cure's, providence,
wishing to shower favours upon him, threw in his path M. de Valenod,
to whom he owned quite freely that his heart was torn in two; a poor
lad such as he was owed an exclusive devotion to the vocation to which
it had pleased Heaven to call him. But vocation was not everything in
this base world. In order to work worthily at the vine of the Lord,
and to be not totally unworthy of so many worthy colleagues, it was
necessary to be educated; it was necessary to spend two expensive years
at the seminary of Besancon; saving consequently became an imperative
necessity, and was certainly much easier with a salary of eight hundred
francs paid quarterly than with six hundred francs which one received
monthly. On the other hand, did not Heaven, by placing him by the side
of the young de Renals, and especially by inspiring him with a special
devotion to them, seem to indicate that it was not proper to abandon
that education for another one.
Julien reached such a degree of perfection in that particular kind of
eloquence which has succeeded the drastic quickness of the empire, that
he finished by boring himself with the sound of his own words.
On reaching home he found a valet of M. Valenod in full livery who had
been looking for him all over the town, with a card inviting him to
dinner for that same day.
Julien had never been in that man's house. Only a few days before
he had been thinking of nothing but the means of giving him a sound
thrashing without getting into trouble with the police. Although
the time of the dinner was one o'clock, Julien thought it was more
deferential to present himself at half-past twelve at the office of M.
the director of the workhouse. He found him parading his importance in
the middle of a lot of despatch boxes. His large black whiskers, his
enormous quantity of hair, his Greek bonnet placed across the top of
his head, his immense pipe, his embroidered slippers, the big chains
of gold crossed all over his breast, and the whole stock-in-trade of
a provincial financier who considers himself prosperous, failed to
impose on Julien in the least: They only made him think the more of the
thrashing which he owed him.
He asked for the honour of being introduced to Madame Valenod. She
was dressing and was unable to receive him. By way of compensation he
had the privilege of witnessing the toilet of M. the director of the
workhouse. They subsequently went into the apartment of Madame Valenod,
who introduced her children to him with tears in her eyes. This lady
was one of the most important in Verrieres, had a big face like a
man's, on which she had put rouge in honour of this great function. She
displayed all the maternal pathos of which she was capable.
Julien thought all the time of Madame de Renal. His distrust made him
only susceptible to those associations which are called up by their
opposites, but he was then affected to the verge of breaking down.
This tendency was increased by the sight of the house of the director
of the workhouse. He was shown over it. Everything in it was new and
magnificent, and he was told the price of every article of furniture.
But Julien detected a certain element of sordidness, which smacked of
stolen money into the bargain. Everybody in it, down to the servants,
had the air of setting his face in advance against contempt.
The collector of taxes, the superintendent of indirect taxes, the
officer of gendarmerie, and two or three other public officials arrived
with their wives. They were followed by some rich Liberals. Dinner was
announced. It occurred to Julien, who was already feeling upset, that
there were some poor prisoners on the other side of the dining-room
wall, and that an illicit profit had perhaps been made over their
rations of meat in order to purchase all that garish luxury with which
they were trying to overwhelm him.
"Perhaps they are hungry at this very minute," he said to himself. He
felt a choking in his throat. He found it impossible to eat and almost
impossible to speak. Matters became much worse a quarter of an hour
afterwards; they heard in the distance some refrains of a popular song
that was, it must be confessed, a little vulgar, which was being sung
by one of the inmates. M. Valenod gave a look to one of his liveried
servants who disappeared and soon there was no more singing to be
heard. At that moment a valet offered Julien some Rhine wine in a green
glass and Madame Valenod made a point of asking him to note that this
wine cost nine francs a bottle in the market. Julien held up his green
glass and said to M. Valenod,
"They are not singing that wretched song any more."
"Zounds, I should think not," answered the triumphant governor. "I have
made the rascals keep quiet."
These words were too much for Julien. He had the manners of his new
position, but he had not yet assimilated its spirit. In spite of all
his hypocrisy and its frequent practice, he felt a big tear drip down
his cheek.
He tried to hide it in the green glass, but he found it absolutely
impossible to do justice to the Rhine wine. "Preventing singing he said
to himself: Oh, my God, and you suffer it."
Fortunately nobody noticed his ill-bred emotion. The collector of
taxes had struck up a royalist song. "So this," reflected Julien's
conscience during the hubbub of the refrain which was sung in chorus,
"is the sordid prosperity which you will eventually reach, and you will
only enjoy it under these conditions and in company like this. You
will, perhaps, have a post worth twenty thousand francs; but while you
gorge yourself on meat, you will have to prevent a poor prisoner from
singing; you will give dinners with the money which you have stolen out
of his miserable rations and during your dinners he will be still more
wretched. Oh, Napoleon, how sweet it was to climb to fortune in your
way through the dangers of a battle, but to think of aggravating the
pain of the unfortunate in this cowardly way."
I own that the weakness which Julien had been manifesting in this
soliloquy gives me a poor opinion of him. He is worthy of being the
accomplice of those kid-gloved conspirators who purport to change the
whole essence of a great country's existence, without wishing to have
on their conscience the most trivial scratch.
Julien was sharply brought back to his role. He had not been invited to
dine in such good company simply to moon dreamily and say nothing.
A retired manufacturer of cotton prints, a corresponding member of the
Academy of Besancon and of that of Uzes, spoke to him from the other
end of the table and asked him if what was said everywhere about his
astonishing progress in the study of the New Testament was really true.
A profound silence was suddenly inaugurated. A New Testament in Latin
was found as though by magic in the possession of the learned member
of the two Academies. After Julien had answered, part of a sentence
in Latin was read at random. Julien then recited. His memory proved
faithful and the prodigy was admired with all the boisterous energy of
the end of dinner. Julien looked at the flushed faces of the ladies. A
good many were not so plain. He recognised the wife of the collector,
who was a fine singer.
"I am ashamed, as a matter of fact, to talk Latin so long before these
ladies," he said, turning his eyes on her. "If M. Rubigneau," that was
the name of the member of the two Academies, "will be kind enough to
read a Latin sentence at random instead of answering by following the
Latin text, I will try to translate it impromptu." This second test
completed his glory.
Several Liberals were there, who, though rich, were none the less the
happy fathers of children capable of obtaining scholarships, and had
consequently been suddenly converted at the last mission. In spite of
this diplomatic step, M. de Renal had never been willing to receive
them in his house. These worthy people, who only knew Julien by name
and from having seen him on horseback on the day of the king of ----'s
entry, were his most noisy admirers. "When will those fools get tired
of listening to this Biblical language, which they don't understand in
the least," he thought. But, on the contrary, that language amused them
by its strangeness and made them smile. But Julien got tired.
As six o'clock struck he got up gravely and talked about a chapter in
Ligorio's New Theology which he had to learn by heart to recite on the
following day to M. Chelan, "for," he added pleasantly, "my business is
to get lessons said by heart to me, and to say them by heart myself."
There was much laughter and admiration; such is the kind of wit which
is customary in Verrieres. Julien had already got up and in spite of
etiquette everybody got up as well, so great is the dominion exercised
by genius. Madame Valenod kept him for another quarter of an hour. He
really must hear her children recite their catechisms. They made the
most absurd mistakes which he alone noticed. He was careful not to
point them out. "What ignorance of the first principles of religion,"
he thought. Finally he bowed and thought he could get away; but they
insisted on his trying a fable of La Fontaine.
"That author is quite immoral," said Julien to Madame Valenod. A
certain fable on Messire Jean Chouart dares to pour ridicule on
all that we hold most venerable. He is shrewdly blamed by the best
commentators. Before Julien left he received four or five invitations
to dinner. "This young man is an honour to the department," cried all
the guests in chorus. They even went so far as to talk of a pension
voted out of the municipal funds to put him in the position of
continuing his studies at Paris.
While this rash idea was resounding through the dining-room Julien
had swiftly reached the front door. "You scum, you scum," he cried,
three or four times in succession in a low voice as he indulged in the
pleasure of breathing in the fresh air.
He felt quite an aristocrat at this moment, though he was the very
man who had been shocked for so long a period by the haughty smile of
disdainful superiority which he detected behind all the courtesies
addressed to him at M. de Renal's. He could not help realising the
extreme difference. Why let us even forget the fact of its being money
stolen from the poor inmates, he said to himself as he went away, let
us forget also their stopping the singing. M. de Renal would never
think of telling his guests the price of each bottle of wine with
which he regales them, and as for this M. Valenod, and his chronic
cataloguing of his various belongings, he cannot talk of his house, his
estate, etc., in the presence of his wife without saying, "Your house,
your estate."
This lady, who was apparently so keenly alive to the delights of
decorum, had just had an awful scene during the dinner with a servant
who had broken a wine-glass and spoilt one of her dozens; and the
servant too had answered her back with the utmost insolence.
"What a collection," said Julien to himself; "I would not live like
they do were they to give me half of all they steal. I shall give
myself away one fine day. I should not be able to restrain myself from
expressing the disgust with which they inspire one."
It was necessary, however, to obey Madame de Renal's injunction and be
present at several dinners of the same kind. Julien was the fashion; he
was forgiven his Guard of Honour uniform, or rather that indiscretion
was the real cause of his successes. Soon the only question in
Verrieres was whether M. de Renal or M. the director of the workhouse
would be the victor in the struggle for the clever young man. These
gentlemen formed, together with M. Maslon, a triumvirate which had
tyrannised over the town for a number of years. People were jealous of
the mayor, and the Liberals had good cause for complaint, but, after
all, he was noble and born for a superior position, while M. Valenod's
father had not left him six hundred francs a year. His career had
necessitated a transition from pitying the shabby green suit which had
been so notorious in his youth, to envying the Norman horses, his gold
chains, his Paris clothes, his whole present prosperity.
Julien thought that he had discovered one honest man in the whirlpool
of this novel world. He was a geometrist named Gros, and had the
reputation of being a Jacobin. Julien, who had vowed to say nothing
but that which he disbelieved himself, was obliged to watch himself
carefully when speaking to M. Gros. He received big packets of
exercises from Vergy. He was advised to visit his father frequently,
and he fulfilled his unpleasant duty. In a word he was patching his
reputation together pretty well, when he was thoroughly surprised to
find himself woken up one morning by two hands held over his eyes.
It was Madame de Renal who had made a trip to the town, and who,
running up the stairs four at a time while she left her children
playing with a pet rabbit, had reached Julien's room a moment before
her sons. This moment was delicious but very short: Madame de Renal
had disappeared when the children arrived with the rabbit which
they wanted to show to their friend. Julien gave them all a hearty
welcome, including the rabbit. He seemed at home again. He felt that
he loved these children and that he enjoyed gossiping with them. He
was astonished at the sweetness of their voices, at the simplicity
and dignity of their little ways; he felt he needed to purge his
imagination of all the vulgar practices and all the unpleasantnesses
among which he had been living in Verrieres. For there everyone was
always frightened of being scored off, and luxury and poverty were at
daggers drawn.
The people with whom he would dine would enter into confidences over
the joint which were as humiliating for themselves as they were
nauseating to the hearer.
"You others, who are nobles, you are right to be proud," he said to
Madame de Renal, as he gave her an account of all the dinners which he
had put up with.
"You're the fashion then," and she laughed heartily as she thought of
the rouge which Madame Valenod thought herself obliged to put on each
time she expected Julien. "I think she has designs on your heart," she
added.
The breakfast was delicious. The presence of the children, though
apparently embarrassing, increased as a matter of fact the happiness of
the party. The poor children did not know how to give expression to the
joy at seeing Julien again. The servants had not failed to tell them
that he had been offered two hundred francs a year more to educate the
little Valenods.
Stanislas-Xavier, who was still pale from his illness, suddenly asked
his mother in the middle of the breakfast, the value of his silver
cover and of the goblet in which he was drinking.
"Why do you want to know that?"
"I want to sell them to give the price to M. Julien so that he shan't
be _done_ if he stays with us."
Julien kissed him with tears in his eyes. His mother wept
unrestrainedly, for Julien took Stanislas on his knees and explained to
him that he should not use the word "done" which, when employed in that
meaning was an expression only fit for the servants' hall. Seeing the
pleasure which he was giving to Madame de Renal, he tried to explain
the meaning of being "done" by picturesque illustrations which amused
the children.
"I understand," said Stanislas, "it's like the crow who is silly enough
to let his cheese fall and be taken by the fox who has been playing the
flatterer."
Madame de Renal felt mad with joy and covered her children with kisses,
a process which involved her leaning a little on Julien.
Suddenly the door opened. It was M. de Renal. His severe and
discontented expression contrasted strangely with the sweet joy
which his presence dissipated. Madame de Renal grew pale, she felt
herself incapable of denying anything. Julien seized command of the
conversation and commenced telling M. the mayor in a loud voice the
incident of the silver goblet which Stanislas wanted to sell. He was
quite certain this story would not be appreciated. M. de Renal first
of all frowned mechanically at the mere mention of money. Any allusion
to that mineral, he was accustomed to say, is always a prelude to some
demand made upon my purse. But this was something more than a mere
money matter. His suspicions were increased. The air of happiness which
animated his family during his absence was not calculated to smooth
matters over with a man who was a prey to so touchy a vanity. "Yes,
yes," he said, as his wife started to praise to him the combined grace
and cleverness of the way in which Julien gave ideas to his pupils. "I
know, he renders me hateful to my own children. It is easy enough for
him to make himself a hundred times more loveable to them than I am
myself, though after all, I am the master. In this century everything
tends to make _legitimate_ authority unpopular. Poor France!"
Madame de Renal had not stopped to examine the fine shades of the
welcome which her husband gave her. She had just caught a glimpse of
the possibility of spending twelve hours with Julien. She had a lot of
purchases to make in the town and declared that she positively insisted
in going to dine at the tavern. She stuck to her idea in spite of all
her husband's protests and remonstrances. The children were delighted
with the mere word tavern, which our modern prudery denounces with so
much gusto.
M. de Renal left his wife in the first draper's shop which she entered
and went to pay some visits. He came back more morose than he had
been in the morning. He was convinced that the whole town was busy
with himself and Julien. As a matter of fact no one had yet given him
any inkling as to the more offensive part of the public gossip. Those
items which had been repeated to M. the mayor dealt exclusively with
the question of whether Julien would remain with him with six hundred
francs, or would accept the eight hundred francs offered by M. the
director of the workhouse.
The director, when he met M. de Renal in society, gave him the cold
shoulder. These tactics were not without cleverness. There is no
impulsiveness in the provinces. Sensations are so rare there that they
are never allowed to be wasted.
M. le Valenod was what is called a hundred miles from Paris a _faraud_;
that means a coarse imprudent type of man. His triumphant existence
since 1815 had consolidated his natural qualities. He reigned, so
to say, in Verrieres subject to the orders of M. de Renal; but as
he was much more energetic, was ashamed of nothing, had a finger in
everything, and was always going about writing and speaking, and
was oblivious of all snubs, he had, although without any personal
pretensions, eventually come to equal the mayor in reputation in the
eyes of the ecclesiastical authorities. M. Valenod had, as it were,
said to the local tradesmen "Give me the two biggest fools among your
number;" to the men of law "Show me the two greatest dunces;" to the
sanitary officials "Point out to me the two biggest charlatans." When
he had thus collected the most impudent members of each separate
calling, he had practically said to them, "Let us reign together."
The manners of those people were offensive to M. de Renal. The
coarseness of Valenod took offence at nothing, not even the frequency
with which the little abbe Maslon would give the lie to him in public.
But in the middle of all this prosperity M. Valenod found it necessary
to reassure himself by a number of petty acts of insolence on the
score of the crude truths which he well realised that everybody was
justified in addressing to him. His activity had redoubled since the
fears which the visit of M. Appert had left him. He had made three
journeys to Besancon. He wrote several letters by each courier; he sent
others by unknown men who came to his house at nightfall. Perhaps he
had been wrong in securing the dismissal of the old cure Chelan. For
this piece of vindictiveness had resulted in his being considered an
extremely malicious man by several pious women of good birth. Besides,
the rendering of this service had placed him in absolute dependence
on M. the Grand Vicar de Frilair from whom he received some strange
commissions. He had reached this point in his intrigues when he had
yielded to the pleasure of writing an anonymous letter, and thus
increasing his embarrassment. His wife declared to him that she wanted
to have Julien in her house; her vanity was intoxicated with the idea.
Such being his position M. Valenod imagined in advance a decisive
scene with his old colleague M. de Renal. The latter might address
to him some harsh words, which he would not mind much; but he might
write to Besancon and even to Paris. Some minister's cousin might
suddenly fall down on Verrieres and take over the workhouse. Valenod
thought of coming to terms with the Liberals. It was for that purpose
that several of them had been invited to the dinner when Julien was
present. He would have obtained powerful support against the mayor but
the elections might supervene, and it was only too evident that the
directorship of the workhouse was inconsistent with voting on the wrong
side. Madame de Renal had made a shrewd guess at this intrigue, and
while she explained it to Julien as he gave her his arm to pass from
one shop to another, they found themselves gradually taken as far as
the _Cours de la Fidelite_ where they spent several hours nearly as
tranquil as those at Vergy.
At the same time M. Valenod was trying to put off a definite crisis
with his old patron by himself assuming the aggressive. These tactics
succeeded on this particular day, but aggravated the mayor's bad
temper. Never has vanity at close grips with all the harshness and
meanness of a pettifogging love of money reduced a man to a more sorry
condition than that of M. de Renal when he entered the tavern. The
children, on the other hand, had never been more joyful and more merry.
This contrast put the finishing touch on his pique.
"So far as I can see I am not wanted in my family," he said as he
entered in a tone which he meant to be impressive.
For answer, his wife took him on one side and declared that it was
essential to send Julien away. The hours of happiness which she had
just enjoyed had given her again the ease and firmness of demeanour
necessary to follow out the plan of campaign which she had been
hatching for a fortnight. The finishing touch to the trouble of the
poor mayor of Verrieres was the fact that he knew that they joked
publicly in the town about his love for cash. Valenod was as generous
as a thief, and on his side had acquitted himself brilliantly in the
last five or six collections for the Brotherhood of St. Joseph, the
congregation of the Virgin, the congregation of the Holy Sacrament,
etc., etc.
M. de Renal's name had been seen more than once at the bottom of the
list of gentlefolk of Verrieres, and the surrounding neighbourhood
who were adroitly classified in the list of the collecting brethren
according to the amount of their offerings. It was in vain that he said
that he was _not making money_. The clergy stands no nonsense in such
matters.
| 4,561 | Part 1, Chapter 22 | https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-1-chapter-22 | Julien reaches Verrieres on his two-week vacation. The first thing he does is visit Father Chelan and build him some bookshelves. On his third day of vacation, Julien gets a visit from a guy named Monsieur de Maugiron who wants to lure Julien away from the de Renals so he can teach de Maugiron's children. Julien is surprised at one point by an invitation to lunch with Monsieur Valenod. Julien would rather beat the man with a stick than lunch with him. But he goes anyway. A bunch of city officials come to lunch, too. They yell for some nearby poor people to shut up and stop singing before settling into their luxurious meals. Julien is understandably disgusted by their upper class behavior. The crowd asks Julien to demonstrates his knowledge of the Bible. He repeats his old performance of reciting from memory any passage the guests start reading. They're all super impressed, which only makes Julien more resentful of them. When he's had enough, he gets up and excuses himself from lunch. He knows that one day, he'll explode and tell these kinds of people what he really thinks of them. Nonetheless, he goes to lots of parties and makes nice with the upper crust of Verrieres because Madame de Renal has told him this is a smart thing to do. One day, he wakes up with a pair of hands covering his eyes. It's Madame de Renal, who is visiting him with her children. While the group lunches, Monsieur de Renal walks in with a gloomy face. He feels like his children are starting to like Julien more than him. Then he leaves to attend some business meetings. The chapter closes by mentioning Monsieur de Renal's insecurity about his reputation as a cheapskate. Mr. Valenod, on the other hand, is famous for giving a lot of money to charity. | null | 311 | 1 | [
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1,526 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/1526-chapters/2.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Twelfth Night, or What You Will/section_1_part_0.txt | Twelfth Night, or What You Will.act 1.scene 2 | act 1, scene 2 | null | {"name": "Act 1, Scene 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210415161814/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/twelfth-night/summary/act-1-scene-2", "summary": "The scene opens after a terrible ship wreck. Viola, a few sailors, and a captain arrive on shore and Viola asks where they are. The captain says they're in Illyria. Viola is bummed that she's in Illyria and says her brother is probably in heaven, but she's holding onto hope that he is alive. The captain tries to comfort Viola and says that, after the ship sank, he saw her brother tie himself to the mast, which had somehow managed to stay afloat. The captain's description of Sebastian clinging to the ship's mast also reveals to the audience what went down at sea. Apparently, when the ship split in two and the passengers and crew went into the water, Viola, being a very scrappy girl, avoided drowning by hanging on to the side of a life boat. Viola gives him some gold for being a nice guy and for cheering her up. The captain, who grew up three hours away from Illyria, tells Viola about the country and dishes a little dirt about its local celebs. The beloved Duke Orsino is a bachelor who's been trying to hook up with the Countess Olivia. But, Olivia's so not into him. Her dad died about a year ago and then her brother died shortly after, so she's sworn off the company of men while she grieves. Viola responds to the gossip by wishing she could disguise her identity and social class for a while by working as Olivia's servant - at least until she gets her bearings and figures out what to do next. The captain explains why that's just not going to happen: Olivia isn't seeing any visitors, not even the Duke. Viola tells the captain that he seems like a trusty fellow, so she's going to pay him a ton of dough to dress her up like a boy and not tell anyone about it. Since she's got such a great singing voice, she wants the captain to introduce her to the Duke as a eunuch. The idea is that parading around as a eunuch will guard Viola from suspicion that she's a woman, while allowing her singing talents to earn her some props in the Duke's court. The captain agrees to keep his lips zipped while Viola dresses up like a boy and plays \"I'm a singing eunuch\" at Orsino's court.", "analysis": ""} | SCENE II.
The sea-coast.
[Enter VIOLA, CAPTAIN, and Sailors.]
VIOLA.
What country, friends, is this?
CAPTAIN.
This is Illyria, lady.
VIOLA.
And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium.
Perchance he is not drown'd--What think you, sailors?
CAPTAIN.
It is perchance that you yourself were sav'd.
VIOLA.
O my poor brother! and so perchance may he be.
CAPTAIN.
True, madam; and, to comfort you with chance,
Assure yourself, after our ship did split,
When you, and those poor number sav'd with you,
Hung on our driving boat, I saw your brother,
Most provident in peril, bind himself,---
Courage and hope both teaching him the practice,--
To a strong mast that liv'd upon the sea;
Where, like Arion on the dolphin's back,
I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves
So long as I could see.
VIOLA.
For saying so, there's gold!
Mine own escape unfoldeth to my hope,
Whereto thy speech serves for authority,
The like of him. Know'st thou this country?
CAPTAIN.
Ay, madam, well; for I was bred and born
Not three hours' travel from this very place.
VIOLA.
Who governs here?
CAPTAIN.
A noble duke, in nature
As in name.
VIOLA.
What is his name?
CAPTAIN.
Orsino.
VIOLA.
Orsino! I have heard my father name him.
He was a bachelor then.
CAPTAIN.
And so is now,
Or was so very late; for but a month
Ago I went from hence; and then 'twas fresh
In murmur,--as, you know, what great ones do,
The less will prattle of,--that he did seek
The love of fair Olivia.
VIOLA.
What's she?
CAPTAIN.
A virtuous maid, the daughter of a count
That died some twelvemonth since; then leaving her
In the protection of his son, her brother,
Who shortly also died; for whose dear love,
They say, she hath abjured the company
And sight of men.
VIOLA.
O that I served that lady!
And might not be delivered to the world,
Till I had made mine own occasion mellow,
What my estate is.
CAPTAIN.
That were hard to compass:
Because she will admit no kind of suit,
No, not the duke's.
VIOLA.
There is a fair behaviour in thee, captain;
And though that nature with a beauteous wall
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
I will believe thou hast a mind that suits
With this thy fair and outward character.
I pray thee, and I'll pay thee bounteously,
Conceal me what I am; and be my aid
For such disguise as, haply, shall become
The form of my intent. I'll serve this duke;
Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him;
It may be worth thy pains, for I can sing,
And speak to him in many sorts of music,
That will allow me very worth his service.
What else may hap to time I will commit;
Only shape thou silence to my wit.
CAPTAIN.
Be you his eunuch and your mute I'll be;
When my tongue blabs, then let mine eyes not see.
VIOLA.
I thank thee. Lead me on.
[Exeunt.]
| 417 | Act 1, Scene 2 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210415161814/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/twelfth-night/summary/act-1-scene-2 | The scene opens after a terrible ship wreck. Viola, a few sailors, and a captain arrive on shore and Viola asks where they are. The captain says they're in Illyria. Viola is bummed that she's in Illyria and says her brother is probably in heaven, but she's holding onto hope that he is alive. The captain tries to comfort Viola and says that, after the ship sank, he saw her brother tie himself to the mast, which had somehow managed to stay afloat. The captain's description of Sebastian clinging to the ship's mast also reveals to the audience what went down at sea. Apparently, when the ship split in two and the passengers and crew went into the water, Viola, being a very scrappy girl, avoided drowning by hanging on to the side of a life boat. Viola gives him some gold for being a nice guy and for cheering her up. The captain, who grew up three hours away from Illyria, tells Viola about the country and dishes a little dirt about its local celebs. The beloved Duke Orsino is a bachelor who's been trying to hook up with the Countess Olivia. But, Olivia's so not into him. Her dad died about a year ago and then her brother died shortly after, so she's sworn off the company of men while she grieves. Viola responds to the gossip by wishing she could disguise her identity and social class for a while by working as Olivia's servant - at least until she gets her bearings and figures out what to do next. The captain explains why that's just not going to happen: Olivia isn't seeing any visitors, not even the Duke. Viola tells the captain that he seems like a trusty fellow, so she's going to pay him a ton of dough to dress her up like a boy and not tell anyone about it. Since she's got such a great singing voice, she wants the captain to introduce her to the Duke as a eunuch. The idea is that parading around as a eunuch will guard Viola from suspicion that she's a woman, while allowing her singing talents to earn her some props in the Duke's court. The captain agrees to keep his lips zipped while Viola dresses up like a boy and plays "I'm a singing eunuch" at Orsino's court. | null | 392 | 1 | [
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161 | true | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/161-chapters/chapters_11_to_15.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/Sense and Sensibility/section_2_part_0.txt | Sense and Sensibility.chapters 11-15 | chapters 11-15 | null | {"name": "Chapters 11-15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210123003206/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/sensibility/section3/", "summary": "The Dashwoods are surprised by the many invitations they receive in Devonshire, including several private balls at Barton Park. Marianne spends almost all of her time with Sir John Willoughby, who seems to have eyes for her alone. Elinor, however, is concerned by how open her sister is in her affections. She, unlike her sister, has no one whose company she truly enjoys, with the exception of Colonel Brandon. He, disappointed by Marianne's ardor for Willoughby, asks Elinor if her sister believes in \"second attachments.\" Elinor must confess that Marianne's romantic sensibility seems bent on the ideal of love at first sight. One morning, while Elinor and Marianne are out walking, the younger sister reveals that Willoughby offered her a horse, as a gift. The offer thrills Marianne, but Elinor gently reminds her sister how inconvenient and expensive the horse would be to maintain. She also tells Marianne that she doubts the propriety of receiving such a generous gift from a man she has known so briefly. Marianne insists that it does not necessarily take a long time for people to get to know each other well, though she ultimately concedes that owning a horse would be too much of a burden on their mother, who manages the household. The next day, Margaret reports to Elinor that she saw Willoughby cut off a lock of Marianne's hair and kiss it, a sure sign of the pair's engagement. Elinor, nonetheless, warns her little sister not to jump to any conclusions. Mrs. Jennings somehow learns that Elinor had affections for someone back at Norland. The old busybody tries to get Elinor to reveal the name of this \"favourite,\" but Elinor insists that she had no such attachment. Finally, however, Margaret confirms that there was such a man, he was of no particular profession, and his name began with an 'F'. Elinor is extremely embarrassed by her sister's indiscretion. The Dashwoods, Colonel Brandon, Willoughby, and the Middletons plan an excursion to Whitwell, an estate twelve miles from Barton belonging to Colonel Brandon's brother-in-law. However, just as they are about to set off, the Colonel receives an urgent letter calling him to town immediately. This disappoints the other members of the party; they encourage Brandon to postpone his trip, but he insists on leaving right away. He refuses to reveal the reason for his sudden departure, though Mrs. Jennings whispers to Elinor that she suspects he must attend to Miss Williams, whom she identifies as his natural daughter. Since they cannot go to Whitwell without Colonel Brandon, the party instead decides to drive about the country in carriages. Marianne later confesses that during this excursion, Willoughby took her to his home at Allenham while his elderly relative, Mrs. Smith, was out. Elinor is appalled by the impropriety of such a visit, and she chastises her sister accordingly. One day while visiting Barton Cottage, Willoughby proclaims his utter fondness for the little house and makes Mrs. Dashwood promise that she will never change a single inch of stone in the structure. The Dashwood women invite him to come to dinner the next day, and he agrees. However, when Elinor and Mrs. Dashwood return home that afternoon, they discover Marianne in tears and Willoughby on his way out the door. Willoughby informs them that he has been sent to London on business and will probably not return to Devonshire for the rest of the year. Mrs. Dashwood, suspecting that he and Marianne are secretly engaged, tries to convince herself that Willoughby had to leave so that Mrs. Smith would not learn of the attachment, but Elinor remains more skeptical and reminds her mother that they do not know if there is any such understanding between the two. Marianne, meanwhile, remains overcome by grief and cannot speak or eat.", "analysis": "Commentary Elinor and Colonel Brandon's discussion of \"second attachments\" is ironic in light of the eventual developments of the novel, for nearly every character except Elinor will ultimately fall in love more than once: Marianne has fallen for John Willoughby but will grow to love the more sensible and constant Colonel; the Colonel loves Marianne because, as we will soon learn, she reminds him of a woman he loved before; Edward Ferrars will marry Elinor only after a long engagement to Lucy Steele; John Willoughby professes his devotion to Marianne but then marries the wealthy Miss Sophia Grey; and even Mr. Henry Dashwood had two wives. In her discussion with the Colonel, Elinor seems to have no problem with second attachments, yet it is only she who marries the very first man she knows and loves. When Marianne uses the term \"attachment,\" she is referring to the deeply individualized, subjective feeling of falling in love, a term closely linked to the novel's notion of \"sensibility.\" The counterpart of this term is \"connection,\" which refers to a public bond that also entails an emotional \"attachment,\" and is closely linked to the notion of \"sense.\" Marianne's relationship with Willoughby is described as an \"attachment,\" whereas, when Elinor speaks of her relationship to Edward, she points out the lack of any formal \"connection\" between them. As in all of Austen's novels, marriage here is closely bound up with financial considerations. When reflecting on her sister's relationship with Willoughby, Elinor realizes that \"marriage might not be immediately in power.\" This preoccupation with money in relation to marriage was highly warranted in Austen's day; marriage was for life, and insurance and social security did not exist; a couple needed a guaranteed source of income before they could settle down together. Jane Austen understood this problem personally. Her older sister Cassandra's engagement stretched on for several years because the marriage was postponed for lack of money. Although Willoughby ultimately marries for money, he seems oblivious to all practical concerns in the early days of his relationship with Marianne. He offers her the gift of a horse even though, as Elinor reminds her sister, there is no way the Dashwoods can afford its upkeep. The horse is named Queen Mab, a reference to the fanciful \"fairies' midwife\" from Romeo and Juliet , who supposedly rides her chariot across lovers' brains to create their magical dreams. These dreams, however, according to Shakespeare's Mercutio, are \"begot of nothing but fantasy\" and are \"more inconstant than the wind,\" just as Marianne's dream of owning the horse can never come true and her Willoughby will prove a mercurial and inconstant lover. Given Willoughby's unfaithfulness, it is ironic that he insists that Mrs. Dashwood promise never to alter a single stone in Barton Cottage; a man who abandons one lover for another has hardly the right to demand that a building remain unchanged. These chapters serve as a lens through which to study one of the most important themes in the novel, the role of appearances in the assessment and judgment of character. Elinor consistently and fiercely refrains from judging other characters on the basis of appearances alone. Although Mrs. Jennings claims early on that Colonel Brandon is interested in Marianne, Elinor is not convinced of this fact until Brandon approaches her directly to discuss Marianne's romantic proclivities. Similarly, although Mrs. Dashwood and Margaret conclude that Marianne and Willoughby are engaged, Elinor remains skeptical so long as the two refrain from formally announcing their engagement. Her discussion with her mother about Marianne's relationship to Willoughby in Chapter 15 reveals that while Mrs. Dashwood readily bases her faith on looks and gestures, Elinor requires that feelings be explicitly articulated. Mrs. Dashwood draws conclusions based on appearances alone, while Elinor suspends judgment until these appearances are confirmed by words. This is yet another example of the dichotomy in the novel's title."} |
Little had Mrs. Dashwood or her daughters imagined when they first came
into Devonshire, that so many engagements would arise to occupy their
time as shortly presented themselves, or that they should have such
frequent invitations and such constant visitors as to leave them little
leisure for serious employment. Yet such was the case. When Marianne
was recovered, the schemes of amusement at home and abroad, which Sir
John had been previously forming, were put into execution. The private
balls at the park then began; and parties on the water were made and
accomplished as often as a showery October would allow. In every
meeting of the kind Willoughby was included; and the ease and
familiarity which naturally attended these parties were exactly
calculated to give increasing intimacy to his acquaintance with the
Dashwoods, to afford him opportunity of witnessing the excellencies of
Marianne, of marking his animated admiration of her, and of receiving,
in her behaviour to himself, the most pointed assurance of her
affection.
Elinor could not be surprised at their attachment. She only wished
that it were less openly shewn; and once or twice did venture to
suggest the propriety of some self-command to Marianne. But Marianne
abhorred all concealment where no real disgrace could attend unreserve;
and to aim at the restraint of sentiments which were not in themselves
illaudable, appeared to her not merely an unnecessary effort, but a
disgraceful subjection of reason to common-place and mistaken notions.
Willoughby thought the same; and their behaviour at all times, was an
illustration of their opinions.
When he was present she had no eyes for any one else. Every thing he
did, was right. Every thing he said, was clever. If their evenings at
the park were concluded with cards, he cheated himself and all the rest
of the party to get her a good hand. If dancing formed the amusement
of the night, they were partners for half the time; and when obliged to
separate for a couple of dances, were careful to stand together and
scarcely spoke a word to any body else. Such conduct made them of
course most exceedingly laughed at; but ridicule could not shame, and
seemed hardly to provoke them.
Mrs. Dashwood entered into all their feelings with a warmth which left
her no inclination for checking this excessive display of them. To her
it was but the natural consequence of a strong affection in a young and
ardent mind.
This was the season of happiness to Marianne. Her heart was devoted to
Willoughby, and the fond attachment to Norland, which she brought with
her from Sussex, was more likely to be softened than she had thought it
possible before, by the charms which his society bestowed on her
present home.
Elinor's happiness was not so great. Her heart was not so much at
ease, nor her satisfaction in their amusements so pure. They afforded
her no companion that could make amends for what she had left behind,
nor that could teach her to think of Norland with less regret than
ever. Neither Lady Middleton nor Mrs. Jennings could supply to her the
conversation she missed; although the latter was an everlasting talker,
and from the first had regarded her with a kindness which ensured her a
large share of her discourse. She had already repeated her own history
to Elinor three or four times; and had Elinor's memory been equal to
her means of improvement, she might have known very early in their
acquaintance all the particulars of Mr. Jennings's last illness, and
what he said to his wife a few minutes before he died. Lady Middleton
was more agreeable than her mother only in being more silent. Elinor
needed little observation to perceive that her reserve was a mere
calmness of manner with which sense had nothing to do. Towards her
husband and mother she was the same as to them; and intimacy was
therefore neither to be looked for nor desired. She had nothing to say
one day that she had not said the day before. Her insipidity was
invariable, for even her spirits were always the same; and though she
did not oppose the parties arranged by her husband, provided every
thing were conducted in style and her two eldest children attended her,
she never appeared to receive more enjoyment from them than she might
have experienced in sitting at home;--and so little did her presence
add to the pleasure of the others, by any share in their conversation,
that they were sometimes only reminded of her being amongst them by her
solicitude about her troublesome boys.
In Colonel Brandon alone, of all her new acquaintance, did Elinor find
a person who could in any degree claim the respect of abilities, excite
the interest of friendship, or give pleasure as a companion.
Willoughby was out of the question. Her admiration and regard, even
her sisterly regard, was all his own; but he was a lover; his
attentions were wholly Marianne's, and a far less agreeable man might
have been more generally pleasing. Colonel Brandon, unfortunately for
himself, had no such encouragement to think only of Marianne, and in
conversing with Elinor he found the greatest consolation for the
indifference of her sister.
Elinor's compassion for him increased, as she had reason to suspect
that the misery of disappointed love had already been known to him.
This suspicion was given by some words which accidentally dropped from
him one evening at the park, when they were sitting down together by
mutual consent, while the others were dancing. His eyes were fixed on
Marianne, and, after a silence of some minutes, he said, with a faint
smile, "Your sister, I understand, does not approve of second
attachments."
"No," replied Elinor, "her opinions are all romantic."
"Or rather, as I believe, she considers them impossible to exist."
"I believe she does. But how she contrives it without reflecting on
the character of her own father, who had himself two wives, I know not.
A few years however will settle her opinions on the reasonable basis of
common sense and observation; and then they may be more easy to define
and to justify than they now are, by any body but herself."
"This will probably be the case," he replied; "and yet there is
something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is
sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions."
"I cannot agree with you there," said Elinor. "There are
inconveniences attending such feelings as Marianne's, which all the
charms of enthusiasm and ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her
systems have all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at
nought; and a better acquaintance with the world is what I look forward
to as her greatest possible advantage."
After a short pause he resumed the conversation by saying,--
"Does your sister make no distinction in her objections against a
second attachment? or is it equally criminal in every body? Are those
who have been disappointed in their first choice, whether from the
inconstancy of its object, or the perverseness of circumstances, to be
equally indifferent during the rest of their lives?"
"Upon my word, I am not acquainted with the minutiae of her principles.
I only know that I never yet heard her admit any instance of a second
attachment's being pardonable."
"This," said he, "cannot hold; but a change, a total change of
sentiments--No, no, do not desire it; for when the romantic refinements
of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they
succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too dangerous! I
speak from experience. I once knew a lady who in temper and mind
greatly resembled your sister, who thought and judged like her, but who
from an inforced change--from a series of unfortunate circumstances"--
Here he stopt suddenly; appeared to think that he had said too much,
and by his countenance gave rise to conjectures, which might not
otherwise have entered Elinor's head. The lady would probably have
passed without suspicion, had he not convinced Miss Dashwood that what
concerned her ought not to escape his lips. As it was, it required but
a slight effort of fancy to connect his emotion with the tender
recollection of past regard. Elinor attempted no more. But Marianne,
in her place, would not have done so little. The whole story would
have been speedily formed under her active imagination; and every thing
established in the most melancholy order of disastrous love.
As Elinor and Marianne were walking together the next morning the
latter communicated a piece of news to her sister, which in spite of
all that she knew before of Marianne's imprudence and want of thought,
surprised her by its extravagant testimony of both. Marianne told her,
with the greatest delight, that Willoughby had given her a horse, one
that he had bred himself on his estate in Somersetshire, and which was
exactly calculated to carry a woman. Without considering that it was
not in her mother's plan to keep any horse, that if she were to alter
her resolution in favour of this gift, she must buy another for the
servant, and keep a servant to ride it, and after all, build a stable
to receive them, she had accepted the present without hesitation, and
told her sister of it in raptures.
"He intends to send his groom into Somersetshire immediately for it,"
she added, "and when it arrives we will ride every day. You shall
share its use with me. Imagine to yourself, my dear Elinor, the
delight of a gallop on some of these downs."
Most unwilling was she to awaken from such a dream of felicity to
comprehend all the unhappy truths which attended the affair; and for
some time she refused to submit to them. As to an additional servant,
the expense would be a trifle; Mama she was sure would never object to
it; and any horse would do for HIM; he might always get one at the
park; as to a stable, the merest shed would be sufficient. Elinor then
ventured to doubt the propriety of her receiving such a present from a
man so little, or at least so lately known to her. This was too much.
"You are mistaken, Elinor," said she warmly, "in supposing I know very
little of Willoughby. I have not known him long indeed, but I am much
better acquainted with him, than I am with any other creature in the
world, except yourself and mama. It is not time or opportunity that is
to determine intimacy;--it is disposition alone. Seven years would be
insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven
days are more than enough for others. I should hold myself guilty of
greater impropriety in accepting a horse from my brother, than from
Willoughby. Of John I know very little, though we have lived together
for years; but of Willoughby my judgment has long been formed."
Elinor thought it wisest to touch that point no more. She knew her
sister's temper. Opposition on so tender a subject would only attach
her the more to her own opinion. But by an appeal to her affection for
her mother, by representing the inconveniences which that indulgent
mother must draw on herself, if (as would probably be the case) she
consented to this increase of establishment, Marianne was shortly
subdued; and she promised not to tempt her mother to such imprudent
kindness by mentioning the offer, and to tell Willoughby when she saw
him next, that it must be declined.
She was faithful to her word; and when Willoughby called at the
cottage, the same day, Elinor heard her express her disappointment to
him in a low voice, on being obliged to forego the acceptance of his
present. The reasons for this alteration were at the same time
related, and they were such as to make further entreaty on his side
impossible. His concern however was very apparent; and after
expressing it with earnestness, he added, in the same low voice,--"But,
Marianne, the horse is still yours, though you cannot use it now. I
shall keep it only till you can claim it. When you leave Barton to
form your own establishment in a more lasting home, Queen Mab shall
receive you."
This was all overheard by Miss Dashwood; and in the whole of the
sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her
sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so
decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between
them. From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each
other; and the belief of it created no other surprise than that she, or
any of their friends, should be left by tempers so frank, to discover
it by accident.
Margaret related something to her the next day, which placed this
matter in a still clearer light. Willoughby had spent the preceding
evening with them, and Margaret, by being left some time in the parlour
with only him and Marianne, had had opportunity for observations,
which, with a most important face, she communicated to her eldest
sister, when they were next by themselves.
"Oh, Elinor!" she cried, "I have such a secret to tell you about
Marianne. I am sure she will be married to Mr. Willoughby very soon."
"You have said so," replied Elinor, "almost every day since they first
met on High-church Down; and they had not known each other a week, I
believe, before you were certain that Marianne wore his picture round
her neck; but it turned out to be only the miniature of our great
uncle."
"But indeed this is quite another thing. I am sure they will be
married very soon, for he has got a lock of her hair."
"Take care, Margaret. It may be only the hair of some great uncle of
HIS."
"But, indeed, Elinor, it is Marianne's. I am almost sure it is, for I
saw him cut it off. Last night after tea, when you and mama went out
of the room, they were whispering and talking together as fast as could
be, and he seemed to be begging something of her, and presently he took
up her scissors and cut off a long lock of her hair, for it was all
tumbled down her back; and he kissed it, and folded it up in a piece of
white paper; and put it into his pocket-book."
For such particulars, stated on such authority, Elinor could not
withhold her credit; nor was she disposed to it, for the circumstance
was in perfect unison with what she had heard and seen herself.
Margaret's sagacity was not always displayed in a way so satisfactory
to her sister. When Mrs. Jennings attacked her one evening at the
park, to give the name of the young man who was Elinor's particular
favourite, which had been long a matter of great curiosity to her,
Margaret answered by looking at her sister, and saying, "I must not
tell, may I, Elinor?"
This of course made every body laugh; and Elinor tried to laugh too.
But the effort was painful. She was convinced that Margaret had fixed
on a person whose name she could not bear with composure to become a
standing joke with Mrs. Jennings.
Marianne felt for her most sincerely; but she did more harm than good
to the cause, by turning very red and saying in an angry manner to
Margaret,
"Remember that whatever your conjectures may be, you have no right to
repeat them."
"I never had any conjectures about it," replied Margaret; "it was you
who told me of it yourself."
This increased the mirth of the company, and Margaret was eagerly
pressed to say something more.
"Oh! pray, Miss Margaret, let us know all about it," said Mrs.
Jennings. "What is the gentleman's name?"
"I must not tell, ma'am. But I know very well what it is; and I know
where he is too."
"Yes, yes, we can guess where he is; at his own house at Norland to be
sure. He is the curate of the parish I dare say."
"No, THAT he is not. He is of no profession at all."
"Margaret," said Marianne with great warmth, "you know that all this is
an invention of your own, and that there is no such person in
existence."
"Well, then, he is lately dead, Marianne, for I am sure there was such
a man once, and his name begins with an F."
Most grateful did Elinor feel to Lady Middleton for observing, at this
moment, "that it rained very hard," though she believed the
interruption to proceed less from any attention to her, than from her
ladyship's great dislike of all such inelegant subjects of raillery as
delighted her husband and mother. The idea however started by her, was
immediately pursued by Colonel Brandon, who was on every occasion
mindful of the feelings of others; and much was said on the subject of
rain by both of them. Willoughby opened the piano-forte, and asked
Marianne to sit down to it; and thus amidst the various endeavours of
different people to quit the topic, it fell to the ground. But not so
easily did Elinor recover from the alarm into which it had thrown her.
A party was formed this evening for going on the following day to see a
very fine place about twelve miles from Barton, belonging to a
brother-in-law of Colonel Brandon, without whose interest it could not
be seen, as the proprietor, who was then abroad, had left strict orders
on that head. The grounds were declared to be highly beautiful, and
Sir John, who was particularly warm in their praise, might be allowed
to be a tolerable judge, for he had formed parties to visit them, at
least, twice every summer for the last ten years. They contained a
noble piece of water; a sail on which was to a form a great part of the
morning's amusement; cold provisions were to be taken, open carriages
only to be employed, and every thing conducted in the usual style of a
complete party of pleasure.
To some few of the company it appeared rather a bold undertaking,
considering the time of year, and that it had rained every day for the
last fortnight;--and Mrs. Dashwood, who had already a cold, was
persuaded by Elinor to stay at home.
Their intended excursion to Whitwell turned out very different from
what Elinor had expected. She was prepared to be wet through,
fatigued, and frightened; but the event was still more unfortunate, for
they did not go at all.
By ten o'clock the whole party was assembled at the park, where they
were to breakfast. The morning was rather favourable, though it had
rained all night, as the clouds were then dispersing across the sky,
and the sun frequently appeared. They were all in high spirits and
good humour, eager to be happy, and determined to submit to the
greatest inconveniences and hardships rather than be otherwise.
While they were at breakfast the letters were brought in. Among the
rest there was one for Colonel Brandon;--he took it, looked at the
direction, changed colour, and immediately left the room.
"What is the matter with Brandon?" said Sir John.
Nobody could tell.
"I hope he has had no bad news," said Lady Middleton. "It must be
something extraordinary that could make Colonel Brandon leave my
breakfast table so suddenly."
In about five minutes he returned.
"No bad news, Colonel, I hope;" said Mrs. Jennings, as soon as he
entered the room.
"None at all, ma'am, I thank you."
"Was it from Avignon? I hope it is not to say that your sister is
worse."
"No, ma'am. It came from town, and is merely a letter of business."
"But how came the hand to discompose you so much, if it was only a
letter of business? Come, come, this won't do, Colonel; so let us hear
the truth of it."
"My dear madam," said Lady Middleton, "recollect what you are saying."
"Perhaps it is to tell you that your cousin Fanny is married?" said
Mrs. Jennings, without attending to her daughter's reproof.
"No, indeed, it is not."
"Well, then, I know who it is from, Colonel. And I hope she is well."
"Whom do you mean, ma'am?" said he, colouring a little.
"Oh! you know who I mean."
"I am particularly sorry, ma'am," said he, addressing Lady Middleton,
"that I should receive this letter today, for it is on business which
requires my immediate attendance in town."
"In town!" cried Mrs. Jennings. "What can you have to do in town at
this time of year?"
"My own loss is great," he continued, "in being obliged to leave so
agreeable a party; but I am the more concerned, as I fear my presence
is necessary to gain your admittance at Whitwell."
What a blow upon them all was this!
"But if you write a note to the housekeeper, Mr. Brandon," said
Marianne, eagerly, "will it not be sufficient?"
He shook his head.
"We must go," said Sir John.--"It shall not be put off when we are so
near it. You cannot go to town till tomorrow, Brandon, that is all."
"I wish it could be so easily settled. But it is not in my power to
delay my journey for one day!"
"If you would but let us know what your business is," said Mrs.
Jennings, "we might see whether it could be put off or not."
"You would not be six hours later," said Willoughby, "if you were to
defer your journey till our return."
"I cannot afford to lose ONE hour."--
Elinor then heard Willoughby say, in a low voice to Marianne, "There
are some people who cannot bear a party of pleasure. Brandon is one of
them. He was afraid of catching cold I dare say, and invented this
trick for getting out of it. I would lay fifty guineas the letter was
of his own writing."
"I have no doubt of it," replied Marianne.
"There is no persuading you to change your mind, Brandon, I know of
old," said Sir John, "when once you are determined on anything. But,
however, I hope you will think better of it. Consider, here are the
two Miss Careys come over from Newton, the three Miss Dashwoods walked
up from the cottage, and Mr. Willoughby got up two hours before his
usual time, on purpose to go to Whitwell."
Colonel Brandon again repeated his sorrow at being the cause of
disappointing the party; but at the same time declared it to be
unavoidable.
"Well, then, when will you come back again?"
"I hope we shall see you at Barton," added her ladyship, "as soon as
you can conveniently leave town; and we must put off the party to
Whitwell till you return."
"You are very obliging. But it is so uncertain, when I may have it in
my power to return, that I dare not engage for it at all."
"Oh! he must and shall come back," cried Sir John. "If he is not here
by the end of the week, I shall go after him."
"Ay, so do, Sir John," cried Mrs. Jennings, "and then perhaps you may
find out what his business is."
"I do not want to pry into other men's concerns. I suppose it is
something he is ashamed of."
Colonel Brandon's horses were announced.
"You do not go to town on horseback, do you?" added Sir John.
"No. Only to Honiton. I shall then go post."
"Well, as you are resolved to go, I wish you a good journey. But you
had better change your mind."
"I assure you it is not in my power."
He then took leave of the whole party.
"Is there no chance of my seeing you and your sisters in town this
winter, Miss Dashwood?"
"I am afraid, none at all."
"Then I must bid you farewell for a longer time than I should wish to
do."
To Marianne, he merely bowed and said nothing.
"Come Colonel," said Mrs. Jennings, "before you go, do let us know what
you are going about."
He wished her a good morning, and, attended by Sir John, left the room.
The complaints and lamentations which politeness had hitherto
restrained, now burst forth universally; and they all agreed again and
again how provoking it was to be so disappointed.
"I can guess what his business is, however," said Mrs. Jennings
exultingly.
"Can you, ma'am?" said almost every body.
"Yes; it is about Miss Williams, I am sure."
"And who is Miss Williams?" asked Marianne.
"What! do not you know who Miss Williams is? I am sure you must have
heard of her before. She is a relation of the Colonel's, my dear; a
very near relation. We will not say how near, for fear of shocking the
young ladies." Then, lowering her voice a little, she said to Elinor,
"She is his natural daughter."
"Indeed!"
"Oh, yes; and as like him as she can stare. I dare say the Colonel
will leave her all his fortune."
When Sir John returned, he joined most heartily in the general regret
on so unfortunate an event; concluding however by observing, that as
they were all got together, they must do something by way of being
happy; and after some consultation it was agreed, that although
happiness could only be enjoyed at Whitwell, they might procure a
tolerable composure of mind by driving about the country. The
carriages were then ordered; Willoughby's was first, and Marianne never
looked happier than when she got into it. He drove through the park
very fast, and they were soon out of sight; and nothing more of them
was seen till their return, which did not happen till after the return
of all the rest. They both seemed delighted with their drive; but said
only in general terms that they had kept in the lanes, while the others
went on the downs.
It was settled that there should be a dance in the evening, and that
every body should be extremely merry all day long. Some more of the
Careys came to dinner, and they had the pleasure of sitting down nearly
twenty to table, which Sir John observed with great contentment.
Willoughby took his usual place between the two elder Miss Dashwoods.
Mrs. Jennings sat on Elinor's right hand; and they had not been long
seated, before she leant behind her and Willoughby, and said to
Marianne, loud enough for them both to hear, "I have found you out in
spite of all your tricks. I know where you spent the morning."
Marianne coloured, and replied very hastily, "Where, pray?"--
"Did not you know," said Willoughby, "that we had been out in my
curricle?"
"Yes, yes, Mr. Impudence, I know that very well, and I was determined
to find out WHERE you had been to.-- I hope you like your house, Miss
Marianne. It is a very large one, I know; and when I come to see you,
I hope you will have new-furnished it, for it wanted it very much when
I was there six years ago."
Marianne turned away in great confusion. Mrs. Jennings laughed
heartily; and Elinor found that in her resolution to know where they
had been, she had actually made her own woman enquire of Mr.
Willoughby's groom; and that she had by that method been informed that
they had gone to Allenham, and spent a considerable time there in
walking about the garden and going all over the house.
Elinor could hardly believe this to be true, as it seemed very unlikely
that Willoughby should propose, or Marianne consent, to enter the house
while Mrs. Smith was in it, with whom Marianne had not the smallest
acquaintance.
As soon as they left the dining-room, Elinor enquired of her about it;
and great was her surprise when she found that every circumstance
related by Mrs. Jennings was perfectly true. Marianne was quite angry
with her for doubting it.
"Why should you imagine, Elinor, that we did not go there, or that we
did not see the house? Is not it what you have often wished to do
yourself?"
"Yes, Marianne, but I would not go while Mrs. Smith was there, and with
no other companion than Mr. Willoughby."
"Mr. Willoughby however is the only person who can have a right to shew
that house; and as he went in an open carriage, it was impossible to
have any other companion. I never spent a pleasanter morning in my
life."
"I am afraid," replied Elinor, "that the pleasantness of an employment
does not always evince its propriety."
"On the contrary, nothing can be a stronger proof of it, Elinor; for if
there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been
sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting
wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure."
"But, my dear Marianne, as it has already exposed you to some very
impertinent remarks, do you not now begin to doubt the discretion of
your own conduct?"
"If the impertinent remarks of Mrs. Jennings are to be the proof of
impropriety in conduct, we are all offending every moment of our lives.
I value not her censure any more than I should do her commendation. I
am not sensible of having done anything wrong in walking over Mrs.
Smith's grounds, or in seeing her house. They will one day be Mr.
Willoughby's, and--"
"If they were one day to be your own, Marianne, you would not be
justified in what you have done."
She blushed at this hint; but it was even visibly gratifying to her;
and after a ten minutes' interval of earnest thought, she came to her
sister again, and said with great good humour, "Perhaps, Elinor, it WAS
rather ill-judged in me to go to Allenham; but Mr. Willoughby wanted
particularly to shew me the place; and it is a charming house, I assure
you.--There is one remarkably pretty sitting room up stairs; of a nice
comfortable size for constant use, and with modern furniture it would
be delightful. It is a corner room, and has windows on two sides. On
one side you look across the bowling-green, behind the house, to a
beautiful hanging wood, and on the other you have a view of the church
and village, and, beyond them, of those fine bold hills that we have so
often admired. I did not see it to advantage, for nothing could be
more forlorn than the furniture,--but if it were newly fitted up--a
couple of hundred pounds, Willoughby says, would make it one of the
pleasantest summer-rooms in England."
Could Elinor have listened to her without interruption from the others,
she would have described every room in the house with equal delight.
The sudden termination of Colonel Brandon's visit at the park, with his
steadiness in concealing its cause, filled the mind, and raised the
wonder of Mrs. Jennings for two or three days; she was a great
wonderer, as every one must be who takes a very lively interest in all
the comings and goings of all their acquaintance. She wondered, with
little intermission what could be the reason of it; was sure there must
be some bad news, and thought over every kind of distress that could
have befallen him, with a fixed determination that he should not escape
them all.
"Something very melancholy must be the matter, I am sure," said she.
"I could see it in his face. Poor man! I am afraid his circumstances
may be bad. The estate at Delaford was never reckoned more than two
thousand a year, and his brother left everything sadly involved. I do
think he must have been sent for about money matters, for what else can
it be? I wonder whether it is so. I would give anything to know the
truth of it. Perhaps it is about Miss Williams and, by the bye, I dare
say it is, because he looked so conscious when I mentioned her. May be
she is ill in town; nothing in the world more likely, for I have a
notion she is always rather sickly. I would lay any wager it is about
Miss Williams. It is not so very likely he should be distressed in his
circumstances NOW, for he is a very prudent man, and to be sure must
have cleared the estate by this time. I wonder what it can be! May be
his sister is worse at Avignon, and has sent for him over. His setting
off in such a hurry seems very like it. Well, I wish him out of all
his trouble with all my heart, and a good wife into the bargain."
So wondered, so talked Mrs. Jennings. Her opinion varying with every
fresh conjecture, and all seeming equally probable as they arose.
Elinor, though she felt really interested in the welfare of Colonel
Brandon, could not bestow all the wonder on his going so suddenly away,
which Mrs. Jennings was desirous of her feeling; for besides that the
circumstance did not in her opinion justify such lasting amazement or
variety of speculation, her wonder was otherwise disposed of. It was
engrossed by the extraordinary silence of her sister and Willoughby on
the subject, which they must know to be peculiarly interesting to them
all. As this silence continued, every day made it appear more strange
and more incompatible with the disposition of both. Why they should
not openly acknowledge to her mother and herself, what their constant
behaviour to each other declared to have taken place, Elinor could not
imagine.
She could easily conceive that marriage might not be immediately in
their power; for though Willoughby was independent, there was no reason
to believe him rich. His estate had been rated by Sir John at about
six or seven hundred a year; but he lived at an expense to which that
income could hardly be equal, and he had himself often complained of
his poverty. But for this strange kind of secrecy maintained by them
relative to their engagement, which in fact concealed nothing at all,
she could not account; and it was so wholly contradictory to their
general opinions and practice, that a doubt sometimes entered her mind
of their being really engaged, and this doubt was enough to prevent her
making any inquiry of Marianne.
Nothing could be more expressive of attachment to them all, than
Willoughby's behaviour. To Marianne it had all the distinguishing
tenderness which a lover's heart could give, and to the rest of the
family it was the affectionate attention of a son and a brother. The
cottage seemed to be considered and loved by him as his home; many more
of his hours were spent there than at Allenham; and if no general
engagement collected them at the park, the exercise which called him
out in the morning was almost certain of ending there, where the rest
of the day was spent by himself at the side of Marianne, and by his
favourite pointer at her feet.
One evening in particular, about a week after Colonel Brandon left the
country, his heart seemed more than usually open to every feeling of
attachment to the objects around him; and on Mrs. Dashwood's happening
to mention her design of improving the cottage in the spring, he warmly
opposed every alteration of a place which affection had established as
perfect with him.
"What!" he exclaimed--"Improve this dear cottage! No. THAT I will
never consent to. Not a stone must be added to its walls, not an inch
to its size, if my feelings are regarded."
"Do not be alarmed," said Miss Dashwood, "nothing of the kind will be
done; for my mother will never have money enough to attempt it."
"I am heartily glad of it," he cried. "May she always be poor, if she
can employ her riches no better."
"Thank you, Willoughby. But you may be assured that I would not
sacrifice one sentiment of local attachment of yours, or of any one
whom I loved, for all the improvements in the world. Depend upon it
that whatever unemployed sum may remain, when I make up my accounts in
the spring, I would even rather lay it uselessly by than dispose of it
in a manner so painful to you. But are you really so attached to this
place as to see no defect in it?"
"I am," said he. "To me it is faultless. Nay, more, I consider it as
the only form of building in which happiness is attainable, and were I
rich enough I would instantly pull Combe down, and build it up again in
the exact plan of this cottage."
"With dark narrow stairs and a kitchen that smokes, I suppose," said
Elinor.
"Yes," cried he in the same eager tone, "with all and every thing
belonging to it;--in no one convenience or INconvenience about it,
should the least variation be perceptible. Then, and then only, under
such a roof, I might perhaps be as happy at Combe as I have been at
Barton."
"I flatter myself," replied Elinor, "that even under the disadvantage
of better rooms and a broader staircase, you will hereafter find your
own house as faultless as you now do this."
"There certainly are circumstances," said Willoughby, "which might
greatly endear it to me; but this place will always have one claim of
my affection, which no other can possibly share."
Mrs. Dashwood looked with pleasure at Marianne, whose fine eyes were
fixed so expressively on Willoughby, as plainly denoted how well she
understood him.
"How often did I wish," added he, "when I was at Allenham this time
twelvemonth, that Barton cottage were inhabited! I never passed within
view of it without admiring its situation, and grieving that no one
should live in it. How little did I then think that the very first
news I should hear from Mrs. Smith, when I next came into the country,
would be that Barton cottage was taken: and I felt an immediate
satisfaction and interest in the event, which nothing but a kind of
prescience of what happiness I should experience from it, can account
for. Must it not have been so, Marianne?" speaking to her in a lowered
voice. Then continuing his former tone, he said, "And yet this house
you would spoil, Mrs. Dashwood? You would rob it of its simplicity by
imaginary improvement! and this dear parlour in which our acquaintance
first began, and in which so many happy hours have been since spent by
us together, you would degrade to the condition of a common entrance,
and every body would be eager to pass through the room which has
hitherto contained within itself more real accommodation and comfort
than any other apartment of the handsomest dimensions in the world
could possibly afford."
Mrs. Dashwood again assured him that no alteration of the kind should
be attempted.
"You are a good woman," he warmly replied. "Your promise makes me
easy. Extend it a little farther, and it will make me happy. Tell me
that not only your house will remain the same, but that I shall ever
find you and yours as unchanged as your dwelling; and that you will
always consider me with the kindness which has made everything
belonging to you so dear to me."
The promise was readily given, and Willoughby's behaviour during the
whole of the evening declared at once his affection and happiness.
"Shall we see you tomorrow to dinner?" said Mrs. Dashwood, when he was
leaving them. "I do not ask you to come in the morning, for we must
walk to the park, to call on Lady Middleton."
He engaged to be with them by four o'clock.
Mrs. Dashwood's visit to Lady Middleton took place the next day, and
two of her daughters went with her; but Marianne excused herself from
being of the party, under some trifling pretext of employment; and her
mother, who concluded that a promise had been made by Willoughby the
night before of calling on her while they were absent, was perfectly
satisfied with her remaining at home.
On their return from the park they found Willoughby's curricle and
servant in waiting at the cottage, and Mrs. Dashwood was convinced that
her conjecture had been just. So far it was all as she had foreseen;
but on entering the house she beheld what no foresight had taught her
to expect. They were no sooner in the passage than Marianne came
hastily out of the parlour apparently in violent affliction, with her
handkerchief at her eyes; and without noticing them ran up stairs.
Surprised and alarmed they proceeded directly into the room she had
just quitted, where they found only Willoughby, who was leaning against
the mantel-piece with his back towards them. He turned round on their
coming in, and his countenance shewed that he strongly partook of the
emotion which over-powered Marianne.
"Is anything the matter with her?" cried Mrs. Dashwood as she
entered--"is she ill?"
"I hope not," he replied, trying to look cheerful; and with a forced
smile presently added, "It is I who may rather expect to be ill--for I
am now suffering under a very heavy disappointment!"
"Disappointment?"
"Yes, for I am unable to keep my engagement with you. Mrs. Smith has
this morning exercised the privilege of riches upon a poor dependent
cousin, by sending me on business to London. I have just received my
dispatches, and taken my farewell of Allenham; and by way of
exhilaration I am now come to take my farewell of you."
"To London!--and are you going this morning?"
"Almost this moment."
"This is very unfortunate. But Mrs. Smith must be obliged;--and her
business will not detain you from us long I hope."
He coloured as he replied, "You are very kind, but I have no idea of
returning into Devonshire immediately. My visits to Mrs. Smith are
never repeated within the twelvemonth."
"And is Mrs. Smith your only friend? Is Allenham the only house in the
neighbourhood to which you will be welcome? For shame, Willoughby, can
you wait for an invitation here?"
His colour increased; and with his eyes fixed on the ground he only
replied, "You are too good."
Mrs. Dashwood looked at Elinor with surprise. Elinor felt equal
amazement. For a few moments every one was silent. Mrs. Dashwood
first spoke.
"I have only to add, my dear Willoughby, that at Barton cottage you
will always be welcome; for I will not press you to return here
immediately, because you only can judge how far THAT might be pleasing
to Mrs. Smith; and on this head I shall be no more disposed to question
your judgment than to doubt your inclination."
"My engagements at present," replied Willoughby, confusedly, "are of
such a nature--that--I dare not flatter myself"--
He stopt. Mrs. Dashwood was too much astonished to speak, and another
pause succeeded. This was broken by Willoughby, who said with a faint
smile, "It is folly to linger in this manner. I will not torment
myself any longer by remaining among friends whose society it is
impossible for me now to enjoy."
He then hastily took leave of them all and left the room. They saw him
step into his carriage, and in a minute it was out of sight.
Mrs. Dashwood felt too much for speech, and instantly quitted the
parlour to give way in solitude to the concern and alarm which this
sudden departure occasioned.
Elinor's uneasiness was at least equal to her mother's. She thought of
what had just passed with anxiety and distrust. Willoughby's behaviour
in taking leave of them, his embarrassment, and affectation of
cheerfulness, and, above all, his unwillingness to accept her mother's
invitation, a backwardness so unlike a lover, so unlike himself,
greatly disturbed her. One moment she feared that no serious design
had ever been formed on his side; and the next that some unfortunate
quarrel had taken place between him and her sister;--the distress in
which Marianne had quitted the room was such as a serious quarrel could
most reasonably account for, though when she considered what Marianne's
love for him was, a quarrel seemed almost impossible.
But whatever might be the particulars of their separation, her sister's
affliction was indubitable; and she thought with the tenderest
compassion of that violent sorrow which Marianne was in all probability
not merely giving way to as a relief, but feeding and encouraging as a
duty.
In about half an hour her mother returned, and though her eyes were
red, her countenance was not uncheerful.
"Our dear Willoughby is now some miles from Barton, Elinor," said she,
as she sat down to work, "and with how heavy a heart does he travel?"
"It is all very strange. So suddenly to be gone! It seems but the work
of a moment. And last night he was with us so happy, so cheerful, so
affectionate? And now, after only ten minutes notice--Gone too without
intending to return!--Something more than what he owned to us must have
happened. He did not speak, he did not behave like himself. YOU must
have seen the difference as well as I. What can it be? Can they have
quarrelled? Why else should he have shewn such unwillingness to accept
your invitation here?"--
"It was not inclination that he wanted, Elinor; I could plainly see
THAT. He had not the power of accepting it. I have thought it all
over I assure you, and I can perfectly account for every thing that at
first seemed strange to me as well as to you."
"Can you, indeed!"
"Yes. I have explained it to myself in the most satisfactory way;--but
you, Elinor, who love to doubt where you can--it will not satisfy YOU,
I know; but you shall not talk ME out of my trust in it. I am
persuaded that Mrs. Smith suspects his regard for Marianne, disapproves
of it, (perhaps because she has other views for him,) and on that
account is eager to get him away;--and that the business which she
sends him off to transact is invented as an excuse to dismiss him.
This is what I believe to have happened. He is, moreover, aware that
she DOES disapprove the connection, he dares not therefore at present
confess to her his engagement with Marianne, and he feels himself
obliged, from his dependent situation, to give into her schemes, and
absent himself from Devonshire for a while. You will tell me, I know,
that this may or may NOT have happened; but I will listen to no cavil,
unless you can point out any other method of understanding the affair
as satisfactory at this. And now, Elinor, what have you to say?"
"Nothing, for you have anticipated my answer."
"Then you would have told me, that it might or might not have happened.
Oh, Elinor, how incomprehensible are your feelings! You had rather
take evil upon credit than good. You had rather look out for misery
for Marianne, and guilt for poor Willoughby, than an apology for the
latter. You are resolved to think him blameable, because he took leave
of us with less affection than his usual behaviour has shewn. And is
no allowance to be made for inadvertence, or for spirits depressed by
recent disappointment? Are no probabilities to be accepted, merely
because they are not certainties? Is nothing due to the man whom we
have all such reason to love, and no reason in the world to think ill
of? To the possibility of motives unanswerable in themselves, though
unavoidably secret for a while? And, after all, what is it you suspect
him of?"
"I can hardly tell myself. But suspicion of something unpleasant is
the inevitable consequence of such an alteration as we just witnessed
in him. There is great truth, however, in what you have now urged of
the allowances which ought to be made for him, and it is my wish to be
candid in my judgment of every body. Willoughby may undoubtedly have
very sufficient reasons for his conduct, and I will hope that he has.
But it would have been more like Willoughby to acknowledge them at
once. Secrecy may be advisable; but still I cannot help wondering at
its being practiced by him."
"Do not blame him, however, for departing from his character, where the
deviation is necessary. But you really do admit the justice of what I
have said in his defence?--I am happy--and he is acquitted."
"Not entirely. It may be proper to conceal their engagement (if they
ARE engaged) from Mrs. Smith--and if that is the case, it must be
highly expedient for Willoughby to be but little in Devonshire at
present. But this is no excuse for their concealing it from us."
"Concealing it from us! my dear child, do you accuse Willoughby and
Marianne of concealment? This is strange indeed, when your eyes have
been reproaching them every day for incautiousness."
"I want no proof of their affection," said Elinor; "but of their
engagement I do."
"I am perfectly satisfied of both."
"Yet not a syllable has been said to you on the subject, by either of
them."
"I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly. Has
not his behaviour to Marianne and to all of us, for at least the last
fortnight, declared that he loved and considered her as his future
wife, and that he felt for us the attachment of the nearest relation?
Have we not perfectly understood each other? Has not my consent been
daily asked by his looks, his manner, his attentive and affectionate
respect? My Elinor, is it possible to doubt their engagement? How
could such a thought occur to you? How is it to be supposed that
Willoughby, persuaded as he must be of your sister's love, should leave
her, and leave her perhaps for months, without telling her of his
affection;--that they should part without a mutual exchange of
confidence?"
"I confess," replied Elinor, "that every circumstance except ONE is in
favour of their engagement; but that ONE is the total silence of both
on the subject, and with me it almost outweighs every other."
"How strange this is! You must think wretchedly indeed of Willoughby,
if, after all that has openly passed between them, you can doubt the
nature of the terms on which they are together. Has he been acting a
part in his behaviour to your sister all this time? Do you suppose him
really indifferent to her?"
"No, I cannot think that. He must and does love her I am sure."
"But with a strange kind of tenderness, if he can leave her with such
indifference, such carelessness of the future, as you attribute to him."
"You must remember, my dear mother, that I have never considered this
matter as certain. I have had my doubts, I confess; but they are
fainter than they were, and they may soon be entirely done away. If we
find they correspond, every fear of mine will be removed."
"A mighty concession indeed! If you were to see them at the altar, you
would suppose they were going to be married. Ungracious girl! But I
require no such proof. Nothing in my opinion has ever passed to
justify doubt; no secrecy has been attempted; all has been uniformly
open and unreserved. You cannot doubt your sister's wishes. It must
be Willoughby therefore whom you suspect. But why? Is he not a man of
honour and feeling? Has there been any inconsistency on his side to
create alarm? can he be deceitful?"
"I hope not, I believe not," cried Elinor. "I love Willoughby,
sincerely love him; and suspicion of his integrity cannot be more
painful to yourself than to me. It has been involuntary, and I will
not encourage it. I was startled, I confess, by the alteration in his
manners this morning;--he did not speak like himself, and did not
return your kindness with any cordiality. But all this may be
explained by such a situation of his affairs as you have supposed. He
had just parted from my sister, had seen her leave him in the greatest
affliction; and if he felt obliged, from a fear of offending Mrs.
Smith, to resist the temptation of returning here soon, and yet aware
that by declining your invitation, by saying that he was going away for
some time, he should seem to act an ungenerous, a suspicious part by
our family, he might well be embarrassed and disturbed. In such a
case, a plain and open avowal of his difficulties would have been more
to his honour I think, as well as more consistent with his general
character;--but I will not raise objections against any one's conduct
on so illiberal a foundation, as a difference in judgment from myself,
or a deviation from what I may think right and consistent."
"You speak very properly. Willoughby certainly does not deserve to be
suspected. Though WE have not known him long, he is no stranger in
this part of the world; and who has ever spoken to his disadvantage?
Had he been in a situation to act independently and marry immediately,
it might have been odd that he should leave us without acknowledging
everything to me at once: but this is not the case. It is an
engagement in some respects not prosperously begun, for their marriage
must be at a very uncertain distance; and even secrecy, as far as it
can be observed, may now be very advisable."
They were interrupted by the entrance of Margaret; and Elinor was then
at liberty to think over the representations of her mother, to
acknowledge the probability of many, and hope for the justice of all.
They saw nothing of Marianne till dinner time, when she entered the
room and took her place at the table without saying a word. Her eyes
were red and swollen; and it seemed as if her tears were even then
restrained with difficulty. She avoided the looks of them all, could
neither eat nor speak, and after some time, on her mother's silently
pressing her hand with tender compassion, her small degree of fortitude
was quite overcome, she burst into tears and left the room.
This violent oppression of spirits continued the whole evening. She
was without any power, because she was without any desire of command
over herself. The slightest mention of anything relative to Willoughby
overpowered her in an instant; and though her family were most
anxiously attentive to her comfort, it was impossible for them, if they
spoke at all, to keep clear of every subject which her feelings
connected with him.
| 8,599 | Chapters 11-15 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210123003206/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/sensibility/section3/ | The Dashwoods are surprised by the many invitations they receive in Devonshire, including several private balls at Barton Park. Marianne spends almost all of her time with Sir John Willoughby, who seems to have eyes for her alone. Elinor, however, is concerned by how open her sister is in her affections. She, unlike her sister, has no one whose company she truly enjoys, with the exception of Colonel Brandon. He, disappointed by Marianne's ardor for Willoughby, asks Elinor if her sister believes in "second attachments." Elinor must confess that Marianne's romantic sensibility seems bent on the ideal of love at first sight. One morning, while Elinor and Marianne are out walking, the younger sister reveals that Willoughby offered her a horse, as a gift. The offer thrills Marianne, but Elinor gently reminds her sister how inconvenient and expensive the horse would be to maintain. She also tells Marianne that she doubts the propriety of receiving such a generous gift from a man she has known so briefly. Marianne insists that it does not necessarily take a long time for people to get to know each other well, though she ultimately concedes that owning a horse would be too much of a burden on their mother, who manages the household. The next day, Margaret reports to Elinor that she saw Willoughby cut off a lock of Marianne's hair and kiss it, a sure sign of the pair's engagement. Elinor, nonetheless, warns her little sister not to jump to any conclusions. Mrs. Jennings somehow learns that Elinor had affections for someone back at Norland. The old busybody tries to get Elinor to reveal the name of this "favourite," but Elinor insists that she had no such attachment. Finally, however, Margaret confirms that there was such a man, he was of no particular profession, and his name began with an 'F'. Elinor is extremely embarrassed by her sister's indiscretion. The Dashwoods, Colonel Brandon, Willoughby, and the Middletons plan an excursion to Whitwell, an estate twelve miles from Barton belonging to Colonel Brandon's brother-in-law. However, just as they are about to set off, the Colonel receives an urgent letter calling him to town immediately. This disappoints the other members of the party; they encourage Brandon to postpone his trip, but he insists on leaving right away. He refuses to reveal the reason for his sudden departure, though Mrs. Jennings whispers to Elinor that she suspects he must attend to Miss Williams, whom she identifies as his natural daughter. Since they cannot go to Whitwell without Colonel Brandon, the party instead decides to drive about the country in carriages. Marianne later confesses that during this excursion, Willoughby took her to his home at Allenham while his elderly relative, Mrs. Smith, was out. Elinor is appalled by the impropriety of such a visit, and she chastises her sister accordingly. One day while visiting Barton Cottage, Willoughby proclaims his utter fondness for the little house and makes Mrs. Dashwood promise that she will never change a single inch of stone in the structure. The Dashwood women invite him to come to dinner the next day, and he agrees. However, when Elinor and Mrs. Dashwood return home that afternoon, they discover Marianne in tears and Willoughby on his way out the door. Willoughby informs them that he has been sent to London on business and will probably not return to Devonshire for the rest of the year. Mrs. Dashwood, suspecting that he and Marianne are secretly engaged, tries to convince herself that Willoughby had to leave so that Mrs. Smith would not learn of the attachment, but Elinor remains more skeptical and reminds her mother that they do not know if there is any such understanding between the two. Marianne, meanwhile, remains overcome by grief and cannot speak or eat. | Commentary Elinor and Colonel Brandon's discussion of "second attachments" is ironic in light of the eventual developments of the novel, for nearly every character except Elinor will ultimately fall in love more than once: Marianne has fallen for John Willoughby but will grow to love the more sensible and constant Colonel; the Colonel loves Marianne because, as we will soon learn, she reminds him of a woman he loved before; Edward Ferrars will marry Elinor only after a long engagement to Lucy Steele; John Willoughby professes his devotion to Marianne but then marries the wealthy Miss Sophia Grey; and even Mr. Henry Dashwood had two wives. In her discussion with the Colonel, Elinor seems to have no problem with second attachments, yet it is only she who marries the very first man she knows and loves. When Marianne uses the term "attachment," she is referring to the deeply individualized, subjective feeling of falling in love, a term closely linked to the novel's notion of "sensibility." The counterpart of this term is "connection," which refers to a public bond that also entails an emotional "attachment," and is closely linked to the notion of "sense." Marianne's relationship with Willoughby is described as an "attachment," whereas, when Elinor speaks of her relationship to Edward, she points out the lack of any formal "connection" between them. As in all of Austen's novels, marriage here is closely bound up with financial considerations. When reflecting on her sister's relationship with Willoughby, Elinor realizes that "marriage might not be immediately in power." This preoccupation with money in relation to marriage was highly warranted in Austen's day; marriage was for life, and insurance and social security did not exist; a couple needed a guaranteed source of income before they could settle down together. Jane Austen understood this problem personally. Her older sister Cassandra's engagement stretched on for several years because the marriage was postponed for lack of money. Although Willoughby ultimately marries for money, he seems oblivious to all practical concerns in the early days of his relationship with Marianne. He offers her the gift of a horse even though, as Elinor reminds her sister, there is no way the Dashwoods can afford its upkeep. The horse is named Queen Mab, a reference to the fanciful "fairies' midwife" from Romeo and Juliet , who supposedly rides her chariot across lovers' brains to create their magical dreams. These dreams, however, according to Shakespeare's Mercutio, are "begot of nothing but fantasy" and are "more inconstant than the wind," just as Marianne's dream of owning the horse can never come true and her Willoughby will prove a mercurial and inconstant lover. Given Willoughby's unfaithfulness, it is ironic that he insists that Mrs. Dashwood promise never to alter a single stone in Barton Cottage; a man who abandons one lover for another has hardly the right to demand that a building remain unchanged. These chapters serve as a lens through which to study one of the most important themes in the novel, the role of appearances in the assessment and judgment of character. Elinor consistently and fiercely refrains from judging other characters on the basis of appearances alone. Although Mrs. Jennings claims early on that Colonel Brandon is interested in Marianne, Elinor is not convinced of this fact until Brandon approaches her directly to discuss Marianne's romantic proclivities. Similarly, although Mrs. Dashwood and Margaret conclude that Marianne and Willoughby are engaged, Elinor remains skeptical so long as the two refrain from formally announcing their engagement. Her discussion with her mother about Marianne's relationship to Willoughby in Chapter 15 reveals that while Mrs. Dashwood readily bases her faith on looks and gestures, Elinor requires that feelings be explicitly articulated. Mrs. Dashwood draws conclusions based on appearances alone, while Elinor suspends judgment until these appearances are confirmed by words. This is yet another example of the dichotomy in the novel's title. | 632 | 648 | [
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174 | false | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/174-chapters/13.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Picture of Dorian Gray/section_6_part_1.txt | The Picture of Dorian Gray.chapter 13 | chapter 13 | null | {"name": "Chapter 13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210228142327/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/doriangray/section7/", "summary": "Dorian leads Basil to the room in which he keeps the painting locked. Inside, Dorian lights a candle and tears the curtain back to reveal the portrait. The painting has become hideous, a \"foul parody\" of its former beauty. Basil stares at the horrifying painting in shock: he recognizes the brushwork and the signature as his own. Dorian stands back and watches Basil with \"a flicker of triumph in his eyes. When Basil asks how such a thing is possible, Dorian reminds him of the day he met Lord Henry, whose cautionary words about the ephemeral nature of beauty caused Dorian to pledge his soul for eternal, unblemished youth. Basil curses the painting as \"an awful lesson,\" believing he worshipped the youth too much and is now being punished for it. He begs Dorian to kneel and pray for forgiveness, but Dorian claims it is too late. Glancing at his picture, Dorian feels hatred welling up within him. He seizes a knife and stabs Basil repeatedly. He then opens the door and listens for the sound of anyone stirring. When he is satisfied that no one has heard the murder, he locks the room and returns to the library. Dorian hides Basil's belongings in a secret compartment in the wall, then slips quietly out to the street. After a few moments, he returns, waking his servant and thus creating the impression that he has been out all night. The servant reports that Basil has been to visit, and Dorian says he is sorry to have missed him", "analysis": "Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen take a decided turn for the macabre: the murder of Basil and the gruesome way it is reflected in the portrait--\"as though the canvas had sweated blood\"--root the novel firmly in the Gothic tradition, where darkness and supernatural horrors reign. In this setting, it becomes a challenge for Wilde to keep his hero from becoming a flat archetype of menacing evil. Much to his credit, he manages to keep Dorian a somewhat sympathetic character, even as he commits an unspeakable crime and blackmails a once dear friend to help him cover it up. Dorian remains worthy of sympathy because we see clearly the failure of his struggle to rise above a troubled conscience. With a murder added to his growing list of sins, Dorian wants nothing more than to be able to shrug off his guilt: he perceives Basil's corpse as a \"thing\" sitting in a chair and tries to lose himself in the lines of a French poet. The most telling evidence of Dorian's guilt can be seen as he sits waiting for the arrival of Alan Campbell; Dorian draws and soon remarks that \"every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward.\" This scene resonates with the Chapter Nine scene in which Dorian asks the artist to draw a picture of Sibyl Vane so that he may better remember her: in both instances, the hedonistic Dorian betrays his gnawing conscience. Throughout the novel, Basil acts as a sort of moral ballast, reminding Lord Henry and Dorian of the price that must be paid for their pleasure seeking. In these chapters, he provides a fascinating counterpoint to the philosophy by which Dorian lives. Refusing to believe that the dissipation of a soul can occur without notice, he claims that \"f a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.\" The introduction of such an opposing view discloses Wilde's love of contradiction. In his essay \"The Truth of Masks,\" Wilde wrote that \" Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.\" Indeed, the truth of The Picture of Dorian Gray, if one is to be found, emerges from oppositions. After all, as Dorian reflects while gazing upon his ruined portrait, art depends as much upon horror as it does upon \"marvellous beauty,\" just as one's being is always the synthesis of a \"Heaven and Hell.\" Like the other secondary characters in the novel, Alan Campbell is introduced and rather quickly ignored. His appearance, however, plays a vital role in establishing the darkening mood of the novel. The macabre experiments that he is accustomed to conducting as a chemist provide him with the knowledge that Dorian finds so necessary. Furthermore, the secrets that surround his personal life contribute to the air of mystery that surrounds Dorian. It is significant that the reader never learns the details of the circumstances by which Dorian blackmails Campbell. Given Wilde's increasingly indiscreet lifestyle and the increasingly hostile social attitudes toward homosexuality that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century, the reader can assume that Campbell's transgression is of a sexual nature. In 1885, the British Parliament passed the Labouchere Amendment, which widened prohibitions against male homosexual acts to include not only sodomy but also \"gross indecency\" , an offense that carried a two-year prison term. Oscar Wilde himself was eventually found guilty of the latter offense. This new law was commonly known as the Blackmailer's Charter. Thus, Alan Campbell, a seemingly inconsequential character, serves as an important indicator of the social prejudices and punishments in Wilde's time."} |
He passed out of the room and began the ascent, Basil Hallward
following close behind. They walked softly, as men do instinctively at
night. The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A
rising wind made some of the windows rattle.
When they reached the top landing, Dorian set the lamp down on the
floor, and taking out the key, turned it in the lock. "You insist on
knowing, Basil?" he asked in a low voice.
"Yes."
"I am delighted," he answered, smiling. Then he added, somewhat
harshly, "You are the one man in the world who is entitled to know
everything about me. You have had more to do with my life than you
think"; and, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in. A
cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in
a flame of murky orange. He shuddered. "Shut the door behind you," he
whispered, as he placed the lamp on the table.
Hallward glanced round him with a puzzled expression. The room looked
as if it had not been lived in for years. A faded Flemish tapestry, a
curtained picture, an old Italian _cassone_, and an almost empty
book-case--that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and
a table. As Dorian Gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was
standing on the mantelshelf, he saw that the whole place was covered
with dust and that the carpet was in holes. A mouse ran scuffling
behind the wainscoting. There was a damp odour of mildew.
"So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Basil? Draw that
curtain back, and you will see mine."
The voice that spoke was cold and cruel. "You are mad, Dorian, or
playing a part," muttered Hallward, frowning.
"You won't? Then I must do it myself," said the young man, and he tore
the curtain from its rod and flung it on the ground.
An exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw in the
dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There was
something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing.
Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at!
The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that
marvellous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and
some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something
of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet
completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat.
Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He seemed to
recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his own design. The
idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the lighted candle,
and held it to the picture. In the left-hand corner was his own name,
traced in long letters of bright vermilion.
It was some foul parody, some infamous ignoble satire. He had never
done that. Still, it was his own picture. He knew it, and he felt as
if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. His
own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? He turned and
looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man. His mouth twitched,
and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate. He passed his hand
across his forehead. It was dank with clammy sweat.
The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with
that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are
absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. There was neither
real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the
spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes. He had taken
the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so.
"What does this mean?" cried Hallward, at last. His own voice sounded
shrill and curious in his ears.
"Years ago, when I was a boy," said Dorian Gray, crushing the flower in
his hand, "you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my
good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who
explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me
that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment that, even
now, I don't know whether I regret or not, I made a wish, perhaps you
would call it a prayer...."
"I remember it! Oh, how well I remember it! No! the thing is
impossible. The room is damp. Mildew has got into the canvas. The
paints I used had some wretched mineral poison in them. I tell you the
thing is impossible."
"Ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to the
window and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained glass.
"You told me you had destroyed it."
"I was wrong. It has destroyed me."
"I don't believe it is my picture."
"Can't you see your ideal in it?" said Dorian bitterly.
"My ideal, as you call it..."
"As you called it."
"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such
an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr."
"It is the face of my soul."
"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a
devil."
"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian with a
wild gesture of despair.
Hallward turned again to the portrait and gazed at it. "My God! If it
is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with your life,
why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you
to be!" He held the light up again to the canvas and examined it. The
surface seemed to be quite undisturbed and as he had left it. It was
from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come.
Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were
slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery
grave was not so fearful.
His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor and
lay there sputtering. He placed his foot on it and put it out. Then
he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table
and buried his face in his hands.
"Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!" There was no
answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window. "Pray,
Dorian, pray," he murmured. "What is it that one was taught to say in
one's boyhood? 'Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins.
Wash away our iniquities.' Let us say that together. The prayer of
your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be
answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You
worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished."
Dorian Gray turned slowly around and looked at him with tear-dimmed
eyes. "It is too late, Basil," he faltered.
"It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we cannot
remember a prayer. Isn't there a verse somewhere, 'Though your sins be
as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow'?"
"Those words mean nothing to me now."
"Hush! Don't say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My
God! Don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?"
Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable
feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him, as though it had
been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his
ear by those grinning lips. The mad passions of a hunted animal
stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table,
more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything. He glanced
wildly around. Something glimmered on the top of the painted chest
that faced him. His eye fell on it. He knew what it was. It was a
knife that he had brought up, some days before, to cut a piece of cord,
and had forgotten to take away with him. He moved slowly towards it,
passing Hallward as he did so. As soon as he got behind him, he seized
it and turned round. Hallward stirred in his chair as if he was going
to rise. He rushed at him and dug the knife into the great vein that
is behind the ear, crushing the man's head down on the table and
stabbing again and again.
There was a stifled groan and the horrible sound of some one choking
with blood. Three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively,
waving grotesque, stiff-fingered hands in the air. He stabbed him
twice more, but the man did not move. Something began to trickle on
the floor. He waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. Then
he threw the knife on the table, and listened.
He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet. He
opened the door and went out on the landing. The house was absolutely
quiet. No one was about. For a few seconds he stood bending over the
balustrade and peering down into the black seething well of darkness.
Then he took out the key and returned to the room, locking himself in
as he did so.
The thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table with
bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms. Had it not been
for the red jagged tear in the neck and the clotted black pool that was
slowly widening on the table, one would have said that the man was
simply asleep.
How quickly it had all been done! He felt strangely calm, and walking
over to the window, opened it and stepped out on the balcony. The wind
had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's
tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. He looked down and saw the
policeman going his rounds and flashing the long beam of his lantern on
the doors of the silent houses. The crimson spot of a prowling hansom
gleamed at the corner and then vanished. A woman in a fluttering shawl
was creeping slowly by the railings, staggering as she went. Now and
then she stopped and peered back. Once, she began to sing in a hoarse
voice. The policeman strolled over and said something to her. She
stumbled away, laughing. A bitter blast swept across the square. The
gas-lamps flickered and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their
black iron branches to and fro. He shivered and went back, closing the
window behind him.
Having reached the door, he turned the key and opened it. He did not
even glance at the murdered man. He felt that the secret of the whole
thing was not to realize the situation. The friend who had painted the
fatal portrait to which all his misery had been due had gone out of his
life. That was enough.
Then he remembered the lamp. It was a rather curious one of Moorish
workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished
steel, and studded with coarse turquoises. Perhaps it might be missed
by his servant, and questions would be asked. He hesitated for a
moment, then he turned back and took it from the table. He could not
help seeing the dead thing. How still it was! How horribly white the
long hands looked! It was like a dreadful wax image.
Having locked the door behind him, he crept quietly downstairs. The
woodwork creaked and seemed to cry out as if in pain. He stopped
several times and waited. No: everything was still. It was merely
the sound of his own footsteps.
When he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner.
They must be hidden away somewhere. He unlocked a secret press that
was in the wainscoting, a press in which he kept his own curious
disguises, and put them into it. He could easily burn them afterwards.
Then he pulled out his watch. It was twenty minutes to two.
He sat down and began to think. Every year--every month, almost--men
were strangled in England for what he had done. There had been a
madness of murder in the air. Some red star had come too close to the
earth.... And yet, what evidence was there against him? Basil Hallward
had left the house at eleven. No one had seen him come in again. Most
of the servants were at Selby Royal. His valet had gone to bed....
Paris! Yes. It was to Paris that Basil had gone, and by the midnight
train, as he had intended. With his curious reserved habits, it would
be months before any suspicions would be roused. Months! Everything
could be destroyed long before then.
A sudden thought struck him. He put on his fur coat and hat and went
out into the hall. There he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of
the policeman on the pavement outside and seeing the flash of the
bull's-eye reflected in the window. He waited and held his breath.
After a few moments he drew back the latch and slipped out, shutting
the door very gently behind him. Then he began ringing the bell. In
about five minutes his valet appeared, half-dressed and looking very
drowsy.
"I am sorry to have had to wake you up, Francis," he said, stepping in;
"but I had forgotten my latch-key. What time is it?"
"Ten minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock and
blinking.
"Ten minutes past two? How horribly late! You must wake me at nine
to-morrow. I have some work to do."
"All right, sir."
"Did any one call this evening?"
"Mr. Hallward, sir. He stayed here till eleven, and then he went away
to catch his train."
"Oh! I am sorry I didn't see him. Did he leave any message?"
"No, sir, except that he would write to you from Paris, if he did not
find you at the club."
"That will do, Francis. Don't forget to call me at nine to-morrow."
"No, sir."
The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.
Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the table and passed into the
library. For a quarter of an hour he walked up and down the room,
biting his lip and thinking. Then he took down the Blue Book from one
of the shelves and began to turn over the leaves. "Alan Campbell, 152,
Hertford Street, Mayfair." Yes; that was the man he wanted.
| 2,435 | Chapter 13 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210228142327/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/doriangray/section7/ | Dorian leads Basil to the room in which he keeps the painting locked. Inside, Dorian lights a candle and tears the curtain back to reveal the portrait. The painting has become hideous, a "foul parody" of its former beauty. Basil stares at the horrifying painting in shock: he recognizes the brushwork and the signature as his own. Dorian stands back and watches Basil with "a flicker of triumph in his eyes. When Basil asks how such a thing is possible, Dorian reminds him of the day he met Lord Henry, whose cautionary words about the ephemeral nature of beauty caused Dorian to pledge his soul for eternal, unblemished youth. Basil curses the painting as "an awful lesson," believing he worshipped the youth too much and is now being punished for it. He begs Dorian to kneel and pray for forgiveness, but Dorian claims it is too late. Glancing at his picture, Dorian feels hatred welling up within him. He seizes a knife and stabs Basil repeatedly. He then opens the door and listens for the sound of anyone stirring. When he is satisfied that no one has heard the murder, he locks the room and returns to the library. Dorian hides Basil's belongings in a secret compartment in the wall, then slips quietly out to the street. After a few moments, he returns, waking his servant and thus creating the impression that he has been out all night. The servant reports that Basil has been to visit, and Dorian says he is sorry to have missed him | Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen take a decided turn for the macabre: the murder of Basil and the gruesome way it is reflected in the portrait--"as though the canvas had sweated blood"--root the novel firmly in the Gothic tradition, where darkness and supernatural horrors reign. In this setting, it becomes a challenge for Wilde to keep his hero from becoming a flat archetype of menacing evil. Much to his credit, he manages to keep Dorian a somewhat sympathetic character, even as he commits an unspeakable crime and blackmails a once dear friend to help him cover it up. Dorian remains worthy of sympathy because we see clearly the failure of his struggle to rise above a troubled conscience. With a murder added to his growing list of sins, Dorian wants nothing more than to be able to shrug off his guilt: he perceives Basil's corpse as a "thing" sitting in a chair and tries to lose himself in the lines of a French poet. The most telling evidence of Dorian's guilt can be seen as he sits waiting for the arrival of Alan Campbell; Dorian draws and soon remarks that "every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward." This scene resonates with the Chapter Nine scene in which Dorian asks the artist to draw a picture of Sibyl Vane so that he may better remember her: in both instances, the hedonistic Dorian betrays his gnawing conscience. Throughout the novel, Basil acts as a sort of moral ballast, reminding Lord Henry and Dorian of the price that must be paid for their pleasure seeking. In these chapters, he provides a fascinating counterpoint to the philosophy by which Dorian lives. Refusing to believe that the dissipation of a soul can occur without notice, he claims that "f a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even." The introduction of such an opposing view discloses Wilde's love of contradiction. In his essay "The Truth of Masks," Wilde wrote that " Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true." Indeed, the truth of The Picture of Dorian Gray, if one is to be found, emerges from oppositions. After all, as Dorian reflects while gazing upon his ruined portrait, art depends as much upon horror as it does upon "marvellous beauty," just as one's being is always the synthesis of a "Heaven and Hell." Like the other secondary characters in the novel, Alan Campbell is introduced and rather quickly ignored. His appearance, however, plays a vital role in establishing the darkening mood of the novel. The macabre experiments that he is accustomed to conducting as a chemist provide him with the knowledge that Dorian finds so necessary. Furthermore, the secrets that surround his personal life contribute to the air of mystery that surrounds Dorian. It is significant that the reader never learns the details of the circumstances by which Dorian blackmails Campbell. Given Wilde's increasingly indiscreet lifestyle and the increasingly hostile social attitudes toward homosexuality that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century, the reader can assume that Campbell's transgression is of a sexual nature. In 1885, the British Parliament passed the Labouchere Amendment, which widened prohibitions against male homosexual acts to include not only sodomy but also "gross indecency" , an offense that carried a two-year prison term. Oscar Wilde himself was eventually found guilty of the latter offense. This new law was commonly known as the Blackmailer's Charter. Thus, Alan Campbell, a seemingly inconsequential character, serves as an important indicator of the social prejudices and punishments in Wilde's time. | 257 | 612 | [
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1,232 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/14.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Prince/section_12_part_0.txt | The Prince.chapter 14 | chapter 14 | null | {"name": "Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201108110625/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-prince/summary-and-analysis/chapter-14", "summary": "The study of war should be a prince's main goal, for war is a ruler's only art. Knowledge of war is so vital that it not only keeps princes in power but can make princes out of private citizens. If princes become too refined to study this art, they lose their states. Being unarmed makes others contemptuous of you. No one can expect an armed man to obey an unarmed one. Therefore a prince who does not understand military matters will not be able to work well with his soldiers. Even in peacetime, a prince must concentrate on war by exercises and by study. Hunting is excellent exercise, because it strengthens the body and makes the prince more familiar with the surrounding terrain. A prince should always be asking himself how to make the best military advantage of the landscape. A prince should also exercise his mind by reading the histories of great men and how they waged war, in order to imitate them. Great leaders have always tried to emulate the qualities of those worthy examples who preceded them. By studying their precepts in good times, the prince will be ready when fortune changes.", "analysis": "Chapter 14 marks the end of Machiavelli's discussion of armies and the beginning of his exploration of the prince's character. Before leaving the topic of armies, Machiavelli has some parting comments for those princes who become too soft to tend to military matters. The Sforzas were uppermost in Machiavelli's mind in this respect, having gone from commoners to dukes in only one generation because of their skills as mercenary soldiers, only to go from dukes to commoners in the next generation. This observation is sometimes interpreted as a warning to the Medici family, who were notable for their lack of military leadership. Unlike most Italian princes of their day, they relied on their wealth and their diplomatic skills, rather than weapons, to secure their power. Military prowess was a very real way to get to the top in Machiavelli's day. In the cutthroat world of Italian politics, an unarmed prince would quickly be undone by his more rapacious neighbors. More importantly, Machiavelli argues for carrying a big stick, because no one can expect an unarmed man to command one who is armed. Machiavelli recommends both physical and mental discipline to keep the prince sharp. Hunting was one of the favorite pastimes of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and was widely recommended as good exercise. Machiavelli also sees it as an opportunity for reconnaissance. While he may be exaggerating somewhat, he makes the point he first made in Chapter 3, that the prince must always be thinking about future events and preparing for potential problems. Mental exercise involved studying history. The humanist scholars of the Renaissance deeply valued the study of history, particularly the histories of classical Greece and Rome, and the imitation of their precepts. In this humanist tradition, Machiavelli draws many of his examples from classical history, blending them with lessons from contemporary events. He closes the chapter with a discussion of personal qualities of the great leaders of history. This leads him into the theme of the next segment of the book, the behavior and character of the prince. Glossary Philopoemen Greek general and leader of the Achaean League; he defeated Nabis the Spartan on several occasions. Alexander Alexander the Great. Machiavelli proposes that Alexander imitated the example of Achilles, the legendary Greek warrior who appears in Homer's Iliad; Julius Caesar , the great Roman general and emperor, imitated Alexander; and Scipio Africanus , another great Roman general, imitated Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire. Xenophon author of the Cyropaedia, purportedly a biography of Cyrus the Great, but actually an exploration of how an ideal ruler should be educated."} |
A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else
for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the
sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it
not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men
to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is
seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have
lost their states. And the first cause of your losing it is to neglect
this art; and what enables you to acquire a state is to be master of
the art. Francesco Sforza, through being martial, from a private person
became Duke of Milan; and the sons, through avoiding the hardships and
troubles of arms, from dukes became private persons. For among other
evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised, and
this is one of those ignominies against which a prince ought to guard
himself, as is shown later on. Because there is nothing proportionate
between the armed and the unarmed; and it is not reasonable that he who
is armed should yield obedience willingly to him who is unarmed, or that
the unarmed man should be secure among armed servants. Because, there
being in the one disdain and in the other suspicion, it is not possible
for them to work well together. And therefore a prince who does not
understand the art of war, over and above the other misfortunes already
mentioned, cannot be respected by his soldiers, nor can he rely on them.
He ought never, therefore, to have out of his thoughts this subject of
war, and in peace he should addict himself more to its exercise than in
war; this he can do in two ways, the one by action, the other by study.
As regards action, he ought above all things to keep his men well
organized and drilled, to follow incessantly the chase, by which he
accustoms his body to hardships, and learns something of the nature of
localities, and gets to find out how the mountains rise, how the valleys
open out, how the plains lie, and to understand the nature of rivers and
marshes, and in all this to take the greatest care. Which knowledge
is useful in two ways. Firstly, he learns to know his country, and
is better able to undertake its defence; afterwards, by means of the
knowledge and observation of that locality, he understands with ease any
other which it may be necessary for him to study hereafter; because
the hills, valleys, and plains, and rivers and marshes that are, for
instance, in Tuscany, have a certain resemblance to those of other
countries, so that with a knowledge of the aspect of one country one can
easily arrive at a knowledge of others. And the prince that lacks this
skill lacks the essential which it is desirable that a captain should
possess, for it teaches him to surprise his enemy, to select quarters,
to lead armies, to array the battle, to besiege towns to advantage.
Philopoemen,(*) Prince of the Achaeans, among other praises which
writers have bestowed on him, is commended because in time of peace he
never had anything in his mind but the rules of war; and when he was in
the country with friends, he often stopped and reasoned with them: "If
the enemy should be upon that hill, and we should find ourselves here
with our army, with whom would be the advantage? How should one best
advance to meet him, keeping the ranks? If we should wish to retreat,
how ought we to pursue?" And he would set forth to them, as he went, all
the chances that could befall an army; he would listen to their opinion
and state his, confirming it with reasons, so that by these continual
discussions there could never arise, in time of war, any unexpected
circumstances that he could not deal with.
(*) Philopoemen, "the last of the Greeks," born 252 B.C.,
died 183 B.C.
But to exercise the intellect the prince should read histories, and
study there the actions of illustrious men, to see how they have borne
themselves in war, to examine the causes of their victories and defeat,
so as to avoid the latter and imitate the former; and above all do as
an illustrious man did, who took as an exemplar one who had been praised
and famous before him, and whose achievements and deeds he always kept
in his mind, as it is said Alexander the Great imitated Achilles, Caesar
Alexander, Scipio Cyrus. And whoever reads the life of Cyrus, written
by Xenophon, will recognize afterwards in the life of Scipio how that
imitation was his glory, and how in chastity, affability, humanity, and
liberality Scipio conformed to those things which have been written of
Cyrus by Xenophon. A wise prince ought to observe some such rules, and
never in peaceful times stand idle, but increase his resources with
industry in such a way that they may be available to him in adversity,
so that if fortune chances it may find him prepared to resist her blows.
| 817 | Chapter 14 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201108110625/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-prince/summary-and-analysis/chapter-14 | The study of war should be a prince's main goal, for war is a ruler's only art. Knowledge of war is so vital that it not only keeps princes in power but can make princes out of private citizens. If princes become too refined to study this art, they lose their states. Being unarmed makes others contemptuous of you. No one can expect an armed man to obey an unarmed one. Therefore a prince who does not understand military matters will not be able to work well with his soldiers. Even in peacetime, a prince must concentrate on war by exercises and by study. Hunting is excellent exercise, because it strengthens the body and makes the prince more familiar with the surrounding terrain. A prince should always be asking himself how to make the best military advantage of the landscape. A prince should also exercise his mind by reading the histories of great men and how they waged war, in order to imitate them. Great leaders have always tried to emulate the qualities of those worthy examples who preceded them. By studying their precepts in good times, the prince will be ready when fortune changes. | Chapter 14 marks the end of Machiavelli's discussion of armies and the beginning of his exploration of the prince's character. Before leaving the topic of armies, Machiavelli has some parting comments for those princes who become too soft to tend to military matters. The Sforzas were uppermost in Machiavelli's mind in this respect, having gone from commoners to dukes in only one generation because of their skills as mercenary soldiers, only to go from dukes to commoners in the next generation. This observation is sometimes interpreted as a warning to the Medici family, who were notable for their lack of military leadership. Unlike most Italian princes of their day, they relied on their wealth and their diplomatic skills, rather than weapons, to secure their power. Military prowess was a very real way to get to the top in Machiavelli's day. In the cutthroat world of Italian politics, an unarmed prince would quickly be undone by his more rapacious neighbors. More importantly, Machiavelli argues for carrying a big stick, because no one can expect an unarmed man to command one who is armed. Machiavelli recommends both physical and mental discipline to keep the prince sharp. Hunting was one of the favorite pastimes of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and was widely recommended as good exercise. Machiavelli also sees it as an opportunity for reconnaissance. While he may be exaggerating somewhat, he makes the point he first made in Chapter 3, that the prince must always be thinking about future events and preparing for potential problems. Mental exercise involved studying history. The humanist scholars of the Renaissance deeply valued the study of history, particularly the histories of classical Greece and Rome, and the imitation of their precepts. In this humanist tradition, Machiavelli draws many of his examples from classical history, blending them with lessons from contemporary events. He closes the chapter with a discussion of personal qualities of the great leaders of history. This leads him into the theme of the next segment of the book, the behavior and character of the prince. Glossary Philopoemen Greek general and leader of the Achaean League; he defeated Nabis the Spartan on several occasions. Alexander Alexander the Great. Machiavelli proposes that Alexander imitated the example of Achilles, the legendary Greek warrior who appears in Homer's Iliad; Julius Caesar , the great Roman general and emperor, imitated Alexander; and Scipio Africanus , another great Roman general, imitated Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire. Xenophon author of the Cyropaedia, purportedly a biography of Cyrus the Great, but actually an exploration of how an ideal ruler should be educated. | 195 | 435 | [
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107 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/21.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_20_part_0.txt | Far from the Madding Crowd.chapter 21 | chapter 21 | null | {"name": "Chapter 21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-21", "summary": "Gabriel had been gone about twenty-four hours when, on Sunday, men came running to Bathsheba to report that many of her sheep had broken into a field of clover. \"'And they be getting blasted,' said Henery Fray. . . . 'And will all die as dead as nits, if they bain't got out and cured!' said Tall.\" Bathsheba shouted at the men for not having gone directly to the fields to do something about it. Despite her velvet dress, she too ran to the fields. The animals were very ill. When she asked what to do, the men told her that the sheep had to be pierced to be relieved, and that only Oak knew how to perform this operation. Bathsheba was furious. She thought of Boldwood, but the men told her that some of his animals had been similarly affected by vetch the other day, and he had sent for Gabriel. Still Bathsheba refused to consider this. Suddenly a sheep fell dead, and Bathsheba sent a message ordering Oak to come. The men waited until Laban Tall returned with word that Gabriel would not come unless properly asked. After another sheep died, Bathsheba wrote the request and added at the bottom: \"Do not desert me, Gabriel!\" When Gabriel appeared, Bathsheba looked at him with gratitude but reproved him for his unkindness. He went at once to lance the animals. He did forty-nine successful operations. There was only one mishap. Four other sheep had died before his arrival. Fifty-seven sheep were saved. \"'Gabriel, will you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon. \"'I will,' said Gabriel. \"And she smiled on him again.\"", "analysis": "The chapter serves less to point up Bathsheba's strongmindedness than as a picture of the vicissitudes of farm life and an appraisal of the constancy of duty on a farm. Gabriel's delay is a matter of discipline, to show Bathsheba that she is dependent on the skills of others and must deal fairly with them."} |
TROUBLES IN THE FOLD--A MESSAGE
Gabriel Oak had ceased to feed the Weatherbury flock for about
four-and-twenty hours, when on Sunday afternoon the elderly gentlemen
Joseph Poorgrass, Matthew Moon, Fray, and half-a-dozen others, came
running up to the house of the mistress of the Upper Farm.
"Whatever IS the matter, men?" she said, meeting them at the door
just as she was coming out on her way to church, and ceasing in a
moment from the close compression of her two red lips, with which
she had accompanied the exertion of pulling on a tight glove.
"Sixty!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
"Seventy!" said Moon.
"Fifty-nine!" said Susan Tall's husband.
"--Sheep have broke fence," said Fray.
"--And got into a field of young clover," said Tall.
"--Young clover!" said Moon.
"--Clover!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
"And they be getting blasted," said Henery Fray.
"That they be," said Joseph.
"And will all die as dead as nits, if they bain't got out and cured!"
said Tall.
Joseph's countenance was drawn into lines and puckers by his concern.
Fray's forehead was wrinkled both perpendicularly and crosswise,
after the pattern of a portcullis, expressive of a double despair.
Laban Tall's lips were thin, and his face was rigid. Matthew's jaws
sank, and his eyes turned whichever way the strongest muscle happened
to pull them.
"Yes," said Joseph, "and I was sitting at home, looking for
Ephesians, and says I to myself, ''Tis nothing but Corinthians and
Thessalonians in this danged Testament,' when who should come in but
Henery there: 'Joseph,' he said, 'the sheep have blasted
theirselves--'"
With Bathsheba it was a moment when thought was speech and speech
exclamation. Moreover, she had hardly recovered her equanimity since
the disturbance which she had suffered from Oak's remarks.
"That's enough--that's enough!--oh, you fools!" she cried, throwing
the parasol and Prayer-book into the passage, and running out of
doors in the direction signified. "To come to me, and not go and get
them out directly! Oh, the stupid numskulls!"
Her eyes were at their darkest and brightest now. Bathsheba's beauty
belonging rather to the demonian than to the angelic school, she
never looked so well as when she was angry--and particularly when the
effect was heightened by a rather dashing velvet dress, carefully put
on before a glass.
All the ancient men ran in a jumbled throng after her to the
clover-field, Joseph sinking down in the midst when about half-way,
like an individual withering in a world which was more and more
insupportable. Having once received the stimulus that her presence
always gave them they went round among the sheep with a will. The
majority of the afflicted animals were lying down, and could not be
stirred. These were bodily lifted out, and the others driven into
the adjoining field. Here, after the lapse of a few minutes, several
more fell down, and lay helpless and livid as the rest.
Bathsheba, with a sad, bursting heart, looked at these primest
specimens of her prime flock as they rolled there--
Swoln with wind and the rank mist they drew.
Many of them foamed at the mouth, their breathing being quick and
short, whilst the bodies of all were fearfully distended.
"Oh, what can I do, what can I do!" said Bathsheba, helplessly.
"Sheep are such unfortunate animals!--there's always something
happening to them! I never knew a flock pass a year without getting
into some scrape or other."
"There's only one way of saving them," said Tall.
"What way? Tell me quick!"
"They must be pierced in the side with a thing made on purpose."
"Can you do it? Can I?"
"No, ma'am. We can't, nor you neither. It must be done in a
particular spot. If ye go to the right or left but an inch you stab
the ewe and kill her. Not even a shepherd can do it, as a rule."
"Then they must die," she said, in a resigned tone.
"Only one man in the neighbourhood knows the way," said Joseph, now
just come up. "He could cure 'em all if he were here."
"Who is he? Let's get him!"
"Shepherd Oak," said Matthew. "Ah, he's a clever man in talents!"
"Ah, that he is so!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
"True--he's the man," said Laban Tall.
"How dare you name that man in my presence!" she said excitedly. "I
told you never to allude to him, nor shall you if you stay with me.
Ah!" she added, brightening, "Farmer Boldwood knows!"
"O no, ma'am" said Matthew. "Two of his store ewes got into some
vetches t'other day, and were just like these. He sent a man on
horseback here post-haste for Gable, and Gable went and saved 'em.
Farmer Boldwood hev got the thing they do it with. 'Tis a holler
pipe, with a sharp pricker inside. Isn't it, Joseph?"
"Ay--a holler pipe," echoed Joseph. "That's what 'tis."
"Ay, sure--that's the machine," chimed in Henery Fray, reflectively,
with an Oriental indifference to the flight of time.
"Well," burst out Bathsheba, "don't stand there with your 'ayes'
and your 'sures' talking at me! Get somebody to cure the sheep
instantly!"
All then stalked off in consternation, to get somebody as directed,
without any idea of who it was to be. In a minute they had vanished
through the gate, and she stood alone with the dying flock.
"Never will I send for him--never!" she said firmly.
One of the ewes here contracted its muscles horribly, extended
itself, and jumped high into the air. The leap was an astonishing
one. The ewe fell heavily, and lay still.
Bathsheba went up to it. The sheep was dead.
"Oh, what shall I do--what shall I do!" she again exclaimed, wringing
her hands. "I won't send for him. No, I won't!"
The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide
with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself. It is often flung
out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst
strong, required no enunciation to prove it so. The "No, I won't" of
Bathsheba meant virtually, "I think I must."
She followed her assistants through the gate, and lifted her hand to
one of them. Laban answered to her signal.
"Where is Oak staying?"
"Across the valley at Nest Cottage!"
"Jump on the bay mare, and ride across, and say he must return
instantly--that I say so."
Tall scrambled off to the field, and in two minutes was on Poll,
the bay, bare-backed, and with only a halter by way of rein. He
diminished down the hill.
Bathsheba watched. So did all the rest. Tall cantered along the
bridle-path through Sixteen Acres, Sheeplands, Middle Field, The
Flats, Cappel's Piece, shrank almost to a point, crossed the bridge,
and ascended from the valley through Springmead and Whitepits on the
other side. The cottage to which Gabriel had retired before taking
his final departure from the locality was visible as a white spot on
the opposite hill, backed by blue firs. Bathsheba walked up and
down. The men entered the field and endeavoured to ease the anguish
of the dumb creatures by rubbing them. Nothing availed.
Bathsheba continued walking. The horse was seen descending the
hill, and the wearisome series had to be repeated in reverse order:
Whitepits, Springmead, Cappel's Piece, The Flats, Middle Field,
Sheeplands, Sixteen Acres. She hoped Tall had had presence of mind
enough to give the mare up to Gabriel, and return himself on foot.
The rider neared them. It was Tall.
"Oh, what folly!" said Bathsheba.
Gabriel was not visible anywhere.
"Perhaps he is already gone!" she said.
Tall came into the inclosure, and leapt off, his face tragic as
Morton's after the battle of Shrewsbury.
"Well?" said Bathsheba, unwilling to believe that her verbal
_lettre-de-cachet_ could possibly have miscarried.
"He says BEGGARS MUSTN'T BE CHOOSERS," replied Laban.
"What!" said the young farmer, opening her eyes and drawing in her
breath for an outburst. Joseph Poorgrass retired a few steps behind
a hurdle.
"He says he shall not come onless you request en to come civilly and
in a proper manner, as becomes any 'ooman begging a favour."
"Oh, oh, that's his answer! Where does he get his airs? Who am I,
then, to be treated like that? Shall I beg to a man who has begged
to me?"
Another of the flock sprang into the air, and fell dead.
The men looked grave, as if they suppressed opinion.
Bathsheba turned aside, her eyes full of tears. The strait she was
in through pride and shrewishness could not be disguised longer: she
burst out crying bitterly; they all saw it; and she attempted no
further concealment.
"I wouldn't cry about it, miss," said William Smallbury,
compassionately. "Why not ask him softer like? I'm sure he'd come
then. Gable is a true man in that way."
Bathsheba checked her grief and wiped her eyes. "Oh, it is a wicked
cruelty to me--it is--it is!" she murmured. "And he drives me to do
what I wouldn't; yes, he does!--Tall, come indoors."
After this collapse, not very dignified for the head of an
establishment, she went into the house, Tall at her heels. Here she
sat down and hastily scribbled a note between the small convulsive
sobs of convalescence which follow a fit of crying as a ground-swell
follows a storm. The note was none the less polite for being written
in a hurry. She held it at a distance, was about to fold it, then
added these words at the bottom:--
"DO NOT DESERT ME, GABRIEL!"
She looked a little redder in refolding it, and closed her lips,
as if thereby to suspend till too late the action of conscience in
examining whether such strategy were justifiable. The note was
despatched as the message had been, and Bathsheba waited indoors
for the result.
It was an anxious quarter of an hour that intervened between the
messenger's departure and the sound of the horse's tramp again
outside. She could not watch this time, but, leaning over the old
bureau at which she had written the letter, closed her eyes, as if
to keep out both hope and fear.
The case, however, was a promising one. Gabriel was not angry: he
was simply neutral, although her first command had been so haughty.
Such imperiousness would have damned a little less beauty; and
on the other hand, such beauty would have redeemed a little less
imperiousness.
She went out when the horse was heard, and looked up. A mounted
figure passed between her and the sky, and drew on towards the field
of sheep, the rider turning his face in receding. Gabriel looked at
her. It was a moment when a woman's eyes and tongue tell distinctly
opposite tales. Bathsheba looked full of gratitude, and she said:--
"Oh, Gabriel, how could you serve me so unkindly!"
Such a tenderly-shaped reproach for his previous delay was the
one speech in the language that he could pardon for not being
commendation of his readiness now.
Gabriel murmured a confused reply, and hastened on. She knew from
the look which sentence in her note had brought him. Bathsheba
followed to the field.
Gabriel was already among the turgid, prostrate forms. He had flung
off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and taken from his pocket
the instrument of salvation. It was a small tube or trochar, with
a lance passing down the inside; and Gabriel began to use it with a
dexterity that would have graced a hospital surgeon. Passing his
hand over the sheep's left flank, and selecting the proper point, he
punctured the skin and rumen with the lance as it stood in the tube;
then he suddenly withdrew the lance, retaining the tube in its place.
A current of air rushed up the tube, forcible enough to have
extinguished a candle held at the orifice.
It has been said that mere ease after torment is delight for a time;
and the countenances of these poor creatures expressed it now.
Forty-nine operations were successfully performed. Owing to the
great hurry necessitated by the far-gone state of some of the flock,
Gabriel missed his aim in one case, and in one only--striking wide
of the mark, and inflicting a mortal blow at once upon the suffering
ewe. Four had died; three recovered without an operation. The total
number of sheep which had thus strayed and injured themselves so
dangerously was fifty-seven.
When the love-led man had ceased from his labours, Bathsheba came and
looked him in the face.
"Gabriel, will you stay on with me?" she said, smiling winningly,
and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end,
because there was going to be another smile soon.
"I will," said Gabriel.
And she smiled on him again.
| 1,995 | Chapter 21 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-21 | Gabriel had been gone about twenty-four hours when, on Sunday, men came running to Bathsheba to report that many of her sheep had broken into a field of clover. "'And they be getting blasted,' said Henery Fray. . . . 'And will all die as dead as nits, if they bain't got out and cured!' said Tall." Bathsheba shouted at the men for not having gone directly to the fields to do something about it. Despite her velvet dress, she too ran to the fields. The animals were very ill. When she asked what to do, the men told her that the sheep had to be pierced to be relieved, and that only Oak knew how to perform this operation. Bathsheba was furious. She thought of Boldwood, but the men told her that some of his animals had been similarly affected by vetch the other day, and he had sent for Gabriel. Still Bathsheba refused to consider this. Suddenly a sheep fell dead, and Bathsheba sent a message ordering Oak to come. The men waited until Laban Tall returned with word that Gabriel would not come unless properly asked. After another sheep died, Bathsheba wrote the request and added at the bottom: "Do not desert me, Gabriel!" When Gabriel appeared, Bathsheba looked at him with gratitude but reproved him for his unkindness. He went at once to lance the animals. He did forty-nine successful operations. There was only one mishap. Four other sheep had died before his arrival. Fifty-seven sheep were saved. "'Gabriel, will you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon. "'I will,' said Gabriel. "And she smiled on him again." | The chapter serves less to point up Bathsheba's strongmindedness than as a picture of the vicissitudes of farm life and an appraisal of the constancy of duty on a farm. Gabriel's delay is a matter of discipline, to show Bathsheba that she is dependent on the skills of others and must deal fairly with them. | 294 | 55 | [
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1,232 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/20.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Prince/section_20_part_0.txt | The Prince.chapter 20 | chapter 20 | null | {"name": "Chapter 20", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210420060055/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/prince-machiavelli/summary/chapter-20", "summary": "People do all kinds of things in order to keep power. They take guns away from people, try to turn them against one another, build fortresses, tear them down. All sorts of things. But let's talk about if they are helpful or not. First, taking away guns. This is a bad idea for most rulers. If you give arms to people, they are excited. If you take them away, they wonder why you don't like them and start to hate you. And we all know where that leads--right, Shmoop rulers of tomorrow? The only people who should be doing this are people who already have vast established kingdoms and are just adding this new one to their collection. Then, go right ahead. You have your army already and taking away arms will keep the state weak. Next, dividing towns into factions and making them fight amongst each other. Now, for some reason, people keep saying this is a good idea. As the president of Panem will tell you, it is not. The weaker faction will turn against you and the stronger one won't be able to defend against a foreign invasion. Just say no. Next, stirring up trouble intentionally. Do it. It will make you seem more awesome if you take care of it like a pro. You'll have a reputation of being a good ruler, and everyone will like you. Machiavelli just leaves us a note here to remember if you take a nation with inside help, you need to be pretty suspicious of those guys that helped you. Hey, they turned on their previous ruler, why shouldn't they turn on you, newbie? Fortresses. Machiavelli approves, but only because everyone has been doing it forever. Mostly they are only helpful if you're afraid of your own people, because they hate you--which, as we all know by now, is the beginning of a downward spiral. The important thing to remember is that fortresses can't help you for long if your people hate you.", "analysis": ""} |
1. Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their
subjects; others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions;
others have fostered enmities against themselves; others have laid
themselves out to gain over those whom they distrusted in the beginning
of their governments; some have built fortresses; some have overthrown
and destroyed them. And although one cannot give a final judgment on all
of these things unless one possesses the particulars of those states
in which a decision has to be made, nevertheless I will speak as
comprehensively as the matter of itself will admit.
2. There never was a new prince who has disarmed his subjects; rather
when he has found them disarmed he has always armed them, because, by
arming them, those arms become yours, those men who were distrusted
become faithful, and those who were faithful are kept so, and your
subjects become your adherents. And whereas all subjects cannot be
armed, yet when those whom you do arm are benefited, the others can be
handled more freely, and this difference in their treatment, which they
quite understand, makes the former your dependents, and the latter,
considering it to be necessary that those who have the most danger and
service should have the most reward, excuse you. But when you disarm
them, you at once offend them by showing that you distrust them, either
for cowardice or for want of loyalty, and either of these opinions
breeds hatred against you. And because you cannot remain unarmed, it
follows that you turn to mercenaries, which are of the character already
shown; even if they should be good they would not be sufficient to
defend you against powerful enemies and distrusted subjects. Therefore,
as I have said, a new prince in a new principality has always
distributed arms. Histories are full of examples. But when a prince
acquires a new state, which he adds as a province to his old one, then
it is necessary to disarm the men of that state, except those who have
been his adherents in acquiring it; and these again, with time and
opportunity, should be rendered soft and effeminate; and matters should
be managed in such a way that all the armed men in the state shall be
your own soldiers who in your old state were living near you.
3. Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed
to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia by factions and Pisa by
fortresses; and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their
tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily.
This may have been well enough in those times when Italy was in a way
balanced, but I do not believe that it can be accepted as a precept
for to-day, because I do not believe that factions can ever be of use;
rather it is certain that when the enemy comes upon you in divided
cities you are quickly lost, because the weakest party will always
assist the outside forces and the other will not be able to resist.
The Venetians, moved, as I believe, by the above reasons, fostered the
Guelph and Ghibelline factions in their tributary cities; and although
they never allowed them to come to bloodshed, yet they nursed these
disputes amongst them, so that the citizens, distracted by their
differences, should not unite against them. Which, as we saw, did not
afterwards turn out as expected, because, after the rout at Vaila, one
party at once took courage and seized the state. Such methods argue,
therefore, weakness in the prince, because these factions will never be
permitted in a vigorous principality; such methods for enabling one the
more easily to manage subjects are only useful in times of peace, but if
war comes this policy proves fallacious.
4. Without doubt princes become great when they overcome the
difficulties and obstacles by which they are confronted, and therefore
fortune, especially when she desires to make a new prince great, who
has a greater necessity to earn renown than an hereditary one, causes
enemies to arise and form designs against him, in order that he may have
the opportunity of overcoming them, and by them to mount higher, as by a
ladder which his enemies have raised. For this reason many consider that
a wise prince, when he has the opportunity, ought with craft to foster
some animosity against himself, so that, having crushed it, his renown
may rise higher.
5. Princes, especially new ones, have found more fidelity and assistance
in those men who in the beginning of their rule were distrusted than
among those who in the beginning were trusted. Pandolfo Petrucci, Prince
of Siena, ruled his state more by those who had been distrusted than by
others. But on this question one cannot speak generally, for it varies
so much with the individual; I will only say this, that those men who
at the commencement of a princedom have been hostile, if they are of
a description to need assistance to support themselves, can always be
gained over with the greatest ease, and they will be tightly held to
serve the prince with fidelity, inasmuch as they know it to be very
necessary for them to cancel by deeds the bad impression which he had
formed of them; and thus the prince always extracts more profit from
them than from those who, serving him in too much security, may neglect
his affairs. And since the matter demands it, I must not fail to warn a
prince, who by means of secret favours has acquired a new state, that he
must well consider the reasons which induced those to favour him who
did so; and if it be not a natural affection towards him, but only
discontent with their government, then he will only keep them friendly
with great trouble and difficulty, for it will be impossible to satisfy
them. And weighing well the reasons for this in those examples which
can be taken from ancient and modern affairs, we shall find that it is
easier for the prince to make friends of those men who were contented
under the former government, and are therefore his enemies, than of
those who, being discontented with it, were favourable to him and
encouraged him to seize it.
6. It has been a custom with princes, in order to hold their states
more securely, to build fortresses that may serve as a bridle and bit
to those who might design to work against them, and as a place of refuge
from a first attack. I praise this system because it has been made use
of formerly. Notwithstanding that, Messer Nicolo Vitelli in our times
has been seen to demolish two fortresses in Citta di Castello so that he
might keep that state; Guido Ubaldo, Duke of Urbino, on returning to
his dominion, whence he had been driven by Cesare Borgia, razed to the
foundations all the fortresses in that province, and considered that
without them it would be more difficult to lose it; the Bentivogli
returning to Bologna came to a similar decision. Fortresses, therefore,
are useful or not according to circumstances; if they do you good in one
way they injure you in another. And this question can be reasoned thus:
the prince who has more to fear from the people than from foreigners
ought to build fortresses, but he who has more to fear from foreigners
than from the people ought to leave them alone. The castle of Milan,
built by Francesco Sforza, has made, and will make, more trouble for the
house of Sforza than any other disorder in the state. For this reason
the best possible fortress is--not to be hated by the people, because,
although you may hold the fortresses, yet they will not save you if the
people hate you, for there will never be wanting foreigners to assist
a people who have taken arms against you. It has not been seen in our
times that such fortresses have been of use to any prince, unless to the
Countess of Forli,(*) when the Count Girolamo, her consort, was killed;
for by that means she was able to withstand the popular attack and wait
for assistance from Milan, and thus recover her state; and the posture
of affairs was such at that time that the foreigners could not assist
the people. But fortresses were of little value to her afterwards when
Cesare Borgia attacked her, and when the people, her enemy, were allied
with foreigners. Therefore, it would have been safer for her, both then
and before, not to have been hated by the people than to have had the
fortresses. All these things considered then, I shall praise him
who builds fortresses as well as him who does not, and I shall blame
whoever, trusting in them, cares little about being hated by the people.
(*) Catherine Sforza, a daughter of Galeazzo Sforza and
Lucrezia Landriani, born 1463, died 1509. It was to the
Countess of Forli that Machiavelli was sent as envoy on 1499.
A letter from Fortunati to the countess announces the
appointment: "I have been with the signori," wrote
Fortunati, "to learn whom they would send and when. They
tell me that Nicolo Machiavelli, a learned young Florentine
noble, secretary to my Lords of the Ten, is to leave with me
at once." Cf. "Catherine Sforza," by Count Pasolini,
translated by P. Sylvester, 1898.
| 1,503 | Chapter 20 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210420060055/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/prince-machiavelli/summary/chapter-20 | People do all kinds of things in order to keep power. They take guns away from people, try to turn them against one another, build fortresses, tear them down. All sorts of things. But let's talk about if they are helpful or not. First, taking away guns. This is a bad idea for most rulers. If you give arms to people, they are excited. If you take them away, they wonder why you don't like them and start to hate you. And we all know where that leads--right, Shmoop rulers of tomorrow? The only people who should be doing this are people who already have vast established kingdoms and are just adding this new one to their collection. Then, go right ahead. You have your army already and taking away arms will keep the state weak. Next, dividing towns into factions and making them fight amongst each other. Now, for some reason, people keep saying this is a good idea. As the president of Panem will tell you, it is not. The weaker faction will turn against you and the stronger one won't be able to defend against a foreign invasion. Just say no. Next, stirring up trouble intentionally. Do it. It will make you seem more awesome if you take care of it like a pro. You'll have a reputation of being a good ruler, and everyone will like you. Machiavelli just leaves us a note here to remember if you take a nation with inside help, you need to be pretty suspicious of those guys that helped you. Hey, they turned on their previous ruler, why shouldn't they turn on you, newbie? Fortresses. Machiavelli approves, but only because everyone has been doing it forever. Mostly they are only helpful if you're afraid of your own people, because they hate you--which, as we all know by now, is the beginning of a downward spiral. The important thing to remember is that fortresses can't help you for long if your people hate you. | null | 333 | 1 | [
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44,747 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/44747-chapters/46.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Red and the Black/section_45_part_0.txt | The Red and the Black.part 2.chapter 16 | part 2, chapter 16 | null | {"name": "Part 2, Chapter 16", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-16", "summary": "Julien locks his bedroom door for the night, sneaks out into the garden, and finds the ladder that Mathilde has left for him. He climbs up into her room carrying a pistol. Julien runs to her and tries to kiss her. But she pushes him away and tells him not to act shamefully. Mathilde gets him to let the ladder leaning against the window back down into the garden. Now he has no way of getting out of the room except the door. Mathilde admits that she invited him to her room in order to test his courage. After some small talk, they have sex. Neither one of them is satisfied by it. For Mathilde, she's just acting the way books say she's supposed to. For Julien, the sex isn't as good as what he had with Madame de Renal. Julien sneaks out the next morning. He gets on his horse and rides out to one of the forests surrounding Paris. Mathilde goes to church and starts to wonder whether she actually loves him, or just thinks she does.", "analysis": ""} | CHAPTER XLVI
ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
This garden was very big, it had been planned a
few years ago in perfect taste. But the trees were
more than a century old. It had a certain rustic
atmosphere.--_Massinger_.
He was going to write a countermanding letter to Fouque when eleven
o'clock struck. He noisily turned the lock of the door of his room as
though he had locked himself in. He went with a sleuth-like step to
observe what was happening over the house, especially on the fourth
storey where the servants slept. There was nothing unusual. One of
madame de la Mole's chambermaids was giving an entertainment, the
servants were taking punch with much gaiety. "Those who laugh like
that," thought Julien, "cannot be participating in the nocturnal
expedition; if they were, they would be more serious."
Eventually he stationed himself in an obscure corner of the garden. "If
their plan is to hide themselves from the servants of the house, they
will despatch the persons whom they have told off to surprise me over
the garden wall.
"If M. de Croisenois shows any sense of proportion in this matter, he
is bound to find it less compromising for the young person, whom he
wishes to make his wife if he has me surprised before I enter her room."
He made a military and extremely detailed reconnaissance. "My honour is
at stake," he thought. "If I tumble into some pitfall it will not be an
excuse in my own eyes to say, 'I never thought of it.'"
The weather was desperately serene. About eleven o'clock the moon rose,
at half-past twelve it completely illuminated the facade of the hotel
looking out upon the garden.
"She is mad," Julien said to himself. As one o'clock struck there
was still a light in comte Norbert's windows. Julien had never been
so frightened in his life, he only saw the dangers of the enterprise
and had no enthusiasm at all. He went and took the immense ladder,
waited five minutes to give her time to tell him not to go, and five
minutes after one placed the ladder against Mathilde's window. He
mounted softly, pistol in hand, astonished at not being attacked. As he
approached the window it opened noiselessly.
"So there you are, monsieur," said Mathilde to him with considerable
emotion. "I have been following your movements for the last hour."
Julien was very much embarrassed. He did not know how to conduct
himself. He did not feel at all in love. He thought in his
embarrassment that he ought to be venturesome. He tried to kiss
Mathilde.
"For shame," she said to him, pushing him away.
Extremely glad at being rebuffed, he hastened to look round him. The
moon was so brilliant that the shadows which it made in mademoiselle de
la Mole's room were black. "It's quite possible for men to be concealed
without my seeing them," he thought.
"What have you got in your pocket at the side of your coat?" Mathilde
said to him, delighted at finding something to talk about. She was
suffering strangely; all those sentiments of reserve and timidity which
were so natural to a girl of good birth, had reasserted their dominion
and were torturing her.
"I have all kinds of arms and pistols," answered Julien equally glad at
having something to say.
"You must take the ladder away," said Mathilde.
"It is very big, and may break the windows of the salon down below or
the room on the ground floor."
"You must not break the windows," replied Mathilde making a vain effort
to assume an ordinary conversational tone; "it seems to me you can
lower the ladder by tying a cord to the first rung. I have always a
supply of cords at hand."
"So this is a woman in love," thought Julien. "She actually dares to
say that she is in love. So much self-possession and such shrewdness in
taking precautions are sufficient indications that I am not triumphing
over M. de Croisenois as I foolishly believed, but that I am simply
succeeding him. As a matter of fact, what does it matter to me? Do I
love her? I am triumphing over the marquis in so far as he would be
very angry at having a successor, and angrier still at that successor
being myself. How haughtily he looked at me this evening in the Cafe
Tortoni when he pretended not to recognise me! And how maliciously he
bowed to me afterwards, when he could not get out of it."
Julien had tied the cord to the last rung of the ladder. He lowered it
softly and leant far out of the balcony in order to avoid its touching
the window pane. "A fine opportunity to kill me," he thought, "if
anyone is hidden in Mathilde's room;" but a profound silence continued
to reign everywhere.
The ladder touched the ground. Julien succeeded in laying it on the
border of the exotic flowers along side the wall.
"What will my mother say," said Mathilde, "when she sees her beautiful
plants all crushed? You must throw down the cord," she added with great
self-possession. "If it were noticed going up to the balcony, it would
be a difficult circumstance to explain."
"And how am I to get away?" said Julien in a jesting tone affecting the
Creole accent. (One of the chambermaids of the household had been born
in Saint-Domingo.)
"You? Why you will leave by the door," said Mathilde, delighted at the
idea.
"Ah! how worthy this man is of all my love," she thought.
Julien had just let the cord fall into the garden; Mathilde grasped
his arm. He thought he had been seized by an enemy and turned round
sharply, drawing a dagger. She had thought that she had heard a window
opening. They remained motionless and scarcely breathed. The moonlight
lit up everything. The noise was not renewed and there was no more
cause for anxiety.
Then their embarrassment began again; it was great on both sides.
Julien assured himself that the door was completely locked; he thought
of looking under the bed, but he did not dare; "they might have
stationed one or two lackeys there." Finally he feared that he might
reproach himself in the future for this lack of prudence, and did
look. Mathilde had fallen into all the anguish of the most extreme
timidity. She was horrified at her position.
"What have you done with my letters?" she said at last.
"What a good opportunity to upset these gentlemen, if they are
eavesdropping, and thus avoiding the battle," thought Julien.
"The first is hid in a big Protestant Bible, which last night's
diligence is taking far away from here."
He spoke very distinctly as he went into these details, so as to be
heard by any persons who might be concealed in two large mahogany
cupboards which he had not dared to inspect.
"The other two are in the post and are bound for the same destination
as the first."
"Heavens, why all these precautions?" said Mathilde in alarm.
"What is the good of my lying?" thought Julien, and he confessed all
his suspicions.
"So that's the cause for the coldness of your letters, dear," exclaimed
Mathilde in a tone of madness rather than of tenderness.
Julien did not notice that nuance. The endearment made him lose his
head, or at any rate his suspicions vanished. He dared to clasp in his
arms that beautiful girl who inspired him with such respect. He was
only partially rebuffed. He fell back on his memory as he had once at
Besancon with Armanda Binet, and recited by heart several of the finest
phrases out of the _Nouvelle Heloise_.
"You have the heart of a man," was the answer she made without
listening too attentively to his phrases; "I wanted to test your
courage, I confess it. Your first suspicions and your resolutions show
you even more intrepid, dear, than I had believed."
Mathilde had to make an effort to call him "dear," and was evidently
paying more attention to this strange method of speech than to
the substance of what she was saying. Being called "dear" without
any tenderness in the tone afforded no pleasure to Julien; he was
astonished at not being happy, and eventually fell back on his
reasoning in order to be so. He saw that he was respected by this proud
young girl who never gave undeserved praise; by means of this reasoning
he managed to enjoy the happiness of satisfied vanity. It was not,
it was true, that soulful pleasure which he had sometimes found with
madame de Renal. There was no element of tenderness in the feelings
of these first few minutes. It was the keen happiness of a gratified
ambition, and Julien was, above all, ambitious. He talked again of
the people whom he had suspected and of the precautions which he had
devised. As he spoke, he thought of the best means of exploiting his
victory.
Mathilde was still very embarrassed and seemed paralysed by the
steps which she had taken. She appeared delighted to find a topic
of conversation. They talked of how they were to see each other
again. Julien extracted a delicious joy from the consciousness of
the intelligence and the courage, of which he again proved himself
possessed during this discussion. They had to reckon with extremely
sharp people, the little Tanbeau was certainly a spy, but Mathilde and
himself as well had their share of cleverness.
What was easier than to meet in the library, and there make all
arrangements?
"I can appear in all parts of the hotel," added Julien, "without
rousing suspicion almost, in fact, in madame de la Mole's own room."
It was absolutely necessary to go through it in order to reach her
daughter's room. If Mathilde thought it preferable for him always to
come by a ladder, then he would expose himself to that paltry danger
with a heart intoxicated with joy.
As she listened to him speaking, Mathilde was shocked by this air of
triumph. "So he is my master," she said to herself, she was already a
prey to remorse. Her reason was horrified at the signal folly which she
had just committed. If she had had the power she would have annihilated
both herself and Julien. When for a few moments she managed by sheer
will-power to silence her pangs of remorse, she was rendered very
unhappy by her timidity and wounded shame. She had quite failed to
foresee the awful plight in which she now found herself.
"I must speak to him, however," she said at last. "That is the proper
thing to do. One does talk to one's lover." And then with a view of
accomplishing a duty, and with a tenderness which was manifested rather
in the words which she employed than in the inflection of her voice,
she recounted various resolutions which she had made concerning him
during the last few days.
She had decided that if he should dare to come to her room by the help
of the gardener's ladder according to his instructions, she would be
entirely his. But never were such tender passages spoken in a more
polite and frigid tone. Up to the present this assignation had been
icy. It was enough to make one hate the name of love. What a lesson
in morality for a young and imprudent girl! Is it worth while to ruin
one's future for moments such as this?
After long fits of hesitation which a superficial observer might have
mistaken for the result of the most emphatic hate (so great is the
difficulty which a woman's self-respect finds in yielding even to so
firm a will as hers) Mathilde became eventually a charming mistress.
In point of fact, these ecstasies were a little artificial. Passionate
love was still more the model which they imitated than a real actuality.
Mademoiselle de la Mole thought she was fulfilling a duty towards
herself and towards her lover. "The poor boy," she said to herself,
"has shewn a consummate bravery. He deserves to be happy or it is
really I who will be shewing a lack of character." But she would have
been glad to have redeemed the cruel necessity in which she found
herself even at the price of an eternity of unhappiness.
In spite of the awful violence she was doing to herself she was
completely mistress of her words.
No regret and no reproach spoiled that night which Julien found
extraordinary rather than happy. Great heavens! what a difference to
his last twenty-four hours' stay in Verrieres. These fine Paris manners
manage to spoil everything, even love, he said to himself, quite
unjustly.
He abandoned himself to these reflections as he stood upright in one of
the great mahogany cupboards into which he had been put at the sign of
the first sounds of movement in the neighbouring apartment, which was
madame de la Mole's. Mathilde followed her mother to mass, the servants
soon left the apartment and Julien easily escaped before they came back
to finish their work.
He mounted a horse and tried to find the most solitary spots in one
of the forests near Paris. He was more astonished than happy. The
happiness which filled his soul from time to time resembled that of a
young sub-lieutenant who as the result of some surprising feat has just
been made a full-fledged colonel by the commander-in-chief; he felt
himself lifted up to an immense height. Everything which was above him
the day before was now on a level with him or even below him. Little
by little Julien's happiness increased in proportion as he got further
away from Paris.
If there was no tenderness in his soul, the reason was that, however
strange it may appear to say so, Mathilde had in everything she had
done, simply accomplished a duty. The only thing she had not foreseen
in all the events of that night, was the shame and unhappiness which
she had experienced instead of that absolute felicity which is found in
novels.
"Can I have made a mistake, and not be in love with him?" she said to
herself.
| 2,195 | Part 2, Chapter 16 | https://web.archive.org/web/20200920104425/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/red-and-the-black/summary/part-2-chapter-16 | Julien locks his bedroom door for the night, sneaks out into the garden, and finds the ladder that Mathilde has left for him. He climbs up into her room carrying a pistol. Julien runs to her and tries to kiss her. But she pushes him away and tells him not to act shamefully. Mathilde gets him to let the ladder leaning against the window back down into the garden. Now he has no way of getting out of the room except the door. Mathilde admits that she invited him to her room in order to test his courage. After some small talk, they have sex. Neither one of them is satisfied by it. For Mathilde, she's just acting the way books say she's supposed to. For Julien, the sex isn't as good as what he had with Madame de Renal. Julien sneaks out the next morning. He gets on his horse and rides out to one of the forests surrounding Paris. Mathilde goes to church and starts to wonder whether she actually loves him, or just thinks she does. | null | 179 | 1 | [
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1,526 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/1526-chapters/5.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/Twelfth Night, or What You Will/section_4_part_0.txt | Twelfth Night, or What You Will.act 1.scene 5 | act 1, scene 5 | null | {"name": "Act 1, Scene 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210415161814/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/twelfth-night/summary/act-1-scene-5", "summary": "Over at Olivia's place, Maria and Feste the Clown goof around, talking trash. Feste makes a dirty joke about how \"well hung\" he is when Maria tells him that Olivia will literally hang him because he hasn't shown up to work in such a long time. Olivia enters and orders her servants to \"Take the fool away.\" Feste responds by saying something like, \"Hey--didn't you hear Olivia say take the fool away? Take her away already.\" Olivia is totally amused, but pretends she's not, so Feste will have to convince her that he should be allowed to stay and make her laugh. Then Feste makes a crack about why Olivia really is a fool--she's wasting her time mourning for a dead brother who's in a better place , while she mopes around in her crazy, all black get-up. Malvolio asks Olivia why she lets Feste hang around. Malvolio claims that Feste isn't really that funny and, besides, he saw some other comedian totally clown him the other day. Olivia tells Malvolio to beat it--he's a bitter jerk if he doesn't see how great Feste is. Maria enters then with news that there's some dumb kid at the gate who wants to talk to Olivia. He's not taking \"no\" for an answer and Maria doesn't know what to do. Olivia tells Malvolio to go to the gate and say she's sick or busy or whatever. The kid should hit the road ASAP because she's not in the mood to talk. Feste makes a random joke about how brainless Sir Toby Belch is, just as Olivia's uncle enters the room. Olivia then takes Toby to task for being a drunk and spending all his time partying. She also asks him about who's at the gate. Toby gives her a drunken answer that basically amounts to, \"Don't know, don't care,\" and staggers out. Olivia sends Feste to look after him. Malvolio reenters the room and confirms that, yep, there's an annoying kid at the gate who says he's not going anywhere until he sees Olivia. Olivia asks what the messenger is like and Malvolio says that he doesn't seem old enough to be a man or young enough to be a boy. The kid also speaks like a \"shrew.\" Intrigued, Olivia lets the kid inside, but not before she covers her face with her black veil. \"Cesario\" enters the room and asks which one of the lovely ladies is Olivia--\"he's\" got to deliver a message from the Duke. Olivia's not interested in the Duke, but the kid is intriguing so she chats him up. \"Cesario\" says \"he's\" got this whole message memorized, so Olivia should just please pipe down and let \"him\" deliver it. Olivia's not interested in Duke Orsino's cliche attempts to sweet talk her, so she toys with \"Cesario\" for a while and asks why he was so lippy when he was out at the gate. \"Cesario\" insists that \"he\" needs to speak to Olivia alone so he can deliver his private message. \"Cesario\" tries to deliver the memorized speech again, but Olivia cuts \"him\" off and mocks the Duke's little love letter. \"Cesario\" asks to see Olivia's face and Olivia removes her veil. \"Cesario\" says that Olivia is gorgeous--she should get married and have some good looking kids with Orsino. Exasperated, Olivia says that the Duke already knows she's not into him. He's nice and all, and rich, and handsome, but he needs to learn to take \"no\" for an answer. \"Cesario\" says that doesn't make any sense. Then Olivia asks \"Cesario\" what he would do if he loved her and \"Cesario\" says \"he\" would stand at Olivia's gate and sing love poetry until Olivia took pity on \"him.\" Olivia is totally smitten when she hears this and she asks \"Cesario\" about his parentage, to which \"Cesario\" replies that \"he\" is well-born. Olivia tells \"Cesario\" to go back to Orsino and tell him to quit bothering her. Then Cesario should come back and tell Olivia what the Duke has to say about that. Olivia tries to give \"Cesario\" a few coins for his trouble, but \"Cesario\" tells her to keep her money. When \"Cesario\" leaves, Olivia says \"Cesario\" is a total dream-boat. Malvolio enters the room and Olivia lies and says that \"Cesario\" gave her a ring from the Duke. She says she doesn't want it so Malvolio should run after \"Cesario\" and return the trinket, ASAP. Olivia has apparently forgotten about her quest to mourn for her dead brother. She tells us that \"fate\" has brought \"Cesario\" to her, so she'll let whatever happens happen.", "analysis": ""} | SCENE V.
A Room in OLIVIA'S House.
[Enter MARIA and CLOWN.]
MARIA.
Nay; either tell me where thou hast been, or I will not open
my lips so wide as a bristle may enter in way of thy excuse: my
lady will hang thee for thy absence.
CLOWN.
Let her hang me: he that is well hanged in this world needs
to fear no colours.
MARIA.
Make that good.
CLOWN.
He shall see none to fear.
MARIA.
A good lenten answer: I can tell thee where that saying was
born, of, I fear no colours.
CLOWN.
Where, good Mistress Mary?
MARIA.
In the wars; and that may you be bold to say in your foolery.
CLOWN.
Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are
fools, let them use their talents.
MARIA.
Yet you will be hanged for being so long absent: or to be
turned away; is not that as good as a hanging to you?
CLOWN.
Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage; and for turning
away, let summer bear it out.
MARIA.
You are resolute, then?
CLOWN.
Not so, neither: but I am resolved on two points.
MARIA.
That if one break, the other will hold; or if both break,
your gaskins fall.
CLOWN.
Apt, in good faith, very apt! Well, go thy way; if Sir Toby
would leave drinking, thou wert as witty a piece of Eve's flesh
as any in Illyria.
MARIA.
Peace, you rogue; no more o' that; here comes my lady: make
your excuse wisely; you were best.
[Exit.]
[Enter OLIVIA and MALVOLIO.]
CLOWN.
Wit, and't be thy will, put me into good fooling! Those wits
that think they have thee do very oft prove fools; and I, that am
sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man. For what says
Quinapalus? Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.--God bless
thee, lady!
OLIVIA.
Take the fool away.
CLOWN.
Do you not hear, fellows? Take away the lady.
OLIVIA.
Go to, you're a dry fool; I'll no more of you: besides, you
grow dishonest.
CLOWN.
Two faults, madonna, that drink and good counsel will amend:
for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry; bid the
dishonest man mend himself: if he mend, he is no longer
dishonest; if he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Anything
that's mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is but
patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue.
If that this simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not,
what remedy? As there is no true cuckold but calamity, so
beauty's a flower:--the lady bade take away the fool; therefore,
I say again, take her away.
OLIVIA.
Sir, I bade them take away you.
CLOWN.
Misprision in the highest degree!--Lady, Cucullus non facit
monachum; that's as much to say, I wear not motley in my
brain. Good madonna, give me leave to prove you a fool.
OLIVIA.
Can you do it?
CLOWN.
Dexteriously, good madonna.
OLIVIA.
Make your proof.
CLOWN.
I must catechize you for it, madonna.
Good my mouse of virtue, answer me.
OLIVIA.
Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I'll 'bide your proof.
CLOWN.
Good madonna, why mourn'st thou?
OLIVIA.
Good fool, for my brother's death.
CLOWN.
I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
OLIVIA.
I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
CLOWN.
The more fool you, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul
being in heaven.--Take away the fool, gentlemen.
OLIVIA.
What think you of this fool, Malvolio? doth he not mend?
MALVOLIO.
Yes; and shall do, till the pangs of death shake him.
Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool.
CLOWN.
God send you, sir, a speedy infirmity, for the better
increasing your folly! Sir Toby will be sworn that I am no fox;
but he will not pass his word for twopence that you are no fool.
OLIVIA.
How say you to that, Malvolio?
MALVOLIO.
I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren
rascal; I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool
that has no more brain than a stone. Look you now, he's out of
his guard already; unless you laugh and minister occasion to him,
he is gagged. I protest I take these wise men that crow so at
these set kind of fools, no better than the fools' zanies.
OLIVIA.
O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a
distempered appetite. To be generous, guiltless, and of free
disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem
cannon bullets. There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he
do nothing but rail; nor no railing in known discreet man, though
he do nothing but reprove.
CLOWN.
Now Mercury endue thee with leasing, for thou speakest well of
fools!
[Re-enter MARIA.]
MARIA.
Madam, there is at the gate a young gentleman much desires
to speak with you.
OLIVIA.
From the Count Orsino, is it?
MARIA.
I know not, madam; 'tis a fair young man, and well attended.
OLIVIA.
Who of my people hold him in delay?
MARIA.
Sir Toby, madam, your kinsman.
OLIVIA.
Fetch him off, I pray you; he speaks nothing but madman.
Fie on him!
[Exit MARIA]
Go you, Malvolio: if it be a suit from the count, I am sick, or
not at home; what you will to dismiss it.
[Exit MALVOLIO.]
Now you see, sir, how your fooling grows old, and people dislike
it.
CLOWN.
Thou hast spoke for us, madonna, as if thy eldest son should
be a fool: whose skull Jove cram with brains, for here he comes--
one of thy kin, has a most weak pia mater.
[Enter SIR TOBY BELCH.]
OLIVIA.
By mine honour, half drunk!--What is he at the gate, cousin?
SIR TOBY.
A gentleman.
OLIVIA.
A gentleman? What gentleman?
SIR TOBY.
'Tis a gentleman here.--A plague o' these pickle-herrings!--How
now, sot?
CLOWN.
Good Sir Toby,--
OLIVIA.
Cousin, cousin, how have you come so early by this lethargy?
SIR TOBY.
Lechery! I defy lechery. There's one at the gate.
OLIVIA.
Ay, marry; what is he?
SIR TOBY.
Let him be the devil an he will, I care not: give me
faith, say I. Well, it's all one.
[Exit.]
OLIVIA.
What's a drunken man like, fool?
CLOWN.
Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman: one draught above
heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns
him.
OLIVIA.
Go thou and seek the coroner, and let him sit o' my coz;
for he's in the third degree of drink; he's drowned: go, look
after him.
CLOWN.
He is but mad yet, madonna; and the fool shall look to the
madman.
[Exit CLOWN.]
[Re-enter MALVOLIO.]
MALVOLIO.
Madam, yond young fellow swears he will speak with you. I
told him you were sick; he takes on him to understand so much,
and therefore comes to speak with you; I told him you were
asleep; he seems to have a foreknowledge of that too, and
therefore comes to speak with you. What is to be said to him,
lady? he's fortified against any denial.
OLIVIA.
Tell him, he shall not speak with me.
MALVOLIO.
Has been told so; and he says he'll stand at your door
like a sheriff's post, and be the supporter of a bench, but he'll
speak with you.
OLIVIA.
What kind of man is he?
MALVOLIO.
Why, of mankind.
OLIVIA.
What manner of man?
MALVOLIO.
Of very ill manner; he'll speak with you, will you or no.
OLIVIA.
Of what personage and years is he?
MALVOLIO.
Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy;
as a squash is before 'tis a peascod, or a codling, when 'tis
almost an apple: 'tis with him e'en standing water, between boy
and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly;
one would think his mother's milk were scarce out of him.
OLIVIA.
Let him approach. Call in my gentlewoman.
MALVOLIO.
Gentlewoman, my lady calls.
[Exit.]
[Re-enter MARIA.]
OLIVIA.
Give me my veil; come, throw it o'er my face;
We'll once more hear Orsino's embassy.
[Enter VIOLA.]
VIOLA.
The honourable lady of the house, which is she?
OLIVIA.
Speak to me; I shall answer for her. Your will?
VIOLA.
Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty,--I pray you,
tell me if this be the lady of the house, for I never saw her: I
would be loath to cast away my speech; for, besides that it is
excellently well penned, I have taken great pains to con it. Good
beauties, let me sustain no scorn; I am very comptible, even to
the least sinister usage.
OLIVIA.
Whence came you, sir?
VIOLA.
I can say little more than I have studied, and that
question's out of my part. Good gentle one, give me modest
assurance, if you be the lady of the house, that I may proceed in
my speech.
OLIVIA.
Are you a comedian?
VIOLA.
No, my profound heart: and yet, by the very fangs of malice
I swear, I am not that I play. Are you the lady of the house?
OLIVIA.
If I do not usurp myself, I am.
VIOLA.
Most certain, if you are she, you do usurp yourself; for
what is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve. But this is from
my commission: I will on with my speech in your praise, and then
show you the heart of my message.
OLIVIA.
Come to what is important in't: I forgive you the praise.
VIOLA.
Alas, I took great pains to study it, and 'tis poetical.
OLIVIA.
It is the more like to be feigned; I pray you keep it in. I
heard you were saucy at my gates; and allowed your approach,
rather to wonder at you than to hear you. If you be not mad, be
gone; if you have reason, be brief: 'tis not that time of moon
with me to make one in so skipping a dialogue.
MARIA.
Will you hoist sail, sir? here lies your way.
VIOLA.
No, good swabber; I am to hull here a little longer.--
Some mollification for your giant, sweet lady.
OLIVIA.
Tell me your mind.
VIOLA.
I am a messenger.
OLIVIA.
Sure, you have some hideous matter to deliver, when the
courtesy of it is so fearful. Speak your office.
VIOLA.
It alone concerns your ear. I bring no overture of war, no
taxation of homage; I hold the olive in my hand: my words are as
full of peace as matter.
OLIVIA.
Yet you began rudely. What are you? what would you?
VIOLA.
The rudeness that hath appeared in me have I learned from my
entertainment. What I am and what I would are as secret as
maidenhead: to your ears, divinity; to any other's, profanation.
OLIVIA.
Give us the place alone: we will hear this divinity.
[Exit MARIA.]
Now, sir, what is your text?
VIOLA.
Most sweet lady,--
OLIVIA.
A comfortable doctrine, and much may be said of it.
Where lies your text?
VIOLA.
In Orsino's bosom.
OLIVIA.
In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom?
VIOLA.
To answer by the method, in the first of his heart.
OLIVIA.
O, I have read it; it is heresy. Have you no more to say?
VIOLA.
Good madam, let me see your face.
OLIVIA.
Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my
face? you are now out of your text: but we will draw the curtain
and show you the picture. Look you, sir, such a one I was this
present. Is't not well done?
[Unveiling.]
VIOLA.
Excellently done, if God did all.
OLIVIA.
'Tis in grain, sir; 'twill endure wind and weather.
VIOLA.
'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on:
Lady, you are the cruel'st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.
OLIVIA.
O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; I will give out
divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried; and every
particle and utensil labelled to my will: as, item, two lips
indifferent red; item, two grey eyes with lids to them; item, one
neck, one chin, and so forth. Were you sent hither to praise me?
VIOLA.
I see you what you are: you are too proud;
But, if you were the devil, you are fair.
My lord and master loves you. O, such love
Could be but recompens'd though you were crown'd
The nonpareil of beauty!
OLIVIA.
How does he love me?
VIOLA.
With adorations, fertile tears,
With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire.
OLIVIA.
Your lord does know my mind; I cannot love him:
Yet I suppose him virtuous, know him noble,
Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth;
In voices well divulged, free, learn'd, and valiant,
And, in dimension and the shape of nature,
A gracious person: but yet I cannot love him;
He might have took his answer long ago.
VIOLA.
If I did love you in my master's flame,
With such a suffering, such a deadly life,
In your denial I would find no sense,
I would not understand it.
OLIVIA.
Why, what would you?
VIOLA.
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud, even in the dead of night;
Holla your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out Olivia! O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me.
OLIVIA.
You might do much. What is your parentage?
VIOLA.
Above my fortunes, yet my state is well: I am a gentleman.
OLIVIA.
Get you to your lord;
I cannot love him: let him send no more;
Unless, perchance, you come to me again,
To tell me how he takes it. Fare you well:
I thank you for your pains: spend this for me.
VIOLA.
I am no fee'd post, lady; keep your purse;
My master, not myself, lacks recompense.
Love make his heart of flint that you shall love;
And let your fervour, like my master's, be
Placed in contempt! Farewell, fair cruelty.
[Exit.]
OLIVIA.
What is your parentage?
'Above my fortunes, yet my state is well:
I am a gentleman.'--I'll be sworn thou art;
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit,
Do give thee five-fold blazon. Not too fast:--soft, soft!
Unless the master were the man.--How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth's perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.--
What, ho, Malvolio!--
[Re-enter MALVOLIO.]
MALVOLIO.
Here, madam, at your service.
OLIVIA.
Run after that same peevish messenger,
The county's man: he left this ring behind him,
Would I or not; tell him I'll none of it.
Desire him not to flatter with his lord,
Nor hold him up with hopes; I am not for him:
If that the youth will come this way to-morrow,
I'll give him reasons for't. Hie thee, Malvolio.
MALVOLIO.
Madam, I will.
[Exit.]
OLIVIA.
I do I know not what: and fear to find
Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind.
Fate, show thy force. Ourselves we do not owe:
What is decreed must be; and be this so!
[Exit.]
| 2,171 | Act 1, Scene 5 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210415161814/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/twelfth-night/summary/act-1-scene-5 | Over at Olivia's place, Maria and Feste the Clown goof around, talking trash. Feste makes a dirty joke about how "well hung" he is when Maria tells him that Olivia will literally hang him because he hasn't shown up to work in such a long time. Olivia enters and orders her servants to "Take the fool away." Feste responds by saying something like, "Hey--didn't you hear Olivia say take the fool away? Take her away already." Olivia is totally amused, but pretends she's not, so Feste will have to convince her that he should be allowed to stay and make her laugh. Then Feste makes a crack about why Olivia really is a fool--she's wasting her time mourning for a dead brother who's in a better place , while she mopes around in her crazy, all black get-up. Malvolio asks Olivia why she lets Feste hang around. Malvolio claims that Feste isn't really that funny and, besides, he saw some other comedian totally clown him the other day. Olivia tells Malvolio to beat it--he's a bitter jerk if he doesn't see how great Feste is. Maria enters then with news that there's some dumb kid at the gate who wants to talk to Olivia. He's not taking "no" for an answer and Maria doesn't know what to do. Olivia tells Malvolio to go to the gate and say she's sick or busy or whatever. The kid should hit the road ASAP because she's not in the mood to talk. Feste makes a random joke about how brainless Sir Toby Belch is, just as Olivia's uncle enters the room. Olivia then takes Toby to task for being a drunk and spending all his time partying. She also asks him about who's at the gate. Toby gives her a drunken answer that basically amounts to, "Don't know, don't care," and staggers out. Olivia sends Feste to look after him. Malvolio reenters the room and confirms that, yep, there's an annoying kid at the gate who says he's not going anywhere until he sees Olivia. Olivia asks what the messenger is like and Malvolio says that he doesn't seem old enough to be a man or young enough to be a boy. The kid also speaks like a "shrew." Intrigued, Olivia lets the kid inside, but not before she covers her face with her black veil. "Cesario" enters the room and asks which one of the lovely ladies is Olivia--"he's" got to deliver a message from the Duke. Olivia's not interested in the Duke, but the kid is intriguing so she chats him up. "Cesario" says "he's" got this whole message memorized, so Olivia should just please pipe down and let "him" deliver it. Olivia's not interested in Duke Orsino's cliche attempts to sweet talk her, so she toys with "Cesario" for a while and asks why he was so lippy when he was out at the gate. "Cesario" insists that "he" needs to speak to Olivia alone so he can deliver his private message. "Cesario" tries to deliver the memorized speech again, but Olivia cuts "him" off and mocks the Duke's little love letter. "Cesario" asks to see Olivia's face and Olivia removes her veil. "Cesario" says that Olivia is gorgeous--she should get married and have some good looking kids with Orsino. Exasperated, Olivia says that the Duke already knows she's not into him. He's nice and all, and rich, and handsome, but he needs to learn to take "no" for an answer. "Cesario" says that doesn't make any sense. Then Olivia asks "Cesario" what he would do if he loved her and "Cesario" says "he" would stand at Olivia's gate and sing love poetry until Olivia took pity on "him." Olivia is totally smitten when she hears this and she asks "Cesario" about his parentage, to which "Cesario" replies that "he" is well-born. Olivia tells "Cesario" to go back to Orsino and tell him to quit bothering her. Then Cesario should come back and tell Olivia what the Duke has to say about that. Olivia tries to give "Cesario" a few coins for his trouble, but "Cesario" tells her to keep her money. When "Cesario" leaves, Olivia says "Cesario" is a total dream-boat. Malvolio enters the room and Olivia lies and says that "Cesario" gave her a ring from the Duke. She says she doesn't want it so Malvolio should run after "Cesario" and return the trinket, ASAP. Olivia has apparently forgotten about her quest to mourn for her dead brother. She tells us that "fate" has brought "Cesario" to her, so she'll let whatever happens happen. | null | 766 | 1 | [
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28,054 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/46.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Brothers Karamazov/section_45_part_0.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.book 8.chapter 1 | book 8, chapter 1 | null | {"name": "Book 8, Chapter 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-8-chapter-1", "summary": "Meanwhile the novel finally returns to Dmitri. So what's he been up to for the past 200 pages - which take up only two days, by the way, as the narrator reminds us on the first page of this chapter? Dmitri has been making a royal fool of himself, that's what. Ashamed of stealing 3,000 roubles from Katerina only to spend it all on Grushenka, Dmitri decides he must return the money to Katerina somehow to save his honor. Only then can he begin a new life with Grushenka. But Dmitri has no money. So he hatches up the desperate plan of going to see Samsonov, Grushenka's old \"patron,\" to borrow the money to repay Katerina and to whisk away Grushenka. Dmitri arrives at Samsonov's and is taken upstairs to see the old man himself, holed up in a small bedroom with his swollen legs. In Dmitri's confusion, he notices a malicious glint in Samsonov's eyes, but he quickly brushes this aside as the peevish wincing of an old man in constant pain from his gouty leg. Dmitri proposes that Samsonov lend him money, using his inheritance, a woodlot in Chermashnya, as collateral. Of course Dmitri doesn't yet have his inheritance, nor is it likely he will ever receive it because it's being held by his father. Samsonov rejects Dmitri's proposal, but then suggests that Dmitri see a fellow by the name of Lyagavy, who's been trying to purchase the woodlot from his father. Lyagavy is staying with a priest in the village of Ilyinskoye. Dmitri is effusively thankful for the tip and leaves Samsonov. The narrator tells us that it was all a malicious joke on Samsonov's part, and that he was infuriated by Dmitri's visit.", "analysis": ""} | Book VIII. Mitya Chapter I. Kuzma Samsonov
But Dmitri, to whom Grushenka, flying away to a new life, had left her
last greetings, bidding him remember the hour of her love for ever, knew
nothing of what had happened to her, and was at that moment in a condition
of feverish agitation and activity. For the last two days he had been in
such an inconceivable state of mind that he might easily have fallen ill
with brain fever, as he said himself afterwards. Alyosha had not been able
to find him the morning before, and Ivan had not succeeded in meeting him
at the tavern on the same day. The people at his lodgings, by his orders,
concealed his movements.
He had spent those two days literally rushing in all directions,
"struggling with his destiny and trying to save himself," as he expressed
it himself afterwards, and for some hours he even made a dash out of the
town on urgent business, terrible as it was to him to lose sight of
Grushenka for a moment. All this was explained afterwards in detail, and
confirmed by documentary evidence; but for the present we will only note
the most essential incidents of those two terrible days immediately
preceding the awful catastrophe, that broke so suddenly upon him.
Though Grushenka had, it is true, loved him for an hour, genuinely and
sincerely, yet she tortured him sometimes cruelly and mercilessly. The
worst of it was that he could never tell what she meant to do. To prevail
upon her by force or kindness was also impossible: she would yield to
nothing. She would only have become angry and turned away from him
altogether, he knew that well already. He suspected, quite correctly, that
she, too, was passing through an inward struggle, and was in a state of
extraordinary indecision, that she was making up her mind to something,
and unable to determine upon it. And so, not without good reason, he
divined, with a sinking heart, that at moments she must simply hate him
and his passion. And so, perhaps, it was, but what was distressing
Grushenka he did not understand. For him the whole tormenting question lay
between him and Fyodor Pavlovitch.
Here, we must note, by the way, one certain fact: he was firmly persuaded
that Fyodor Pavlovitch would offer, or perhaps had offered, Grushenka
lawful wedlock, and did not for a moment believe that the old voluptuary
hoped to gain his object for three thousand roubles. Mitya had reached
this conclusion from his knowledge of Grushenka and her character. That
was how it was that he could believe at times that all Grushenka's
uneasiness rose from not knowing which of them to choose, which was most
to her advantage.
Strange to say, during those days it never occurred to him to think of the
approaching return of the "officer," that is, of the man who had been such
a fatal influence in Grushenka's life, and whose arrival she was expecting
with such emotion and dread. It is true that of late Grushenka had been
very silent about it. Yet he was perfectly aware of a letter she had
received a month ago from her seducer, and had heard of it from her own
lips. He partly knew, too, what the letter contained. In a moment of spite
Grushenka had shown him that letter, but to her astonishment he attached
hardly any consequence to it. It would be hard to say why this was.
Perhaps, weighed down by all the hideous horror of his struggle with his
own father for this woman, he was incapable of imagining any danger more
terrible, at any rate for the time. He simply did not believe in a suitor
who suddenly turned up again after five years' disappearance, still less
in his speedy arrival. Moreover, in the "officer's" first letter which had
been shown to Mitya, the possibility of his new rival's visit was very
vaguely suggested. The letter was very indefinite, high-flown, and full of
sentimentality. It must be noted that Grushenka had concealed from him the
last lines of the letter, in which his return was alluded to more
definitely. He had, besides, noticed at that moment, he remembered
afterwards, a certain involuntary proud contempt for this missive from
Siberia on Grushenka's face. Grushenka told him nothing of what had passed
later between her and this rival; so that by degrees he had completely
forgotten the officer's existence.
He felt that whatever might come later, whatever turn things might take,
his final conflict with Fyodor Pavlovitch was close upon him, and must be
decided before anything else. With a sinking heart he was expecting every
moment Grushenka's decision, always believing that it would come suddenly,
on the impulse of the moment. All of a sudden she would say to him: "Take
me, I'm yours for ever," and it would all be over. He would seize her and
bear her away at once to the ends of the earth. Oh, then he would bear her
away at once, as far, far away as possible; to the farthest end of Russia,
if not of the earth, then he would marry her, and settle down with her
incognito, so that no one would know anything about them, there, here, or
anywhere. Then, oh, then, a new life would begin at once!
Of this different, reformed and "virtuous" life ("it must, it must be
virtuous") he dreamed feverishly at every moment. He thirsted for that
reformation and renewal. The filthy morass, in which he had sunk of his
own free will, was too revolting to him, and, like very many men in such
cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for
these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he
could fly away from this accursed place--he would be altogether
regenerated, would enter on a new path. That was what he believed in, and
what he was yearning for.
But all this could only be on condition of the first, the _happy_ solution
of the question. There was another possibility, a different and awful
ending. Suddenly she might say to him: "Go away. I have just come to terms
with Fyodor Pavlovitch. I am going to marry him and don't want you"--and
then ... but then.... But Mitya did not know what would happen then. Up to
the last hour he didn't know. That must be said to his credit. He had no
definite intentions, had planned no crime. He was simply watching and
spying in agony, while he prepared himself for the first, happy solution
of his destiny. He drove away any other idea, in fact. But for that ending
a quite different anxiety arose, a new, incidental, but yet fatal and
insoluble difficulty presented itself.
If she were to say to him: "I'm yours; take me away," how could he take
her away? Where had he the means, the money to do it? It was just at this
time that all sources of revenue from Fyodor Pavlovitch, doles which had
gone on without interruption for so many years, ceased. Grushenka had
money, of course, but with regard to this Mitya suddenly evinced
extraordinary pride; he wanted to carry her away and begin the new life
with her himself, at his own expense, not at hers. He could not conceive
of taking her money, and the very idea caused him a pang of intense
repulsion. I won't enlarge on this fact or analyze it here, but confine
myself to remarking that this was his attitude at the moment. All this may
have arisen indirectly and unconsciously from the secret stings of his
conscience for the money of Katerina Ivanovna that he had dishonestly
appropriated. "I've been a scoundrel to one of them, and I shall be a
scoundrel again to the other directly," was his feeling then, as he
explained after: "and when Grushenka knows, she won't care for such a
scoundrel."
Where then was he to get the means, where was he to get the fateful money?
Without it, all would be lost and nothing could be done, "and only because
I hadn't the money. Oh, the shame of it!"
To anticipate things: he did, perhaps, know where to get the money, knew,
perhaps, where it lay at that moment. I will say no more of this here, as
it will all be clear later. But his chief trouble, I must explain however
obscurely, lay in the fact that to have that sum he knew of, to _have the
right_ to take it, he must first restore Katerina Ivanovna's three
thousand--if not, "I'm a common pickpocket, I'm a scoundrel, and I don't
want to begin a new life as a scoundrel," Mitya decided. And so he made up
his mind to move heaven and earth to return Katerina Ivanovna that three
thousand, and that _first of all_. The final stage of this decision, so to
say, had been reached only during the last hours, that is, after his last
interview with Alyosha, two days before, on the high-road, on the evening
when Grushenka had insulted Katerina Ivanovna, and Mitya, after hearing
Alyosha's account of it, had admitted that he was a scoundrel, and told
him to tell Katerina Ivanovna so, if it could be any comfort to her. After
parting from his brother on that night, he had felt in his frenzy that it
would be better "to murder and rob some one than fail to pay my debt to
Katya. I'd rather every one thought me a robber and a murderer, I'd rather
go to Siberia than that Katya should have the right to say that I deceived
her and stole her money, and used her money to run away with Grushenka and
begin a new life! That I can't do!" So Mitya decided, grinding his teeth,
and he might well fancy at times that his brain would give way. But
meanwhile he went on struggling....
Strange to say, though one would have supposed there was nothing left for
him but despair--for what chance had he, with nothing in the world, to
raise such a sum?--yet to the very end he persisted in hoping that he would
get that three thousand, that the money would somehow come to him of
itself, as though it might drop from heaven. That is just how it is with
people who, like Dmitri, have never had anything to do with money, except
to squander what has come to them by inheritance without any effort of
their own, and have no notion how money is obtained. A whirl of the most
fantastic notions took possession of his brain immediately after he had
parted with Alyosha two days before, and threw his thoughts into a tangle
of confusion. This is how it was he pitched first on a perfectly wild
enterprise. And perhaps to men of that kind in such circumstances the most
impossible, fantastic schemes occur first, and seem most practical.
He suddenly determined to go to Samsonov, the merchant who was Grushenka's
protector, and to propose a "scheme" to him, and by means of it to obtain
from him at once the whole of the sum required. Of the commercial value of
his scheme he had no doubt, not the slightest, and was only uncertain how
Samsonov would look upon his freak, supposing he were to consider it from
any but the commercial point of view. Though Mitya knew the merchant by
sight, he was not acquainted with him and had never spoken a word to him.
But for some unknown reason he had long entertained the conviction that
the old reprobate, who was lying at death's door, would perhaps not at all
object now to Grushenka's securing a respectable position, and marrying a
man "to be depended upon." And he believed not only that he would not
object, but that this was what he desired, and, if opportunity arose, that
he would be ready to help. From some rumor, or perhaps from some stray
word of Grushenka's, he had gathered further that the old man would
perhaps prefer him to Fyodor Pavlovitch for Grushenka.
Possibly many of the readers of my novel will feel that in reckoning on
such assistance, and being ready to take his bride, so to speak, from the
hands of her protector, Dmitri showed great coarseness and want of
delicacy. I will only observe that Mitya looked upon Grushenka's past as
something completely over. He looked on that past with infinite pity and
resolved with all the fervor of his passion that when once Grushenka told
him she loved him and would marry him, it would mean the beginning of a
new Grushenka and a new Dmitri, free from every vice. They would forgive
one another and would begin their lives afresh. As for Kuzma Samsonov,
Dmitri looked upon him as a man who had exercised a fateful influence in
that remote past of Grushenka's, though she had never loved him, and who
was now himself a thing of the past, completely done with, and, so to say,
non-existent. Besides, Mitya hardly looked upon him as a man at all, for
it was known to every one in the town that he was only a shattered wreck,
whose relations with Grushenka had changed their character and were now
simply paternal, and that this had been so for a long time.
In any case there was much simplicity on Mitya's part in all this, for in
spite of all his vices, he was a very simple-hearted man. It was an
instance of this simplicity that Mitya was seriously persuaded that, being
on the eve of his departure for the next world, old Kuzma must sincerely
repent of his past relations with Grushenka, and that she had no more
devoted friend and protector in the world than this, now harmless old man.
After his conversation with Alyosha, at the cross-roads, he hardly slept
all night, and at ten o'clock next morning, he was at the house of
Samsonov and telling the servant to announce him. It was a very large and
gloomy old house of two stories, with a lodge and outhouses. In the lower
story lived Samsonov's two married sons with their families, his old
sister, and his unmarried daughter. In the lodge lived two of his clerks,
one of whom also had a large family. Both the lodge and the lower story
were overcrowded, but the old man kept the upper floor to himself, and
would not even let the daughter live there with him, though she waited
upon him, and in spite of her asthma was obliged at certain fixed hours,
and at any time he might call her, to run upstairs to him from below.
This upper floor contained a number of large rooms kept purely for show,
furnished in the old-fashioned merchant style, with long monotonous rows
of clumsy mahogany chairs along the walls, with glass chandeliers under
shades, and gloomy mirrors on the walls. All these rooms were entirely
empty and unused, for the old man kept to one room, a small, remote
bedroom, where he was waited upon by an old servant with a kerchief on her
head, and by a lad, who used to sit on the locker in the passage. Owing to
his swollen legs, the old man could hardly walk at all, and was only
rarely lifted from his leather arm-chair, when the old woman supporting
him led him up and down the room once or twice. He was morose and taciturn
even with this old woman.
When he was informed of the arrival of the "captain," he at once refused
to see him. But Mitya persisted and sent his name up again. Samsonov
questioned the lad minutely: What he looked like? Whether he was drunk?
Was he going to make a row? The answer he received was: that he was sober,
but wouldn't go away. The old man again refused to see him. Then Mitya,
who had foreseen this, and purposely brought pencil and paper with him,
wrote clearly on the piece of paper the words: "On most important business
closely concerning Agrafena Alexandrovna," and sent it up to the old man.
After thinking a little Samsonov told the lad to take the visitor to the
drawing-room, and sent the old woman downstairs with a summons to his
younger son to come upstairs to him at once. This younger son, a man over
six foot and of exceptional physical strength, who was closely-shaven and
dressed in the European style, though his father still wore a kaftan and a
beard, came at once without a comment. All the family trembled before the
father. The old man had sent for this giant, not because he was afraid of
the "captain" (he was by no means of a timorous temper), but in order to
have a witness in case of any emergency. Supported by his son and the
servant-lad, he waddled at last into the drawing-room. It may be assumed
that he felt considerable curiosity. The drawing-room in which Mitya was
awaiting him was a vast, dreary room that laid a weight of depression on
the heart. It had a double row of windows, a gallery, marbled walls, and
three immense chandeliers with glass lusters covered with shades.
Mitya was sitting on a little chair at the entrance, awaiting his fate
with nervous impatience. When the old man appeared at the opposite door,
seventy feet away, Mitya jumped up at once, and with his long, military
stride walked to meet him. Mitya was well dressed, in a frock-coat,
buttoned up, with a round hat and black gloves in his hands, just as he
had been three days before at the elder's, at the family meeting with his
father and brothers. The old man waited for him, standing dignified and
unbending, and Mitya felt at once that he had looked him through and
through as he advanced. Mitya was greatly impressed, too, with Samsonov's
immensely swollen face. His lower lip, which had always been thick, hung
down now, looking like a bun. He bowed to his guest in dignified silence,
motioned him to a low chair by the sofa, and, leaning on his son's arm he
began lowering himself on to the sofa opposite, groaning painfully, so
that Mitya, seeing his painful exertions, immediately felt remorseful and
sensitively conscious of his insignificance in the presence of the
dignified person he had ventured to disturb.
"What is it you want of me, sir?" said the old man, deliberately,
distinctly, severely, but courteously, when he was at last seated.
Mitya started, leapt up, but sat down again. Then he began at once
speaking with loud, nervous haste, gesticulating, and in a positive
frenzy. He was unmistakably a man driven into a corner, on the brink of
ruin, catching at the last straw, ready to sink if he failed. Old Samsonov
probably grasped all this in an instant, though his face remained cold and
immovable as a statue's.
"Most honored sir, Kuzma Kuzmitch, you have no doubt heard more than once
of my disputes with my father, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, who robbed me
of my inheritance from my mother ... seeing the whole town is gossiping
about it ... for here every one's gossiping of what they shouldn't ... and
besides, it might have reached you through Grushenka ... I beg your
pardon, through Agrafena Alexandrovna ... Agrafena Alexandrovna, the lady
for whom I have the highest respect and esteem ..."
So Mitya began, and broke down at the first sentence. We will not
reproduce his speech word for word, but will only summarize the gist of
it. Three months ago, he said, he had of express intention (Mitya
purposely used these words instead of "intentionally") consulted a lawyer
in the chief town of the province, "a distinguished lawyer, Kuzma
Kuzmitch, Pavel Pavlovitch Korneplodov. You have perhaps heard of him? A
man of vast intellect, the mind of a statesman ... he knows you, too ...
spoke of you in the highest terms ..." Mitya broke down again. But these
breaks did not deter him. He leapt instantly over the gaps, and struggled
on and on.
This Korneplodov, after questioning him minutely, and inspecting the
documents he was able to bring him (Mitya alluded somewhat vaguely to
these documents, and slurred over the subject with special haste),
reported that they certainly might take proceedings concerning the village
of Tchermashnya, which ought, he said, to have come to him, Mitya, from
his mother, and so checkmate the old villain, his father ... "because
every door was not closed and justice might still find a loophole." In
fact, he might reckon on an additional sum of six or even seven thousand
roubles from Fyodor Pavlovitch, as Tchermashnya was worth, at least,
twenty-five thousand, he might say twenty-eight thousand, in fact,
"thirty, thirty, Kuzma Kuzmitch, and would you believe it, I didn't get
seventeen from that heartless man!" So he, Mitya, had thrown the business
up, for the time, knowing nothing about the law, but on coming here was
struck dumb by a cross-claim made upon him (here Mitya went adrift again
and again took a flying leap forward), "so will not you, excellent and
honored Kuzma Kuzmitch, be willing to take up all my claims against that
unnatural monster, and pay me a sum down of only three thousand?... You
see, you cannot, in any case, lose over it. On my honor, my honor, I swear
that. Quite the contrary, you may make six or seven thousand instead of
three." Above all, he wanted this concluded that very day.
"I'll do the business with you at a notary's, or whatever it is ... in
fact, I'm ready to do anything.... I'll hand over all the deeds ...
whatever you want, sign anything ... and we could draw up the agreement at
once ... and if it were possible, if it were only possible, that very
morning.... You could pay me that three thousand, for there isn't a
capitalist in this town to compare with you, and so would save me from ...
would save me, in fact ... for a good, I might say an honorable action....
For I cherish the most honorable feelings for a certain person, whom you
know well, and care for as a father. I would not have come, indeed, if it
had not been as a father. And, indeed, it's a struggle of three in this
business, for it's fate--that's a fearful thing, Kuzma Kuzmitch! A tragedy,
Kuzma Kuzmitch, a tragedy! And as you've dropped out long ago, it's a tug-
of-war between two. I'm expressing it awkwardly, perhaps, but I'm not a
literary man. You see, I'm on the one side, and that monster on the other.
So you must choose. It's either I or the monster. It all lies in your
hands--the fate of three lives, and the happiness of two.... Excuse me, I'm
making a mess of it, but you understand ... I see from your venerable eyes
that you understand ... and if you don't understand, I'm done for ... so
you see!"
Mitya broke off his clumsy speech with that, "so you see!" and jumping up
from his seat, awaited the answer to his foolish proposal. At the last
phrase he had suddenly become hopelessly aware that it had all fallen
flat, above all, that he had been talking utter nonsense.
"How strange it is! On the way here it seemed all right, and now it's
nothing but nonsense." The idea suddenly dawned on his despairing mind.
All the while he had been talking, the old man sat motionless, watching
him with an icy expression in his eyes. After keeping him for a moment in
suspense, Kuzma Kuzmitch pronounced at last in the most positive and
chilling tone:
"Excuse me, we don't undertake such business."
Mitya suddenly felt his legs growing weak under him.
"What am I to do now, Kuzma Kuzmitch?" he muttered, with a pale smile. "I
suppose it's all up with me--what do you think?"
"Excuse me...."
Mitya remained standing, staring motionless. He suddenly noticed a
movement in the old man's face. He started.
"You see, sir, business of that sort's not in our line," said the old man
slowly. "There's the court, and the lawyers--it's a perfect misery. But if
you like, there is a man here you might apply to."
"Good heavens! Who is it? You're my salvation, Kuzma Kuzmitch," faltered
Mitya.
"He doesn't live here, and he's not here just now. He is a peasant, he
does business in timber. His name is Lyagavy. He's been haggling with
Fyodor Pavlovitch for the last year, over your copse at Tchermashnya. They
can't agree on the price, maybe you've heard? Now he's come back again and
is staying with the priest at Ilyinskoe, about twelve versts from the
Volovya station. He wrote to me, too, about the business of the copse,
asking my advice. Fyodor Pavlovitch means to go and see him himself. So if
you were to be beforehand with Fyodor Pavlovitch and to make Lyagavy the
offer you've made me, he might possibly--"
"A brilliant idea!" Mitya interrupted ecstatically. "He's the very man, it
would just suit him. He's haggling with him for it, being asked too much,
and here he would have all the documents entitling him to the property
itself. Ha ha ha!"
And Mitya suddenly went off into his short, wooden laugh, startling
Samsonov.
"How can I thank you, Kuzma Kuzmitch?" cried Mitya effusively.
"Don't mention it," said Samsonov, inclining his head.
"But you don't know, you've saved me. Oh, it was a true presentiment
brought me to you.... So now to this priest!"
"No need of thanks."
"I'll make haste and fly there. I'm afraid I've overtaxed your strength. I
shall never forget it. It's a Russian says that, Kuzma Kuzmitch, a R-r-
russian!"
"To be sure!"
Mitya seized his hand to press it, but there was a malignant gleam in the
old man's eye. Mitya drew back his hand, but at once blamed himself for
his mistrustfulness.
"It's because he's tired," he thought.
"For her sake! For her sake, Kuzma Kuzmitch! You understand that it's for
her," he cried, his voice ringing through the room. He bowed, turned
sharply round, and with the same long stride walked to the door without
looking back. He was trembling with delight.
"Everything was on the verge of ruin and my guardian angel saved me," was
the thought in his mind. And if such a business man as Samsonov (a most
worthy old man, and what dignity!) had suggested this course, then ...
then success was assured. He would fly off immediately. "I will be back
before night, I shall be back at night and the thing is done. Could the
old man have been laughing at me?" exclaimed Mitya, as he strode towards
his lodging. He could, of course, imagine nothing, but that the advice was
practical "from such a business man" with an understanding of the
business, with an understanding of this Lyagavy (curious surname!). Or--the
old man was laughing at him.
Alas! The second alternative was the correct one. Long afterwards, when
the catastrophe had happened, old Samsonov himself confessed, laughing,
that he had made a fool of the "captain." He was a cold, spiteful and
sarcastic man, liable to violent antipathies. Whether it was the
"captain's" excited face, or the foolish conviction of the "rake and
spendthrift," that he, Samsonov, could be taken in by such a cock-and-bull
story as his scheme, or his jealousy of Grushenka, in whose name this
"scapegrace" had rushed in on him with such a tale to get money which
worked on the old man, I can't tell. But at the instant when Mitya stood
before him, feeling his legs grow weak under him, and frantically
exclaiming that he was ruined, at that moment the old man looked at him
with intense spite, and resolved to make a laughing-stock of him. When
Mitya had gone, Kuzma Kuzmitch, white with rage, turned to his son and
bade him see to it that that beggar be never seen again, and never
admitted even into the yard, or else he'd--
He did not utter his threat. But even his son, who often saw him enraged,
trembled with fear. For a whole hour afterwards, the old man was shaking
with anger, and by evening he was worse, and sent for the doctor.
| 4,386 | Book 8, Chapter 1 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/book-8-chapter-1 | Meanwhile the novel finally returns to Dmitri. So what's he been up to for the past 200 pages - which take up only two days, by the way, as the narrator reminds us on the first page of this chapter? Dmitri has been making a royal fool of himself, that's what. Ashamed of stealing 3,000 roubles from Katerina only to spend it all on Grushenka, Dmitri decides he must return the money to Katerina somehow to save his honor. Only then can he begin a new life with Grushenka. But Dmitri has no money. So he hatches up the desperate plan of going to see Samsonov, Grushenka's old "patron," to borrow the money to repay Katerina and to whisk away Grushenka. Dmitri arrives at Samsonov's and is taken upstairs to see the old man himself, holed up in a small bedroom with his swollen legs. In Dmitri's confusion, he notices a malicious glint in Samsonov's eyes, but he quickly brushes this aside as the peevish wincing of an old man in constant pain from his gouty leg. Dmitri proposes that Samsonov lend him money, using his inheritance, a woodlot in Chermashnya, as collateral. Of course Dmitri doesn't yet have his inheritance, nor is it likely he will ever receive it because it's being held by his father. Samsonov rejects Dmitri's proposal, but then suggests that Dmitri see a fellow by the name of Lyagavy, who's been trying to purchase the woodlot from his father. Lyagavy is staying with a priest in the village of Ilyinskoye. Dmitri is effusively thankful for the tip and leaves Samsonov. The narrator tells us that it was all a malicious joke on Samsonov's part, and that he was infuriated by Dmitri's visit. | null | 287 | 1 | [
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5,658 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/chapters_28_to_30.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Lord Jim/section_18_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapters 28-30 | chapters 28-30 | null | {"name": "Chapters 28-30", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219145744/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/l/lord-jim/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2830", "summary": "After Sherif Ali was routed, there was no further trouble from Rajah Allang. He immediately flung himself face down on his bamboo floor and moaned in fear for hours on end. Meanwhile, Jim conferred with Dain Waris, and they appointed new head -- men for the villages; Jim had taken control of the area. Old Doramin took great pride in the peace that Jim brought to Patusan, and he dreamed of someday seeing his son, Dain Waris, as the ultimate ruler of Patusan. This was his secret ambition, his single most secret obsession, in fact, and he had unbounded confidence in Jim's role, regarding Dain Waris' fate. Marlow tried to assure Doramin and his wife that Jim would stay on in Patusan, but they could not believe that he would do so. They wanted to know why Jim would want to stay; no other white man had ever done so. Surely, said Doramin's wife, Jim had a home and kinsmen -- a mother, perhaps? Marlow was unsuccessful in trying to convince them of Jim's decision to stay at Patusan forever. Marlow then turns to the story of Jim's beloved Jewel, a young woman who is three-quarters white. Jewel had lived all her life at Patusan. Her stepfather was a white man, a Portuguese named Cornelius, and he was Jim's predecessor in the trading post. He was the most slinking, slimy, amoral man in the entire settlement. He was without any honor or character. Jim placed great value on Jewel; he married her in a native ceremony, and we hear how they walked \"side by side, openly, he holding her arm under his -- pressed to his side -- thus -- in a most extraordinary way.\" Cornelius was not happy that Jim had come to Patusan. He began to creep around, continually \"slinking in the neighbourhood with that peculiar twist of his mouth as if he were perpetually on the point of gnashing his teeth.\" To Cornelius, Jim had not come to merely take Patusan from him, but already he had begun to also take Jewel from him. Marlow says that what he remembers most clearly about Jewel was the \"even, olive pallor\" of her skin and the \"intense blue-black gleams of her hair.\" Also, she wore a small crimson cap far back on her head. She was a curious mixture of charm and shyness and audacity, and she was obviously devoted to Jim; \"her tenderness hovered over him like a flutter of wings.\" It seemed, Marlow says, as if she were always \"ready to make a footstool of her head for his feet.\" Cornelius' house was in a shambles when Jim came to live there. Half the roof had fallen in, and all of Stein's account books were torn, and there was nothing in the storehouse but rats. It was unpleasant, Jim said, and what made it worse was the fact that, during his first six weeks there, he kept hearing rumors that Rajah Allang planned to kill him, which of course, was very possible, for, as Jim said, \"I couldn't see what there was to prevent him if he really had made up his mind to have me killed.\" Jim tried to explain to Marlow why he had decided to remain at Patusan. Of course, he said, there was Jewel, and she was treated horribly by her stepfather. Cornelius would scream at her, curse her dead mother, and finally he would chase Jewel around the house, flinging mud at her. Such cruelty, Jim said, was \"a strange thing to come upon in a wilderness.\" Jim was finally so exasperated by Jewel's stepfather's behavior that he told her that he was willing to kill Cornelius. Then Jewel told him a curious thing: she herself could easily kill Cornelius \"with her own hands,\" but she knew how \"intensely wretched\" Cornelius was with himself. Lying on his back one night, on a thin mat, Jim saw an omen: \"a star suddenly twinkled through a hole in the roof.\" Instantly, Jim knew the real reason for his staying on at Patusan. He would rid Patusan of the evil Sherif Ali. Jim knew that he had to make solid plans for overcoming Sherif Ali in his hilltop stockade \"roost\" above Patusan. He would destroy this Arab \"who lurked above the town like a hawk above a chicken yard.\" Jim envisioned cannons mounted on the top of the hill opposite Sherif Ali's stockade. He became so excited and possessed by the idea that he told Jewel about it. She listened reverently to Jim, clapping her hands softly and whispering her admiration for his vision.", "analysis": "Even though Jim becomes the most respected person in Patusan, being called \"Tuan Jim,\" or Lord Jim, Doramin shows no sense of jealousy even though Doramin's most secret desire is to have his son Dain Waris become the chief ruler of Patusan. Part of Doramin's lack of jealousy, of course, stems from the fact that both he and his wife know that no white man has ever stayed in Patusan for longer than a few years, unless they were evil, vicious, spiteful, and cruel -- such as the wicked and unprincipled Cornelius. Jim, however, basking in the glory of his recent triumphs, cannot tell the people of Patusan that he is, in the eyes of the outside world, a disgrace who can never be accepted, and thus, he can never return to that society. In addition to Doramin's wife, then, who cannot believe that Jim has no mother, no one at all to return to, later Jewel, Jim's wife, will also have difficulty believing that Jim will not leave her someday. This brings Marlow to the subject of the romantic love that developed between Jim and Cornelius' stepdaughter. Their love, from the start, was imbued with \"a romantic conscience,\" and Jim even translated her Malay name into the English name \"Jewel,\" meaning any gem of precious quality. Not only was their marriage performed in the native style, but their union was highly successful. It was also highly unique because Jim and Jewel would walk publicly hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm; normally, a Malay woman was supposed to walk behind her lord and master and was considered to be inferior to her husband. Furthermore, we later learn that when Jim had to be away from the village, Jewel was placed in charge of valuable property, such as the ammunition room. Chapter 29 presents more of Jewel's background and reinforces what we have already been told about her total and complete devotion to Lord Jim -- a devotion that is equaled only by Tamb' Itam's loyalty to Jim. The depth of the devotion of these two people to Jim will later account for their inability to understand Jim's decision not to flee after the terrible tragedy at the end of the novel. In contrast to the purity and beauty of Jewel's and Tamb' Itam's characters is the vileness of Cornelius, Jewel's stepfather. \"His slow, laborious walk resembled the creeping of a repulsive beetle, the legs alone moving with horrid industry while the body glided evenly. . . . loathsome, abject and disgusting\" that Marlow could not stand to even be around him. Conrad's graphic description of Cornelius prepares the reader for his vicious and cowardly behavior at the end of the novel. Chapter 30 continues to present Cornelius' atrocious behavior, especially his disgraceful treatment of Jewel. Yet, ironically, it is in the midst of the horror of Cornelius' presence that Jim suddenly conceives of a plan to free Patusan of the wicked Sherif Ali -- a plan which we have already seen was successful."} | 'The defeated Sherif Ali fled the country without making another stand,
and when the miserable hunted villagers began to crawl out of the jungle
back to their rotting houses, it was Jim who, in consultation with Dain
Waris, appointed the headmen. Thus he became the virtual ruler of the
land. As to old Tunku Allang, his fears at first had known no bounds. It
is said that at the intelligence of the successful storming of the hill
he flung himself, face down, on the bamboo floor of his audience-hall,
and lay motionless for a whole night and a whole day, uttering stifled
sounds of such an appalling nature that no man dared approach his
prostrate form nearer than a spear's length. Already he could see
himself driven ignominiously out of Patusan, wandering abandoned,
stripped, without opium, without his women, without followers, a fair
game for the first comer to kill. After Sherif Ali his turn would come,
and who could resist an attack led by such a devil? And indeed he owed
his life and such authority as he still possessed at the time of my
visit to Jim's idea of what was fair alone. The Bugis had been extremely
anxious to pay off old scores, and the impassive old Doramin cherished
the hope of yet seeing his son ruler of Patusan. During one of our
interviews he deliberately allowed me to get a glimpse of this secret
ambition. Nothing could be finer in its way than the dignified wariness
of his approaches. He himself--he began by declaring--had used his
strength in his young days, but now he had grown old and tired. . . .
With his imposing bulk and haughty little eyes darting sagacious,
inquisitive glances, he reminded one irresistibly of a cunning old
elephant; the slow rise and fall of his vast breast went on powerful and
regular, like the heave of a calm sea. He too, as he protested, had an
unbounded confidence in Tuan Jim's wisdom. If he could only obtain a
promise! One word would be enough! . . . His breathing silences, the
low rumblings of his voice, recalled the last efforts of a spent
thunderstorm.
'I tried to put the subject aside. It was difficult, for there could be
no question that Jim had the power; in his new sphere there did not seem
to be anything that was not his to hold or to give. But that, I repeat,
was nothing in comparison with the notion, which occurred to me, while I
listened with a show of attention, that he seemed to have come very near
at last to mastering his fate. Doramin was anxious about the future of
the country, and I was struck by the turn he gave to the argument. The
land remains where God had put it; but white men--he said--they come to
us and in a little while they go. They go away. Those they leave behind
do not know when to look for their return. They go to their own land, to
their people, and so this white man too would. . . . I don't know what
induced me to commit myself at this point by a vigorous "No, no." The
whole extent of this indiscretion became apparent when Doramin, turning
full upon me his face, whose expression, fixed in rugged deep folds,
remained unalterable, like a huge brown mask, said that this was good
news indeed, reflectively; and then wanted to know why.
'His little, motherly witch of a wife sat on my other hand, with
her head covered and her feet tucked up, gazing through the great
shutter-hole. I could only see a straying lock of grey hair, a high
cheek-bone, the slight masticating motion of the sharp chin. Without
removing her eyes from the vast prospect of forests stretching as far as
the hills, she asked me in a pitying voice why was it that he so young
had wandered from his home, coming so far, through so many dangers?
Had he no household there, no kinsmen in his own country? Had he no old
mother, who would always remember his face? . . .
'I was completely unprepared for this. I could only mutter and shake my
head vaguely. Afterwards I am perfectly aware I cut a very poor figure
trying to extricate myself out of this difficulty. From that moment,
however, the old nakhoda became taciturn. He was not very pleased, I
fear, and evidently I had given him food for thought. Strangely enough,
on the evening of that very day (which was my last in Patusan) I was
once more confronted with the same question, with the unanswerable why
of Jim's fate. And this brings me to the story of his love.
'I suppose you think it is a story that you can imagine for yourselves.
We have heard so many such stories, and the majority of us don't believe
them to be stories of love at all. For the most part we look upon them
as stories of opportunities: episodes of passion at best, or perhaps
only of youth and temptation, doomed to forgetfulness in the end, even
if they pass through the reality of tenderness and regret. This view
mostly is right, and perhaps in this case too. . . . Yet I don't know.
To tell this story is by no means so easy as it should be--were the
ordinary standpoint adequate. Apparently it is a story very much like
the others: for me, however, there is visible in its background the
melancholy figure of a woman, the shadow of a cruel wisdom buried in a
lonely grave, looking on wistfully, helplessly, with sealed lips. The
grave itself, as I came upon it during an early morning stroll, was a
rather shapeless brown mound, with an inlaid neat border of white lumps
of coral at the base, and enclosed within a circular fence made of split
saplings, with the bark left on. A garland of leaves and flowers was
woven about the heads of the slender posts--and the flowers were fresh.
'Thus, whether the shadow is of my imagination or not, I can at all
events point out the significant fact of an unforgotten grave. When I
tell you besides that Jim with his own hands had worked at the rustic
fence, you will perceive directly the difference, the individual side of
the story. There is in his espousal of memory and affection belonging to
another human being something characteristic of his seriousness. He had
a conscience, and it was a romantic conscience. Through her whole life
the wife of the unspeakable Cornelius had no other companion, confidant,
and friend but her daughter. How the poor woman had come to marry the
awful little Malacca Portuguese--after the separation from the father
of her girl--and how that separation had been brought about, whether by
death, which can be sometimes merciful, or by the merciless pressure of
conventions, is a mystery to me. From the little which Stein (who knew
so many stories) had let drop in my hearing, I am convinced that she was
no ordinary woman. Her own father had been a white; a high official;
one of the brilliantly endowed men who are not dull enough to nurse a
success, and whose careers so often end under a cloud. I suppose she too
must have lacked the saving dullness--and her career ended in Patusan.
Our common fate . . . for where is the man--I mean a real sentient
man--who does not remember vaguely having been deserted in the fullness
of possession by some one or something more precious than life? . . .
our common fate fastens upon the women with a peculiar cruelty. It
does not punish like a master, but inflicts lingering torment, as if to
gratify a secret, unappeasable spite. One would think that, appointed
to rule on earth, it seeks to revenge itself upon the beings that come
nearest to rising above the trammels of earthly caution; for it is
only women who manage to put at times into their love an element just
palpable enough to give one a fright--an extra-terrestrial touch. I ask
myself with wonder--how the world can look to them--whether it has the
shape and substance _we_ know, the air _we_ breathe! Sometimes I fancy
it must be a region of unreasonable sublimities seething with the
excitement of their adventurous souls, lighted by the glory of all
possible risks and renunciations. However, I suspect there are very few
women in the world, though of course I am aware of the multitudes of
mankind and of the equality of sexes--in point of numbers, that is. But
I am sure that the mother was as much of a woman as the daughter seemed
to be. I cannot help picturing to myself these two, at first the young
woman and the child, then the old woman and the young girl, the awful
sameness and the swift passage of time, the barrier of forest, the
solitude and the turmoil round these two lonely lives, and every word
spoken between them penetrated with sad meaning. There must have
been confidences, not so much of fact, I suppose, as of innermost
feelings--regrets--fears--warnings, no doubt: warnings that the younger
did not fully understand till the elder was dead--and Jim came along.
Then I am sure she understood much--not everything--the fear mostly, it
seems. Jim called her by a word that means precious, in the sense of a
precious gem--jewel. Pretty, isn't it? But he was capable of anything.
He was equal to his fortune, as he--after all--must have been equal to
his misfortune. Jewel he called her; and he would say this as he might
have said "Jane," don't you know--with a marital, homelike, peaceful
effect. I heard the name for the first time ten minutes after I had
landed in his courtyard, when, after nearly shaking my arm off, he
darted up the steps and began to make a joyous, boyish disturbance at
the door under the heavy eaves. "Jewel! O Jewel! Quick! Here's a friend
come," . . . and suddenly peering at me in the dim verandah, he mumbled
earnestly, "You know--this--no confounded nonsense about it--can't tell
you how much I owe to her--and so--you understand--I--exactly as
if . . ." His hurried, anxious whispers were cut short by the flitting of
a white form within the house, a faint exclamation, and a child-like but
energetic little face with delicate features and a profound, attentive
glance peeped out of the inner gloom, like a bird out of the recess of a
nest. I was struck by the name, of course; but it was not till later
on that I connected it with an astonishing rumour that had met me on my
journey, at a little place on the coast about 230 miles south of Patusan
River. Stein's schooner, in which I had my passage, put in there, to
collect some produce, and, going ashore, I found to my great surprise
that the wretched locality could boast of a third-class deputy-assistant
resident, a big, fat, greasy, blinking fellow of mixed descent, with
turned-out, shiny lips. I found him lying extended on his back in a cane
chair, odiously unbuttoned, with a large green leaf of some sort on the
top of his steaming head, and another in his hand which he used lazily
as a fan . . . Going to Patusan? Oh yes. Stein's Trading Company. He
knew. Had a permission? No business of his. It was not so bad there now,
he remarked negligently, and, he went on drawling, "There's some sort of
white vagabond has got in there, I hear. . . . Eh? What you say?
Friend of yours? So! . . . Then it was true there was one of these
verdammte--What was he up to? Found his way in, the rascal. Eh? I had
not been sure. Patusan--they cut throats there--no business of ours." He
interrupted himself to groan. "Phoo! Almighty! The heat! The heat! Well,
then, there might be something in the story too, after all, and . . ."
He shut one of his beastly glassy eyes (the eyelid went on quivering)
while he leered at me atrociously with the other. "Look here," says
he mysteriously, "if--do you understand?--if he has really got hold of
something fairly good--none of your bits of green glass--understand?--I
am a Government official--you tell the rascal . . . Eh? What? Friend of
yours?" . . . He continued wallowing calmly in the chair . . . "You said
so; that's just it; and I am pleased to give you the hint. I suppose
you too would like to get something out of it? Don't interrupt. You
just tell him I've heard the tale, but to my Government I have made no
report. Not yet. See? Why make a report? Eh? Tell him to come to me if
they let him get alive out of the country. He had better look out
for himself. Eh? I promise to ask no questions. On the quiet--you
understand? You too--you shall get something from me. Small commission
for the trouble. Don't interrupt. I am a Government official, and make
no report. That's business. Understand? I know some good people that
will buy anything worth having, and can give him more money than
the scoundrel ever saw in his life. I know his sort." He fixed me
steadfastly with both his eyes open, while I stood over him utterly
amazed, and asking myself whether he was mad or drunk. He perspired,
puffed, moaning feebly, and scratching himself with such horrible
composure that I could not bear the sight long enough to find out. Next
day, talking casually with the people of the little native court of the
place, I discovered that a story was travelling slowly down the
coast about a mysterious white man in Patusan who had got hold of
an extraordinary gem--namely, an emerald of an enormous size, and
altogether priceless. The emerald seems to appeal more to the Eastern
imagination than any other precious stone. The white man had obtained
it, I was told, partly by the exercise of his wonderful strength and
partly by cunning, from the ruler of a distant country, whence he had
fled instantly, arriving in Patusan in utmost distress, but frightening
the people by his extreme ferocity, which nothing seemed able to subdue.
Most of my informants were of the opinion that the stone was probably
unlucky,--like the famous stone of the Sultan of Succadana, which in
the old times had brought wars and untold calamities upon that country.
Perhaps it was the same stone--one couldn't say. Indeed the story of a
fabulously large emerald is as old as the arrival of the first white men
in the Archipelago; and the belief in it is so persistent that less than
forty years ago there had been an official Dutch inquiry into the truth
of it. Such a jewel--it was explained to me by the old fellow from whom
I heard most of this amazing Jim-myth--a sort of scribe to the wretched
little Rajah of the place;--such a jewel, he said, cocking his poor
purblind eyes up at me (he was sitting on the cabin floor out of
respect), is best preserved by being concealed about the person of a
woman. Yet it is not every woman that would do. She must be young--he
sighed deeply--and insensible to the seductions of love. He shook his
head sceptically. But such a woman seemed to be actually in existence.
He had been told of a tall girl, whom the white man treated with great
respect and care, and who never went forth from the house unattended.
People said the white man could be seen with her almost any day; they
walked side by side, openly, he holding her arm under his--pressed to
his side--thus--in a most extraordinary way. This might be a lie, he
conceded, for it was indeed a strange thing for any one to do: on the
other hand, there could be no doubt she wore the white man's jewel
concealed upon her bosom.'
'This was the theory of Jim's marital evening walks. I made a third on
more than one occasion, unpleasantly aware every time of Cornelius,
who nursed the aggrieved sense of his legal paternity, slinking in
the neighbourhood with that peculiar twist of his mouth as if he were
perpetually on the point of gnashing his teeth. But do you notice how,
three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat
lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation wither and die,
to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility,
often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of
art? Romance had singled Jim for its own--and that was the true part of
the story, which otherwise was all wrong. He did not hide his jewel. In
fact, he was extremely proud of it.
'It comes to me now that I had, on the whole, seen very little of her.
What I remember best is the even, olive pallor of her complexion, and
the intense blue-black gleams of her hair, flowing abundantly from under
a small crimson cap she wore far back on her shapely head. Her movements
were free, assured, and she blushed a dusky red. While Jim and I were
talking, she would come and go with rapid glances at us, leaving on her
passage an impression of grace and charm and a distinct suggestion of
watchfulness. Her manner presented a curious combination of shyness and
audacity. Every pretty smile was succeeded swiftly by a look of silent,
repressed anxiety, as if put to flight by the recollection of some
abiding danger. At times she would sit down with us and, with her soft
cheek dimpled by the knuckles of her little hand, she would listen
to our talk; her big clear eyes would remain fastened on our lips, as
though each pronounced word had a visible shape. Her mother had taught
her to read and write; she had learned a good bit of English from
Jim, and she spoke it most amusingly, with his own clipping, boyish
intonation. Her tenderness hovered over him like a flutter of wings. She
lived so completely in his contemplation that she had acquired something
of his outward aspect, something that recalled him in her movements, in
the way she stretched her arm, turned her head, directed her glances.
Her vigilant affection had an intensity that made it almost perceptible
to the senses; it seemed actually to exist in the ambient matter
of space, to envelop him like a peculiar fragrance, to dwell in the
sunshine like a tremulous, subdued, and impassioned note. I suppose you
think that I too am romantic, but it is a mistake. I am relating to you
the sober impressions of a bit of youth, of a strange uneasy romance
that had come in my way. I observed with interest the work of
his--well--good fortune. He was jealously loved, but why she should
be jealous, and of what, I could not tell. The land, the people, the
forests were her accomplices, guarding him with vigilant accord, with
an air of seclusion, of mystery, of invincible possession. There was
no appeal, as it were; he was imprisoned within the very freedom of his
power, and she, though ready to make a footstool of her head for his
feet, guarded her conquest inflexibly--as though he were hard to keep.
The very Tamb' Itam, marching on our journeys upon the heels of his
white lord, with his head thrown back, truculent and be-weaponed like a
janissary, with kriss, chopper, and lance (besides carrying Jim's gun);
even Tamb' Itam allowed himself to put on the airs of uncompromising
guardianship, like a surly devoted jailer ready to lay down his life for
his captive. On the evenings when we sat up late, his silent, indistinct
form would pass and repass under the verandah, with noiseless footsteps,
or lifting my head I would unexpectedly make him out standing rigidly
erect in the shadow. As a general rule he would vanish after a time,
without a sound; but when we rose he would spring up close to us as if
from the ground, ready for any orders Jim might wish to give. The girl
too, I believe, never went to sleep till we had separated for the night.
More than once I saw her and Jim through the window of my room come out
together quietly and lean on the rough balustrade--two white forms very
close, his arm about her waist, her head on his shoulder. Their soft
murmurs reached me, penetrating, tender, with a calm sad note in the
stillness of the night, like a self-communion of one being carried on
in two tones. Later on, tossing on my bed under the mosquito-net, I
was sure to hear slight creakings, faint breathing, a throat cleared
cautiously--and I would know that Tamb' Itam was still on the prowl.
Though he had (by the favour of the white lord) a house in the compound,
had "taken wife," and had lately been blessed with a child, I believe
that, during my stay at all events, he slept on the verandah every
night. It was very difficult to make this faithful and grim retainer
talk. Even Jim himself was answered in jerky short sentences, under
protest as it were. Talking, he seemed to imply, was no business of his.
The longest speech I heard him volunteer was one morning when, suddenly
extending his hand towards the courtyard, he pointed at Cornelius and
said, "Here comes the Nazarene." I don't think he was addressing me,
though I stood at his side; his object seemed rather to awaken the
indignant attention of the universe. Some muttered allusions, which
followed, to dogs and the smell of roast-meat, struck me as singularly
felicitous. The courtyard, a large square space, was one torrid blaze of
sunshine, and, bathed in intense light, Cornelius was creeping across
in full view with an inexpressible effect of stealthiness, of dark and
secret slinking. He reminded one of everything that is unsavoury. His
slow laborious walk resembled the creeping of a repulsive beetle, the
legs alone moving with horrid industry while the body glided evenly. I
suppose he made straight enough for the place where he wanted to get to,
but his progress with one shoulder carried forward seemed oblique. He
was often seen circling slowly amongst the sheds, as if following
a scent; passing before the verandah with upward stealthy glances;
disappearing without haste round the corner of some hut. That he seemed
free of the place demonstrated Jim's absurd carelessness or else his
infinite disdain, for Cornelius had played a very dubious part (to say
the least of it) in a certain episode which might have ended fatally for
Jim. As a matter of fact, it had redounded to his glory. But everything
redounded to his glory; and it was the irony of his good fortune that
he, who had been too careful of it once, seemed to bear a charmed life.
'You must know he had left Doramin's place very soon after his
arrival--much too soon, in fact, for his safety, and of course a long
time before the war. In this he was actuated by a sense of duty; he had
to look after Stein's business, he said. Hadn't he? To that end, with an
utter disregard of his personal safety, he crossed the river and took up
his quarters with Cornelius. How the latter had managed to exist through
the troubled times I can't say. As Stein's agent, after all, he must
have had Doramin's protection in a measure; and in one way or another
he had managed to wriggle through all the deadly complications, while I
have no doubt that his conduct, whatever line he was forced to take, was
marked by that abjectness which was like the stamp of the man. That was
his characteristic; he was fundamentally and outwardly abject, as other
men are markedly of a generous, distinguished, or venerable appearance.
It was the element of his nature which permeated all his acts and
passions and emotions; he raged abjectly, smiled abjectly, was abjectly
sad; his civilities and his indignations were alike abject. I am sure
his love would have been the most abject of sentiments--but can one
imagine a loathsome insect in love? And his loathsomeness, too, was
abject, so that a simply disgusting person would have appeared noble
by his side. He has his place neither in the background nor in the
foreground of the story; he is simply seen skulking on its outskirts,
enigmatical and unclean, tainting the fragrance of its youth and of its
naiveness.
'His position in any case could not have been other than extremely
miserable, yet it may very well be that he found some advantages in it.
Jim told me he had been received at first with an abject display of
the most amicable sentiments. "The fellow apparently couldn't contain
himself for joy," said Jim with disgust. "He flew at me every morning to
shake both my hands--confound him!--but I could never tell whether there
would be any breakfast. If I got three meals in two days I considered
myself jolly lucky, and he made me sign a chit for ten dollars every
week. Said he was sure Mr. Stein did not mean him to keep me for
nothing. Well--he kept me on nothing as near as possible. Put it down to
the unsettled state of the country, and made as if to tear his hair out,
begging my pardon twenty times a day, so that I had at last to entreat
him not to worry. It made me sick. Half the roof of his house had
fallen in, and the whole place had a mangy look, with wisps of dry grass
sticking out and the corners of broken mats flapping on every wall. He
did his best to make out that Mr. Stein owed him money on the last three
years' trading, but his books were all torn, and some were missing. He
tried to hint it was his late wife's fault. Disgusting scoundrel! At
last I had to forbid him to mention his late wife at all. It made Jewel
cry. I couldn't discover what became of all the trade-goods; there was
nothing in the store but rats, having a high old time amongst a litter
of brown paper and old sacking. I was assured on every hand that he had
a lot of money buried somewhere, but of course could get nothing out of
him. It was the most miserable existence I led there in that wretched
house. I tried to do my duty by Stein, but I had also other matters to
think of. When I escaped to Doramin old Tunku Allang got frightened and
returned all my things. It was done in a roundabout way, and with no end
of mystery, through a Chinaman who keeps a small shop here; but as soon
as I left the Bugis quarter and went to live with Cornelius it began
to be said openly that the Rajah had made up his mind to have me killed
before long. Pleasant, wasn't it? And I couldn't see what there was to
prevent him if he really _had_ made up his mind. The worst of it was,
I couldn't help feeling I wasn't doing any good either for Stein or for
myself. Oh! it was beastly--the whole six weeks of it."'
'He told me further that he didn't know what made him hang on--but of
course we may guess. He sympathised deeply with the defenceless girl, at
the mercy of that "mean, cowardly scoundrel." It appears Cornelius led
her an awful life, stopping only short of actual ill-usage, for which
he had not the pluck, I suppose. He insisted upon her calling him
father--"and with respect, too--with respect," he would scream, shaking
a little yellow fist in her face. "I am a respectable man, and what are
you? Tell me--what are you? You think I am going to bring up somebody
else's child and not be treated with respect? You ought to be glad I let
you. Come--say Yes, father. . . . No? . . . You wait a bit." Thereupon
he would begin to abuse the dead woman, till the girl would run off with
her hands to her head. He pursued her, dashing in and out and round the
house and amongst the sheds, would drive her into some corner, where she
would fall on her knees stopping her ears, and then he would stand at a
distance and declaim filthy denunciations at her back for half an hour
at a stretch. "Your mother was a devil, a deceitful devil--and you too
are a devil," he would shriek in a final outburst, pick up a bit of dry
earth or a handful of mud (there was plenty of mud around the house),
and fling it into her hair. Sometimes, though, she would hold out full
of scorn, confronting him in silence, her face sombre and contracted,
and only now and then uttering a word or two that would make the other
jump and writhe with the sting. Jim told me these scenes were terrible.
It was indeed a strange thing to come upon in a wilderness. The
endlessness of such a subtly cruel situation was appalling--if you think
of it. The respectable Cornelius (Inchi 'Nelyus the Malays called him,
with a grimace that meant many things) was a much-disappointed man. I
don't know what he had expected would be done for him in consideration
of his marriage; but evidently the liberty to steal, and embezzle, and
appropriate to himself for many years and in any way that suited him
best, the goods of Stein's Trading Company (Stein kept the supply up
unfalteringly as long as he could get his skippers to take it there) did
not seem to him a fair equivalent for the sacrifice of his honourable
name. Jim would have enjoyed exceedingly thrashing Cornelius within an
inch of his life; on the other hand, the scenes were of so painful
a character, so abominable, that his impulse would be to get out of
earshot, in order to spare the girl's feelings. They left her agitated,
speechless, clutching her bosom now and then with a stony,
desperate face, and then Jim would lounge up and say unhappily,
"Now--come--really--what's the use--you must try to eat a bit," or give
some such mark of sympathy. Cornelius would keep on slinking through
the doorways, across the verandah and back again, as mute as a fish, and
with malevolent, mistrustful, underhand glances. "I can stop his game,"
Jim said to her once. "Just say the word." And do you know what she
answered? She said--Jim told me impressively--that if she had not been
sure he was intensely wretched himself, she would have found the courage
to kill him with her own hands. "Just fancy that! The poor devil of a
girl, almost a child, being driven to talk like that," he exclaimed in
horror. It seemed impossible to save her not only from that mean
rascal but even from herself! It wasn't that he pitied her so much, he
affirmed; it was more than pity; it was as if he had something on his
conscience, while that life went on. To leave the house would have
appeared a base desertion. He had understood at last that there was
nothing to expect from a longer stay, neither accounts nor money, nor
truth of any sort, but he stayed on, exasperating Cornelius to the
verge, I won't say of insanity, but almost of courage. Meantime he felt
all sorts of dangers gathering obscurely about him. Doramin had sent
over twice a trusty servant to tell him seriously that he could do
nothing for his safety unless he would recross the river again and live
amongst the Bugis as at first. People of every condition used to call,
often in the dead of night, in order to disclose to him plots for
his assassination. He was to be poisoned. He was to be stabbed in the
bath-house. Arrangements were being made to have him shot from a boat
on the river. Each of these informants professed himself to be his very
good friend. It was enough--he told me--to spoil a fellow's rest for
ever. Something of the kind was extremely possible--nay, probable--but
the lying warnings gave him only the sense of deadly scheming going on
all around him, on all sides, in the dark. Nothing more calculated to
shake the best of nerve. Finally, one night, Cornelius himself, with a
great apparatus of alarm and secrecy, unfolded in solemn wheedling tones
a little plan wherein for one hundred dollars--or even for eighty; let's
say eighty--he, Cornelius, would procure a trustworthy man to smuggle
Jim out of the river, all safe. There was nothing else for it now--if
Jim cared a pin for his life. What's eighty dollars? A trifle. An
insignificant sum. While he, Cornelius, who had to remain behind, was
absolutely courting death by this proof of devotion to Mr. Stein's young
friend. The sight of his abject grimacing was--Jim told me--very hard
to bear: he clutched at his hair, beat his breast, rocked himself to
and fro with his hands pressed to his stomach, and actually pretended to
shed tears. "Your blood be on your own head," he squeaked at last, and
rushed out. It is a curious question how far Cornelius was sincere in
that performance. Jim confessed to me that he did not sleep a wink after
the fellow had gone. He lay on his back on a thin mat spread over the
bamboo flooring, trying idly to make out the bare rafters, and listening
to the rustlings in the torn thatch. A star suddenly twinkled through a
hole in the roof. His brain was in a whirl; but, nevertheless, it was on
that very night that he matured his plan for overcoming Sherif Ali. It
had been the thought of all the moments he could spare from the hopeless
investigation into Stein's affairs, but the notion--he says--came to him
then all at once. He could see, as it were, the guns mounted on the top
of the hill. He got very hot and excited lying there; sleep was out of
the question more than ever. He jumped up, and went out barefooted
on the verandah. Walking silently, he came upon the girl, motionless
against the wall, as if on the watch. In his then state of mind it did
not surprise him to see her up, nor yet to hear her ask in an anxious
whisper where Cornelius could be. He simply said he did not know. She
moaned a little, and peered into the campong. Everything was very quiet.
He was possessed by his new idea, and so full of it that he could not
help telling the girl all about it at once. She listened, clapped her
hands lightly, whispered softly her admiration, but was evidently on the
alert all the time. It seems he had been used to make a confidant of
her all along--and that she on her part could and did give him a lot of
useful hints as to Patusan affairs there is no doubt. He assured me more
than once that he had never found himself the worse for her advice. At
any rate, he was proceeding to explain his plan fully to her there and
then, when she pressed his arm once, and vanished from his side. Then
Cornelius appeared from somewhere, and, perceiving Jim, ducked sideways,
as though he had been shot at, and afterwards stood very still in the
dusk. At last he came forward prudently, like a suspicious cat. "There
were some fishermen there--with fish," he said in a shaky voice. "To
sell fish--you understand." . . . It must have been then two o'clock in
the morning--a likely time for anybody to hawk fish about!
'Jim, however, let the statement pass, and did not give it a single
thought. Other matters occupied his mind, and besides he had neither
seen nor heard anything. He contented himself by saying, "Oh!" absently,
got a drink of water out of a pitcher standing there, and leaving
Cornelius a prey to some inexplicable emotion--that made him embrace
with both arms the worm-eaten rail of the verandah as if his legs had
failed--went in again and lay down on his mat to think. By-and-by he
heard stealthy footsteps. They stopped. A voice whispered tremulously
through the wall, "Are you asleep?" "No! What is it?" he answered
briskly, and there was an abrupt movement outside, and then all was
still, as if the whisperer had been startled. Extremely annoyed at this,
Jim came out impetuously, and Cornelius with a faint shriek fled
along the verandah as far as the steps, where he hung on to the broken
banister. Very puzzled, Jim called out to him from the distance to know
what the devil he meant. "Have you given your consideration to what
I spoke to you about?" asked Cornelius, pronouncing the words with
difficulty, like a man in the cold fit of a fever. "No!" shouted Jim in
a passion. "I have not, and I don't intend to. I am going to live here,
in Patusan." "You shall d-d-die h-h-here," answered Cornelius,
still shaking violently, and in a sort of expiring voice. The whole
performance was so absurd and provoking that Jim didn't know whether he
ought to be amused or angry. "Not till I have seen you tucked away,
you bet," he called out, exasperated yet ready to laugh. Half seriously
(being excited with his own thoughts, you know) he went on shouting,
"Nothing can touch me! You can do your damnedest." Somehow the shadowy
Cornelius far off there seemed to be the hateful embodiment of all the
annoyances and difficulties he had found in his path. He let himself
go--his nerves had been over-wrought for days--and called him many
pretty names,--swindler, liar, sorry rascal: in fact, carried on in an
extraordinary way. He admits he passed all bounds, that he was quite
beside himself--defied all Patusan to scare him away--declared he would
make them all dance to his own tune yet, and so on, in a menacing,
boasting strain. Perfectly bombastic and ridiculous, he said. His ears
burned at the bare recollection. Must have been off his chump in some
way. . . . The girl, who was sitting with us, nodded her little head at
me quickly, frowned faintly, and said, "I heard him," with child-like
solemnity. He laughed and blushed. What stopped him at last, he said,
was the silence, the complete deathlike silence, of the indistinct
figure far over there, that seemed to hang collapsed, doubled over the
rail in a weird immobility. He came to his senses, and ceasing suddenly,
wondered greatly at himself. He watched for a while. Not a stir, not a
sound. "Exactly as if the chap had died while I had been making all that
noise," he said. He was so ashamed of himself that he went indoors in a
hurry without another word, and flung himself down again. The row seemed
to have done him good though, because he went to sleep for the rest of
the night like a baby. Hadn't slept like that for weeks. "But _I_ didn't
sleep," struck in the girl, one elbow on the table and nursing her
cheek. "I watched." Her big eyes flashed, rolling a little, and then she
fixed them on my face intently.' | 6,123 | Chapters 28-30 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219145744/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/l/lord-jim/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2830 | After Sherif Ali was routed, there was no further trouble from Rajah Allang. He immediately flung himself face down on his bamboo floor and moaned in fear for hours on end. Meanwhile, Jim conferred with Dain Waris, and they appointed new head -- men for the villages; Jim had taken control of the area. Old Doramin took great pride in the peace that Jim brought to Patusan, and he dreamed of someday seeing his son, Dain Waris, as the ultimate ruler of Patusan. This was his secret ambition, his single most secret obsession, in fact, and he had unbounded confidence in Jim's role, regarding Dain Waris' fate. Marlow tried to assure Doramin and his wife that Jim would stay on in Patusan, but they could not believe that he would do so. They wanted to know why Jim would want to stay; no other white man had ever done so. Surely, said Doramin's wife, Jim had a home and kinsmen -- a mother, perhaps? Marlow was unsuccessful in trying to convince them of Jim's decision to stay at Patusan forever. Marlow then turns to the story of Jim's beloved Jewel, a young woman who is three-quarters white. Jewel had lived all her life at Patusan. Her stepfather was a white man, a Portuguese named Cornelius, and he was Jim's predecessor in the trading post. He was the most slinking, slimy, amoral man in the entire settlement. He was without any honor or character. Jim placed great value on Jewel; he married her in a native ceremony, and we hear how they walked "side by side, openly, he holding her arm under his -- pressed to his side -- thus -- in a most extraordinary way." Cornelius was not happy that Jim had come to Patusan. He began to creep around, continually "slinking in the neighbourhood with that peculiar twist of his mouth as if he were perpetually on the point of gnashing his teeth." To Cornelius, Jim had not come to merely take Patusan from him, but already he had begun to also take Jewel from him. Marlow says that what he remembers most clearly about Jewel was the "even, olive pallor" of her skin and the "intense blue-black gleams of her hair." Also, she wore a small crimson cap far back on her head. She was a curious mixture of charm and shyness and audacity, and she was obviously devoted to Jim; "her tenderness hovered over him like a flutter of wings." It seemed, Marlow says, as if she were always "ready to make a footstool of her head for his feet." Cornelius' house was in a shambles when Jim came to live there. Half the roof had fallen in, and all of Stein's account books were torn, and there was nothing in the storehouse but rats. It was unpleasant, Jim said, and what made it worse was the fact that, during his first six weeks there, he kept hearing rumors that Rajah Allang planned to kill him, which of course, was very possible, for, as Jim said, "I couldn't see what there was to prevent him if he really had made up his mind to have me killed." Jim tried to explain to Marlow why he had decided to remain at Patusan. Of course, he said, there was Jewel, and she was treated horribly by her stepfather. Cornelius would scream at her, curse her dead mother, and finally he would chase Jewel around the house, flinging mud at her. Such cruelty, Jim said, was "a strange thing to come upon in a wilderness." Jim was finally so exasperated by Jewel's stepfather's behavior that he told her that he was willing to kill Cornelius. Then Jewel told him a curious thing: she herself could easily kill Cornelius "with her own hands," but she knew how "intensely wretched" Cornelius was with himself. Lying on his back one night, on a thin mat, Jim saw an omen: "a star suddenly twinkled through a hole in the roof." Instantly, Jim knew the real reason for his staying on at Patusan. He would rid Patusan of the evil Sherif Ali. Jim knew that he had to make solid plans for overcoming Sherif Ali in his hilltop stockade "roost" above Patusan. He would destroy this Arab "who lurked above the town like a hawk above a chicken yard." Jim envisioned cannons mounted on the top of the hill opposite Sherif Ali's stockade. He became so excited and possessed by the idea that he told Jewel about it. She listened reverently to Jim, clapping her hands softly and whispering her admiration for his vision. | Even though Jim becomes the most respected person in Patusan, being called "Tuan Jim," or Lord Jim, Doramin shows no sense of jealousy even though Doramin's most secret desire is to have his son Dain Waris become the chief ruler of Patusan. Part of Doramin's lack of jealousy, of course, stems from the fact that both he and his wife know that no white man has ever stayed in Patusan for longer than a few years, unless they were evil, vicious, spiteful, and cruel -- such as the wicked and unprincipled Cornelius. Jim, however, basking in the glory of his recent triumphs, cannot tell the people of Patusan that he is, in the eyes of the outside world, a disgrace who can never be accepted, and thus, he can never return to that society. In addition to Doramin's wife, then, who cannot believe that Jim has no mother, no one at all to return to, later Jewel, Jim's wife, will also have difficulty believing that Jim will not leave her someday. This brings Marlow to the subject of the romantic love that developed between Jim and Cornelius' stepdaughter. Their love, from the start, was imbued with "a romantic conscience," and Jim even translated her Malay name into the English name "Jewel," meaning any gem of precious quality. Not only was their marriage performed in the native style, but their union was highly successful. It was also highly unique because Jim and Jewel would walk publicly hand-in-hand or arm-in-arm; normally, a Malay woman was supposed to walk behind her lord and master and was considered to be inferior to her husband. Furthermore, we later learn that when Jim had to be away from the village, Jewel was placed in charge of valuable property, such as the ammunition room. Chapter 29 presents more of Jewel's background and reinforces what we have already been told about her total and complete devotion to Lord Jim -- a devotion that is equaled only by Tamb' Itam's loyalty to Jim. The depth of the devotion of these two people to Jim will later account for their inability to understand Jim's decision not to flee after the terrible tragedy at the end of the novel. In contrast to the purity and beauty of Jewel's and Tamb' Itam's characters is the vileness of Cornelius, Jewel's stepfather. "His slow, laborious walk resembled the creeping of a repulsive beetle, the legs alone moving with horrid industry while the body glided evenly. . . . loathsome, abject and disgusting" that Marlow could not stand to even be around him. Conrad's graphic description of Cornelius prepares the reader for his vicious and cowardly behavior at the end of the novel. Chapter 30 continues to present Cornelius' atrocious behavior, especially his disgraceful treatment of Jewel. Yet, ironically, it is in the midst of the horror of Cornelius' presence that Jim suddenly conceives of a plan to free Patusan of the wicked Sherif Ali -- a plan which we have already seen was successful. | 769 | 501 | [
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107 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/02.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_1_part_0.txt | Far from the Madding Crowd.chapter 2 | chapter 2 | null | {"name": "Chapter 2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-2", "summary": "Swirling winds blew over Norcombe Hill one St. Thomas' Eve. \"The trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir.\" Mingling with the wintry midnight sounds came the sounds of a flute. They issued from a small, arklike structure on wheels, of the type shepherds dragged about the fields to shelter themselves as they attended to their ewes at lambing time. Gabriel was keeping vigil. After less than a year \"as master and not as man,\" he now owned two hundred ewes, which he kept on leased land. With his lantern, he made the rounds of the straw-thatched hurdles around which the ewes stood. Cradling a fragile, newborn lamb, he hastened back to his hut and placed it on some hay before the bit of fire. The hut's furnishings were meager: they consisted of a small stove, a bed of corn sacks, a few medications and ointments, some food, and the flute. Not stopping to adjust the two round ventilating holes, Oak instantly fell asleep on his cornshuck bed. Soon the warmth restored the lamb, which began to bleat. Gabriel roused instantly and carried it back to its mother. The stars told him, his timepiece having failed as usual, that scarcely an hour had passed. Perceiving a faint light on the horizon, Gabriel went to the edge of the plantation to check. The light came from a hut built into the slope. As he looked through the chinks in the roof, the light illuminated two women tending an ailing cow, and a second cow just delivered of a calf. The older woman was glad the cow was improving; the younger lamented that there was no man to do these heavy chores and that she had lost her hat. All the same, she volunteered to ride to town to fetch cereals in the morning. As the enshrouding cloak fell from her head, Gabriel discerned the dark tresses and red jacket of the girl he had seen in the wagon.", "analysis": "One cannot be unaware of Hardy's sense of the unity of man with nature: the eternal hills of his Wessex, the sounds of wind and weather, the ever-circling constellations, the light at different times of day and different seasons, the growth of vegetation, and the behavior of living creatures. His characters convey a general feeling of being a part of the universe; his narrative captures its rhythms. Far from the madding crowd, he seems to say, man comes into his own. Gabriel is so perfectly attuned to nature that he does his tasks, at whatever hour, faithfully and unquestioningly. The notes of Gabriel's flute, \"a sequence which was to be found nowhere in nature,\" remind us of Hardy's own participation in a church choir and his playing in an orchestra in his youth; there is an obvious musical dimension to his art appreciation. Hardy notes that a limited view causes our imagination to fill in the outlines \"according to the wants within us.\" And so it is with Gabriel: \"Having for some time known the want of a satisfactory form to fill an increasing void within him, his position moreover affording the widest scope for his fancy, he painted her a beauty.\" This statement shows us another side of Gabriel. He has a romantic as well as a practical sensibility."} |
NIGHT--THE FLOCK--AN INTERIOR--ANOTHER INTERIOR
It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas's, the shortest day
in the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill
whereon Oak had watched the yellow waggon and its occupant in the
sunshine of a few days earlier.
Norcombe Hill--not far from lonely Toller-Down--was one of the spots
which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape
approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on
earth. It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil--an ordinary
specimen of those smoothly-outlined protuberances of the globe which
may remain undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far
grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.
The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying
plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a line over the
crest, fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane.
To-night these trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest
blasts, which smote the wood and floundered through it with a sound
as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened
moan. The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same
breezes, a tongue of air occasionally ferreting out a few, and
sending them spinning across the grass. A group or two of the latest
in date amongst the dead multitude had remained till this very
mid-winter time on the twigs which bore them and in falling rattled
against the trunks with smart taps.
Between this half-wooded half-naked hill, and the vague still horizon
that its summit indistinctly commanded, was a mysterious sheet of
fathomless shade--the sounds from which suggested that what it
concealed bore some reduced resemblance to features here. The thin
grasses, more or less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in
breezes of differing powers, and almost of differing natures--one
rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another
brushing them like a soft broom. The instinctive act of humankind
was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the
trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular
antiphonies of a cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to
leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and
how the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no
more.
The sky was clear--remarkably clear--and the twinkling of all the
stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
The North Star was directly in the wind's eye, and since evening the
Bear had swung round it outwardly to the east, till he was now at
a right angle with the meridian. A difference of colour in the
stars--oftener read of than seen in England--was really perceptible
here. The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a
steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and
Betelgueux shone with a fiery red.
To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as
this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement.
The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past
earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness,
or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the
wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression
of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a
phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification
it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night,
and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass
of civilised mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all
such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately
progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is
hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of
such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.
Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this
place up against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found
nowhere in the wind, and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in
nature. They were the notes of Farmer Oak's flute.
The tune was not floating unhindered into the open air: it seemed
muffled in some way, and was altogether too curtailed in power to
spread high or wide. It came from the direction of a small dark
object under the plantation hedge--a shepherd's hut--now presenting
an outline to which an uninitiated person might have been puzzled
to attach either meaning or use.
The image as a whole was that of a small Noah's Ark on a small
Ararat, allowing the traditionary outlines and general form of
the Ark which are followed by toy-makers--and by these means are
established in men's imaginations among their firmest, because
earliest impressions--to pass as an approximate pattern. The hut
stood on little wheels, which raised its floor about a foot from the
ground. Such shepherds' huts are dragged into the fields when the
lambing season comes on, to shelter the shepherd in his enforced
nightly attendance.
It was only latterly that people had begun to call Gabriel "Farmer"
Oak. During the twelvemonth preceding this time he had been enabled
by sustained efforts of industry and chronic good spirits to lease
the small sheep-farm of which Norcombe Hill was a portion, and stock
it with two hundred sheep. Previously he had been a bailiff for a
short time, and earlier still a shepherd only, having from his
childhood assisted his father in tending the flocks of large
proprietors, till old Gabriel sank to rest.
This venture, unaided and alone, into the paths of farming as master
and not as man, with an advance of sheep not yet paid for, was a
critical juncture with Gabriel Oak, and he recognised his position
clearly. The first movement in his new progress was the lambing of
his ewes, and sheep having been his speciality from his youth, he
wisely refrained from deputing the task of tending them at this
season to a hireling or a novice.
The wind continued to beat about the corners of the hut, but the
flute-playing ceased. A rectangular space of light appeared in the
side of the hut, and in the opening the outline of Farmer Oak's
figure. He carried a lantern in his hand, and closing the door
behind him, came forward and busied himself about this nook of the
field for nearly twenty minutes, the lantern light appearing and
disappearing here and there, and brightening him or darkening him
as he stood before or behind it.
Oak's motions, though they had a quiet-energy, were slow, and their
deliberateness accorded well with his occupation. Fitness being the
basis of beauty, nobody could have denied that his steady swings and
turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. Yet, although if
occasion demanded he could do or think a thing with as mercurial a
dash as can the men of towns who are more to the manner born, his
special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static, owing
little or nothing to momentum as a rule.
A close examination of the ground hereabout, even by the wan
starlight only, revealed how a portion of what would have been
casually called a wild slope had been appropriated by Farmer Oak for
his great purpose this winter. Detached hurdles thatched with straw
were stuck into the ground at various scattered points, amid and
under which the whitish forms of his meek ewes moved and rustled.
The ring of the sheep-bell, which had been silent during his absence,
recommenced, in tones that had more mellowness than clearness, owing
to an increasing growth of surrounding wool. This continued till Oak
withdrew again from the flock. He returned to the hut, bringing in
his arms a new-born lamb, consisting of four legs large enough for
a full-grown sheep, united by a seemingly inconsiderable membrane
about half the substance of the legs collectively, which constituted
the animal's entire body just at present.
The little speck of life he placed on a wisp of hay before the small
stove, where a can of milk was simmering. Oak extinguished the
lantern by blowing into it and then pinching the snuff, the cot being
lighted by a candle suspended by a twisted wire. A rather hard
couch, formed of a few corn sacks thrown carelessly down, covered
half the floor of this little habitation, and here the young man
stretched himself along, loosened his woollen cravat, and closed his
eyes. In about the time a person unaccustomed to bodily labour would
have decided upon which side to lie, Farmer Oak was asleep.
The inside of the hut, as it now presented itself, was cosy and
alluring, and the scarlet handful of fire in addition to the candle,
reflecting its own genial colour upon whatever it could reach, flung
associations of enjoyment even over utensils and tools. In the
corner stood the sheep-crook, and along a shelf at one side were
ranged bottles and canisters of the simple preparations pertaining to
ovine surgery and physic; spirits of wine, turpentine, tar, magnesia,
ginger, and castor-oil being the chief. On a triangular shelf across
the corner stood bread, bacon, cheese, and a cup for ale or cider,
which was supplied from a flagon beneath. Beside the provisions lay
the flute, whose notes had lately been called forth by the lonely
watcher to beguile a tedious hour. The house was ventilated by two
round holes, like the lights of a ship's cabin, with wood slides.
The lamb, revived by the warmth began to bleat, and the sound entered
Gabriel's ears and brain with an instant meaning, as expected
sounds will. Passing from the profoundest sleep to the most alert
wakefulness with the same ease that had accompanied the reverse
operation, he looked at his watch, found that the hour-hand had
shifted again, put on his hat, took the lamb in his arms, and carried
it into the darkness. After placing the little creature with its
mother, he stood and carefully examined the sky, to ascertain the
time of night from the altitudes of the stars.
The Dog-star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were
half-way up the Southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which
gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it
soared forth above the rim of the landscape. Castor and Pollux with
their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy
Square of Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west; far away
through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the
leafless trees, and Cassiopeia's chair stood daintily poised on the
uppermost boughs.
"One o'clock," said Gabriel.
Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some
charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky
as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit,
as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed
impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with
the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and
sounds of man. Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys
were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded
hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could
fancy them all gone round to the sunny side.
Occupied thus, with eyes stretched afar, Oak gradually perceived
that what he had previously taken to be a star low down behind the
outskirts of the plantation was in reality no such thing. It was an
artificial light, almost close at hand.
To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable
and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by
far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when
intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability,
induction--every kind of evidence in the logician's list--have united
to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.
Farmer Oak went towards the plantation and pushed through its lower
boughs to the windy side. A dim mass under the slope reminded him
that a shed occupied a place here, the site being a cutting into the
slope of the hill, so that at its back part the roof was almost level
with the ground. In front it was formed of board nailed to posts and
covered with tar as a preservative. Through crevices in the roof and
side spread streaks and dots of light, a combination of which made
the radiance that had attracted him. Oak stepped up behind, where,
leaning down upon the roof and putting his eye close to a hole, he
could see into the interior clearly.
The place contained two women and two cows. By the side of the
latter a steaming bran-mash stood in a bucket. One of the women was
past middle age. Her companion was apparently young and graceful;
he could form no decided opinion upon her looks, her position being
almost beneath his eye, so that he saw her in a bird's-eye view, as
Milton's Satan first saw Paradise. She wore no bonnet or hat, but
had enveloped herself in a large cloak, which was carelessly flung
over her head as a covering.
"There, now we'll go home," said the elder of the two, resting her
knuckles upon her hips, and looking at their goings-on as a whole.
"I do hope Daisy will fetch round again now. I have never been more
frightened in my life, but I don't mind breaking my rest if she
recovers."
The young woman, whose eyelids were apparently inclined to fall
together on the smallest provocation of silence, yawned without
parting her lips to any inconvenient extent, whereupon Gabriel caught
the infection and slightly yawned in sympathy.
"I wish we were rich enough to pay a man to do these things," she
said.
"As we are not, we must do them ourselves," said the other; "for you
must help me if you stay."
"Well, my hat is gone, however," continued the younger. "It went over
the hedge, I think. The idea of such a slight wind catching it."
The cow standing erect was of the Devon breed, and was encased in a
tight warm hide of rich Indian red, as absolutely uniform from eyes
to tail as if the animal had been dipped in a dye of that colour, her
long back being mathematically level. The other was spotted, grey
and white. Beside her Oak now noticed a little calf about a day old,
looking idiotically at the two women, which showed that it had not
long been accustomed to the phenomenon of eyesight, and often turning
to the lantern, which it apparently mistook for the moon, inherited
instinct having as yet had little time for correction by experience.
Between the sheep and the cows Lucina had been busy on Norcombe Hill
lately.
"I think we had better send for some oatmeal," said the elder woman;
"there's no more bran."
"Yes, aunt; and I'll ride over for it as soon as it is light."
"But there's no side-saddle."
"I can ride on the other: trust me."
Oak, upon hearing these remarks, became more curious to observe her
features, but this prospect being denied him by the hooding effect of
the cloak, and by his aerial position, he felt himself drawing upon
his fancy for their details. In making even horizontal and clear
inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us
whatever our eyes bring in. Had Gabriel been able from the first to
get a distinct view of her countenance, his estimate of it as very
handsome or slightly so would have been as his soul required a
divinity at the moment or was ready supplied with one. Having for
some time known the want of a satisfactory form to fill an increasing
void within him, his position moreover affording the widest scope for
his fancy, he painted her a beauty.
By one of those whimsical coincidences in which Nature, like a busy
mother, seems to spare a moment from her unremitting labours to turn
and make her children smile, the girl now dropped the cloak, and
forth tumbled ropes of black hair over a red jacket. Oak knew
her instantly as the heroine of the yellow waggon, myrtles, and
looking-glass: prosily, as the woman who owed him twopence.
They placed the calf beside its mother again, took up the lantern,
and went out, the light sinking down the hill till it was no more
than a nebula. Gabriel Oak returned to his flock.
| 2,613 | Chapter 2 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-2 | Swirling winds blew over Norcombe Hill one St. Thomas' Eve. "The trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir." Mingling with the wintry midnight sounds came the sounds of a flute. They issued from a small, arklike structure on wheels, of the type shepherds dragged about the fields to shelter themselves as they attended to their ewes at lambing time. Gabriel was keeping vigil. After less than a year "as master and not as man," he now owned two hundred ewes, which he kept on leased land. With his lantern, he made the rounds of the straw-thatched hurdles around which the ewes stood. Cradling a fragile, newborn lamb, he hastened back to his hut and placed it on some hay before the bit of fire. The hut's furnishings were meager: they consisted of a small stove, a bed of corn sacks, a few medications and ointments, some food, and the flute. Not stopping to adjust the two round ventilating holes, Oak instantly fell asleep on his cornshuck bed. Soon the warmth restored the lamb, which began to bleat. Gabriel roused instantly and carried it back to its mother. The stars told him, his timepiece having failed as usual, that scarcely an hour had passed. Perceiving a faint light on the horizon, Gabriel went to the edge of the plantation to check. The light came from a hut built into the slope. As he looked through the chinks in the roof, the light illuminated two women tending an ailing cow, and a second cow just delivered of a calf. The older woman was glad the cow was improving; the younger lamented that there was no man to do these heavy chores and that she had lost her hat. All the same, she volunteered to ride to town to fetch cereals in the morning. As the enshrouding cloak fell from her head, Gabriel discerned the dark tresses and red jacket of the girl he had seen in the wagon. | One cannot be unaware of Hardy's sense of the unity of man with nature: the eternal hills of his Wessex, the sounds of wind and weather, the ever-circling constellations, the light at different times of day and different seasons, the growth of vegetation, and the behavior of living creatures. His characters convey a general feeling of being a part of the universe; his narrative captures its rhythms. Far from the madding crowd, he seems to say, man comes into his own. Gabriel is so perfectly attuned to nature that he does his tasks, at whatever hour, faithfully and unquestioningly. The notes of Gabriel's flute, "a sequence which was to be found nowhere in nature," remind us of Hardy's own participation in a church choir and his playing in an orchestra in his youth; there is an obvious musical dimension to his art appreciation. Hardy notes that a limited view causes our imagination to fill in the outlines "according to the wants within us." And so it is with Gabriel: "Having for some time known the want of a satisfactory form to fill an increasing void within him, his position moreover affording the widest scope for his fancy, he painted her a beauty." This statement shows us another side of Gabriel. He has a romantic as well as a practical sensibility. | 343 | 220 | [
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1,232 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/19.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Prince/section_19_part_0.txt | The Prince.chapter 19 | chapter 19 | null | {"name": "Chapter 19", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210420060055/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/prince-machiavelli/summary/chapter-19", "summary": "Remember how Machiavelli has said several times that it is super duper important not to be hated? Well, he's saying it again. Yeah, we got it, Niccolo. He kind of summarizes in this chapter: don't be hated, leave people's family and property alone, don't appear weak, appear to be awesome in every way. Sounds good so far. If you do all of that, you're probably safe from both internal and external threats. What are internal threats, you say? Well we've been talking about external threats, which are war and invasions and that kind of stuff. Internal threats are things like conspiracies and revolutions. How do you stop internal threats? Oh yeah, don't be hated. You see, conspiracies need a certain amount of people. A one-person conspiracy is called a crazy person. So if most people like you, no one will ever be able to get together enough people that want to kill you and don't mind taking the risk to try to overthrow you. Actually, if people like you enough, they might rat out the conspiracy to get you to like them. Machiavelli gives us an example of Annibale Bentivogli, Duke of Bologna, who was killed by a conspiracy. The thing is, everyone loved the family so much that it didn't even matter that, after the conspiracy, the only person in the family left was a baby. The city waited for the baby to grow up and rule them. That's serious love right there. The conspiracy didn't even make a dent. Or better yet, look at France. There the king set up a parliamentary system to protect the people from the nobles, at least according to Machiavelli. A bonus was that everything could be blamed on the system, so no one would hate the king. Genius! Okay, okay. Some critics in the back of the room are pointing out that the Roman emperors followed this advice and still failed. First of all, that's like comparing apples to oranges. They needed to deal with the greed and cruelty of the army in addition to not being hated. This was a tough task, because the people wanted a peaceful leader, but the soldiers wanted the craziest, most bloodthirsty guy they could find. Since it was kind of impossible to please both sides, it was most important to please the side that had the weapons. You know, the side that could kill you. The emperors who just wanted to chill and sing kumbaya? Off with their heads. But because they made the people hate them, the ones who let the army run amok in violent frenzies didn't keep their heads on much better than the other guys. Only one dude did that, and that was Severus. He somehow managed not to be hated, but admired. We know, you want to figure out what kind of awesome sauce he was using, so we'll tell you. This guy was so big and bad that when he walked into Rome with his posse, the Senate got so scared that they made him emperor without him even asking. Then, Mr. Emperor realized that he had two problems: a guy in the West who wanted to be emperor, and guy in the East. How to fix this? Attack one outright. The other one? Yep, it's the old make-him-think-you're-a friend-and-then-kill-him-instead trick. Honestly, this is starting to get old. After this feat of cunning, everyone was too scared to mess with Severus. He was never hated by the people, even though he liked to pillage their lands. Now for what not to do. Do not be like Severus's son, who was so overwhelmingly violent that he killed a decent number of the people in Rome. So everyone hates him by now, and you know what happens when everyone hates you. Yep, conspiracy. Off with his head. Still, Machiavelli tells us: you know, assassinations just happen sometimes, and not to worry about it. Right. So, where were we? Oh, right. Roman emperors had a lot more to deal with. Today , he says, rulers don't have to worry about the will of the Military as much, because the people are more powerful than they are. Well, except for Turkish and Egyptian rulers. They are weird. Otherwise, yeah: don't get hated by the people.", "analysis": ""} |
Now, concerning the characteristics of which mention is made above, I
have spoken of the more important ones, the others I wish to discuss
briefly under this generality, that the prince must consider, as has
been in part said before, how to avoid those things which will make him
hated or contemptible; and as often as he shall have succeeded he
will have fulfilled his part, and he need not fear any danger in other
reproaches.
It makes him hated above all things, as I have said, to be rapacious,
and to be a violator of the property and women of his subjects, from
both of which he must abstain. And when neither their property nor their
honor is touched, the majority of men live content, and he has only to
contend with the ambition of a few, whom he can curb with ease in many
ways.
It makes him contemptible to be considered fickle, frivolous,
effeminate, mean-spirited, irresolute, from all of which a prince should
guard himself as from a rock; and he should endeavour to show in his
actions greatness, courage, gravity, and fortitude; and in his
private dealings with his subjects let him show that his judgments are
irrevocable, and maintain himself in such reputation that no one can
hope either to deceive him or to get round him.
That prince is highly esteemed who conveys this impression of himself,
and he who is highly esteemed is not easily conspired against; for,
provided it is well known that he is an excellent man and revered by
his people, he can only be attacked with difficulty. For this reason
a prince ought to have two fears, one from within, on account of his
subjects, the other from without, on account of external powers. From
the latter he is defended by being well armed and having good allies,
and if he is well armed he will have good friends, and affairs will
always remain quiet within when they are quiet without, unless they
should have been already disturbed by conspiracy; and even should
affairs outside be disturbed, if he has carried out his preparations and
has lived as I have said, as long as he does not despair, he will resist
every attack, as I said Nabis the Spartan did.
But concerning his subjects, when affairs outside are disturbed he has
only to fear that they will conspire secretly, from which a prince
can easily secure himself by avoiding being hated and despised, and by
keeping the people satisfied with him, which it is most necessary
for him to accomplish, as I said above at length. And one of the most
efficacious remedies that a prince can have against conspiracies is not
to be hated and despised by the people, for he who conspires against
a prince always expects to please them by his removal; but when the
conspirator can only look forward to offending them, he will not have
the courage to take such a course, for the difficulties that confront
a conspirator are infinite. And as experience shows, many have been the
conspiracies, but few have been successful; because he who conspires
cannot act alone, nor can he take a companion except from those whom he
believes to be malcontents, and as soon as you have opened your mind
to a malcontent you have given him the material with which to content
himself, for by denouncing you he can look for every advantage; so that,
seeing the gain from this course to be assured, and seeing the other
to be doubtful and full of dangers, he must be a very rare friend, or a
thoroughly obstinate enemy of the prince, to keep faith with you.
And, to reduce the matter into a small compass, I say that, on the side
of the conspirator, there is nothing but fear, jealousy, prospect of
punishment to terrify him; but on the side of the prince there is the
majesty of the principality, the laws, the protection of friends and
the state to defend him; so that, adding to all these things the
popular goodwill, it is impossible that any one should be so rash as to
conspire. For whereas in general the conspirator has to fear before the
execution of his plot, in this case he has also to fear the sequel to
the crime; because on account of it he has the people for an enemy, and
thus cannot hope for any escape.
Endless examples could be given on this subject, but I will be content
with one, brought to pass within the memory of our fathers. Messer
Annibale Bentivogli, who was prince in Bologna (grandfather of the
present Annibale), having been murdered by the Canneschi, who had
conspired against him, not one of his family survived but Messer
Giovanni,(*) who was in childhood: immediately after his assassination
the people rose and murdered all the Canneschi. This sprung from the
popular goodwill which the house of Bentivogli enjoyed in those days in
Bologna; which was so great that, although none remained there after the
death of Annibale who was able to rule the state, the Bolognese, having
information that there was one of the Bentivogli family in Florence,
who up to that time had been considered the son of a blacksmith, sent to
Florence for him and gave him the government of their city, and it was
ruled by him until Messer Giovanni came in due course to the government.
(*) Giovanni Bentivogli, born in Bologna 1438, died at Milan
1508. He ruled Bologna from 1462 to 1506. Machiavelli's
strong condemnation of conspiracies may get its edge from
his own very recent experience (February 1513), when he had
been arrested and tortured for his alleged complicity in the
Boscoli conspiracy.
For this reason I consider that a prince ought to reckon conspiracies
of little account when his people hold him in esteem; but when it
is hostile to him, and bears hatred towards him, he ought to fear
everything and everybody. And well-ordered states and wise princes have
taken every care not to drive the nobles to desperation, and to keep the
people satisfied and contented, for this is one of the most important
objects a prince can have.
Among the best ordered and governed kingdoms of our times is France, and
in it are found many good institutions on which depend the liberty
and security of the king; of these the first is the parliament and its
authority, because he who founded the kingdom, knowing the ambition of
the nobility and their boldness, considered that a bit to their mouths
would be necessary to hold them in; and, on the other side, knowing the
hatred of the people, founded in fear, against the nobles, he wished to
protect them, yet he was not anxious for this to be the particular care
of the king; therefore, to take away the reproach which he would be
liable to from the nobles for favouring the people, and from the people
for favouring the nobles, he set up an arbiter, who should be one who
could beat down the great and favour the lesser without reproach to the
king. Neither could you have a better or a more prudent arrangement, or
a greater source of security to the king and kingdom. From this one can
draw another important conclusion, that princes ought to leave affairs
of reproach to the management of others, and keep those of grace in
their own hands. And further, I consider that a prince ought to cherish
the nobles, but not so as to make himself hated by the people.
It may appear, perhaps, to some who have examined the lives and deaths
of the Roman emperors that many of them would be an example contrary
to my opinion, seeing that some of them lived nobly and showed great
qualities of soul, nevertheless they have lost their empire or have been
killed by subjects who have conspired against them. Wishing, therefore,
to answer these objections, I will recall the characters of some of the
emperors, and will show that the causes of their ruin were not different
to those alleged by me; at the same time I will only submit for
consideration those things that are noteworthy to him who studies the
affairs of those times.
It seems to me sufficient to take all those emperors who succeeded to
the empire from Marcus the philosopher down to Maximinus; they were
Marcus and his son Commodus, Pertinax, Julian, Severus and his son
Antoninus Caracalla, Macrinus, Heliogabalus, Alexander, and Maximinus.
There is first to note that, whereas in other principalities the
ambition of the nobles and the insolence of the people only have to be
contended with, the Roman emperors had a third difficulty in having to
put up with the cruelty and avarice of their soldiers, a matter so beset
with difficulties that it was the ruin of many; for it was a hard thing
to give satisfaction both to soldiers and people; because the people
loved peace, and for this reason they loved the unaspiring prince,
whilst the soldiers loved the warlike prince who was bold, cruel, and
rapacious, which qualities they were quite willing he should exercise
upon the people, so that they could get double pay and give vent to
their own greed and cruelty. Hence it arose that those emperors were
always overthrown who, either by birth or training, had no great
authority, and most of them, especially those who came new to the
principality, recognizing the difficulty of these two opposing humours,
were inclined to give satisfaction to the soldiers, caring little about
injuring the people. Which course was necessary, because, as princes
cannot help being hated by someone, they ought, in the first place, to
avoid being hated by every one, and when they cannot compass this, they
ought to endeavour with the utmost diligence to avoid the hatred of the
most powerful. Therefore, those emperors who through inexperience had
need of special favour adhered more readily to the soldiers than to
the people; a course which turned out advantageous to them or not,
accordingly as the prince knew how to maintain authority over them.
From these causes it arose that Marcus, Pertinax, and Alexander, being
all men of modest life, lovers of justice, enemies to cruelty, humane,
and benignant, came to a sad end except Marcus; he alone lived and died
honoured, because he had succeeded to the throne by hereditary title,
and owed nothing either to the soldiers or the people; and afterwards,
being possessed of many virtues which made him respected, he always kept
both orders in their places whilst he lived, and was neither hated nor
despised.
But Pertinax was created emperor against the wishes of the soldiers,
who, being accustomed to live licentiously under Commodus, could not
endure the honest life to which Pertinax wished to reduce them; thus,
having given cause for hatred, to which hatred there was added contempt
for his old age, he was overthrown at the very beginning of his
administration. And here it should be noted that hatred is acquired as
much by good works as by bad ones, therefore, as I said before, a prince
wishing to keep his state is very often forced to do evil; for when that
body is corrupt whom you think you have need of to maintain yourself--it
may be either the people or the soldiers or the nobles--you have to
submit to its humours and to gratify them, and then good works will do
you harm.
But let us come to Alexander, who was a man of such great goodness,
that among the other praises which are accorded him is this, that in the
fourteen years he held the empire no one was ever put to death by
him unjudged; nevertheless, being considered effeminate and a man who
allowed himself to be governed by his mother, he became despised, the
army conspired against him, and murdered him.
Turning now to the opposite characters of Commodus, Severus, Antoninus
Caracalla, and Maximinus, you will find them all cruel and rapacious-men
who, to satisfy their soldiers, did not hesitate to commit every kind of
iniquity against the people; and all, except Severus, came to a bad
end; but in Severus there was so much valour that, keeping the soldiers
friendly, although the people were oppressed by him, he reigned
successfully; for his valour made him so much admired in the sight of
the soldiers and people that the latter were kept in a way astonished
and awed and the former respectful and satisfied. And because the
actions of this man, as a new prince, were great, I wish to show
briefly that he knew well how to counterfeit the fox and the lion, which
natures, as I said above, it is necessary for a prince to imitate.
Knowing the sloth of the Emperor Julian, he persuaded the army in
Sclavonia, of which he was captain, that it would be right to go to Rome
and avenge the death of Pertinax, who had been killed by the praetorian
soldiers; and under this pretext, without appearing to aspire to the
throne, he moved the army on Rome, and reached Italy before it was known
that he had started. On his arrival at Rome, the Senate, through fear,
elected him emperor and killed Julian. After this there remained for
Severus, who wished to make himself master of the whole empire, two
difficulties; one in Asia, where Niger, head of the Asiatic army, had
caused himself to be proclaimed emperor; the other in the west where
Albinus was, who also aspired to the throne. And as he considered it
dangerous to declare himself hostile to both, he decided to attack
Niger and to deceive Albinus. To the latter he wrote that, being elected
emperor by the Senate, he was willing to share that dignity with him and
sent him the title of Caesar; and, moreover, that the Senate had made
Albinus his colleague; which things were accepted by Albinus as true.
But after Severus had conquered and killed Niger, and settled oriental
affairs, he returned to Rome and complained to the Senate that Albinus,
little recognizing the benefits that he had received from him, had
by treachery sought to murder him, and for this ingratitude he was
compelled to punish him. Afterwards he sought him out in France, and
took from him his government and life. He who will, therefore, carefully
examine the actions of this man will find him a most valiant lion and
a most cunning fox; he will find him feared and respected by every one,
and not hated by the army; and it need not be wondered at that he, a
new man, was able to hold the empire so well, because his supreme
renown always protected him from that hatred which the people might have
conceived against him for his violence.
But his son Antoninus was a most eminent man, and had very excellent
qualities, which made him admirable in the sight of the people and
acceptable to the soldiers, for he was a warlike man, most enduring
of fatigue, a despiser of all delicate food and other luxuries, which
caused him to be beloved by the armies. Nevertheless, his ferocity and
cruelties were so great and so unheard of that, after endless single
murders, he killed a large number of the people of Rome and all those of
Alexandria. He became hated by the whole world, and also feared by those
he had around him, to such an extent that he was murdered in the midst
of his army by a centurion. And here it must be noted that such-like
deaths, which are deliberately inflicted with a resolved and desperate
courage, cannot be avoided by princes, because any one who does not fear
to die can inflict them; but a prince may fear them the less because
they are very rare; he has only to be careful not to do any grave injury
to those whom he employs or has around him in the service of the state.
Antoninus had not taken this care, but had contumeliously killed a
brother of that centurion, whom also he daily threatened, yet retained
in his bodyguard; which, as it turned out, was a rash thing to do, and
proved the emperor's ruin.
But let us come to Commodus, to whom it should have been very easy to
hold the empire, for, being the son of Marcus, he had inherited it,
and he had only to follow in the footsteps of his father to please his
people and soldiers; but, being by nature cruel and brutal, he gave
himself up to amusing the soldiers and corrupting them, so that he might
indulge his rapacity upon the people; on the other hand, not maintaining
his dignity, often descending to the theatre to compete with gladiators,
and doing other vile things, little worthy of the imperial majesty, he
fell into contempt with the soldiers, and being hated by one party and
despised by the other, he was conspired against and was killed.
It remains to discuss the character of Maximinus. He was a very warlike
man, and the armies, being disgusted with the effeminacy of Alexander,
of whom I have already spoken, killed him and elected Maximinus to the
throne. This he did not possess for long, for two things made him hated
and despised; the one, his having kept sheep in Thrace, which brought
him into contempt (it being well known to all, and considered a great
indignity by every one), and the other, his having at the accession
to his dominions deferred going to Rome and taking possession of the
imperial seat; he had also gained a reputation for the utmost ferocity
by having, through his prefects in Rome and elsewhere in the empire,
practised many cruelties, so that the whole world was moved to anger
at the meanness of his birth and to fear at his barbarity. First Africa
rebelled, then the Senate with all the people of Rome, and all Italy
conspired against him, to which may be added his own army; this latter,
besieging Aquileia and meeting with difficulties in taking it, were
disgusted with his cruelties, and fearing him less when they found so
many against him, murdered him.
I do not wish to discuss Heliogabalus, Macrinus, or Julian, who, being
thoroughly contemptible, were quickly wiped out; but I will bring this
discourse to a conclusion by saying that princes in our times have this
difficulty of giving inordinate satisfaction to their soldiers in a
far less degree, because, notwithstanding one has to give them some
indulgence, that is soon done; none of these princes have armies that
are veterans in the governance and administration of provinces, as were
the armies of the Roman Empire; and whereas it was then more necessary
to give satisfaction to the soldiers than to the people, it is now more
necessary to all princes, except the Turk and the Soldan, to satisfy the
people rather the soldiers, because the people are the more powerful.
From the above I have excepted the Turk, who always keeps round him
twelve thousand infantry and fifteen thousand cavalry on which depend
the security and strength of the kingdom, and it is necessary that,
putting aside every consideration for the people, he should keep them
his friends. The kingdom of the Soldan is similar; being entirely in the
hands of soldiers, it follows again that, without regard to the people,
he must keep them his friends. But you must note that the state of the
Soldan is unlike all other principalities, for the reason that it
is like the Christian pontificate, which cannot be called either an
hereditary or a newly formed principality; because the sons of the old
prince are not the heirs, but he who is elected to that position by
those who have authority, and the sons remain only noblemen. And this
being an ancient custom, it cannot be called a new principality, because
there are none of those difficulties in it that are met with in new
ones; for although the prince is new, the constitution of the state is
old, and it is framed so as to receive him as if he were its hereditary
lord.
But returning to the subject of our discourse, I say that whoever will
consider it will acknowledge that either hatred or contempt has been
fatal to the above-named emperors, and it will be recognized also how
it happened that, a number of them acting in one way and a number
in another, only one in each way came to a happy end and the rest to
unhappy ones. Because it would have been useless and dangerous for
Pertinax and Alexander, being new princes, to imitate Marcus, who
was heir to the principality; and likewise it would have been utterly
destructive to Caracalla, Commodus, and Maximinus to have imitated
Severus, they not having sufficient valour to enable them to tread
in his footsteps. Therefore a prince, new to the principality, cannot
imitate the actions of Marcus, nor, again, is it necessary to follow
those of Severus, but he ought to take from Severus those parts which
are necessary to found his state, and from Marcus those which are proper
and glorious to keep a state that may already be stable and firm.
| 3,308 | Chapter 19 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210420060055/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/prince-machiavelli/summary/chapter-19 | Remember how Machiavelli has said several times that it is super duper important not to be hated? Well, he's saying it again. Yeah, we got it, Niccolo. He kind of summarizes in this chapter: don't be hated, leave people's family and property alone, don't appear weak, appear to be awesome in every way. Sounds good so far. If you do all of that, you're probably safe from both internal and external threats. What are internal threats, you say? Well we've been talking about external threats, which are war and invasions and that kind of stuff. Internal threats are things like conspiracies and revolutions. How do you stop internal threats? Oh yeah, don't be hated. You see, conspiracies need a certain amount of people. A one-person conspiracy is called a crazy person. So if most people like you, no one will ever be able to get together enough people that want to kill you and don't mind taking the risk to try to overthrow you. Actually, if people like you enough, they might rat out the conspiracy to get you to like them. Machiavelli gives us an example of Annibale Bentivogli, Duke of Bologna, who was killed by a conspiracy. The thing is, everyone loved the family so much that it didn't even matter that, after the conspiracy, the only person in the family left was a baby. The city waited for the baby to grow up and rule them. That's serious love right there. The conspiracy didn't even make a dent. Or better yet, look at France. There the king set up a parliamentary system to protect the people from the nobles, at least according to Machiavelli. A bonus was that everything could be blamed on the system, so no one would hate the king. Genius! Okay, okay. Some critics in the back of the room are pointing out that the Roman emperors followed this advice and still failed. First of all, that's like comparing apples to oranges. They needed to deal with the greed and cruelty of the army in addition to not being hated. This was a tough task, because the people wanted a peaceful leader, but the soldiers wanted the craziest, most bloodthirsty guy they could find. Since it was kind of impossible to please both sides, it was most important to please the side that had the weapons. You know, the side that could kill you. The emperors who just wanted to chill and sing kumbaya? Off with their heads. But because they made the people hate them, the ones who let the army run amok in violent frenzies didn't keep their heads on much better than the other guys. Only one dude did that, and that was Severus. He somehow managed not to be hated, but admired. We know, you want to figure out what kind of awesome sauce he was using, so we'll tell you. This guy was so big and bad that when he walked into Rome with his posse, the Senate got so scared that they made him emperor without him even asking. Then, Mr. Emperor realized that he had two problems: a guy in the West who wanted to be emperor, and guy in the East. How to fix this? Attack one outright. The other one? Yep, it's the old make-him-think-you're-a friend-and-then-kill-him-instead trick. Honestly, this is starting to get old. After this feat of cunning, everyone was too scared to mess with Severus. He was never hated by the people, even though he liked to pillage their lands. Now for what not to do. Do not be like Severus's son, who was so overwhelmingly violent that he killed a decent number of the people in Rome. So everyone hates him by now, and you know what happens when everyone hates you. Yep, conspiracy. Off with his head. Still, Machiavelli tells us: you know, assassinations just happen sometimes, and not to worry about it. Right. So, where were we? Oh, right. Roman emperors had a lot more to deal with. Today , he says, rulers don't have to worry about the will of the Military as much, because the people are more powerful than they are. Well, except for Turkish and Egyptian rulers. They are weird. Otherwise, yeah: don't get hated by the people. | null | 712 | 1 | [
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107 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/107-chapters/15.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_14_part_0.txt | Far from the Madding Crowd.chapter 15 | chapter 15 | null | {"name": "Chapter 15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-15", "summary": "After a few hours of sleep, the maltster made himself a breakfast of bread and bacon which \"was eaten on the plateless system\" and flavored with a \"mustard plaster.\" Although he was toothless, his hardened gums functioned efficiently. Warren's Malthouse served as a sort of clubhouse, an alternative to the inn. Henery appeared, followed by several carters, and expressed the opinion that Bathsheba would not manage the farm successfully. All viewed the prospect of her management negatively. They also disapproved of Bathsheba's new piano and other new furnishings. Henery longed to be bailiff. He felt God had cheated him. A religious discussion followed. Oak arrived with some newborn lambs to be warmed, for the fields here had no shepherd's hut. When he heard that the men had been discussing Bathsheba, he grew angry and threatened anyone maligning the mistress. The men sought to appease him, flattering him a bit and changing the subject. Joseph now became the victim of taunts directed at his lesser farming skills. Oak admitted that he, too, wished to be bailiff. Soon Boldwood appeared with Gabriel's letter. It was from Fanny Robin, thanking Gabriel for his help and returning his shilling. She asked again for secrecy and explained that she would be marrying Sergeant Troy. Gabriel showed Boldwood the letter, for he knew that the farmer had been kind to Fanny. Boldwood was doubtful of her marriage plans, for he knew Troy to be unreliable. Little Cainy broke in, coughing from running, with the news that there were more twin lambs. Gabriel branded the revived ones with Bathsheba's initials. As he left, Boldwood asked Gabriel to identify the handwriting of the mystery valentine. Learning it was Bathsheba's, Boldwood was troubled.", "analysis": "In this chapter we see further evidence of Gabriel's steadfastness and loyalty and his unhurried manner of doing what needs to be done. We meet the gossipmongers again. Another link is added to the Fanny Robin matter. Boldwood fears for Fanny and also broods about the reason for Bathsheba's sending the valentine. Bill Smallbury's remark, \"Your lot is your lot, and the Scripture is nothing; for if you do good you don't get rewarded according to your works, but he cheated in some mean way out of your recompense,\" is a passing comment on what later became one of Hardy's main themes, the indifference of God to man."} |
A MORNING MEETING--THE LETTER AGAIN
The scarlet and orange light outside the malthouse did not penetrate
to its interior, which was, as usual, lighted by a rival glow of
similar hue, radiating from the hearth.
The maltster, after having lain down in his clothes for a few
hours, was now sitting beside a three-legged table, breakfasting of
bread and bacon. This was eaten on the plateless system, which is
performed by placing a slice of bread upon the table, the meat flat
upon the bread, a mustard plaster upon the meat, and a pinch of salt
upon the whole, then cutting them vertically downwards with a large
pocket-knife till wood is reached, when the severed lump is impaled
on the knife, elevated, and sent the proper way of food.
The maltster's lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly diminish
his powers as a mill. He had been without them for so many years
that toothlessness was felt less to be a defect than hard gums an
acquisition. Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic
curve approaches a straight line--less directly as he got nearer,
till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.
In the ashpit was a heap of potatoes roasting, and a boiling pipkin
of charred bread, called "coffee", for the benefit of whomsoever
should call, for Warren's was a sort of clubhouse, used as an
alternative to the inn.
"I say, says I, we get a fine day, and then down comes a snapper at
night," was a remark now suddenly heard spreading into the malthouse
from the door, which had been opened the previous moment. The form
of Henery Fray advanced to the fire, stamping the snow from his boots
when about half-way there. The speech and entry had not seemed to be
at all an abrupt beginning to the maltster, introductory matter being
often omitted in this neighbourhood, both from word and deed, and
the maltster having the same latitude allowed him, did not hurry to
reply. He picked up a fragment of cheese, by pecking upon it with
his knife, as a butcher picks up skewers.
Henery appeared in a drab kerseymere great-coat, buttoned over his
smock-frock, the white skirts of the latter being visible to the
distance of about a foot below the coat-tails, which, when you
got used to the style of dress, looked natural enough, and even
ornamental--it certainly was comfortable.
Matthew Moon, Joseph Poorgrass, and other carters and waggoners
followed at his heels, with great lanterns dangling from their hands,
which showed that they had just come from the cart-horse stables,
where they had been busily engaged since four o'clock that morning.
"And how is she getting on without a baily?" the maltster inquired.
Henery shook his head, and smiled one of the bitter smiles, dragging
all the flesh of his forehead into a corrugated heap in the centre.
"She'll rue it--surely, surely!" he said. "Benjy Pennyways were not
a true man or an honest baily--as big a betrayer as Judas Iscariot
himself. But to think she can carr' on alone!" He allowed his head
to swing laterally three or four times in silence. "Never in all my
creeping up--never!"
This was recognized by all as the conclusion of some gloomy speech
which had been expressed in thought alone during the shake of the
head; Henery meanwhile retained several marks of despair upon his
face, to imply that they would be required for use again directly
he should go on speaking.
"All will be ruined, and ourselves too, or there's no meat in
gentlemen's houses!" said Mark Clark.
"A headstrong maid, that's what she is--and won't listen to no advice
at all. Pride and vanity have ruined many a cobbler's dog. Dear,
dear, when I think o' it, I sorrows like a man in travel!"
"True, Henery, you do, I've heard ye," said Joseph Poorgrass in a
voice of thorough attestation, and with a wire-drawn smile of misery.
"'Twould do a martel man no harm to have what's under her bonnet,"
said Billy Smallbury, who had just entered, bearing his one tooth
before him. "She can spaik real language, and must have some sense
somewhere. Do ye foller me?"
"I do, I do; but no baily--I deserved that place," wailed Henery,
signifying wasted genius by gazing blankly at visions of a high
destiny apparently visible to him on Billy Smallbury's smock-frock.
"There, 'twas to be, I suppose. Your lot is your lot, and Scripture
is nothing; for if you do good you don't get rewarded according to
your works, but be cheated in some mean way out of your recompense."
"No, no; I don't agree with'ee there," said Mark Clark. "God's a
perfect gentleman in that respect."
"Good works good pay, so to speak it," attested Joseph Poorgrass.
A short pause ensued, and as a sort of _entr'acte_ Henery turned and
blew out the lanterns, which the increase of daylight rendered no
longer necessary even in the malthouse, with its one pane of glass.
"I wonder what a farmer-woman can want with a harpsichord, dulcimer,
pianner, or whatever 'tis they d'call it?" said the maltster. "Liddy
saith she've a new one."
"Got a pianner?"
"Ay. Seems her old uncle's things were not good enough for her.
She've bought all but everything new. There's heavy chairs for the
stout, weak and wiry ones for the slender; great watches, getting on
to the size of clocks, to stand upon the chimbley-piece."
"Pictures, for the most part wonderful frames."
"And long horse-hair settles for the drunk, with horse-hair pillows
at each end," said Mr. Clark. "Likewise looking-glasses for the
pretty, and lying books for the wicked."
A firm loud tread was now heard stamping outside; the door was opened
about six inches, and somebody on the other side exclaimed--
"Neighbours, have ye got room for a few new-born lambs?"
"Ay, sure, shepherd," said the conclave.
The door was flung back till it kicked the wall and trembled from
top to bottom with the blow. Mr. Oak appeared in the entry with a
steaming face, hay-bands wound about his ankles to keep out the snow,
a leather strap round his waist outside the smock-frock, and looking
altogether an epitome of the world's health and vigour. Four lambs
hung in various embarrassing attitudes over his shoulders, and the
dog George, whom Gabriel had contrived to fetch from Norcombe,
stalked solemnly behind.
"Well, Shepherd Oak, and how's lambing this year, if I mid say it?"
inquired Joseph Poorgrass.
"Terrible trying," said Oak. "I've been wet through twice a-day,
either in snow or rain, this last fortnight. Cainy and I haven't
tined our eyes to-night."
"A good few twins, too, I hear?"
"Too many by half. Yes; 'tis a very queer lambing this year. We
shan't have done by Lady Day."
"And last year 'twer all over by Sexajessamine Sunday," Joseph
remarked.
"Bring on the rest Cain," said Gabriel, "and then run back to the
ewes. I'll follow you soon."
Cainy Ball--a cheery-faced young lad, with a small circular orifice
by way of mouth, advanced and deposited two others, and retired as he
was bidden. Oak lowered the lambs from their unnatural elevation,
wrapped them in hay, and placed them round the fire.
"We've no lambing-hut here, as I used to have at Norcombe," said
Gabriel, "and 'tis such a plague to bring the weakly ones to a house.
If 'twasn't for your place here, malter, I don't know what I should
do i' this keen weather. And how is it with you to-day, malter?"
"Oh, neither sick nor sorry, shepherd; but no younger."
"Ay--I understand."
"Sit down, Shepherd Oak," continued the ancient man of malt. "And
how was the old place at Norcombe, when ye went for your dog? I
should like to see the old familiar spot; but faith, I shouldn't know
a soul there now."
"I suppose you wouldn't. 'Tis altered very much."
"Is it true that Dicky Hill's wooden cider-house is pulled down?"
"Oh yes--years ago, and Dicky's cottage just above it."
"Well, to be sure!"
"Yes; and Tompkins's old apple-tree is rooted that used to bear two
hogsheads of cider; and no help from other trees."
"Rooted?--you don't say it! Ah! stirring times we live in--stirring
times."
"And you can mind the old well that used to be in the middle of the
place? That's turned into a solid iron pump with a large stone
trough, and all complete."
"Dear, dear--how the face of nations alter, and what we live to see
nowadays! Yes--and 'tis the same here. They've been talking but now
of the mis'ess's strange doings."
"What have you been saying about her?" inquired Oak, sharply turning
to the rest, and getting very warm.
"These middle-aged men have been pulling her over the coals for pride
and vanity," said Mark Clark; "but I say, let her have rope enough.
Bless her pretty face--shouldn't I like to do so--upon her cherry
lips!" The gallant Mark Clark here made a peculiar and well known
sound with his own.
"Mark," said Gabriel, sternly, "now you mind this! none of that
dalliance-talk--that smack-and-coddle style of yours--about Miss
Everdene. I don't allow it. Do you hear?"
"With all my heart, as I've got no chance," replied Mr. Clark,
cordially.
"I suppose you've been speaking against her?" said Oak, turning to
Joseph Poorgrass with a very grim look.
"No, no--not a word I--'tis a real joyful thing that she's no worse,
that's what I say," said Joseph, trembling and blushing with terror.
"Matthew just said--"
"Matthew Moon, what have you been saying?" asked Oak.
"I? Why ye know I wouldn't harm a worm--no, not one underground
worm?" said Matthew Moon, looking very uneasy.
"Well, somebody has--and look here, neighbours," Gabriel, though one
of the quietest and most gentle men on earth, rose to the occasion,
with martial promptness and vigour. "That's my fist." Here he
placed his fist, rather smaller in size than a common loaf, in the
mathematical centre of the maltster's little table, and with it gave
a bump or two thereon, as if to ensure that their eyes all thoroughly
took in the idea of fistiness before he went further. "Now--the
first man in the parish that I hear prophesying bad of our mistress,
why" (here the fist was raised and let fall as Thor might have done
with his hammer in assaying it)--"he'll smell and taste that--or I'm
a Dutchman."
All earnestly expressed by their features that their minds did not
wander to Holland for a moment on account of this statement, but were
deploring the difference which gave rise to the figure; and Mark
Clark cried "Hear, hear; just what I should ha' said." The dog George
looked up at the same time after the shepherd's menace, and though he
understood English but imperfectly, began to growl.
"Now, don't ye take on so, shepherd, and sit down!" said Henery,
with a deprecating peacefulness equal to anything of the kind in
Christianity.
"We hear that ye be a extraordinary good and clever man, shepherd,"
said Joseph Poorgrass with considerable anxiety from behind the
maltster's bedstead, whither he had retired for safety. "'Tis a
great thing to be clever, I'm sure," he added, making movements
associated with states of mind rather than body; "we wish we were,
don't we, neighbours?"
"Ay, that we do, sure," said Matthew Moon, with a small anxious laugh
towards Oak, to show how very friendly disposed he was likewise.
"Who's been telling you I'm clever?" said Oak.
"'Tis blowed about from pillar to post quite common," said Matthew.
"We hear that ye can tell the time as well by the stars as we can by
the sun and moon, shepherd."
"Yes, I can do a little that way," said Gabriel, as a man of medium
sentiments on the subject.
"And that ye can make sun-dials, and prent folks' names upon their
waggons almost like copper-plate, with beautiful flourishes, and
great long tails. A excellent fine thing for ye to be such a clever
man, shepherd. Joseph Poorgrass used to prent to Farmer James
Everdene's waggons before you came, and 'a could never mind which way
to turn the J's and E's--could ye, Joseph?" Joseph shook his head
to express how absolute was the fact that he couldn't. "And so you
used to do 'em the wrong way, like this, didn't ye, Joseph?" Matthew
marked on the dusty floor with his whip-handle
[the word J A M E S appears here with the "J" and the "E"
printed backwards]
"And how Farmer James would cuss, and call thee a fool, wouldn't he,
Joseph, when 'a seed his name looking so inside-out-like?" continued
Matthew Moon with feeling.
"Ay--'a would," said Joseph, meekly. "But, you see, I wasn't so much
to blame, for them J's and E's be such trying sons o' witches for the
memory to mind whether they face backward or forward; and I always
had such a forgetful memory, too."
"'Tis a very bad affliction for ye, being such a man of calamities in
other ways."
"Well, 'tis; but a happy Providence ordered that it should be no
worse, and I feel my thanks. As to shepherd, there, I'm sure mis'ess
ought to have made ye her baily--such a fitting man for't as you be."
"I don't mind owning that I expected it," said Oak, frankly.
"Indeed, I hoped for the place. At the same time, Miss Everdene has
a right to be her own baily if she choose--and to keep me down to be
a common shepherd only." Oak drew a slow breath, looked sadly into
the bright ashpit, and seemed lost in thoughts not of the most
hopeful hue.
The genial warmth of the fire now began to stimulate the nearly
lifeless lambs to bleat and move their limbs briskly upon the hay,
and to recognize for the first time the fact that they were born.
Their noise increased to a chorus of baas, upon which Oak pulled the
milk-can from before the fire, and taking a small tea-pot from the
pocket of his smock-frock, filled it with milk, and taught those of
the helpless creatures which were not to be restored to their dams
how to drink from the spout--a trick they acquired with astonishing
aptitude.
"And she don't even let ye have the skins of the dead lambs, I hear?"
resumed Joseph Poorgrass, his eyes lingering on the operations of Oak
with the necessary melancholy.
"I don't have them," said Gabriel.
"Ye be very badly used, shepherd," hazarded Joseph again, in the hope
of getting Oak as an ally in lamentation after all. "I think she's
took against ye--that I do."
"Oh no--not at all," replied Gabriel, hastily, and a sigh escaped
him, which the deprivation of lamb skins could hardly have caused.
Before any further remark had been added a shade darkened the door,
and Boldwood entered the malthouse, bestowing upon each a nod of a
quality between friendliness and condescension.
"Ah! Oak, I thought you were here," he said. "I met the mail-cart
ten minutes ago, and a letter was put into my hand, which I opened
without reading the address. I believe it is yours. You must excuse
the accident please."
"Oh yes--not a bit of difference, Mr. Boldwood--not a bit," said
Gabriel, readily. He had not a correspondent on earth, nor was there
a possible letter coming to him whose contents the whole parish would
not have been welcome to peruse.
Oak stepped aside, and read the following in an unknown hand:--
DEAR FRIEND,--I do not know your name, but I think these
few lines will reach you, which I wrote to thank you for
your kindness to me the night I left Weatherbury in a
reckless way. I also return the money I owe you, which you
will excuse my not keeping as a gift. All has ended well,
and I am happy to say I am going to be married to the young
man who has courted me for some time--Sergeant Troy, of
the 11th Dragoon Guards, now quartered in this town. He
would, I know, object to my having received anything except
as a loan, being a man of great respectability and high
honour--indeed, a nobleman by blood.
I should be much obliged to you if you would keep the
contents of this letter a secret for the present, dear
friend. We mean to surprise Weatherbury by coming there
soon as husband and wife, though I blush to state it to one
nearly a stranger. The sergeant grew up in Weatherbury.
Thanking you again for your kindness,
I am, your sincere well-wisher,
FANNY ROBIN.
"Have you read it, Mr. Boldwood?" said Gabriel; "if not, you had
better do so. I know you are interested in Fanny Robin."
Boldwood read the letter and looked grieved.
"Fanny--poor Fanny! the end she is so confident of has not yet
come, she should remember--and may never come. I see she gives no
address."
"What sort of a man is this Sergeant Troy?" said Gabriel.
"H'm--I'm afraid not one to build much hope upon in such a case as
this," the farmer murmured, "though he's a clever fellow, and up to
everything. A slight romance attaches to him, too. His mother was
a French governess, and it seems that a secret attachment existed
between her and the late Lord Severn. She was married to a poor
medical man, and soon after an infant was born; and while money was
forthcoming all went on well. Unfortunately for her boy, his best
friends died; and he got then a situation as second clerk at a
lawyer's in Casterbridge. He stayed there for some time, and might
have worked himself into a dignified position of some sort had he not
indulged in the wild freak of enlisting. I have much doubt if ever
little Fanny will surprise us in the way she mentions--very much
doubt. A silly girl!--silly girl!"
The door was hurriedly burst open again, and in came running Cainy
Ball out of breath, his mouth red and open, like the bell of a penny
trumpet, from which he coughed with noisy vigour and great distension
of face.
"Now, Cain Ball," said Oak, sternly, "why will you run so fast and
lose your breath so? I'm always telling you of it."
"Oh--I--a puff of mee breath--went--the--wrong way, please, Mister
Oak, and made me cough--hok--hok!"
"Well--what have you come for?"
"I've run to tell ye," said the junior shepherd, supporting his
exhausted youthful frame against the doorpost, "that you must come
directly. Two more ewes have twinned--that's what's the matter,
Shepherd Oak."
"Oh, that's it," said Oak, jumping up, and dimissing for the present
his thoughts on poor Fanny. "You are a good boy to run and tell me,
Cain, and you shall smell a large plum pudding some day as a treat.
But, before we go, Cainy, bring the tarpot, and we'll mark this lot
and have done with 'em."
Oak took from his illimitable pockets a marking iron, dipped it
into the pot, and imprinted on the buttocks of the infant sheep the
initials of her he delighted to muse on--"B. E.," which signified to
all the region round that henceforth the lambs belonged to Farmer
Bathsheba Everdene, and to no one else.
"Now, Cainy, shoulder your two, and off. Good morning, Mr. Boldwood."
The shepherd lifted the sixteen large legs and four small bodies he
had himself brought, and vanished with them in the direction of the
lambing field hard by--their frames being now in a sleek and hopeful
state, pleasantly contrasting with their death's-door plight of half
an hour before.
Boldwood followed him a little way up the field, hesitated, and
turned back. He followed him again with a last resolve, annihilating
return. On approaching the nook in which the fold was constructed,
the farmer drew out his pocket-book, unfastened it, and allowed it to
lie open on his hand. A letter was revealed--Bathsheba's.
"I was going to ask you, Oak," he said, with unreal carelessness, "if
you know whose writing this is?"
Oak glanced into the book, and replied instantly, with a flushed
face, "Miss Everdene's."
Oak had coloured simply at the consciousness of sounding her name.
He now felt a strangely distressing qualm from a new thought. The
letter could of course be no other than anonymous, or the inquiry
would not have been necessary.
Boldwood mistook his confusion: sensitive persons are always ready
with their "Is it I?" in preference to objective reasoning.
"The question was perfectly fair," he returned--and there was
something incongruous in the serious earnestness with which he
applied himself to an argument on a valentine. "You know it is
always expected that privy inquiries will be made: that's where
the--fun lies." If the word "fun" had been "torture," it could not
have been uttered with a more constrained and restless countenance
than was Boldwood's then.
Soon parting from Gabriel, the lonely and reserved man returned to
his house to breakfast--feeling twinges of shame and regret at having
so far exposed his mood by those fevered questions to a stranger. He
again placed the letter on the mantelpiece, and sat down to think of
the circumstances attending it by the light of Gabriel's information.
| 3,374 | Chapter 15 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-15 | After a few hours of sleep, the maltster made himself a breakfast of bread and bacon which "was eaten on the plateless system" and flavored with a "mustard plaster." Although he was toothless, his hardened gums functioned efficiently. Warren's Malthouse served as a sort of clubhouse, an alternative to the inn. Henery appeared, followed by several carters, and expressed the opinion that Bathsheba would not manage the farm successfully. All viewed the prospect of her management negatively. They also disapproved of Bathsheba's new piano and other new furnishings. Henery longed to be bailiff. He felt God had cheated him. A religious discussion followed. Oak arrived with some newborn lambs to be warmed, for the fields here had no shepherd's hut. When he heard that the men had been discussing Bathsheba, he grew angry and threatened anyone maligning the mistress. The men sought to appease him, flattering him a bit and changing the subject. Joseph now became the victim of taunts directed at his lesser farming skills. Oak admitted that he, too, wished to be bailiff. Soon Boldwood appeared with Gabriel's letter. It was from Fanny Robin, thanking Gabriel for his help and returning his shilling. She asked again for secrecy and explained that she would be marrying Sergeant Troy. Gabriel showed Boldwood the letter, for he knew that the farmer had been kind to Fanny. Boldwood was doubtful of her marriage plans, for he knew Troy to be unreliable. Little Cainy broke in, coughing from running, with the news that there were more twin lambs. Gabriel branded the revived ones with Bathsheba's initials. As he left, Boldwood asked Gabriel to identify the handwriting of the mystery valentine. Learning it was Bathsheba's, Boldwood was troubled. | In this chapter we see further evidence of Gabriel's steadfastness and loyalty and his unhurried manner of doing what needs to be done. We meet the gossipmongers again. Another link is added to the Fanny Robin matter. Boldwood fears for Fanny and also broods about the reason for Bathsheba's sending the valentine. Bill Smallbury's remark, "Your lot is your lot, and the Scripture is nothing; for if you do good you don't get rewarded according to your works, but he cheated in some mean way out of your recompense," is a passing comment on what later became one of Hardy's main themes, the indifference of God to man. | 284 | 108 | [
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44,747 | true | sparknotes | all_chapterized_books/44747-chapters/part_2_chapters_35_to_41.txt | finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Red and the Black/section_8_part_0.txt | The Red and the Black.part 2.chapters 35-41 | book 2, chapters 35-41 | null | {"name": "", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210301223854/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/redblack/section9/", "summary": "Julien feels like he has won the battle but not the war. He quickly impresses the other soldiers with his skill and professionalism. He is more ambitious than ever, hoping to become commander-in- chief of the French army by the time he is thirty. Julien also begins planning for the future of his child, who he is sure will be a boy. But all of his dreams are shattered when the Marquis de la Mole receives a letter from Mme. de Renal, denouncing Julien as a womanizer ambitious to make his fortune by seducing rich aristocrats. The Marquis withdraws all of his support for Julien, condemns his proposed marriage to Mathilde and asks Julien to move to America. Julien is stunned and, without a second thought, races back home to Verrieres where he finds Mme. de Renal kneeling in prayer at Church. Shaking violently, he shoots her from behind. Julien is immediately arrested and taken to Besancon to await trial. There he writes to Mathilde, ordering her to forget about him and to marry one of her many suitors. The idea of death no longer frightens Julien and he demands to be executed. However, Mme. de Renal was only slightly wounded from the one bullet that struck her and makes a quick recovery. Julien is overjoyed that she is not dead and for the first time in his life begins to believe in God. Mathilde and Fouque soon arrive to help him escape but Julien refuses, deciding that he wants to die. Mathilde goes to great lengths in her efforts to save Julien, hiring lawyers and attempting to bribe the priests in charge of Julien's court case. Despite her devotion to him, Julien soon loses interest in Mathilde and begins to think of Mme. de Renal instead. He decides that he only knew true happiness with Mme. de Renal, not Mathilde. Mme. de Renal decides not to appear at Julien's trial and writes a letter to the jury demanding his acquittal. She is still in love with Julien and feels so guilty that she secretly wishes he had killed her. Despite Julien's plea for death, Mathilde thinks that she has bribed the right people to assure Julien's innocence. However, M. Valenod is the foreman of the jury and is still jealous of Julien's affair with Mme. de Renal. He and one of Julien's enemies from the seminary pronounce Julien guilty and vote for his execution. Julien contemplates suicide until Mme. de Renal visits him in jail. They both still love each other, and vow not to commit suicide. Mme. de Renal confesses that she was forced by her confessor to write the letter to the Marquis, and Julien forgives her. When he is left alone, Julien finally begins to understand himself. He renounces hypocrisy as the malaise of his century and finds solace in his love for Mme. de Renal. He wishes that he had not been so ambitious and could have just concentrated on loving her. Julien rejects all final offers of clemency and is guillotined. With a bitter sense of historical irony, Mathilde buries his severed head herself, while Mme. de Renal dies of despair three days later.", "analysis": "Commentary Stendhal finishes the novel with a bitter denunciation of the political corruption of the clergy. He continues to acknowledge the existence of good men like M. Chelan and M. Pirard, but he portrays the majority of the clergy as conniving politicians. A jealous priest forces Mme. de Renal to write her letter to the Marquis. She later admits to Julien that the priest actually wrote it himself. During Julien's trial, Mathilde bribes a large number of priests who claim they can secure an acquittal. One priest even tries to blackmail Mathilde into making him a bishop in return for his help. As he nears death, Julien refuses to find truth in a religion where priests are more concerned with politics and their salaries than in helping the poor. Both Julien and Mathilde's reliance on French history to dictate their own destinies comes back to haunt them in this final section. Julien's admiration for Napoleonic honor and glory encourage him to both shoot Mme. de Renal and to later refuse clemency. He falsely believes that, like Napoleon, his glory and reputation will grow with his death. He wants to be a martyr. Mathilde's obsession with her decapitated ancestor, Boniface de la Mole, comes to life as well. As Julien goes off to kill Mme. de Renal, Mathilde notes how \"Boniface de la Mole seemed reborn in him.\" When Julien is finally guillotined, she does not hesitate to kiss his severed head and bury it herself, just as Queen Margot did 250 years earlier. In this historical context, Julien's fate seems sealed from the moment Mathilde falls in love with him. Her idea of romance is inextricably linked to the decapitation of her lover. Julien simply reenacts a role subconsciously prescribed to him by Mathilde. Stendhal thus uses Julien's unoriginal death to further criticize the predictable and boring nineteenth century. It is only in this last section that the reader begins to understand and admire Julien Sorel. He readily admits that Mme. de Renal represents a maternal figure for him. Since there is never any mention of Julien's biological mother, his tie with Mme. de Renal seems much stronger. As his love for Mathilde grows cold, one can only suspect that Julien has not been able to forget the class difference that separates them. His rejection of French society must also be a rejection of Mathilde. But as a surrogate mother, Mme. de Renal represents everything Julien ever really wanted in life: unconditional love. As he approaches death, Julien gains a sudden insight into who he really is. He realizes that he has always defined himself in terms of politics and society as a whole, never on his own terms. He always saw himself as a possible something-else, and not as Julien Sorel. This emphasis on individualism, one of Stendhal's classic themes, is finally resolved when Julien refuses to see himself through the lens of French society and French history. He is no Napoleon, he is no Boniface, and he is no de la Vernaye. Unlike the charlatans around him, Julien discovers that he has \"nobility in my heart.\" At his trial, he thus admonishes the lack of originality and creativity that plagues the nineteenth century. Having wanted to make his fortune all his life, Julien finally sees that it is successful bourgeois men like M. Valenod that are the most dangerous men in France. Stendhal sadly notes that not only are conservatives impeding the progress of French society, but liberals are making hypocrisy the national pastime."} | CHAPTER LXV
A STORM
My God, give me mediocrity.--_Mirabeau_.
His mind was engrossed; he only half answered the eager tenderness that
she showed to him. He remained gloomy and taciturn. He had never seemed
so great and so adorable in Mathilde's eyes. She was apprehensive of
some subtle twist of his pride which would spoil the whole situation.
She saw the abbe Pirard come to the hotel nearly every morning. Might
not Julien have divined something of her father's intentions through
him? Might not the marquis himself have written to him in a momentary
caprice. What was the explanation of Julien's stern manner following on
so great a happiness? She did not dare to question.
She did not _dare_--she--Mathilde! From that moment her feelings for
Julien contained a certain vague and unexpected element which was
almost panic. This arid soul experienced all the passion possible in
an individual who has been brought up amid that excessive civilisation
which Paris so much admires.
Early on the following day Julien was at the house of the abbe Pirard.
Some post-horses were arriving in the courtyard with a dilapidated
chaise which had been hired at a neighbouring station.
"A vehicle like that is out of fashion," said the stern abbe to him
morosely. "Here are twenty thousand francs which M. de la Mole makes
you a gift of. He insists on your spending them within a year, but
at the same time wants you to try to look as little ridiculous as
possible." (The priest regarded flinging away so substantial a sum on a
young man as simply an opportunity for sin).
"The marquis adds this: 'M. Julien de la Vernaye will have received
this money from his father, whom it is needless to call by any other
name. M. de la Vernaye will perhaps think it proper to give a present
to M. Sorel, a carpenter of Verrieres, who cared for him in his
childhood....' I can undertake that commission," added the abbe. "I
have at last prevailed upon M. de la Mole to come to a settlement with
that Jesuit, the abbe de Frilair. His influence is unquestionably too
much for us. The complete recognition of your high birth on the part
of this man, who is in fact the governor of B---- will be one of the
unwritten terms of the arrangement." Julien could no longer control his
ecstasy. He embraced the abbe. He saw himself recognised.
"For shame," said M. Pirard, pushing him away. "What is the meaning of
this worldly vanity? As for Sorel and his sons, I will offer them in my
own name a yearly allowance of five hundred francs, which will be paid
to each of them as long as I am satisfied with them."
Julien was already cold and haughty. He expressed his thanks, but in
the vaguest terms which bound him to nothing. "Could it be possible,"
he said to himself, "that I am the natural son of some great nobleman
who was exiled to our mountains by the terrible Napoleon?" This idea
seemed less and less improbable every minute.... "My hatred of my
father would be a proof of this.... In that case, I should not be an
unnatural monster after all."
A few days after this soliloquy the Fifteenth Regiment of Hussars,
which was one of the most brilliant in the army, was being reviewed on
the parade ground of Strasbourg. M. the chevalier de La Vernaye sat
the finest horse in Alsace, which had cost him six thousand francs. He
was received as a lieutenant, though he had never been sub-lieutenant
except on the rolls of a regiment of which he had never heard.
His impassive manner, his stern and almost malicious eyes, his pallor,
and his invariable self-possession, founded his reputation from
the very first day. Shortly afterwards his perfect and calculated
politeness, and his skill at shooting and fencing, of which, though
without any undue ostentation, he made his comrades aware, did away
with all idea of making fun of him openly. After hesitating for five
or six days, the public opinion of the regiment declared itself in his
favour.
"This young man has everything," said the facetious old officers,
"except youth."
Julien wrote from Strasbourg to the old cure of Verrieres, M. Chelan,
who was now verging on extreme old age.
"You will have learnt, with a joy of which I have no doubt, of the
events which have induced my family to enrich me. Here are five hundred
francs which I request you to distribute quietly, and without any
mention of my name, among those unfortunate ones who are now poor as I
myself was once, and whom you will doubtless help as you once helped
me."
Julien was intoxicated with ambition, and not with vanity. He
nevertheless devoted a great part of his time to attending to his
external appearance. His horses, his uniform, his orderlies' liveries,
were all kept with a correctness which would have done credit to the
punctiliousness of a great English nobleman. He had scarcely been made
a lieutenant as a matter of favour (and that only two days ago) than
he began to calculate that if he was to become commander-in-chief
at thirty, like all the great generals, then he must be more than a
lieutenant at twenty-three at the latest. He thought about nothing
except fame and his son.
It was in the midst of the ecstasies of the most reinless ambition that
he was surprised by the arrival of a young valet from the Hotel de la
Mole, who had come with a letter.
"All is lost," wrote Mathilde to him: "Rush here as quickly as
possible, sacrifice everything, desert if necessary. As soon as you
have arrived, wait for me in a fiacre near the little garden door,
near No. ---- of the street ---- I will come and speak to you: I shall
perhaps be able to introduce you into the garden. All is lost, and I am
afraid there is no way out; count on me; you will find me staunch and
firm in adversity. I love you."
A few minutes afterwards, Julien obtained a furlough from the colonel,
and left Strasbourg at full gallop. But the awful anxiety which
devoured him did not allow him to continue this method of travel beyond
Metz. He flung himself into a post-chaise, and arrived with an almost
incredible rapidity at the indicated spot, near the little garden door
of the Hotel de la Mole. The door opened, and Mathilde, oblivious of
all human conventions, rushed into his arms. Fortunately, it was only
five o'clock in the morning, and the street was still deserted.
"All is lost. My father, fearing my tears, left Thursday night. Nobody
knows where for? But here is his letter: read it." She climbed into the
fiacre with Julien.
"I could forgive everything except the plan of seducing you because
you are rich. That, unhappy girl, is the awful truth. I give you my
word of honour that I will never consent to a marriage with that man.
I will guarantee him an income of 10,000 francs if he will live far
away beyond the French frontiers, or better still, in America. Read the
letter which I have just received in answer to the enquiries which I
have made. The impudent scoundrel had himself requested me to write to
madame de Renal. I will never read a single line you write concerning
that man. I feel a horror for both Paris and yourself. I urge you to
cover what is bound to happen with the utmost secrecy. Be frank, have
nothing more to do with the vile man, and you will find again the
father you have lost."
"Where is Madame de Renal's letter?" said Julien coldly.
"Here it is. I did not want to shew it to you before you were prepared
for it."
LETTER
"My duties to the sacred cause of religion and morality,
oblige me, monsieur, to take the painful course which I
have just done with regard to yourself: an infallible
principle orders me to do harm to my neighbour at the
present moment, but only in order to avoid an even
greater scandal. My sentiment of duty must overcome
the pain which I experience. It is only too true,
monsieur, that the conduct of the person about whom you
ask me to tell you the whole truth may seem incredible
or even honest. It may possibly be considered proper
to hide or to disguise part of the truth: that would
be in accordance with both prudence and religion. But
the conduct about which you desire information has
been in fact reprehensible to the last degree, and
more than I can say. Poor and greedy as the man is, it
is only by the aid of the most consummate hypocrisy,
and by seducing a weak and unhappy woman, that he has
endeavoured to make a career for himself and become
someone in the world. It is part of my painful duty to
add that I am obliged to believe that M. Julien has no
religious principles. I am driven conscientiously to
think that one of his methods of obtaining success in
any household is to try to seduce the woman who commands
the principal influence. His one great object, in spite
of his show of disinterestedness, and his stock-in-trade
of phrases out of novels, is to succeed in doing what he
likes with the master of the household and his fortune.
He leaves behind him unhappiness and eternal remorse,
etc., etc., etc."
This extremely long letter, which was almost blotted out by tears, was
certainly in madame de Renal's handwriting; it was even written with
more than ordinary care.
"I cannot blame M. de la Mole," said Julien, "after he had finished it.
He is just and prudent. What father would give his beloved daughter to
such a man? Adieu!" Julien jumped out of the fiacre and rushed to his
post-chaise, which had stopped at the end of the street. Mathilde, whom
he had apparently forgotten, took a few steps as though to follow him,
but the looks she received from the tradesmen, who were coming out on
the thresholds of their shops, and who knew who she was, forced her to
return precipitately to the garden.
Julien had left for Verrieres. During that rapid journey he was unable
to write to Mathilde as he had intended. His hand could only form
illegible characters on the paper.
He arrived at Verrieres on a Sunday morning. He entered the shop of the
local gunsmith, who overwhelmed him with congratulations on his recent
good fortune. It constituted the news of the locality.
Julien had much difficulty in making him understand that he wanted a
pair of pistols. At his request the gunsmith loaded the pistols.
The three peals sounded; it is a well-known signal in the villages of
France, and after the various ringings in the morning announces the
immediate commencement of Mass.
Julien entered the new church of Verrieres. All the lofty windows of
the building were veiled with crimson curtains. Julien found himself
some spaces behind the pew of madame de Renal. It seemed to him that
she was praying fervently The sight of the woman whom he had loved so
much made Julien's arm tremble so violently that he was at first unable
to execute his project. "I cannot," he said to himself. "It is a
physical impossibility."
At that moment the young priest, who was officiating at the Mass, rang
the bell for the elevation of the host. Madame de Renal lowered her
head, which, for a moment became entirely hidden by the folds of her
shawl. Julien did not see her features so distinctly: he aimed a pistol
shot at her, and missed her: he aimed a second shot, she fell.
CHAPTER LXVI
SAD DETAILS
Do not expect any weakness on my part. I have avenged
myself. I have deserved death, and here I am. Pray for
my soul.--_Schiller_
Julien remained motionless. He saw nothing more. When he recovered
himself a little he noticed all the faithful rushing from the church.
The priest had left the altar. Julien started fairly slowly to follow
some women who were going away with loud screams. A woman who was
trying to get away more quickly than the others, pushed him roughly. He
fell. His feet got entangled with a chair, knocked over by the crowd;
when he got up, he felt his neck gripped. A gendarme, in full uniform,
was arresting him. Julien tried mechanically to have recourse to his
little pistol; but a second gendarme pinioned his arms.
He was taken to the prison. They went into a room where irons were put
on his hands. He was left alone. The door was doubly locked on him. All
this was done very quickly, and he scarcely appreciated it at all.
"Yes, upon my word, all is over," he said aloud as he recovered
himself. "Yes, the guillotine in a fortnight ... or killing myself
here."
His reasoning did not go any further. His head felt as though it had
been seized in some violent grip. He looked round to see if anyone was
holding him. After some moments he fell into a deep sleep.
Madame de Renal was not mortally wounded. The first bullet had pierced
her hat. The second had been fired as she was turning round. The
bullet had struck her on the shoulder, and, astonishing to relate,
had ricocheted from off the shoulder bone (which it had, however,
broken) against a gothic pillar, from which it had loosened an enormous
splinter of stone.
When, after a long and painful bandaging, the solemn surgeon said to
madame de Renal, "I answer for your life as I would for my own," she
was profoundly grieved.
She had been sincerely desirous of death for a long time. The letter
which she had written to M. de la Mole in accordance with the
injunctions of her present confessor, had proved the final blow to a
creature already weakened by an only too permanent unhappiness. This
unhappiness was caused by Julien's absence; but she, for her own part,
called it remorse. Her director, a young ecclesiastic, who was both
virtuous and enthusiastic, and had recently come to Dijon, made no
mistake as to its nature.
"Dying in this way, though not by my own hand, is very far from being
a sin," thought madame de Renal. "God will perhaps forgive me for
rejoicing over my death." She did not dare to add, "and dying by
Julien's hand puts the last touch on my happiness."
She had scarcely been rid of the presence of the surgeon and of all the
crowd of friends that had rushed to see her, than she called her maid,
Elisa. "The gaoler," she said to her with a violent blush, "is a cruel
man. He will doubtless ill-treat him, thinking to please me by doing
so.... I cannot bear that idea. Could you not go, as though on your own
account, and give the gaoler this little packet which contains some
louis. You will tell him that religion forbids him to treat him badly,
above all, he must not go and speak about the sending of this money."
It was this circumstance, which we have just mentioned, that Julien had
to thank for the humanity of the gaoler of Verrieres. It was still the
same M. Noiraud, that ideal official, whom he remembered as being so
finely alarmed by M. Appert's presence.
A judge appeared in the prison. "I occasioned death by premeditation,"
said Julien to him. "I bought the pistols and had them loaded at
so-and-so's, a gunsmith. Article 1342 of the penal code is clear. I
deserve death, and I expect it." Astonished at this kind of answer, the
judge started to multiply his questions, with a view of the accused
contradicting himself in his answers.
"Don't you see," said Julien to him with a smile, "that I am making
myself out as guilty as you can possibly desire? Go away, monsieur, you
will not fail to catch the quarry you are pursuing. You will have the
pleasure to condemn me. Spare me your presence."
"I have an irksome duty to perform," thought Julien. "I must write to
mademoiselle de la Mole:--"
"I have avenged myself," he said to her. "Unfortunately,
my name will appear in the papers, and I shall not be
able to escape from the world incognito. I shall die
in two months' time. My revenge was ghastly, like the
pain of being separated from you. From this moment I
forbid myself to write or pronounce your name. Never
speak of me even to my son; silence is the only way of
honouring me. To the ordinary commonplace man, I shall
represent a common assassin. Allow me the luxury of the
truth at this supreme moment; you will forget me. This
great catastrophe of which I advise you not to say a
single word to a single living person, will exhaust,
for several years to come, all that romantic and unduly
adventurous element which I have detected in your
character. You were intended by nature to live among the
heroes of the middle ages; exhibit their firm character.
Let what has to happen take place in secret and without
your being compromised. You will assume a false name,
and you will confide in no one. If you absolutely need a
friend's help, I bequeath the abbe Pirard to you.
"Do not talk to anyone else, particularly to the people
of your own class--the de Luz's, the Caylus's.
"A year after my death, marry M. de Croisenois; I
command you as your husband. Do not write to me at all,
I shall not answer. Though in my view, much less wicked
than Iago, I am going to say, like him: 'From this time
forth, I never will speack word.'[1]
"I shall never be seen to speak or write again. You will
have received my final words and my final expressions of
adoration.
"J. S."
It was only after he had despatched this letter and had recovered
himself a little, that Julien felt for the first time extremely
unhappy. Those momentous words, I shall die, meant the successive
tearing out of his heart of each individual hope and ambition.
Death, in itself, was not horrible in his eyes. His whole life had
been nothing but a long preparation for unhappiness, and he had
made a point of not losing sight of what is considered the greatest
unhappiness of all.
"Come then," he said to himself; "if I had to fight a duel in a couple
of months, with an expert duellist, should I be weak enough to think
about it incessantly with panic in my soul?"
He passed more than an hour in trying to analyze himself thoroughly on
this score.
When he saw clear in his own soul, and the truth appeared before his
eyes with as much definiteness as one of the pillars of his prison, he
thought about remorse.
"Why should I have any? I have been atrociously injured; I have
killed--I deserve death, but that is all. I die after having squared my
account with humanity. I do not leave any obligation unfulfilled. I owe
nothing to anybody; there is nothing shameful about my death, except
the instrument of it; that alone, it is true, is simply sufficient to
disgrace me in the eyes of the bourgeois of Verrieres; but from the
intellectual standpoint, what could be more contemptible than they? I
have one means of winning their consideration; by flinging pieces of
gold to the people as I go to the scaffold. If my memory is linked with
the idea of gold, they will always look upon it as resplendent."
After this chain of reasoning, which after a minute's reflection seemed
to him self-evident, Julien said to himself, "I have nothing left to do
in the world," and fell into a deep sleep.
About 9 o'clock in the evening the gaoler woke him up as he brought in
his supper.
"What are they saying in Verrieres?"
"M. Julien, the oath which I took before the crucifix in the 'Royal
Courtyard,' on the day when I was installed in my place, obliges me to
silence."
He was silent, but remained. Julien was amused by the sight of this
vulgar hypocrisy. I must make him, he thought, wait a long time for the
five francs which he wants to sell his conscience for.
When the gaoler saw him finish his meal without making any attempt to
corrupt him, he said in a soft and perfidious voice:
"The affection which I have for you, M. Julien, compels me to speak.
Although they say that it is contrary to the interests of justice,
because it may assist you in preparing your defence. M. Julien you are
a good fellow at heart, and you will be very glad to learn that madame
de Renal is better."
"What! she is not dead?" exclaimed Julien, beside himself.
"What, you know nothing?" said the gaoler, with a stupid air which soon
turned into exultant cupidity. "It would be very proper, monsieur, for
you to give something to the surgeon, who, so far as law and justice
go, ought not to have spoken. But in order to please you, monsieur, I
went to him, and he told me everything."
"Anyway, the wound is not mortal," said Julien to him impatiently, "you
answer for it on your life?"
The gaoler, who was a giant six feet tall, was frightened and retired
towards the door. Julien saw that he was adopting bad tactics for
getting at the truth. He sat down again and flung a napoleon to M.
Noiraud.
As the man's story proved to Julien more and more conclusively that
madame de Renal's wound was not mortal, he felt himself overcome by
tears. "Leave me," he said brusquely.
The gaoler obeyed. Scarcely had the door shut, than Julien exclaimed:
"Great God, she is not dead," and he fell on his knees, shedding hot
tears.
In this supreme moment he was a believer. What mattered the hypocrisies
of the priests? Could they abate one whit of the truth and sublimity of
the idea of God?
It was only then that Julien began to repent of the crime that he had
committed. By a coincidence, which prevented him falling into despair,
it was only at the present moment that the condition of physical
irritation and semi-madness, in which he had been plunged since his
departure from Paris for Verrieres came to an end.
His tears had a generous source. He had no doubt about the condemnation
which awaited him.
"So she will live," he said to himself. "She will live to forgive me
and love me."
Very late the next morning the gaoler woke him up and said, "You must
have a famous spirit, M. Julien. I have come in twice, but I did not
want to wake you up. Here are two bottles of excellent wine which our
cure, M. Maslon, has sent you."
"What, is that scoundrel still here?" said Julien.
"Yes, monsieur," said the gaoler, lowering his voice. "But do not talk
so loud, it may do you harm."
Julien laughed heartily.
"At the stage I have reached, my friend, you alone can do me harm in
the event of your ceasing to be kind and tender. You will be well
paid," said Julien, changing his tone and reverting to his imperious
manner. This manner was immediately justified by the gift of a piece of
money.
M. Noiraud related again, with the greatest detail, everything he
had learnt about madame de Renal, but he did not make any mention of
mademoiselle Elisa's visit.
The man was as base and servile as it was possible to be. An idea
crossed Julien's mind. "This kind of misshapen giant cannot earn more
than three or four hundred francs, for his prison is not at all full.
I can guarantee him ten thousand francs, if he will escape with me
to Switzerland. The difficulty will be in persuading him of my good
faith." The idea of the long conversation he would need to have with so
vile a person filled Julien with disgust. He thought of something else.
In the evening the time had passed. A post-chaise had come to pick him
up at midnight. He was very pleased with his travelling companions, the
gendarmes. When he arrived at the prison of Besancon in the morning
they were kind enough to place him in the upper storey of a Gothic
turret. He judged the architecture to be of the beginning of the
fourteenth century. He admired its fascinating grace and lightness.
Through a narrow space between two walls, beyond the deep court, there
opened a superb vista.
On the following day there was an interrogation, after which he was
left in peace for several days. His soul was calm. He found his affair
a perfectly simple one. "I meant to kill. I deserve to be killed."
His thoughts did not linger any further over this line of reasoning.
As for the sentence, the disagreeableness of appearing in public,
the defence, he considered all this as slight embarrassment, irksome
formalities, which it would be time enough to consider on the actual
day. The actual moment of death did not seize hold of his mind either.
"I will think about it after the sentence." Life was no longer boring,
he was envisaging everything from a new point of view, he had no longer
any ambition. He rarely thought about mademoiselle de la Mole. His
passion of remorse engrossed him a great deal, and often conjured up
the image of madame de Renal, particularly during the silence of the
night, which in this high turret was only disturbed by the song of the
osprey.
He thanked heaven that he had not inflicted a mortal wound.
"Astonishing," he said to himself, "I thought that she had destroyed my
future happiness for ever by her letter to M. de la Mole, and here am
I, less than a fortnight after the date of that letter, not giving a
single thought to all the things that engrossed me then. An income of
two or three thousand francs, on which to live quietly in a mountain
district, like Vergy.... I was happy then.... I did not realise my
happiness."
At other moments he would jump up from his chair. "If I had mortally
wounded madame de Renal, I would have killed myself.... I need to feel
certain of that so as not to horrify myself."
"Kill myself? That's the great question," he said to himself. "Oh,
those judges, those fiends of red tape, who would hang their best
citizen in order to win the cross.... At any rate, I should escape from
their control and from the bad French of their insults, which the local
paper will call eloquence."
"I still have five or six weeks, more or less to live.... Kill myself.
No, not for a minute," he said to himself after some days, "Napoleon
went on living."
"Besides, I find life pleasant, this place is quiet, I am not troubled
with bores," he added with a smile, and he began to make out a list of
the books which he wanted to order from Paris.
[1] Stendhal's bad spelling is here reproduced.
CHAPTER LXVII
A TURRET
The tomb of a friend.--_Sterne_.
He heard a loud noise in the corridor. It was not the time when the
gaoler usually came up to his prison. The osprey flew away with a
shriek. The door opened, and the venerable cure Chelan threw himself
into his arms. He was trembling all over and had his stick in his hands.
"Great God! Is it possible, my child--I ought to say monster?"
The good old man could not add a single word. Julien was afraid he
would fall down. He was obliged to lead him to a chair. The hand of
time lay heavy on this man who had once been so active. He seemed to
Julien the mere shadow of his former self.
When he had regained his breath, he said, "It was only the day before
yesterday that I received your letter from Strasbourg with your five
hundred francs for the poor of Verrieres. They brought it to me in
the mountains at Liveru where I am living in retirement with my
nephew Jean. Yesterday I learnt of the catastrophe.... Heavens, is it
possible?" And the old man left off weeping. He did not seem to have
any ideas left, but added mechanically, "You will have need of your
five hundred francs, I will bring them back to you."
"I need to see you, my father," exclaimed Julien, really touched. "I
have money, anyway."
But he could not obtain any coherent answer. From time to time, M.
Chelan shed some tears which coursed silently down his cheeks. He then
looked at Julien, and was quite dazed when he saw him kiss his hands
and carry them to his lips. That face which had once been so vivid,
and which had once portrayed with such vigour the most noble emotions
was now sunk in a perpetual apathy. A kind of peasant came soon to
fetch the old man. "You must not fatigue him," he said to Julien, who
understood that he was the nephew. This visit left Julien plunged in a
cruel unhappiness which found no vent in tears. Everything seemed to
him gloomy and disconsolate. He felt his heart frozen in his bosom.
This moment was the cruellest which he had experienced since the
crime. He had just seen death and seen it in all its ugliness. All his
illusions about greatness of soul and nobility of character had been
dissipated like a cloud before the hurricane.
This awful plight lasted several hours. After moral poisoning, physical
remedies and champagne are necessary. Julien would have considered
himself a coward to have resorted to them. "What a fool I am," he
exclaimed, towards the end of the horrible day that he had spent
entirely in walking up and down his narrow turret. "It's only, if I
had been going to die like anybody else, that the sight of that poor
old man would have had any right to have thrown me into this awful fit
of sadness: but a rapid death in the flower of my age simply puts me
beyond the reach of such awful senility."
In spite of all his argumentation, Julien felt as touched as any
weak-minded person would have been, and consequently felt unhappy
as the result of the visit. He no longer had any element of rugged
greatness, or any Roman virtue. Death appeared to him at a great height
and seemed a less easy proposition.
"This is what I shall take for my thermometer," he said to himself.
"To-night I am ten degrees below the courage requisite for
guillotine-point level. I had that courage this morning. Anyway, what
does it matter so long as it comes back to me at the necessary moment?"
This thermometer idea amused him and finally managed to distract him.
When he woke up the next day he was ashamed of the previous day. "My
happiness and peace of mind are at stake." He almost made up his mind
to write to the Procureur-General to request that no one should be
admitted to see him. "And how about Fouque," he thought? "If he takes
it upon himself to come to Besancon, his grief will be immense."
It had perhaps been two months since he had given Fouque a thought.
"I was a great fool at Strasbourg. My thoughts did not go beyond my
coat-collar. He was much engrossed by the memory of Fouque, which
left him more and more touched. He walked nervously about. Here I
am, clearly twenty degrees below death point.... If this weakness
increases, it will be better for me to kill myself. What joy for the
abbe Maslon, and the Valenods, if I die like an usher."
Fouque arrived. The good, simple man, was distracted by grief. His one
idea, so far as he had any at all, was to sell all he possessed in
order to bribe the gaoler and secure Julien's escape. He talked to him
at length of M. de Lavalette's escape.
"You pain me," Julien said to him. "M. de Lavalette was innocent--I
am guilty. Though you did not mean to, you made me think of the
difference...."
"But is it true? What? were you going to sell all you possessed?" said
Julien, suddenly becoming mistrustful and observant.
Fouque was delighted at seeing his friend answer his obsessing idea,
and detailed at length, and within a hundred francs, what he would get
for each of his properties.
"What a sublime effort for a small country land-owner," thought Julien.
"He is ready to sacrifice for me the fruits of all the economies, and
all the little semi-swindling tricks which I used to be ashamed of when
I saw him practice them."
"None of the handsome young people whom I saw in the Hotel de la Mole,
and who read Rene, would have any of his ridiculous weaknesses: but,
except those who are very young and who have also inherited riches
and are ignorant of the value of money, which of all those handsome
Parisians would be capable of such a sacrifice?"
All Fouque's mistakes in French and all his common gestures seemed to
disappear. He threw himself into his arms. Never have the provinces
in comparison with Paris received so fine a tribute. Fouque was so
delighted with the momentary enthusiasm which he read in his friend's
eyes that he took it for consent to the flight.
This view of the sublime recalled to Julien all the strength that the
apparition of M. Chelan had made him lose. He was still very young;
but in my view he was a fine specimen. Instead of his character passing
from tenderness to cunning, as is the case with the majority of men,
age would have given him that kindness of heart which is easily melted
... but what avail these vain prophecies.
The interrogations became more frequent in spite of all the efforts
of Julien, who always endeavoured by his answers to shorten the whole
matter.
"I killed, or at any rate, I wished to occasion death, and I did so
with premeditation," he would repeat every day. But the judge was
a pedant above everything. Julien's confessions had no effect in
curtailing the interrogations. The judge's conceit was wounded. Julien
did not know that they had wanted to transfer him into an awful cell,
and that it was only, thanks to Fouque's efforts, that he was allowed
to keep his pretty room at the top of a hundred and eighty steps.
M. the abbe de Frilair was one of the important customers who entrusted
Fouque with the purveying of their firewood. The good tradesmen managed
to reach the all powerful grand vicar. M. de Frilair informed him,
to his unspeakable delight, that he was so touched by Julien's good
qualities, and by the services which he had formerly rendered to the
seminary, that he intended to recommend him to the judges. Fouque
thought he saw a hope of saving his friend, and as he went out, bowing
down to the ground, requested M. the grand vicar, to distribute a sum
of ten louis in masses to entreat the acquittal of the accused.
Fouque was making a strange mistake. M. de Frilair was very far from
being a Valenod. He refused, and even tried to make the good peasant
understand that he would do better to keep his money. Seeing that it
was impossible to be clear without being indiscreet, he advised him to
give that sum as alms for the use of the poor prisoners, who, in point
of fact, were destitute of everything.
"This Julien is a singular person, his action is unintelligible,"
thought M. de Frilair, "and I ought to find nothing unintelligible.
Perhaps it will be possible to make a martyr of him.... In any case,
I shall get to the bottom of the matter, and shall perhaps find an
opportunity of putting fear into the heart of that madame de Renal
who has no respect for us, and at the bottom detests me.... Perhaps
I might be able to utilise all this as a means of a brilliant
reconciliation with M. de la Mole, who has a weakness for the little
seminarist."
The settlement of the lawsuit had been signed some weeks previously,
and the abbe Pirard had left Besancon after having duly mentioned
Julien's mysterious birth, on the very day when the unhappy man tried
to assassinate madame de Renal in the church of Verrieres.
There was only one disagreeable event between himself and his death
which Julien anticipated. He consulted Fouque concerning his idea
of writing to M. the Procureur-General asking to be exempt from all
visits. This horror at the sight of a father, above all at a moment
like this, deeply shocked the honest middle-class heart of the wood
merchant.
He thought he understood why so many people had a passionate hatred for
his friend. He concealed his feelings out of respect for misfortune.
"In any case," he answered coldly, "such an order for privacy would not
be applied to your father."
CHAPTER LXVIII
A POWERFUL MAN
But her proceedings are so mysterious and her figure is
so elegant! Who can she be?--_Schiller_.
The doors of the turret opened very early on the following day.
"Oh! good God," he thought, "here's my father! What an unpleasant
scene!"
At the same time a woman dressed like a peasant rushed into his arms.
He had difficulty in recognising her. It was mademoiselle de la Mole.
"You wicked man! Your letter only told me where you were. As for what
you call your crime, but which is really nothing more or less than a
noble vengeance, which shews me all the loftiness of the heart which
beats within your bosom, I only got to know of it at Verrieres."
In spite of all his prejudices against mademoiselle de la Mole,
prejudices moreover which he had not owned to himself quite frankly,
Julien found her extremely pretty. It was impossible not to recognise
both in what she had done and what she had said, a noble disinterested
feeling far above the level of anything that a petty vulgar soul would
have dared to do? He thought that he still loved a queen, and after a
few moments said to her with a remarkable nobility both of thought and
of elocution,
"I sketched out the future very clearly. After my death I intended to
remarry you to M. de Croisenois, who will officially of course then
marry a widow. The noble but slightly romantic soul of this charming
widow, who will have been brought back to the cult of vulgar prudence
by an astonishing and singular event which played in her life a part
as great as it was tragic, will deign to appreciate the very real
merit of the young marquis. You will resign yourself to be happy with
ordinary worldly happiness, prestige, riches, high rank. But, dear
Mathilde, if your arrival at Besancon is suspected, it will be a mortal
blow for M. de la Mole, and that is what I shall never forgive myself.
I have already caused him so much sorrow. The academician will say that
he has nursed a serpent in his bosom.
"I must confess that I little expected so much cold reason and so much
solicitude for the future," said mademoiselle de la Mole, slightly
annoyed. "My maid who is almost as prudent as you are, took a passport
for herself, and I posted here under the name of madam Michelet."
"And did madame Michelet find it so easy to get to see me?"
"Ah! you are still the same superior man whom I chose to favour. I
started by offering a hundred francs to one of the judge's secretaries,
who alleged at first that my admission into this turret was impossible.
But once he had got the money the worthy man kept me waiting, raised
objections, and I thought that he meant to rob me--" She stopped.
"Well?" said Julien.
"Do not be angry, my little Julien," she said, kissing him. "I was
obliged to tell my name to the secretary, who took me for a young
working girl from Paris in love with handsome Julien. As a matter of
fact those are his actual expressions. I swore to him, my dear, that I
was your wife, and I shall have a permit to see you every day."
"Nothing could be madder," thought Julien, "but I could not help it.
After all, M. de la Mole is so great a nobleman that public opinion
will manage to find an excuse for the young colonel who will marry
such a charming widow. My death will atone for everything;" and he
abandoned himself with delight to Mathilde's love. It was madness, it
was greatness of soul, it was the most remarkable thing possible. She
seriously suggested that she should kill herself with him.
After these first transports, when she had had her fill of the
happiness of seeing Julien, a keen curiosity suddenly invaded her soul.
She began to scrutinize her lover, and found him considerably above
the plane which she had anticipated. Boniface de La Mole seemed to be
brought to life again, but on a more heroic scale.
Mathilde saw the first advocates of the locality, and offended them by
offering gold too crudely, but they finished by accepting.
She promptly came to the conclusion that so far as dubious and far
reaching intrigues were concerned, everything depended at Besancon on
M. the abbe de Frilair.
She found at first overwhelming difficulties in obtaining an interview
with the all-powerful leader of the congregation under the obscure name
of madame Michelet. But the rumour of the beauty of a young dressmaker,
who was madly in love, and had come from Paris to Besancon to console
the young abbe Julien Sorel, spread over the town.
Mathilde walked about the Besancon streets alone: she hoped not to be
recognised. In any case, she thought it would be of some use to her
cause if she produced a great impression on the people. She thought, in
her madness, of making them rebel in order to save Julien as he walked
to his death. Mademoiselle de la Mole thought she was dressed simply
and in a way suitable to a woman in mourning, she was dressed in fact
in such a way as to attract every one's attention.
She was the object of everyone's notice at Besancon when she obtained
an audience of M. de Frilair after a week spent in soliciting it.
In spite of all her courage, the idea of an influential leader of the
congregation, and the idea of deep and calculating criminality, were so
associated with each other in her mind, that she trembled as she rang
the bell at the door of the bishop's palace. She could scarcely walk
when she had to go up the staircase, which led to the apartment of the
first grand Vicar. The solitude of the episcopal palace chilled her. "I
might sit down in an armchair, and the armchair might grip my arms: I
should then disappear. Whom could my maid ask for? The captain of the
gendarmerie will take care to do nothing. I am isolated in this great
town."
After her first look at the apartment, mademoiselle de la Mole felt
reassured. In the first place, the lackey who had opened the door to
her had on a very elegant livery. The salon in which she was asked to
wait displayed that refined and delicate luxury which differs so much
from crude magnificence, and which is only found in the best houses in
Paris. As soon as she noticed M. de Frilair coming towards her with
quite a paternal air, all her ideas of his criminality disappeared. She
did not even find on his handsome face the impress of that drastic and
somewhat savage courage which is so anti-pathetic to Paris society.
The half-smile which animated the features of the priest, who was
all-powerful at Besancon, betokened the well-bred man, the learned
prelate, the clever administrator. Mathilde felt herself at Paris.
It was the work of a few minutes for M. de Frilair to induce Mathilde
to confess to him that she was the daughter of his powerful opponent,
the marquis de la Mole.
"As a matter of fact, I am not Madame Michelet," she said, reassuming
all the haughtiness of her natural demeanour, "and this confession
costs me but little since I have come to consult you, monsieur, on the
possibility of procuring the escape of M. de la Vernaye. Moreover, he
is only guilty of a piece of folly; the woman whom he shot at is well;
and, in the second place, I can put down fifty-thousand francs straight
away for the purpose of bribing the officials, and pledge myself for
twice that sum. Finally, my gratitude and the gratitude of my family
will be ready to do absolutely anything for the man who has saved M. de
la Vernaye."
M. de Frilair seemed astonished at the name. Mathilde shewed him
several letters from the Minister of War, addressed to M. Julien Sorel
de la Vernaye.
"You see, monsieur, that my father took upon himself the responsibility
of his career. I married him secretly, my father was desirous that he
should be a superior officer before the notification of this marriage,
which, after all, is somewhat singular for a de la Mole."
Mathilde noticed that M. de Frilair's expression of goodwill and mild
cheerfulness was rapidly vanishing in proportion as he made certain
important discoveries. His face exhibited a subtlety tinged with deep
perfidiousness, the abbe had doubts, he was slowly re-reading the
official documents.
"What can I get out of these strange confidences?" he said to himself.
"Here I am suddenly thrown into intimate relations with a friend of
the celebrated marechale de Fervaques, who is the all-powerful niece
of my lord, bishop of ---- who can make one a bishop of France. What
I looked upon as an extremely distant possibility presents itself
unexpectedly. This may lead me to the goal of all my hopes."
Mathilde was at first alarmed by the sudden change in the expression
of this powerful man, with whom she was alone in a secluded room. "But
come," she said to herself soon afterwards. "Would it not have been
more unfortunate if I had made no impression at all on the cold egoism
of a priest who was already sated with power and enjoyment?"
Dazzled at the sight of this rapid and unexpected path of reaching the
episcopate which now disclosed itself to him, and astonished as he was
by Mathilde's genius, M. de Frilair ceased for a moment to be on his
guard. Mademoiselle de la Mole saw him almost at her feet, tingling
with ambition, and trembling nervously.
"Everything is cleared up," she thought. "Madame de Fervaques' friend
will find nothing impossible in this town." In spite of a sentiment
of still painful jealousy she had sufficient courage to explain that
Julien was the intimate friend of the marechale, and met my lord the
bishop of ---- nearly every day.
"If you were to draw by ballot four or five times in succession a
list of thirty-six jurymen from out the principal inhabitants of this
department," said the grand Vicar, emphasizing his words, and with a
hard, ambitious expression in his eyes, "I should not feel inclined to
congratulate myself, if I could not reckon on eight or ten friends who
would be the most intelligent of the lot in each list. I can always
manage in nearly every case to get more than a sufficient majority to
secure a condemnation, so you see, mademoiselle, how easy it is for me
to secure a conviction." The abbe stopped short as though astonished
by the sound of his own words; he was admitting things which are never
said to the profane. But he in his turn dumbfounded Mathilde when he
informed her that the special feature in Julien's strange adventure
which astonished and interested Besancon society, was that he had
formerly inspired Madame de Renal with a grand passion and reciprocated
it for a long time. M. de Frilair had no difficulty in perceiving the
extreme trouble which his story produced.
"I have my revenge," he thought. "After all it's a way of managing
this decided young person. I was afraid that I should not succeed." Her
distinguished and intractable appearance intensified in his eyes the
charm of the rare beauty whom he now saw practically entreating him. He
regained all his self-possession--and he did not hesitate to move the
dagger about in her heart.
"I should not be at all surprised," he said to her lightly, "if we
were to learn that it was owing to jealousy that M. Sorel fired two
pistol shots at the woman he once loved so much. Of course she must
have consoled herself and for some time she has been seeing extremely
frequently a certain abbe Marquinot of Dijon, a kind of Jansenist, and
as immoral as all Jansenists are."
M. de Frilair experienced the voluptuous pleasure of torturing at
his leisure the heart of this beautiful girl whose weakness he had
surprised.
"Why," he added, as he fixed his ardent eyes upon Mathilde, "should
M. Sorel have chosen the church, if it were not for the reason that
his rival was celebrating mass in it at that very moment? Everyone
attributes an infinite amount of intelligence and an even greater
amount of prudence to the fortunate man who is the object of your
interest. What would have been simpler than to hide himself in the
garden of M. de Renal which he knows so well. Once there he could put
the woman of whom he was jealous to death with the practical certainty
of being neither seen, caught, nor suspected."
This apparently sound train of reasoning eventually made Mathilde
loose all self-possession. Her haughty soul steeped in all that arid
prudence, which passes in high society for the true psychology of the
human heart, was not of the type to be at all quick in appreciating
that joy of scorning all prudence, which an ardent soul can find so
keen. In the high classes of Paris society in which Mathilde had lived,
it is only rarely that passion can divest itself of prudence, and
people always make a point of throwing themselves out of windows from
the fifth storey.
At last the abbe de Frilair was sure of his power over her. He gave
Mathilde to understand (and he was doubtless lying) that he could do
what he liked with the public official who was entrusted with the
conduct of Julien's prosecution. After the thirty-six jurymen for the
sessions had been chosen by ballot, he would approach at least thirty
jurymen directly and personally.
If M. de Frilair had not thought Mathilde so pretty, he would not have
spoken so clearly before the fifth or sixth interview.
CHAPTER LXIX
THE INTRIGUE
Castres 1676--A brother has just murdered his sister
in the house next to mine. This gentleman had already
been guilty of one murder. His father saved his life by
causing five-hundred crowns to be distributed among the
councillors.--_Locke: Journey in France_.
When she left the bishop's palace, Mathilde did not hesitate to
despatch a courier to madame de Fervaques. The fear of compromising
herself did not stop her for a moment. She entreated her rival to
obtain for M. de Frilair an autograph letter from the bishop of ----.
She went as far as to entreat her to come herself to Besancon with all
speed. This was an heroic act on the part of a proud and jealous soul.
Acting on Fouque's advice, she had had the discretion to refrain from
mentioning the steps she had taken for Julien. Her presence troubled
him enough without that. A better man when face to face with death than
he had ever been during his life, he had remorse not only towards M. de
la Mole, but also towards Mathilde.
"Come," he said to himself, "there are times when I feel absent-minded
and even bored by her society. She is ruining herself on my account,
and this is how I reward her. Am I really a scoundrel?" This question
would have bothered him but little in the days when he was ambitious.
In those days he looked upon failure as the only disgrace.
His moral discomfort when with Mathilde was proportionately emphasized
by the fact that he inspired her at this time with the maddest and most
extraordinary passion. She talked of nothing but the strange sacrifices
that she was ready to make in order to save him.
Exalted as she was by a sentiment on which she plumed herself, to the
complete subordination of her pride, she would have liked not to have
let a single minute of her life go by without filling it with some
extraordinary act. The strangest projects, and ones involving her in
the utmost danger, supplied the topics of her long interviews with
Julien. The well-paid gaolers allowed her to reign over the prison.
Mathilde's ideas were not limited by the sacrifice of her reputation.
She would have thought nothing of making her condition known to society
at large. Throwing herself on her knees before the king's carriage
as it galloped along, in order to ask for Julien's pardon, and thus
attracting the attention of the prince, at the risk of being crushed
a thousand times over, was one of the least fantastic dreams in which
this exalted and courageous imagination chose to indulge. She was
certain of being admitted into the reserved portion of the park of St.
Cloud, through those friends of hers who were employed at the king's
court.
Julien thought himself somewhat unworthy of so much devotion. As a
matter of fact, he was tired of heroism. A simple, naive, and almost
timid tenderness was what would have appealed to him, while Mathilde's
haughty soul, on the other hand, always required the idea of a public
and an audience.
In the midst of all her anguish and all her fears for the life of
that lover whom she was unwilling to survive, she felt a secret need
of astonishing the public by the extravagance of her love and the
sublimity of her actions.
Julien felt irritated at not finding himself touched by all this
heroism. What would he have felt if he had known of all the mad ideas
with which Mathilde overwhelmed the devoted but eminently logical and
limited spirit of the good Fouque?
He did not know what to find fault with in Mathilde's devotion. For
he, too, would have sacrificed all his fortune, and have exposed his
life to the greatest risks in order to save Julien. He was dumbfounded
by the quantity of gold which Mathilde flung away. During the first
days Fouque, who had all the provincial's respect for money, was much
impressed by the sums she spent in this way.
He at last discovered that mademoiselle de la Mole's projects
frequently varied, and he was greatly relieved at finding a word with
which to express his blame for a character whom he found so exhausting.
She was changeable. There is only a step from this epithet to that of
wrong-headed, the greatest term of opprobrium known to the provinces.
"It is singular," said Julien to himself, as Mathilde was going out
of his prison one day, "that I should be so insensible at being the
object of so keen a passion! And two months ago I adored her! I have,
of course, read that the approach of death makes one lose interest
in everything, but it is awful to feel oneself ungrateful, and not
to be able to change. Am I an egoist, then?" He addressed the most
humiliating reproaches to himself on this score.
Ambition was dead in his heart; another passion had arisen from its
ashes. He called it remorse at having assassinated madame de Renal.
As a matter of fact, he loved her to the point of distraction. He
experienced a singular happiness on these occasions when, being left
absolutely alone, and without being afraid of being interrupted, he
could surrender himself completely to the memory of the happy days
which he had once passed at Verrieres, or at Vergy. The slightest
incidents of these days, which had fleeted away only too rapidly,
possessed an irresistible freshness and charm. He never gave a thought
to his Paris successes; they bored him.
These moods, which became intensified with every succeeding day, were
partly guessed by the jealous Mathilde. She realised very clearly that
she had to struggle against his love of solitude. Sometimes, with
terror in her heart, she uttered madame de Renal's name.
She saw Julien quiver. Henceforth her passion had neither bounds nor
limit.
"If he dies, I will die after him," she said to herself in all good
faith. "What will the Paris salons say when they see a girl of my own
rank carry her adoration for a lover who is condemned to death to such
a pitch as this? For sentiments like these you must go back to the age
of the heroes. It was loves of this kind which thrilled the hearts of
the century of Charles IX. and Henri III."
In the midst of her keenest transports, when she was clasping Julien's
head against her heart, she would say to herself with horror, "What!
is this charming head doomed to fall? Well," she added, inflamed by
a not unhappy heroism, "these lips of mine, which are now pressing
against this pretty hair, will be icy cold less than twenty-four hours
afterwards."
Thoughts of the awful voluptuousness of such heroic moments gripped
her in a compelling embrace. The idea of suicide, absorbing enough
in itself, entered that haughty soul (to which, up to the present it
had been so utterly alien), and soon reigned over it with an absolute
dominion.
"No, the blood of my ancestors has not grown tepid in descending to
me," said Mathilde proudly to herself.
"I have a favour to ask of you," said her lover to her one day. "Put
your child out to nurse at Verrieres. Madame de Renal will look after
the nurse."
"Those words of yours are very harsh." And Mathilde paled.
"It is true, and I ask your pardon a thousand times," exclaimed Julien,
emerging from his reverie, and clasping her in his arms.
After having dried his tears, he reverted to his original idea, but
with greater tact. He had given a twist of melancholy philosophy to the
conversation. He talked of that future of his which was so soon going
to close. "One must admit, dear one, that passions are an accident in
life, but such accidents only occur in superior souls.... My son's
death would be in reality a happiness for your own proud family, and
all the servants will realize as much. Neglect will be the lot of that
child of shame and unhappiness. I hope that, at a time which I do not
wish to fix, but which nevertheless I am courageous enough to imagine,
you will obey my last advice: you will marry the marquis de Croisenois."
"What? Dishonoured?"
"Dishonour cannot attach to a name such as yours. You will be a widow,
and the widow of a madman--that is all. I will go further--my crime
will confer no dishonour, since it had no money motive. Perhaps when
the time comes for your marriage, some philosophic legislator will have
so far prevailed on the prejudice of his contemporaries as to have
secured the suppression of the death penalty. Then some friendly voice
will say, by way of giving an instance: 'Why, madame de la Mole's first
husband was a madman, but not a wicked man or a criminal. It was absurd
to have his head cut off.' So my memory will not be infamous in any
way--at least, after a certain time.... Your position in society, your
fortune, and, if you will allow me to say so, your genius, will make M.
de Croisenois, once he is your husband, play a part which he would have
never managed to secure unaided. He only possesses birth and bravery,
and those qualities alone, though they constituted an accomplished man
in 1729, are an anachronism a century later on, and only give rise to
unwarranted pretensions. You need other things if you are to place
yourself at the head of the youth of France."
"You will take all the help of your firm and enterprising character
to the political party which you will make your husband join. You may
be able to be a successor to the Chevreuses and the Longuevilles of
the Fronde--but then, dear one, the divine fire which animates you
at present will have grown a little tepid. Allow me to tell you," he
added, "after many other preparatory phrases, that in fifteen years'
time you will look upon the love you once had for me as a madness,
which though excusable, was a piece of madness all the same."
He stopped suddenly and became meditative. He found himself again
confronted with the idea which shocked Mathilde so much: "In fifteen
years, madame de Renal will adore my son and you will have forgotten
him."
CHAPTER LXX
TRANQUILITY
It is because I was foolish then that I am wise to-day.
Oh thou philosopher who seest nothing except the actual
instant. How short-sighted are thy views! Thine eye
is not adapted to follow the subterranean work of the
passions.--_M. Goethe_.
This conversation was interrupted by an interrogation followed by
a conference with the advocate entrusted with the defence. These
moments were the only absolutely unpleasant ones in a life made up of
nonchalance and tender reveries.
"There is murder, and murder with premeditation," said Julien to the
judge as he had done to the advocate, "I am sorry, gentlemen, he added
with a smile, that this reduces your functions to a very small compass."
"After all," said Julien to himself, when he had managed to rid
himself of those two persons, "I must really be brave, and apparently
braver than those two men. They regard that duel with an unfortunate
termination, which I can only seriously bother myself about on the
actual day, as the greatest of evils and the arch-terror."
"The fact is that I have known a much greater unhappiness," continued
Julien, as he went on philosophising with himself. "I suffered far
more acutely during my first journey to Strasbourg, when I thought I
was abandoned by Mathilde--and to think that I desired so passionately
that same perfect intimacy which to-day leaves me so cold--as a matter
of fact I am more happy alone than when that handsome girl shares my
solitude."
The advocate, who was a red-tape pedant, thought him mad, and believed,
with the public, that it was jealousy which had lead him to take up
the pistol. He ventured one day to give Julien to understand that
this contention, whether true or false, would be an excellent way of
pleading. But the accused man became in a single minute a passionate
and drastic individual.
"As you value your life, monsieur," exclaimed Julien, quite beside
himself, "mind you never put forward such an abominable lie." The
cautious advocate was for a moment afraid of being assassinated.
He was preparing his case because the decisive moment was drawing near.
The only topic of conversation in Besancon, and all the department, was
the _cause celebre_. Julien did not know of this circumstance. He had
requested his friends never to talk to him about that kind of thing.
On this particular day, Fouque and Mathilde had tried to inform him
of certain rumours which in their view were calculated to give hope.
Julien had stopped them at the very first word.
"Leave me my ideal life. Your pettifogging troubles and details of
practical life all more or less jar on me and bring me down from my
heaven. One dies as best one can: but I wish to chose my own way of
thinking about death. What do I care for other people? My relations
with other people will be sharply cut short. Be kind enough not to talk
to me any more about those people. Seeing the judge and the advocate is
more than enough."
"As a matter of fact," he said to himself, "it seems that I am fated
to die dreaming. An obscure creature like myself, who is certain to be
forgotten within a fortnight, would be very silly, one must admit, to
go and play a part. It is nevertheless singular that I never knew so
much about the art of enjoying life, as since I have seen its end so
near me."
He passed his last day in promenading upon the narrow terrace at the
top of the turret, smoking some excellent cigars which Mathilde had
had fetched from Holland by a courier. He had no suspicion that his
appearance was waited for each day by all the telescopes in the town.
His thoughts were at Vergy. He never spoke to Fouque about madame de
Renal, but his friend told him two or three times that she was rapidly
recovering, and these words reverberated in his heart.
While Julien's soul was nearly all the time wholly in the realm
of ideas, Mathilde, who, as befits an aristocratic spirit, had
occupied herself with concrete things, had managed to make the
direct and intimate correspondence between madame de Fervaques and
M. de Frilair progress so far that the great word bishopric had been
already pronounced. The venerable prelate, who was entrusted with the
distribution of the benefices, added in a postscript to one of his
niece's letters, "This poor Sorel is only a lunatic. I hope he will be
restored to us."
At the sight of these lines, M. de Frilair felt transported. He had no
doubts about saving Julien.
"But for this Jacobin law which has ordered the formation of an
unending panel of jurymen, and which has no other real object, except
to deprive well-born people of all their influence," he said to
Mathilde on the eve of the balloting for the thirty-six jurymen of the
session, "I would have answered for the verdict. I certainly managed to
get the cure N---- acquitted."
When the names were selected by ballot on the following day, M. de
Frilair experienced a genuine pleasure in finding that they contained
five members of the Besancon congregation and that amongst those who
were strangers to the town were the names of MM. Valenod, de Moirod,
de Cholin. I can answer for these eight jurymen he said to Mathilde.
The first five are mere machines, Valenod is my agent: Moirod owes me
everything: de Cholin is an imbecile who is frightened of everything.
The journal published the names of the jurymen throughout the
department, and to her husband's unspeakable terror, madame de Renal
wished to go to Besancon. All that M. de Renal could prevail on her
to promise was that she would not leave her bed so as to avoid the
unpleasantness of being called to give evidence. "You do not understand
my position," said the former mayor of Verrieres. "I am now said to
be disloyal and a Liberal. No doubt that scoundrel Valenod and M. de
Frilair will get the procureur-general and the judges to do all they
can to cause me unpleasantness."
Madame de Renal found no difficulty in yielding to her husband's
orders. "If I appear at the assize court," she said to herself, "I
should seem as if I were asking for vengeance." In spite of all the
promises she had made to the director of her conscience and to her
husband that she would be discreet, she had scarcely arrived at
Besancon before she wrote with her own hand to each of the thirty-six
jurymen:--
"I shall not appear on the day of the trial, monsieur, because my
presence might be prejudicial to M. Sorel's case. I only desire one
thing in the world, and that I desire passionately--for him to be
saved. Have no doubt about it, the awful idea that I am the cause of an
innocent man being led to his death would poison the rest of my life
and would no doubt curtail it. How can you condemn him to death while I
continue to live? No, there is no doubt about it, society has no right
to take away a man's life, and above all, the life of a being like
Julien Sorel. Everyone at Verrieres knew that there were moments when
he was quite distracted. This poor young man has some powerful enemies,
but even among his enemies, (and how many has he not got?) who is there
who casts any doubt on his admirable talents and his deep knowledge?
The man whom you are going to try, monsieur, is not an ordinary person.
For a period of nearly eighteen months we all knew him as a devout and
well behaved student. Two or three times in the year he was seized by
fits of melancholy that went to the point of distraction. The whole
town of Verrieres, all our neighbours at Vergy, where we live in the
fine weather, my whole family, and monsieur the sub-prefect himself
will render justice to his exemplary piety. He knows all the Holy Bible
by heart. Would a blasphemer have spent years of study in learning the
Sacred Book. My sons will have the honour of presenting you with this
letter, they are children. Be good enough to question them, monsieur,
they will give you all the details concerning this poor young man which
are necessary to convince you of how barbarous it would be to condemn
him. Far from revenging me, you would be putting me to death.
"What can his enemies argue against this? The wound, which was the
result of one of those moments of madness, which my children themselves
used to remark in their tutor, is so little dangerous than in less
than two months it has allowed me to take the post from Verrieres to
Besancon. If I learn, monsieur, that you show the slightest hesitation
in releasing so innocent a person from the barbarity of the law, I will
leave my bed, where I am only kept by my husband's express orders, and
I will go and throw myself at your feet. Bring in a verdict, monsieur,
that the premeditation has not been made out, and you will not have an
innocent man's blood on your head, etc."
CHAPTER LXXI
THE TRIAL
The country will remember this celebrated case for
a long time. The interest in the accused amounted
to an agitation. The reason was that his crime was
astonishing, and yet not atrocious. Even if it had been,
this young man was so handsome. His brilliant career,
that came to an end so early in his life, intensified
the pathos. "Will they condemn him?" the women asked of
the men of their acquaintance, and they could be seen to
grow pale as they waited for the answer.--_Sainte Beuve_.
The day that madame de Renal and Mathilde feared so much arrived at
last.
Their terror was intensified by the strange appearance of the town,
which had its emotional effect even upon Fouque's sturdy soul. All the
province had rushed to Besancon to see the trial of this romantic case.
There had been no room left in the inns for some days. M. the president
of the assizes, was besieged by requests for tickets; all the ladies
in the town wanted to be present at the trial. Julien's portrait was
hawked about the streets, etc., etc.
Mathilde was keeping in reserve for this supreme moment a complete
autograph letter from my lord, bishop of ----. This prelate, who
governed the Church of France and created its bishops, was good enough
to ask for Julien's acquittal. On the eve of the trial, Mathilde took
this letter to the all-powerful grand vicar.
When she was going away in tears at the end of the interview, M.
de Frilair at last emerged from his diplomatic reserve and almost
shewed some emotion himself. "I will be responsible for the jury's
verdict," he said to her. "Out of the twelve persons charged with the
investigation of whether your friend's crime is made out, and above
all, whether there was premeditation, I can count six friends who are
devoted to my fortunes, and I have given them to understand that they
have it in their power to promote me to the episcopate. Baron Valenod,
whom I have made mayor of Verrieres, can do just as he likes with two
of his officials, MM. de Moirod, and de Cholin. As a matter of fact,
fate has given us for this business two jurymen of extremely loose
views; but, although ultra-Liberals, they are faithful to my orders on
great occasions, and I have requested them to vote like M. Valenod.
I have learnt that a sixth juryman, a manufacturer, who is immensely
rich, and a garrulous Liberal into the bargain, has secret aspirations
for a contract with the War Office, and doubtless he would not like to
displease me. I have had him told that M. de Valenod knows my final
injunctions."
"And who is this M. Valenod?" said Mathilde, anxiously.
"If you knew him, you could not doubt our success. He is an audacious
speaker, coarse, impudent, with a natural gift for managing fools. 1814
saw him in low water, and I am going to make a prefect of him. He is
capable of beating the other jurymen if they do not vote his way."
Mathilde felt a little reassured.
Another discussion awaited her in the evening. To avoid the
prolongation of an unpleasant scene, the result of which, in his view,
was absolutely certain, Julien had resolved not to make a speech.
"My advocate will speak," he said to Mathilde. "I shall figure too long
anyway as a laughing-stock to all my enemies. These provincials have
been shocked by the rapidity of my success, for which I have to thank
you, and believe me, there is not one of them who does not desire my
conviction, though he would be quite ready to cry like an idiot when I
am taken to my death."
"They desire to see you humiliated. That is only too true," answered
Mathilde, "but I do not think they are at all cruel. My presence at
Besancon, and the sight of my sufferings have interested all the women;
your handsome face will do the rest. If you say a few words to your
judges, the whole audience will be on your side, etc., etc."
At nine o'clock on the following day, when Julien left his prison
for the great hall of the Palais de Justice, the gendarmes had much
difficulty in driving away the immense crowd that was packed in the
courtyard. Julien had slept well. He was very calm, and experienced no
other sentiment except a sense of philosophic pity towards that crowd
of jealous creatures who were going to applaud his death sentence,
though without cruelty. He was very surprised when, having been
detained in the middle of the crowd more than a quarter of an hour,
he was obliged to admit that his presence affected the public with
a tender pity. He did not hear a single unpleasant remark. "These
provincials are less evil than I thought," he said to himself.
As he entered the courtroom, he was struck by the elegance of the
architecture. It was real Gothic, with a number of pretty little
columns hewn out of stone with the utmost care. He thought himself in
England.
But his attention was soon engrossed by twelve or fifteen pretty
women, who sat exactly opposite the prisoner's seat and filled the
three balconies above the judges and the jury. As he turned round
towards the public, he saw that the circular gallery that dominated the
amphitheatre was filled with women, the majority were young and seemed
very pretty, their eyes were shining and full of interest. The crowd
was enormous throughout the rest of the room. People were knocking
against the door, and the janitors could not obtain silence.
When all the eyes that were looking for Julien observed where he was,
and saw him occupying the slightly raised place which is reserved for
the prisoner, he was greeted by a murmur of astonishment and tender
interest.
You would have taken him for under twenty on this day. He was dressed
very simply, but with a perfect grace. His hair and his forehead were
charming. Mathilde had insisted on officiating personally at his
toilette. Julien's pallor was extreme. Scarcely was he seated in this
place than he heard people say all over the room, "Great heavens! how
young he is!... But he's quite a child!... He is much better than his
portrait."
"Prisoner," said the gendarme who was sitting on his right, "do you see
those six ladies in that balcony?" The gendarme pointed out a little
gallery that jutted out over the amphitheatre where the jury were
placed. "That's madame, the prefect's wife," continued the gendarme.
"Next to her, madame the marquise de M----. She likes you well: I have
heard her speak to the judge of first instance. Next to her is madame
Derville."
"Madame Derville!" exclaimed Julien, and a vivid blush spread over his
forehead. "When she leaves here," he thought, "she will write to madame
de Renal." He was ignorant of madame de Renal's arrival at Besancon.
The witnesses were quickly heard. After the first words of the opening
of the prosecution by the advocate-general, two of the ladies in the
little balcony just opposite Julien burst into tears. Julien noticed
that madame Derville did not break down at all. He remarked, however,
that she was very red.
The advocate-general was indulging in melodrama in bad French over the
barbarity of the crime that had been perpetrated. Julien noticed that
madame Derville's neighbours seemed to manifest a keen disapproval.
Several jurors, who were apparently acquainted with the ladies, spoke
to them and seemed to reassure them. "So far as it goes, that is
certainly a good omen," thought Julien.
Up to the present, he had felt himself steeped in an unadulterated
contempt for all the persons who were present at the trial. This
sentiment of disgust was intensified by the stale eloquence of
the advocate-general. But the coldness of Julien's soul gradually
disappeared before the marks of interest of which he was evidently the
object.
He was satisfied with the sturdy demeanour of his advocate. "No
phrases," he said to him in a whisper, as he was about to commence his
speech.
"All the bombast which our opponent has stolen from Bossuet and
lavished upon you," said the advocate, "has done you good."
As a matter of fact, he had scarcely spoken for five minutes before
practically all the women had their handkerchiefs in their hands. The
advocate was encouraged, and addressed some extremely strong remarks
to the jury. Julien shuddered. He felt on the point of breaking into
tears. "My God," he thought, "what would my enemies say?"
He was on the point of succumbing to the emotion which was overcoming
him, when, luckily for him, he surprised an insolent look from M. the
baron de Valenod.
"That rogue's eyes are gleaming," he said to himself "What a triumph
for that base soul! If my crime had only produced this one result, it
would be my duty to curse it. God knows what he will say about it to
madame de Renal."
This idea effaced all others. Shortly afterwards Julien was brought
back to reality by the public's manifestation of applause. The advocate
had just finished his speech. Julien remembered that it was good form
to shake hands with him. The time had passed rapidly.
They brought in refreshments for the advocate and the prisoner. It was
only then that Julien was struck by the fact that none of the women had
left the audience to go and get dinner.
"Upon my word, I am dying of hunger," said the advocate. "And you?"
"I, too," answered Julien.
"See, there's madame, the prefect's wife, who is also getting her
dinner," said the advocate, as he pointed out the little balcony. "Keep
up your courage; everything is going all right." The court sat again.
Midnight struck as the president was summing up. The president was
obliged to pause in his remarks. Amid the silence and the anxiety of
all present, the reverberation of the clock filled the hall.
"So my last day is now beginning," thought Julien. He soon felt
inflamed by the idea of his duty. Up to the present he had controlled
his emotion and had kept his resolution not to speak. When the
president of the assizes asked him if he had anything to add, he got
up. He saw in front of him the eyes of madame Derville, which seemed
very brilliant in the artificial light. "Can she by any chance be
crying?" he thought.
"Gentlemen of the jury!
"I am induced to speak by my fear of that contempt which I thought,
at the very moment of my death, I should be able to defy. Gentlemen,
I have not the honour of belonging to your class. You behold in me a
peasant who has rebelled against the meanness of his fortune.
"I do not ask you for any pardon," continued Julien, with a firmer
note in his voice. "I am under no illusions. Death awaits me; it
will be just. I have brought myself to make an attempt on the life
of the woman who is most worthy of all reverence and all respect.
Madame de Renal was a mother to me. My crime was atrocious, and it
was premeditated. Consequently, I have deserved death, gentlemen of
the jury. But even if I were not so guilty, I see among you men who,
without a thought for any pity that may be due to my youth, would like
to use me as a means for punishing and discouraging for ever that class
of young man who, though born in an inferior class, and to some extent
oppressed by poverty, have none the less been fortunate enough to
obtain a good education, and bold enough to mix with what the pride of
the rich calls Society.
"That is my crime, gentlemen, and it will be punished with even more
severity, inasmuch as, in fact, I am very far from being judged by my
peers. I do not see on the jury benches any peasant who has made money,
but only indignant bourgeois...."
Julien talked in this strain for twenty minutes. He said everything
he had on his mind. The advocate-general, who aspired to the favours
of the aristocracy, writhed in his seat. But in spite of the somewhat
abstract turn which Julien had given to his speech, all the women
burst out into tears. Even madame Derville put her handkerchief to
her eyes. Before finishing, Julien alluded again to the fact of his
premeditation, to his repentance, and to the respect and unbounded
filial admiration which, in happier days, he had entertained for madame
de Renal.... Madame Derville gave a cry and fainted.
One o'clock was striking when the jury retired to their room. None of
the women had left their places; several men had tears in their eyes.
The conversations were at first very animated, but, as there was a
delay in the verdict of the jury, their general fatigue gradually began
to invest the gathering with an atmosphere of calm. It was a solemn
moment; the lights grew less brilliant. Julien, who was very tired,
heard people around him debating the question of whether this delay was
a good or a bad omen. He was pleased to see that all the wishes were
for him. The jury did not come back, and yet not a woman left the court.
When two o'clock had struck, a great movement was heard. The little
door of the jury room opened. M. the baron de Valenod advanced with
a slow and melodramatic step. He was followed by all the jurors. He
coughed, and then declared on his soul and conscience that the jury's
unanimous verdict was that Julien Sorel was guilty of murder, and of
murder with premeditation. This verdict involved the death penalty,
which was pronounced a moment afterwards. Julien looked at his watch,
and remembered M. de Lavalette. It was a quarter past two. "To-day is
Friday," he thought.
"Yes, but this day is lucky for the Valenod who has got me
convicted.... I am watched too well for Mathilde to manage to save me
like madame de Lavalette saved her husband.... So in three days' time,
at this very hour, I shall know what view to take about the great
perhaps."
At this moment he heard a cry and was called back to the things of this
world. The women around him were sobbing: he saw that all faces were
turned towards a little gallery built into the crowning of a Gothic
pilaster. He knew later that Mathilde had concealed herself there. As
the cry was not repeated, everybody began to look at Julien again, as
the gendarmes were trying to get him through the crowd.
"Let us try not to give that villain Valenod any chance of laughing
at me," thought Julien. "With what a contrite sycophantic expression
he pronounced the verdict which entails the death penalty, while that
poor president of the assizes, although he has been a judge for years
and years, had tears in his eyes as he sentenced me. What a joy the
Valenod must find in revenging himself for our former rivalry for
madame de Renal's favors! ... So I shall never see her again! The thing
is finished.... A last good-bye between us is impossible--I feel it....
How happy I should have been to have told her all the horror I feel for
my crime!
"Mere words. I consider myself justly convicted."
| 13,942 | null | https://web.archive.org/web/20210301223854/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/redblack/section9/ | Julien feels like he has won the battle but not the war. He quickly impresses the other soldiers with his skill and professionalism. He is more ambitious than ever, hoping to become commander-in- chief of the French army by the time he is thirty. Julien also begins planning for the future of his child, who he is sure will be a boy. But all of his dreams are shattered when the Marquis de la Mole receives a letter from Mme. de Renal, denouncing Julien as a womanizer ambitious to make his fortune by seducing rich aristocrats. The Marquis withdraws all of his support for Julien, condemns his proposed marriage to Mathilde and asks Julien to move to America. Julien is stunned and, without a second thought, races back home to Verrieres where he finds Mme. de Renal kneeling in prayer at Church. Shaking violently, he shoots her from behind. Julien is immediately arrested and taken to Besancon to await trial. There he writes to Mathilde, ordering her to forget about him and to marry one of her many suitors. The idea of death no longer frightens Julien and he demands to be executed. However, Mme. de Renal was only slightly wounded from the one bullet that struck her and makes a quick recovery. Julien is overjoyed that she is not dead and for the first time in his life begins to believe in God. Mathilde and Fouque soon arrive to help him escape but Julien refuses, deciding that he wants to die. Mathilde goes to great lengths in her efforts to save Julien, hiring lawyers and attempting to bribe the priests in charge of Julien's court case. Despite her devotion to him, Julien soon loses interest in Mathilde and begins to think of Mme. de Renal instead. He decides that he only knew true happiness with Mme. de Renal, not Mathilde. Mme. de Renal decides not to appear at Julien's trial and writes a letter to the jury demanding his acquittal. She is still in love with Julien and feels so guilty that she secretly wishes he had killed her. Despite Julien's plea for death, Mathilde thinks that she has bribed the right people to assure Julien's innocence. However, M. Valenod is the foreman of the jury and is still jealous of Julien's affair with Mme. de Renal. He and one of Julien's enemies from the seminary pronounce Julien guilty and vote for his execution. Julien contemplates suicide until Mme. de Renal visits him in jail. They both still love each other, and vow not to commit suicide. Mme. de Renal confesses that she was forced by her confessor to write the letter to the Marquis, and Julien forgives her. When he is left alone, Julien finally begins to understand himself. He renounces hypocrisy as the malaise of his century and finds solace in his love for Mme. de Renal. He wishes that he had not been so ambitious and could have just concentrated on loving her. Julien rejects all final offers of clemency and is guillotined. With a bitter sense of historical irony, Mathilde buries his severed head herself, while Mme. de Renal dies of despair three days later. | Commentary Stendhal finishes the novel with a bitter denunciation of the political corruption of the clergy. He continues to acknowledge the existence of good men like M. Chelan and M. Pirard, but he portrays the majority of the clergy as conniving politicians. A jealous priest forces Mme. de Renal to write her letter to the Marquis. She later admits to Julien that the priest actually wrote it himself. During Julien's trial, Mathilde bribes a large number of priests who claim they can secure an acquittal. One priest even tries to blackmail Mathilde into making him a bishop in return for his help. As he nears death, Julien refuses to find truth in a religion where priests are more concerned with politics and their salaries than in helping the poor. Both Julien and Mathilde's reliance on French history to dictate their own destinies comes back to haunt them in this final section. Julien's admiration for Napoleonic honor and glory encourage him to both shoot Mme. de Renal and to later refuse clemency. He falsely believes that, like Napoleon, his glory and reputation will grow with his death. He wants to be a martyr. Mathilde's obsession with her decapitated ancestor, Boniface de la Mole, comes to life as well. As Julien goes off to kill Mme. de Renal, Mathilde notes how "Boniface de la Mole seemed reborn in him." When Julien is finally guillotined, she does not hesitate to kiss his severed head and bury it herself, just as Queen Margot did 250 years earlier. In this historical context, Julien's fate seems sealed from the moment Mathilde falls in love with him. Her idea of romance is inextricably linked to the decapitation of her lover. Julien simply reenacts a role subconsciously prescribed to him by Mathilde. Stendhal thus uses Julien's unoriginal death to further criticize the predictable and boring nineteenth century. It is only in this last section that the reader begins to understand and admire Julien Sorel. He readily admits that Mme. de Renal represents a maternal figure for him. Since there is never any mention of Julien's biological mother, his tie with Mme. de Renal seems much stronger. As his love for Mathilde grows cold, one can only suspect that Julien has not been able to forget the class difference that separates them. His rejection of French society must also be a rejection of Mathilde. But as a surrogate mother, Mme. de Renal represents everything Julien ever really wanted in life: unconditional love. As he approaches death, Julien gains a sudden insight into who he really is. He realizes that he has always defined himself in terms of politics and society as a whole, never on his own terms. He always saw himself as a possible something-else, and not as Julien Sorel. This emphasis on individualism, one of Stendhal's classic themes, is finally resolved when Julien refuses to see himself through the lens of French society and French history. He is no Napoleon, he is no Boniface, and he is no de la Vernaye. Unlike the charlatans around him, Julien discovers that he has "nobility in my heart." At his trial, he thus admonishes the lack of originality and creativity that plagues the nineteenth century. Having wanted to make his fortune all his life, Julien finally sees that it is successful bourgeois men like M. Valenod that are the most dangerous men in France. Stendhal sadly notes that not only are conservatives impeding the progress of French society, but liberals are making hypocrisy the national pastime. | 530 | 586 | [
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5,658 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/chapters_22_to_23.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Lord Jim/section_15_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapters 22-23 | chapters 22-23 | null | {"name": "Chapters 22-23", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219145744/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/l/lord-jim/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2223", "summary": "Patusan, we are told, was often used by adventurers to satisfy either their greed or their need to perform heroic deeds. It was savage country, shut off from the rest of the world. A man could feel as though he were a \"hero\" if he went there to go \"into the bush\" -- that is, to ravage Patusan's treasure, which was pepper. Men had often died in Patusan attempting a perilous quest for pepper, for at one time, pepper was almost as valuable as pearls. One day, however, pepper lost its aura of rarity, and as the narrator says, \"Nobody cares for it now.\" Today, wealth is no longer flowing out of Patusan, and the bones of its anonymous \"heroes\" are lying in scattered heaps, bleaching on sunlit beaches. Marlow marvels at the bizarre, absurd lengths to which some men will go to achieve money and transient glory. When Jim went to Patusan, Marlow says, the only people fighting over Patusan were the diverse uncles of the Sultan, himself \"an imbecile youth with two thumbs on his left hand.\" The worst of the uncles was Rajah Allang, a \"dirty little used-up old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth.\" Marlow remembers Jim's reaction when he first told him about Patusan. Initially, Jim had felt a kind of \"weary resignation,\" but that attitude was gradually replaced by \"surprise, interest, wonder, and by boyish eagerness.\" This was the chance Jim had been dreaming of! Marlow emphasized to Jim that this venture would be \"his own doing.\" Jim would be wholly responsible. The young man was filled with impulsive and inarticulate joy. He didn't mind going into a wilderness. He was eager to do so! The outside world would never know that he had ever existed. At last, he would finally have \"nothing but the soles of his two feet to stand on.\" Marlow cautioned Jim to use prudence in this new venture, but Jim was filled with so much exuberance that he flung himself out of the room before Marlow could finish speaking. Jim stated that he never wanted to go back to England, a desire that Marlow found unimaginable. Never? he asked him. Never, Jim emphasized. He was adamant about his decision: \"'Never,' he repeated dreamily . . . and then flew into sudden activity.\" With Marlow's help, Jim finally got packed. Then, at the last moment before Jim's rowers had cast off, Marlow clamored onto Jim's ship and talked briefly to Jim's half-caste captain, who seemed to be a lunatic. The man said that he intended to take Jim to the mouth of the river leading into Patusan, but that he had no intention of going any farther upriver. Patusan was too dangerous; it was like a \"cage of beasts made ravenous by long impenitence,\" he said, and in a mock pantomime, he dramatically stabbed himself in the back. Behind the captain, Marlow saw Jim suddenly appear, smiling silently and raising a hand to check Marlow's horror of the adventure that was about to begin. Then a heavy boom swung around, and Jim and Marlow clasped each other's hands. Marlow awkwardly called Jim \"dear boy,\" and Jim half-uttered \"old man.\" Yet, Marlow says, there was in their embarrassed goodbyes, \"a moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a glimpse of some everlasting, saving truth.\" The ship cast off, and Jim raised his cap above his head and waved it broadly to Marlow, calling out indistinctly, \"You -- shall -- hear -- of -- me.\"", "analysis": "Again, Conrad lets us know that at an earlier time, Patusan was famous for its vast treasure of pepper, but now that pepper is not so important, Patusan has lost much of its influence as an important trading center. In fact, the reader often wonders what it is that justifies Stein's still retaining a trading post there. In this chapter, we also hear of the immense danger for strangers to travel to Patusan; the \"wary captain\" who is to take Jim to Patusan refuses to go any farther than the mouth of the river; he explains to Marlow that he already sees Jim as a dead man. Part of the danger is a man named Rajah Allang . Jim, however, welcomes to the point of ecstasy the opportunity to simply fade from civilization, to enter Patusan and let the veil of civilization forever close behind him. He welcomes the opportunity to \"jump into the unknown\" and \"achieve his disappearance\" from all of the known world. Thus, Conrad continues his metaphor of \"jumping\" -- that is, just as Jim's jump from the Patna was a jump into an unknown part of himself, his \"Jump\" here, into an unknown part of the world , is an equivalent jump into the unknown. \"Once he got in, it would be for the outside world as though he had never existed. He would have nothing but the soles of his two feet to stand upon.\" We further see Stein as the complete romantic, and his romantic nature is further revealed in the generous provisions that he is ready to make for this youth, whose story has captured his own romantic imagination to the point that he is ready to bestow much of his fortune on Jim. In Chapter 23, we are told about the ring which old Doramin gave to Stein as a parting symbol of their eternal friendship. Jim is to take Stein's ring to Doramin, and it will insure him protection by the great chief . This, of course, is the ring which will figure so prominently in Jim's tragic death at the end of the narrative. Although Jim is wildly enthusiastic about his future fortunes -- to Marlow, Jim seems filled with romantic posturing to the point of being melodramatic. But even now, Marlow doesn't fully understand the nature of the weight that Jim feels, a weight so heavy that Marlow doesn't understand Jim when Jim mentions that once he is in Patusan, he will never want to come out again. When Marlow asserts that \"if you only live long enough, you will want to come back,\" Jim virtually ignores him and dismisses Marlow's comment with the remark, \"Come back to what?\" For Jim, the civilized world has no hold on him. He is no longer a part of the civilized world. For Jim, this is his \"magnificent chance\" to prove his own worth to himself."} |
'The conquest of love, honour, men's confidence--the pride of it, the
power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are
struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim's successes there
were no externals. Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of
an indifferent world, and the noise of the white surf along the coast
overpowered the voice of fame. The stream of civilisation, as if divided
on a headland a hundred miles north of Patusan, branches east and
south-east, leaving its plains and valleys, its old trees and its old
mankind, neglected and isolated, such as an insignificant and crumbling
islet between the two branches of a mighty, devouring stream. You find
the name of the country pretty often in collections of old voyages. The
seventeenth-century traders went there for pepper, because the passion
for pepper seemed to burn like a flame of love in the breast of Dutch
and English adventurers about the time of James the First. Where
wouldn't they go for pepper! For a bag of pepper they would cut each
other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls,
of which they were so careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that
desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes--the unknown seas, the
loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence,
and despair. It made them great! By heavens! it made them heroic; and
it made them pathetic too in their craving for trade with the inflexible
death levying its toll on young and old. It seems impossible to believe
that mere greed could hold men to such a steadfastness of purpose, to
such a blind persistence in endeavour and sacrifice. And indeed those
who adventured their persons and lives risked all they had for a slender
reward. They left their bones to lie bleaching on distant shores, so
that wealth might flow to the living at home. To us, their less tried
successors, they appear magnified, not as agents of trade but as
instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into the unknown in
obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a
dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they
were ready for the wonderful. They recorded it complacently in their
sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of strange
nations, in the glory of splendid rulers.
'In Patusan they had found lots of pepper, and had been impressed by the
magnificence and the wisdom of the Sultan; but somehow, after a century
of chequered intercourse, the country seems to drop gradually out of the
trade. Perhaps the pepper had given out. Be it as it may, nobody cares
for it now; the glory has departed, the Sultan is an imbecile youth
with two thumbs on his left hand and an uncertain and beggarly revenue
extorted from a miserable population and stolen from him by his many
uncles.
'This of course I have from Stein. He gave me their names and a short
sketch of the life and character of each. He was as full of information
about native states as an official report, but infinitely more amusing.
He _had_ to know. He traded in so many, and in some districts--as in
Patusan, for instance--his firm was the only one to have an agency by
special permit from the Dutch authorities. The Government trusted his
discretion, and it was understood that he took all the risks. The men
he employed understood that too, but he made it worth their while
apparently. He was perfectly frank with me over the breakfast-table in
the morning. As far as he was aware (the last news was thirteen months
old, he stated precisely), utter insecurity for life and property was
the normal condition. There were in Patusan antagonistic forces, and one
of them was Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan's uncles, the governor
of the river, who did the extorting and the stealing, and ground down
to the point of extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly
defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating--"For indeed," as
Stein remarked, "where could they go, and how could they get away?"
No doubt they did not even desire to get away. The world (which is
circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains) has been given into the
hand of the high-born, and _this_ Rajah they knew: he was of their own
royal house. I had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman later on. He
was a dirty, little, used-up old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth,
who swallowed an opium pill every two hours, and in defiance of common
decency wore his hair uncovered and falling in wild stringy locks about
his wizened grimy face. When giving audience he would clamber upon a
sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a rotten
bamboo floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or
fifteen feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying
under the house. That is where and how he received us when, accompanied
by Jim, I paid him a visit of ceremony. There were about forty people in
the room, and perhaps three times as many in the great courtyard below.
There was constant movement, coming and going, pushing and murmuring,
at our backs. A few youths in gay silks glared from the distance; the
majority, slaves and humble dependants, were half naked, in ragged
sarongs, dirty with ashes and mud-stains. I had never seen Jim look so
grave, so self-possessed, in an impenetrable, impressive way. In the
midst of these dark-faced men, his stalwart figure in white apparel,
the gleaming clusters of his fair hair, seemed to catch all the sunshine
that trickled through the cracks in the closed shutters of that dim
hall, with its walls of mats and a roof of thatch. He appeared like a
creature not only of another kind but of another essence. Had they not
seen him come up in a canoe they might have thought he had descended
upon them from the clouds. He did, however, come in a crazy dug-out,
sitting (very still and with his knees together, for fear of overturning
the thing)--sitting on a tin box--which I had lent him--nursing on his
lap a revolver of the Navy pattern--presented by me on parting--which,
through an interposition of Providence, or through some wrong-headed
notion, that was just like him, or else from sheer instinctive sagacity,
he had decided to carry unloaded. That's how he ascended the Patusan
river. Nothing could have been more prosaic and more unsafe, more
extravagantly casual, more lonely. Strange, this fatality that would
cast the complexion of a flight upon all his acts, of impulsive
unreflecting desertion of a jump into the unknown.
'It is precisely the casualness of it that strikes me most. Neither
Stein nor I had a clear conception of what might be on the other side
when we, metaphorically speaking, took him up and hove him over the
wall with scant ceremony. At the moment I merely wished to achieve his
disappearance; Stein characteristically enough had a sentimental motive.
He had a notion of paying off (in kind, I suppose) the old debt he had
never forgotten. Indeed he had been all his life especially friendly to
anybody from the British Isles. His late benefactor, it is true, was a
Scot--even to the length of being called Alexander McNeil--and Jim came
from a long way south of the Tweed; but at the distance of six or
seven thousand miles Great Britain, though never diminished, looks
foreshortened enough even to its own children to rob such details of
their importance. Stein was excusable, and his hinted intentions were
so generous that I begged him most earnestly to keep them secret for
a time. I felt that no consideration of personal advantage should be
allowed to influence Jim; that not even the risk of such influence
should be run. We had to deal with another sort of reality. He wanted
a refuge, and a refuge at the cost of danger should be offered
him--nothing more.
'Upon every other point I was perfectly frank with him, and I even (as
I believed at the time) exaggerated the danger of the undertaking. As
a matter of fact I did not do it justice; his first day in Patusan was
nearly his last--would have been his last if he had not been so reckless
or so hard on himself and had condescended to load that revolver. I
remember, as I unfolded our precious scheme for his retreat, how his
stubborn but weary resignation was gradually replaced by surprise,
interest, wonder, and by boyish eagerness. This was a chance he had been
dreaming of. He couldn't think how he merited that I . . . He would be
shot if he could see to what he owed . . . And it was Stein, Stein the
merchant, who . . . but of course it was me he had to . . . I cut him
short. He was not articulate, and his gratitude caused me inexplicable
pain. I told him that if he owed this chance to any one especially, it
was to an old Scot of whom he had never heard, who had died many years
ago, of whom little was remembered besides a roaring voice and a rough
sort of honesty. There was really no one to receive his thanks. Stein
was passing on to a young man the help he had received in his own young
days, and I had done no more than to mention his name. Upon this he
coloured, and, twisting a bit of paper in his fingers, he remarked
bashfully that I had always trusted him.
'I admitted that such was the case, and added after a pause that I
wished he had been able to follow my example. "You think I don't?" he
asked uneasily, and remarked in a mutter that one had to get some sort
of show first; then brightening up, and in a loud voice he protested he
would give me no occasion to regret my confidence, which--which . . .
'"Do not misapprehend," I interrupted. "It is not in your power to make
me regret anything." There would be no regrets; but if there were, it
would be altogether my own affair: on the other hand, I wished him to
understand clearly that this arrangement, this--this--experiment, was
his own doing; he was responsible for it and no one else. "Why? Why," he
stammered, "this is the very thing that I . . ." I begged him not to
be dense, and he looked more puzzled than ever. He was in a fair way
to make life intolerable to himself . . . "Do you think so?" he asked,
disturbed; but in a moment added confidently, "I was going on though.
Was I not?" It was impossible to be angry with him: I could not help a
smile, and told him that in the old days people who went on like
this were on the way of becoming hermits in a wilderness. "Hermits be
hanged!" he commented with engaging impulsiveness. Of course he didn't
mind a wilderness. . . . "I was glad of it," I said. That was where
he would be going to. He would find it lively enough, I ventured to
promise. "Yes, yes," he said, keenly. He had shown a desire, I continued
inflexibly, to go out and shut the door after him. . . . "Did I?" he
interrupted in a strange access of gloom that seemed to envelop him
from head to foot like the shadow of a passing cloud. He was wonderfully
expressive after all. Wonderfully! "Did I?" he repeated bitterly. "You
can't say I made much noise about it. And I can keep it up, too--only,
confound it! you show me a door." . . . "Very well. Pass on," I struck
in. I could make him a solemn promise that it would be shut behind him
with a vengeance. His fate, whatever it was, would be ignored,
because the country, for all its rotten state, was not judged ripe
for interference. Once he got in, it would be for the outside world as
though he had never existed. He would have nothing but the soles of his
two feet to stand upon, and he would have first to find his ground at
that. "Never existed--that's it, by Jove," he murmured to himself. His
eyes, fastened upon my lips, sparkled. If he had thoroughly understood
the conditions, I concluded, he had better jump into the first gharry he
could see and drive on to Stein's house for his final instructions. He
flung out of the room before I had fairly finished speaking.'
'He did not return till next morning. He had been kept to dinner and for
the night. There never had been such a wonderful man as Mr. Stein. He
had in his pocket a letter for Cornelius ("the Johnnie who's going to
get the sack," he explained, with a momentary drop in his elation), and
he exhibited with glee a silver ring, such as natives use, worn down
very thin and showing faint traces of chasing.
'This was his introduction to an old chap called Doramin--one of the
principal men out there--a big pot--who had been Mr. Stein's friend in
that country where he had all these adventures. Mr. Stein called him
"war-comrade." War-comrade was good. Wasn't it? And didn't Mr. Stein
speak English wonderfully well? Said he had learned it in Celebes--of
all places! That was awfully funny. Was it not? He did speak with an
accent--a twang--did I notice? That chap Doramin had given him the ring.
They had exchanged presents when they parted for the last time. Sort of
promising eternal friendship. He called it fine--did I not? They had
to make a dash for dear life out of the country when that
Mohammed--Mohammed--What's-his-name had been killed. I knew the story,
of course. Seemed a beastly shame, didn't it? . . .
'He ran on like this, forgetting his plate, with a knife and fork in
hand (he had found me at tiffin), slightly flushed, and with his eyes
darkened many shades, which was with him a sign of excitement. The ring
was a sort of credential--("It's like something you read of in books,"
he threw in appreciatively)--and Doramin would do his best for him. Mr.
Stein had been the means of saving that chap's life on some occasion;
purely by accident, Mr. Stein had said, but he--Jim--had his own opinion
about that. Mr. Stein was just the man to look out for such accidents.
No matter. Accident or purpose, this would serve his turn immensely.
Hoped to goodness the jolly old beggar had not gone off the hooks
meantime. Mr. Stein could not tell. There had been no news for more
than a year; they were kicking up no end of an all-fired row amongst
themselves, and the river was closed. Jolly awkward, this; but, no fear;
he would manage to find a crack to get in.
'He impressed, almost frightened, me with his elated rattle. He was
voluble like a youngster on the eve of a long holiday with a prospect of
delightful scrapes, and such an attitude of mind in a grown man and in
this connection had in it something phenomenal, a little mad, dangerous,
unsafe. I was on the point of entreating him to take things seriously
when he dropped his knife and fork (he had begun eating, or rather
swallowing food, as it were, unconsciously), and began a search all
round his plate. The ring! The ring! Where the devil . . . Ah! Here it
was . . . He closed his big hand on it, and tried all his pockets one
after another. Jove! wouldn't do to lose the thing. He meditated gravely
over his fist. Had it? Would hang the bally affair round his neck! And
he proceeded to do this immediately, producing a string (which looked
like a bit of a cotton shoe-lace) for the purpose. There! That would do
the trick! It would be the deuce if . . . He seemed to catch sight of my
face for the first time, and it steadied him a little. I probably didn't
realise, he said with a naive gravity, how much importance he attached
to that token. It meant a friend; and it is a good thing to have a
friend. He knew something about that. He nodded at me expressively, but
before my disclaiming gesture he leaned his head on his hand and for
a while sat silent, playing thoughtfully with the bread-crumbs on the
cloth . . . "Slam the door--that was jolly well put," he cried, and
jumping up, began to pace the room, reminding me by the set of the
shoulders, the turn of his head, the headlong and uneven stride, of
that night when he had paced thus, confessing, explaining--what you
will--but, in the last instance, living--living before me, under his
own little cloud, with all his unconscious subtlety which could draw
consolation from the very source of sorrow. It was the same mood, the
same and different, like a fickle companion that to-day guiding you
on the true path, with the same eyes, the same step, the same impulse,
to-morrow will lead you hopelessly astray. His tread was assured, his
straying, darkened eyes seemed to search the room for something. One of
his footfalls somehow sounded louder than the other--the fault of his
boots probably--and gave a curious impression of an invisible halt in
his gait. One of his hands was rammed deep into his trousers' pocket,
the other waved suddenly above his head. "Slam the door!" he shouted.
"I've been waiting for that. I'll show yet . . . I'll . . . I'm ready
for any confounded thing . . . I've been dreaming of it . . . Jove! Get
out of this. Jove! This is luck at last . . . You wait. I'll . . ."
'He tossed his head fearlessly, and I confess that for the first and
last time in our acquaintance I perceived myself unexpectedly to be
thoroughly sick of him. Why these vapourings? He was stumping about
the room flourishing his arm absurdly, and now and then feeling on
his breast for the ring under his clothes. Where was the sense of such
exaltation in a man appointed to be a trading-clerk, and in a place
where there was no trade--at that? Why hurl defiance at the universe?
This was not a proper frame of mind to approach any undertaking; an
improper frame of mind not only for him, I said, but for any man. He
stood still over me. Did I think so? he asked, by no means subdued, and
with a smile in which I seemed to detect suddenly something insolent.
But then I am twenty years his senior. Youth is insolent; it is its
right--its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in
this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence. He went off into a
far corner, and coming back, he, figuratively speaking, turned to rend
me. I spoke like that because I--even I, who had been no end kind
to him--even I remembered--remembered--against him--what--what had
happened. And what about others--the--the--world? Where's the wonder he
wanted to get out, meant to get out, meant to stay out--by heavens! And
I talked about proper frames of mind!
'"It is not I or the world who remember," I shouted. "It is you--you,
who remember."
'He did not flinch, and went on with heat, "Forget everything,
everybody, everybody." . . . His voice fell. . . "But you," he added.
'"Yes--me too--if it would help," I said, also in a low tone. After this
we remained silent and languid for a time as if exhausted. Then he began
again, composedly, and told me that Mr. Stein had instructed him to wait
for a month or so, to see whether it was possible for him to remain,
before he began building a new house for himself, so as to avoid
"vain expense." He did make use of funny expressions--Stein did. "Vain
expense" was good. . . . Remain? Why! of course. He would hang on. Let
him only get in--that's all; he would answer for it he would remain.
Never get out. It was easy enough to remain.
'"Don't be foolhardy," I said, rendered uneasy by his threatening tone.
"If you only live long enough you will want to come back."
'"Come back to what?" he asked absently, with his eyes fixed upon the
face of a clock on the wall.
'I was silent for a while. "Is it to be never, then?" I said. "Never,"
he repeated dreamily without looking at me, and then flew into sudden
activity. "Jove! Two o'clock, and I sail at four!"
'It was true. A brigantine of Stein's was leaving for the westward that
afternoon, and he had been instructed to take his passage in her, only
no orders to delay the sailing had been given. I suppose Stein forgot.
He made a rush to get his things while I went aboard my ship, where
he promised to call on his way to the outer roadstead. He turned up
accordingly in a great hurry and with a small leather valise in his
hand. This wouldn't do, and I offered him an old tin trunk of mine
supposed to be water-tight, or at least damp-tight. He effected the
transfer by the simple process of shooting out the contents of his
valise as you would empty a sack of wheat. I saw three books in the
tumble; two small, in dark covers, and a thick green-and-gold volume--a
half-crown complete Shakespeare. "You read this?" I asked. "Yes. Best
thing to cheer up a fellow," he said hastily. I was struck by this
appreciation, but there was no time for Shakespearian talk. A
heavy revolver and two small boxes of cartridges were lying on the
cuddy-table. "Pray take this," I said. "It may help you to remain."
No sooner were these words out of my mouth than I perceived what grim
meaning they could bear. "May help you to get in," I corrected myself
remorsefully. He however was not troubled by obscure meanings; he
thanked me effusively and bolted out, calling Good-bye over his
shoulder. I heard his voice through the ship's side urging his boatmen
to give way, and looking out of the stern-port I saw the boat rounding
under the counter. He sat in her leaning forward, exciting his men with
voice and gestures; and as he had kept the revolver in his hand and
seemed to be presenting it at their heads, I shall never forget the
scared faces of the four Javanese, and the frantic swing of their stroke
which snatched that vision from under my eyes. Then turning away, the
first thing I saw were the two boxes of cartridges on the cuddy-table.
He had forgotten to take them.
'I ordered my gig manned at once; but Jim's rowers, under the impression
that their lives hung on a thread while they had that madman in the
boat, made such excellent time that before I had traversed half the
distance between the two vessels I caught sight of him clambering over
the rail, and of his box being passed up. All the brigantine's canvas
was loose, her mainsail was set, and the windlass was just beginning to
clink as I stepped upon her deck: her master, a dapper little half-caste
of forty or so, in a blue flannel suit, with lively eyes, his round
face the colour of lemon-peel, and with a thin little black moustache
drooping on each side of his thick, dark lips, came forward smirking. He
turned out, notwithstanding his self-satisfied and cheery exterior, to
be of a careworn temperament. In answer to a remark of mine (while Jim
had gone below for a moment) he said, "Oh yes. Patusan." He was going to
carry the gentleman to the mouth of the river, but would "never ascend."
His flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary compiled by
a lunatic. Had Mr. Stein desired him to "ascend," he would have
"reverentially"--(I think he wanted to say respectfully--but devil only
knows)--"reverentially made objects for the safety of properties."
If disregarded, he would have presented "resignation to quit." Twelve
months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius
"propitiated many offertories" to Mr. Rajah Allang and the "principal
populations," on conditions which made the trade "a snare and ashes
in the mouth," yet his ship had been fired upon from the woods by
"irresponsive parties" all the way down the river; which causing his
crew "from exposure to limb to remain silent in hidings," the brigantine
was nearly stranded on a sandbank at the bar, where she "would have
been perishable beyond the act of man." The angry disgust at the
recollection, the pride of his fluency, to which he turned an attentive
ear, struggled for the possession of his broad simple face. He scowled
and beamed at me, and watched with satisfaction the undeniable effect
of his phraseology. Dark frowns ran swiftly over the placid sea, and
the brigantine, with her fore-topsail to the mast and her main-boom
amidships, seemed bewildered amongst the cat's-paws. He told me further,
gnashing his teeth, that the Rajah was a "laughable hyaena" (can't
imagine how he got hold of hyaenas); while somebody else was many
times falser than the "weapons of a crocodile." Keeping one eye on the
movements of his crew forward, he let loose his volubility--comparing
the place to a "cage of beasts made ravenous by long impenitence." I
fancy he meant impunity. He had no intention, he cried, to "exhibit
himself to be made attached purposefully to robbery." The long-drawn
wails, giving the time for the pull of the men catting the anchor,
came to an end, and he lowered his voice. "Plenty too much enough of
Patusan," he concluded, with energy.
'I heard afterwards he had been so indiscreet as to get himself tied up
by the neck with a rattan halter to a post planted in the middle of a
mud-hole before the Rajah's house. He spent the best part of a day and a
whole night in that unwholesome situation, but there is every reason
to believe the thing had been meant as a sort of joke. He brooded for
a while over that horrid memory, I suppose, and then addressed in a
quarrelsome tone the man coming aft to the helm. When he turned to me
again it was to speak judicially, without passion. He would take the
gentleman to the mouth of the river at Batu Kring (Patusan town "being
situated internally," he remarked, "thirty miles"). But in his eyes,
he continued--a tone of bored, weary conviction replacing his previous
voluble delivery--the gentleman was already "in the similitude of a
corpse." "What? What do you say?" I asked. He assumed a startlingly
ferocious demeanour, and imitated to perfection the act of stabbing from
behind. "Already like the body of one deported," he explained, with the
insufferably conceited air of his kind after what they imagine a display
of cleverness. Behind him I perceived Jim smiling silently at me, and
with a raised hand checking the exclamation on my lips.
'Then, while the half-caste, bursting with importance, shouted his
orders, while the yards swung creaking and the heavy boom came surging
over, Jim and I, alone as it were, to leeward of the mainsail, clasped
each other's hands and exchanged the last hurried words. My heart was
freed from that dull resentment which had existed side by side with
interest in his fate. The absurd chatter of the half-caste had given
more reality to the miserable dangers of his path than Stein's careful
statements. On that occasion the sort of formality that had been always
present in our intercourse vanished from our speech; I believe I
called him "dear boy," and he tacked on the words "old man" to some
half-uttered expression of gratitude, as though his risk set off against
my years had made us more equal in age and in feeling. There was a
moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a
glimpse of some everlasting, of some saving truth. He exerted himself to
soothe me as though he had been the more mature of the two. "All right,
all right," he said, rapidly, and with feeling. "I promise to take care
of myself. Yes; I won't take any risks. Not a single blessed risk. Of
course not. I mean to hang out. Don't you worry. Jove! I feel as if
nothing could touch me. Why! this is luck from the word Go. I wouldn't
spoil such a magnificent chance!" . . . A magnificent chance! Well, it
_was_ magnificent, but chances are what men make them, and how was I
to know? As he had said, even I--even I remembered--his--his misfortune
against him. It was true. And the best thing for him was to go.
'My gig had dropped in the wake of the brigantine, and I saw him aft
detached upon the light of the westering sun, raising his cap high above
his head. I heard an indistinct shout, "You--shall--hear--of--me." Of
me, or from me, I don't know which. I think it must have been of me. My
eyes were too dazzled by the glitter of the sea below his feet to see
him clearly; I am fated never to see him clearly; but I can assure you
no man could have appeared less "in the similitude of a corpse," as that
half-caste croaker had put it. I could see the little wretch's face,
the shape and colour of a ripe pumpkin, poked out somewhere under Jim's
elbow. He, too, raised his arm as if for a downward thrust. Absit omen!'
| 4,634 | Chapters 22-23 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219145744/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/l/lord-jim/summary-and-analysis/chapters-2223 | Patusan, we are told, was often used by adventurers to satisfy either their greed or their need to perform heroic deeds. It was savage country, shut off from the rest of the world. A man could feel as though he were a "hero" if he went there to go "into the bush" -- that is, to ravage Patusan's treasure, which was pepper. Men had often died in Patusan attempting a perilous quest for pepper, for at one time, pepper was almost as valuable as pearls. One day, however, pepper lost its aura of rarity, and as the narrator says, "Nobody cares for it now." Today, wealth is no longer flowing out of Patusan, and the bones of its anonymous "heroes" are lying in scattered heaps, bleaching on sunlit beaches. Marlow marvels at the bizarre, absurd lengths to which some men will go to achieve money and transient glory. When Jim went to Patusan, Marlow says, the only people fighting over Patusan were the diverse uncles of the Sultan, himself "an imbecile youth with two thumbs on his left hand." The worst of the uncles was Rajah Allang, a "dirty little used-up old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth." Marlow remembers Jim's reaction when he first told him about Patusan. Initially, Jim had felt a kind of "weary resignation," but that attitude was gradually replaced by "surprise, interest, wonder, and by boyish eagerness." This was the chance Jim had been dreaming of! Marlow emphasized to Jim that this venture would be "his own doing." Jim would be wholly responsible. The young man was filled with impulsive and inarticulate joy. He didn't mind going into a wilderness. He was eager to do so! The outside world would never know that he had ever existed. At last, he would finally have "nothing but the soles of his two feet to stand on." Marlow cautioned Jim to use prudence in this new venture, but Jim was filled with so much exuberance that he flung himself out of the room before Marlow could finish speaking. Jim stated that he never wanted to go back to England, a desire that Marlow found unimaginable. Never? he asked him. Never, Jim emphasized. He was adamant about his decision: "'Never,' he repeated dreamily . . . and then flew into sudden activity." With Marlow's help, Jim finally got packed. Then, at the last moment before Jim's rowers had cast off, Marlow clamored onto Jim's ship and talked briefly to Jim's half-caste captain, who seemed to be a lunatic. The man said that he intended to take Jim to the mouth of the river leading into Patusan, but that he had no intention of going any farther upriver. Patusan was too dangerous; it was like a "cage of beasts made ravenous by long impenitence," he said, and in a mock pantomime, he dramatically stabbed himself in the back. Behind the captain, Marlow saw Jim suddenly appear, smiling silently and raising a hand to check Marlow's horror of the adventure that was about to begin. Then a heavy boom swung around, and Jim and Marlow clasped each other's hands. Marlow awkwardly called Jim "dear boy," and Jim half-uttered "old man." Yet, Marlow says, there was in their embarrassed goodbyes, "a moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a glimpse of some everlasting, saving truth." The ship cast off, and Jim raised his cap above his head and waved it broadly to Marlow, calling out indistinctly, "You -- shall -- hear -- of -- me." | Again, Conrad lets us know that at an earlier time, Patusan was famous for its vast treasure of pepper, but now that pepper is not so important, Patusan has lost much of its influence as an important trading center. In fact, the reader often wonders what it is that justifies Stein's still retaining a trading post there. In this chapter, we also hear of the immense danger for strangers to travel to Patusan; the "wary captain" who is to take Jim to Patusan refuses to go any farther than the mouth of the river; he explains to Marlow that he already sees Jim as a dead man. Part of the danger is a man named Rajah Allang . Jim, however, welcomes to the point of ecstasy the opportunity to simply fade from civilization, to enter Patusan and let the veil of civilization forever close behind him. He welcomes the opportunity to "jump into the unknown" and "achieve his disappearance" from all of the known world. Thus, Conrad continues his metaphor of "jumping" -- that is, just as Jim's jump from the Patna was a jump into an unknown part of himself, his "Jump" here, into an unknown part of the world , is an equivalent jump into the unknown. "Once he got in, it would be for the outside world as though he had never existed. He would have nothing but the soles of his two feet to stand upon." We further see Stein as the complete romantic, and his romantic nature is further revealed in the generous provisions that he is ready to make for this youth, whose story has captured his own romantic imagination to the point that he is ready to bestow much of his fortune on Jim. In Chapter 23, we are told about the ring which old Doramin gave to Stein as a parting symbol of their eternal friendship. Jim is to take Stein's ring to Doramin, and it will insure him protection by the great chief . This, of course, is the ring which will figure so prominently in Jim's tragic death at the end of the narrative. Although Jim is wildly enthusiastic about his future fortunes -- to Marlow, Jim seems filled with romantic posturing to the point of being melodramatic. But even now, Marlow doesn't fully understand the nature of the weight that Jim feels, a weight so heavy that Marlow doesn't understand Jim when Jim mentions that once he is in Patusan, he will never want to come out again. When Marlow asserts that "if you only live long enough, you will want to come back," Jim virtually ignores him and dismisses Marlow's comment with the remark, "Come back to what?" For Jim, the civilized world has no hold on him. He is no longer a part of the civilized world. For Jim, this is his "magnificent chance" to prove his own worth to himself. | 588 | 486 | [
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23,042 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/23042-chapters/9.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Tempest/section_8_part_0.txt | The Tempest.act 5.scene 1 | scene 1 | null | {"name": "Scene 1", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219151049/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/the-tempest/summary-and-analysis/act-v-scene-1", "summary": "This scene opens with Ariel revealing to Prospero that Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio are remorseful, worried, and desperate. Gonzalo is worried and grief-stricken at his king's pain. Prospero reassures Ariel that he will be compassionate in dealing with his enemies and asks that Ariel bring the group to him. While he is waiting for the king and his party to appear, Prospero soliloquizes about what he has accomplished with magic and, at the soliloquy's end, promises that he will now give up his magic, bury his magic staff, and drown his magic book at sea. Almost immediately, Ariel enters with the royal party, who appear to be in a trance, and places them within the magic circle that Prospero had earlier drawn. With a few chanted words, the spell is removed. Prospero, clothed in the garments of the duke of Milan -- his rightful position -- appears before them. In a gesture of reconciliation, Prospero embraces Alonso, who is filled with remorse and immediately gives up Prospero's dukedom. Gonzalo is also embraced in turn, and then Prospero turns to Sebastian and Antonio. Prospero tells them that he will not charge them as traitors, at this time. Antonio is forgiven and required to renounce his claims on Prospero's dukedom. While Alonso continues to mourn the loss of his son, Prospero relates that he too has lost his child, his daughter. But he means that he has lost her in marriage and pulls back a curtain to reveal Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. Ferdinand explains to his father that he is betrothed to Miranda and that this event occurred while he thought his father dead. Alonso quickly welcomes Miranda and says he will be a second father to his son's affianced. At the sight of the couple, Gonzalo begins to cry and thanks God for having worked such a miracle. Ariel enters with the master of the boat and boatswain. Although the ship lay in harbor and in perfect shape, the puzzled men cannot explain how any of this has occurred. Alonso is also mystified, but Prospero tells him not to trouble his mind with such concerns. Next, Ariel leads in Caliban, Stefano, and Trinculo, who are still drunk. Prospero explains that these men have robbed him and plotted to murder him. Caliban immediately repents and promises to seek grace. The three conspirators, who have sobered somewhat since confronted with Prospero and the king, are sent to decorate Prospero's cell. Prospero invites his guests to spend the night with him, where he will tell them of his adventures and of his life during these past 12 years. Ariel's last duty to Prospero is to provide calm seas when they sail the next morning.", "analysis": "This final scene indicates the extent of Prospero's forgiveness and provides an example of humanity toward one's enemies. Before he confronts his enemies, Prospero tells Ariel that \"The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance\" . That is, it is better to forgive than to hate one's enemies. This is the example that Prospero provides in reuniting everyone in this final scene. When he emerges from his trance, Alonso moves quickly to embrace Prospero, and just as quickly, he renounces his claims to Prospero's dukedom. This is the behavior the audience expects of Ferdinand's father, and it is what Prospero requires to resolve this conflict. Ferdinand is an honorable young man, filled with love and charity, and it is reasonable to expect that he learned these values from his father, even if his father has, on occasion, forgotten them. Alonso is honestly delighted in Ferdinand's engagement and welcomes Miranda with authentic grace. It is to be predicted that he is happy at recovering his son, but he is also clearly pleased to have gained a daughter. These spontaneous actions reveal that Alonso is as humane and honest as Prospero. It is equally clear that Antonio and Sebastian each lack the humanity of their respective brothers. No apology is forthcoming from Antonio, and Sebastian thinks that Prospero is very likely the devil. Antonio never directly addresses Prospero, not even to justify his previous actions. And although both Prospero and Miranda might have died when cast out on to the sea some 12 years earlier, Antonio has no words for his niece. In spite of the obvious absence of regret from his brother, Prospero is true to his promise and seeks no revenge against Antonio. There is no reason to assume that shame restrains Antonio from speaking, and in all likelihood, he only regrets having been caught. Although Prospero warns his brother that he might still charge him with treason in the future, this warning is unlikely to restrain such a recalcitrant as Antonio. Prospero's humanity is clearly obvious in his treatment of Antonio, whom he calls traitor but whom he declines to treat as a traitor. Critics and audience might be tempted to label Antonio as an unnatural brother, as would also be true for Sebastian. But their cruelty only indicates that nature provides for both goodness and evil. In the Christian world of the Shakespeare's time, evil is chosen, not destined, and nature provides for all outcomes, those who are virtuous and their counterparts, those who are corrupt. Hence, evil siblings are as natural as good siblings. Although the self-serving behavior of Antonio and Sebastian may be despicable, they are still a part of the natural world. Caliban is also from the natural world, although as the child of a witch and devil. He is certainly different from the other humans on the island, but in this final scene, he displays more humanity than many of Prospero's \"civilized\" enemies. Antonio's only remark in this whole scene is to suggest that Caliban provides an opportunity to make money . Antonio and Sebastian echo Stefano and Trinculo's earlier notion of exhibiting Caliban for profit, and in doing so, they reaffirm the impression that even the upper classes can be as lacking in morals as the two examples of the lower class, a butler and a court jester. Caliban, however, has risen above his companions and willingly admits his errors. In admitting his fault, Caliban proves himself more honorable than those who are socially his superior, Antonio and Sebastian. Caliban is often celebrated as a natural man, one who is unspoiled by civilization. And yet, he easily embraces the worse that civilization has to offer. When exposed to Stefano and Trinculo, Caliban embraces their drunkenness and, in return, entices them to help plan a heinous crime. Many critics justify Caliban's actions by pointing to Prospero's persecution of Caliban. But nowhere in this play does Shakespeare validate this kind of revenge. Prospero may enslave Caliban, but he does not threaten his very existence. Certainly there is no way to justify slavery, and Shakespeare makes no attempt to do so. In the end, Prospero leaves Caliban to his island and to the natural world that he craves. The conclusion is about redemption, the personal redemption that so many of the participants reach. Caliban's regret during this final scene indicates he, too, has found the way to reconciliation. Gonzalo is one of the few participants who has no need to ask forgiveness nor any cause to regret his actions. Upon discovering that Ferdinand is alive and that he is betrothed to Miranda, Gonzalo quite properly thanks God, who has \"chalked forth the way\" . Gonzalo also sees the irony in Miranda's offspring inheriting all that was her father's and all that belongs to his enemy. He also observes that there is much that has been restored: Ferdinand to his father, and with him, a wife. But there is more. Prospero's dukedom has been restored, as has the ship and all its missing crew. Yet more important than people or objects, other essential components of civilized society have been restored: authority, harmony, and order. Even before this reconciliation scene occurs, Prospero has promised to put aside his magic and dispose of his magic book and staff, which are the source of his power. He has used magic to work in concert with nature, not to control or evoke evil. Now that he has his enemies under his control, Prospero permits compassion to replace magic. This putting away of his magic also signifies that Prospero's game is at an end. He has used magic to restore harmony and now needs it no more. The play ends with the promise of Ariel's freedom and the restoration of Prospero to a life filled with all that nature and God intended. Glossary mantle to enclose or envelop. furtherer an accomplice. rapier a slender two-edged sword used chiefly in thrusting. subtleties here, the illusions. requite to make return or repayment to for a benefit, injury, and so on; reward. tight and yare sound and ready. The ship is ready to sail. coragio take courage ."} | ACT V. SCENE I.
_Before the cell of Prospero._
_Enter PROSPERO in his magic robes, and ARIEL._
_Pros._ Now does my project gather to a head:
My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time
Goes upright with his carriage. How's the day?
_Ari._ On the sixth hour; at which time, my lord,
You said our work should cease.
_Pros._ I did say so, 5
When first I raised the tempest. Say, my spirit,
How fares the king and's followers?
_Ari._ Confined together
In the same fashion as you gave in charge,
Just as you left them; all prisoners, sir,
In the line-grove which weather-fends your cell; 10
They cannot budge till your release. The king,
His brother, and yours, abide all three distracted,
And the remainder mourning over them,
Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly
Him that you term'd, sir, "The good old lord, Gonzalo;" 15
His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops
From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works 'em,
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
_Pros._ Dost thou think so, spirit?
_Ari._ Mine would, sir, were I human.
_Pros._ And mine shall. 20
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick, 25
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel: 30
My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,
And they shall be themselves.
_Ari._ I'll fetch them, sir. [_Exit._
_Pros._ Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him 35
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid-- 40
Weak masters though ye be--I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds.
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak 45
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic 50
I here abjure; and, when I have required
Some heavenly music,--which even now I do,--
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, 55
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book. [_Solemn music._
_Re-enter ARIEL before: then ALONSO, with a frantic gesture,
attended by GONZALO; SEBASTIAN and ANTONIO in like manner,
attended by ADRIAN and FRANCISCO: they all enter the circle
which PROSPERO had made, and there stand charmed; which PROSPERO
observing, speaks:_
A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains,
Now useless, boil'd within thy skull! There stand, 60
For you are spell-stopp'd.
Holy Gonzalo, honourable man,
Mine eyes, even sociable to the show of thine,
Fall fellowly drops. The charm dissolves apace;
And as the morning steals upon the night, 65
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason. O good Gonzalo,
My true preserver, and a loyal sir
To him thou follow'st! I will pay thy graces 70
Home both in word and deed. Most cruelly
Didst thou, Alonso, use me and my daughter:
Thy brother was a furtherer in the act.
Thou art pinch'd for't now, Sebastian. Flesh and blood,
You, brother mine, that entertain'd ambition, 75
Expell'd remorse and nature; who, with Sebastian,--
Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong,--
Would here have kill'd your king; I do forgive thee,
Unnatural though thou art. Their understanding
Begins to swell; and the approaching tide 80
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore,
That now lies foul and muddy. Not one of them
That yet looks on me, or would know me: Ariel,
Fetch me the hat and rapier in my cell:
I will discase me, and myself present 85
As I was sometime Milan: quickly, spirit;
Thou shalt ere long be free.
_ARIEL sings and helps to attire him._
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry. 90
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
_Pros._ Why, that's my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee; 95
But yet thou shalt have freedom: so, so, so.
To the king's ship, invisible as thou art:
There shalt thou find the mariners asleep
Under the hatches; the master and the boatswain
Being awake, enforce them to this place, 100
And presently, I prithee.
_Ari._ I drink the air before me, and return
Or ere your pulse twice beat. [_Exit._
_Gon._ All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement
Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us 105
Out of this fearful country!
_Pros._ Behold, sir king,
The wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero:
For more assurance that a living prince
Does now speak to thee, I embrace thy body;
And to thee and thy company I bid 110
A hearty welcome.
_Alon._ Whether thou be'st he or no,
Or some enchanted trifle to abuse me,
As late I have been, I not know: thy pulse
Beats, as of flesh and blood; and, since I saw thee,
The affliction of my mind amends, with which, 115
I fear, a madness held me: this must crave--
An if this be at all--a most strange story.
Thy dukedom I resign, and do entreat
Thou pardon me my wrongs. --But how should Prospero
Be living and be here?
_Pros._ First, noble friend, 120
Let me embrace thine age, whose honour cannot
Be measured or confined.
_Gon._ Whether this be
Or be not, I'll not swear.
_Pros._ You do yet taste
Some subtilties o' the isle, that will not let you
Believe things certain. Welcome, my friends all! 125
[_Aside to Seb. and Ant._]
But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded,
I here could pluck his Highness' frown upon you,
And justify you traitors: at this time
I will tell no tales.
_Seb._ [_Aside_] The devil speaks in him.
_Pros._ No.
For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother 130
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault,--all of them; and require
My dukedom of thee, which perforce, I know,
Thou must restore.
_Alon._ If thou be'st Prospero,
Give us particulars of thy preservation; 135
How thou hast met us here, who three hours since
Were wreck'd upon this shore; where I have lost--
How sharp the point of this remembrance is!--
My dear son Ferdinand.
_Pros._ I am woe for't, sir.
_Alon._ Irreparable is the loss; and patience 140
Says it is past her cure.
_Pros._ I rather think
You have not sought her help, of whose soft grace
For the like loss I have her sovereign aid,
And rest myself content.
_Alon._ You the like loss!
_Pros._ As great to me as late; and, supportable 145
To make the dear loss, have I means much weaker
Than you may call to comfort you, for I
Have lost my daughter.
_Alon._ A daughter?
O heavens, that they were living both in Naples,
The king and queen there! that they were, I wish 150
Myself were mudded in that oozy bed
Where my son lies. When did you lose you daughter?
_Pros._ In this last tempest. I perceive, these lords
At this encounter do so much admire,
That they devour their reason, and scarce think 155
Their eyes do offices of truth, their words
Are natural breath: but, howsoe'er you have
Been justled from your senses, know for certain
That I am Prospero, and that very duke
Which was thrust forth of Milan; who most strangely 160
Upon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was landed,
To be the Lord on't. No more yet of this;
For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,
Not a relation for a breakfast, nor
Befitting this first meeting. Welcome, sir; 165
This cell's my court: here have I few attendants,
And subjects none abroad: pray you, look in.
My dukedom since you have given me again,
I will requite you with as good a thing;
At least bring forth a wonder, to content ye 170
As much as me my dukedom.
_Here Prospero discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess._
_Mir._ Sweet lord, you play me false.
_Fer._ No, my dear'st love,
I would not for the world.
_Mir._ Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it fair play.
_Alon._ If this prove 175
A vision of the island, one dear son
Shall I twice lose.
_Seb._ A most high miracle!
_Fer._ Though the seas threaten, they are merciful;
I have cursed them without cause. [_Kneels._
_Alon._ Now all the blessings
Of a glad father compass thee about! 180
Arise, and say how thou camest here.
_Mir._ O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
_Pros._ 'Tis new to thee.
_Alon._ What is this maid with whom thou wast at play? 185
Your eld'st acquaintance cannot be three hours:
Is she the goddess that hath sever'd us,
And brought us thus together?
_Fer._ Sir, she is mortal;
But by immortal Providence she's mine:
I chose her when I could not ask my father 190
For his advice, nor thought I had one. She
Is daughter to this famous Duke of Milan,
Of whom so often I have heard renown,
But never saw before; of whom I have
Received a second life; and second father 195
This lady makes him to me.
_Alon._ I am hers:
But, O, how oddly will it sound that I
Must ask my child forgiveness!
_Pros._ There, sir, stop:
Let us not burthen our remembrances with
A heaviness that's gone.
_Gon._ I have inly wept, 200
Or should have spoke ere this. Look down, you gods,
And on this couple drop a blessed crown!
For it is you that have chalk'd forth the way
Which brought us hither.
_Alon._ I say, Amen, Gonzalo!
_Gon._ Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue 205
Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy! and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife 210
Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle, and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.
_Alon._ [_to Fer. and Mir._] Give me your hands:
Let grief and sorrow still embrace his heart
That doth not wish you joy!
_Gon._ Be it so! Amen! 215
_Re-enter ARIEL, with the _Master_ and _Boatswain_ amazedly
following._
O, look, sir, look, sir! here is more of us:
I prophesied, if a gallows were on land,
This fellow could not drown. Now, blasphemy,
That swear'st grace o'erboard, not an oath on shore?
Hast thou no mouth by land? What is the news? 220
_Boats._ The best news is, that we have safely found
Our king and company; the next, our ship--
Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split--
Is tight and yare and bravely rigg'd, as when
We first put out to sea.
_Ari._ [_Aside to Pros._] Sir, all this service 225
Have I done since I went.
_Pros._ [_Aside to Ari._] My tricksy spirit!
_Alon._ These are not natural events; they strengthen
From strange to stranger. Say, how came you hither?
_Boats._ If I did think, sir, I were well awake,
I'ld strive to tell you. We were dead of sleep, 230
And--how we know not--all clapp'd under hatches;
Where, but even now, with strange and several noises
Of roaring, shrieking, howling, jingling chains,
And more diversity of sounds, all horrible,
We were awaked; straightway, at liberty; 235
Where we, in all her trim, freshly beheld
Our royal, good, and gallant ship; our master
Capering to eye her:--on a trice, so please you,
Even in a dream, were we divided from them,
And were brought moping hither.
_Ari._ [_Aside to Pros._] Was't well done? 240
_Pros._ [_Aside to Ari._] Bravely, my diligence. Thou shalt be free.
_Alon._ This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod;
And there is in this business more than nature
Was ever conduct of: some oracle
Must rectify our knowledge.
_Pros._ Sir, my liege, 245
Do not infest your mind with beating on
The strangeness of this business; at pick'd leisure
Which shall be shortly, single I'll resolve you,
Which to you shall seem probable, of every
These happen'd accidents; till when, be cheerful, 250
And think of each thing well.
[_Aside to Ari._] Come hither, spirit:
Set Caliban and his companions free;
Untie the spell. [_Exit Ariel._] How fares my gracious sir?
There are yet missing of your company
Some few odd lads that you remember not. 255
_Re-enter ARIEL, driving in CALIBAN, STEPHANO, and TRINCULO,
in their stolen apparel._
_Ste._ Every man shift for all the rest, and let no man
take care for himself; for all is but fortune. --Coragio,
bully-monster, coragio!
_Trin._ If these be true spies which I wear in my head,
here's a goodly sight. 260
_Cal._ O Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed!
How fine my master is! I am afraid
He will chastise me.
_Seb._ Ha, ha!
What things are these, my lord Antonio?
Will money buy 'em?
_Ant._ Very like; one of them 265
Is a plain fish, and, no doubt, marketable.
_Pros._ Mark but the badges of these men, my lords,
Then say if they be true. This mis-shapen knave,
His mother was a witch; and one so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs, 270
And deal in her command, without her power.
These three have robb'd me; and this demi-devil--
For he's a bastard one--had plotted with them
To take my life. Two of these fellows you
Must know and own; this thing of darkness I 275
Acknowledge mine.
_Cal._ I shall be pinch'd to death.
_Alon._ Is not this Stephano, my drunken butler?
_Seb._ He is drunk now: where had he wine?
_Alon._ And Trinculo is reeling ripe: where should they
Find this grand liquor that hath gilded 'em?-- 280
How camest thou in this pickle?
_Trin._ I have been in such a pickle, since I saw you
last, that, I fear me, will never out of my bones: I shall not
fear fly-blowing.
_Seb._ Why, how now, Stephano! 285
_Ste._ O, touch me not;--I am not Stephano, but a cramp.
_Pros._ You'ld be king o' the isle, sirrah?
_Ste._ I should have been a sore one, then.
_Alon._ This is a strange thing as e'er I look'd on.
[_Pointing to Caliban._
_Pros._ He is as disproportion'd in his manners 290
As in his shape. Go, sirrah, to my cell;
Take with you your companions; as you look
To have my pardon, trim it handsomely.
_Cal._ Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass 295
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool!
_Pros._ Go to; away!
_Alon._ Hence, and bestow your luggage where you found it.
_Seb._ Or stole it, rather. [_Exeunt Cal., Ste., and Trin._
_Pros._ Sir, I invite your Highness and your train 300
To my poor cell, where you shall take your rest
For this one night; which, part of it, I'll waste
With such discourse as, I not doubt, shall make it
Go quick away: the story of my life,
And the particular accidents gone by 305
Since I came to this isle: and in the morn
I'll bring you to your ship, and so to Naples,
Where I have hope to see the nuptial
Of these our dear-beloved solemnized;
And thence retire me to my Milan, where 310
Every third thought shall be my grave.
_Alon._ I long
To hear the story of your life, which must
Take the ear strangely.
_Pros._ I'll deliver all;
And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales,
And sail so expeditious, that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off. [_Aside to Ari._] My Ariel, chick, 315
That is thy charge: then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well! Please you, draw near.
[_Exeunt._
Notes: V, 1.
7: _together_] om. Pope.
9: _all_] _all your_ Pope.
10: _line-grove_] _lime-grove_ Rowe.
11: _your_] F1 F2. _you_ F3 F4.
15: _sir_] om. Pope.
16: _run_] _runs_ F1.
_winter's_] _winter_ F4.]
23: F1 F2 put a comma after _sharply_. F3 F4 omit it.
24: _Passion_] _Passion'd_ Pope.
26: _'gainst_] Pope. _gainst_ F1 F2. _against_ F3 F4.
33: SCENE II. Pope.
37: _green sour_] _green-sward_ Douce conj.
46: _strong-based_] Rowe. _strong-bass'd_ Ff.
58: SCENE III. Pope.
60: _boil'd_] Pope. _boile_ F1 F2. _boil_ F3 F4.
62: _Holy_] _Noble_ Collier MS.
63: _show_] _shew_ Ff. _flow_ Collier MS.
64: _fellowly_] _fellow_ Pope.
68: _O_] _O my_ Pope. _O thou_ S. Walker conj.
69: _sir_] _servant_ Collier MS.
72: _Didst_] F3 F4. _Did_ F1 F2.
74: _Sebastian. Flesh and blood,_] _Sebastian, flesh and blood._
Theobald.
75: _entertain'd_] _entertaine_ F1.
76: _who_] Rowe. _whom_ Ff.
82: _lies_] F3 F4. _ly_ F1 F2.
83: _or_] _e'er_ Collier MS.
84: Theobald gives as stage direction "Exit Ariel and returns
immediately."
88: _suck_] _lurk_ Theobald.
90: _couch_] _crowch_ F3 F4.
[Capell punctuates _There I couch: when owls do cry,_]
92: _summer_] _sun-set_ Theobald.
106: _Behold,_] _lo!_ Pope.
111: _Whether thou be'st_] _Where thou beest_ Ff. _Be'st thou_ Pope.
_Whe'r thou be'st_ Capell.
112: _trifle_] _devil_ Collier MS.
119: _my_] _thy_ Collier MS.
124: _not_] F3 F4. _nor_ F1 F2.
132: _fault_] _faults_ F4.
136: _who_] F2 F3 F4. _whom_ F1.
145: _and,_] _sir, and_ Capell.
_supportable_] F1 F2. _insupportable_ F3 F4. _portable_ Steevens.
148: _my_] _my only_ Hanmer.
_A daughter_] _Only daughter_ Hanmer. _Daughter_ Capell.
156: _eyes_] F1. _eye_ F2 F3 F4.
_their_] _these_ Capell.]
172: SCENE IV. Pope.
Here Prospero discovers...] Ff. SCENE opens to the entrance of
the cell. Here Prospero discovers... Theobald. Cell opens and
discovers... Capell.]
172: _dear'st_] _dearest_ Ff.
179: [Kneels] Theobald.
191: _advice_] F4. _advise_ F1 F2 F3.
199, 200: _remembrances with_] _remembrance with_ Pope.
_remembrances With_ Malone.
213: _When_] _Where_ Johnson conj.]
_and_] om. Capell.
216: SCENE V. Pope.
_sir, look, sir_] _sir, look_ F3 F4.]
_is_] _are_ Pope.]
221: _safely_] _safe_ F3 F4.
230: _of sleep_] _a-sleep_ Pope.
234: _more_] Rowe. _mo_ F1 F2. _moe_ F3 F4.
236: _her_] Theobald (Thirlby conj.). _our_ Ff.
242-245: Given to Ariel in F2 F3 F4.
247: _leisure_] F1. _seisure_ F2. _seizure_ F3 F4.
248: _Which shall be shortly, single_] Pope. _(which shall be
shortly single)_ Ff.
253: [Exit Ariel] Capell.
256: SCENE VI. Pope.
258: _Coragio_] _corasio_ F1.
268: _mis-shapen_] _mis-shap'd_ Pope.
271: _command, without her power._] _command. Without her power,_
anon. conj.
_without_] _with all_ Collier MS.
280: _liquor_] _'lixir_ Theobald.
282-284: Printed as verse in Ff.
289: _This is_] F1 F2. _'Tis_ F3 F4.]
_e'er I_] _I ever_ Hanmer.
[Pointing to Caliban.] Steevens.]
299: [Exeunt... Trin.] Capell.
308: _nuptial_] _nuptiall_ F1. _nuptials_ F2 F3 F4.
309: See note (XVIII).
| 5,224 | Scene 1 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201219151049/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/the-tempest/summary-and-analysis/act-v-scene-1 | This scene opens with Ariel revealing to Prospero that Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio are remorseful, worried, and desperate. Gonzalo is worried and grief-stricken at his king's pain. Prospero reassures Ariel that he will be compassionate in dealing with his enemies and asks that Ariel bring the group to him. While he is waiting for the king and his party to appear, Prospero soliloquizes about what he has accomplished with magic and, at the soliloquy's end, promises that he will now give up his magic, bury his magic staff, and drown his magic book at sea. Almost immediately, Ariel enters with the royal party, who appear to be in a trance, and places them within the magic circle that Prospero had earlier drawn. With a few chanted words, the spell is removed. Prospero, clothed in the garments of the duke of Milan -- his rightful position -- appears before them. In a gesture of reconciliation, Prospero embraces Alonso, who is filled with remorse and immediately gives up Prospero's dukedom. Gonzalo is also embraced in turn, and then Prospero turns to Sebastian and Antonio. Prospero tells them that he will not charge them as traitors, at this time. Antonio is forgiven and required to renounce his claims on Prospero's dukedom. While Alonso continues to mourn the loss of his son, Prospero relates that he too has lost his child, his daughter. But he means that he has lost her in marriage and pulls back a curtain to reveal Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. Ferdinand explains to his father that he is betrothed to Miranda and that this event occurred while he thought his father dead. Alonso quickly welcomes Miranda and says he will be a second father to his son's affianced. At the sight of the couple, Gonzalo begins to cry and thanks God for having worked such a miracle. Ariel enters with the master of the boat and boatswain. Although the ship lay in harbor and in perfect shape, the puzzled men cannot explain how any of this has occurred. Alonso is also mystified, but Prospero tells him not to trouble his mind with such concerns. Next, Ariel leads in Caliban, Stefano, and Trinculo, who are still drunk. Prospero explains that these men have robbed him and plotted to murder him. Caliban immediately repents and promises to seek grace. The three conspirators, who have sobered somewhat since confronted with Prospero and the king, are sent to decorate Prospero's cell. Prospero invites his guests to spend the night with him, where he will tell them of his adventures and of his life during these past 12 years. Ariel's last duty to Prospero is to provide calm seas when they sail the next morning. | This final scene indicates the extent of Prospero's forgiveness and provides an example of humanity toward one's enemies. Before he confronts his enemies, Prospero tells Ariel that "The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance" . That is, it is better to forgive than to hate one's enemies. This is the example that Prospero provides in reuniting everyone in this final scene. When he emerges from his trance, Alonso moves quickly to embrace Prospero, and just as quickly, he renounces his claims to Prospero's dukedom. This is the behavior the audience expects of Ferdinand's father, and it is what Prospero requires to resolve this conflict. Ferdinand is an honorable young man, filled with love and charity, and it is reasonable to expect that he learned these values from his father, even if his father has, on occasion, forgotten them. Alonso is honestly delighted in Ferdinand's engagement and welcomes Miranda with authentic grace. It is to be predicted that he is happy at recovering his son, but he is also clearly pleased to have gained a daughter. These spontaneous actions reveal that Alonso is as humane and honest as Prospero. It is equally clear that Antonio and Sebastian each lack the humanity of their respective brothers. No apology is forthcoming from Antonio, and Sebastian thinks that Prospero is very likely the devil. Antonio never directly addresses Prospero, not even to justify his previous actions. And although both Prospero and Miranda might have died when cast out on to the sea some 12 years earlier, Antonio has no words for his niece. In spite of the obvious absence of regret from his brother, Prospero is true to his promise and seeks no revenge against Antonio. There is no reason to assume that shame restrains Antonio from speaking, and in all likelihood, he only regrets having been caught. Although Prospero warns his brother that he might still charge him with treason in the future, this warning is unlikely to restrain such a recalcitrant as Antonio. Prospero's humanity is clearly obvious in his treatment of Antonio, whom he calls traitor but whom he declines to treat as a traitor. Critics and audience might be tempted to label Antonio as an unnatural brother, as would also be true for Sebastian. But their cruelty only indicates that nature provides for both goodness and evil. In the Christian world of the Shakespeare's time, evil is chosen, not destined, and nature provides for all outcomes, those who are virtuous and their counterparts, those who are corrupt. Hence, evil siblings are as natural as good siblings. Although the self-serving behavior of Antonio and Sebastian may be despicable, they are still a part of the natural world. Caliban is also from the natural world, although as the child of a witch and devil. He is certainly different from the other humans on the island, but in this final scene, he displays more humanity than many of Prospero's "civilized" enemies. Antonio's only remark in this whole scene is to suggest that Caliban provides an opportunity to make money . Antonio and Sebastian echo Stefano and Trinculo's earlier notion of exhibiting Caliban for profit, and in doing so, they reaffirm the impression that even the upper classes can be as lacking in morals as the two examples of the lower class, a butler and a court jester. Caliban, however, has risen above his companions and willingly admits his errors. In admitting his fault, Caliban proves himself more honorable than those who are socially his superior, Antonio and Sebastian. Caliban is often celebrated as a natural man, one who is unspoiled by civilization. And yet, he easily embraces the worse that civilization has to offer. When exposed to Stefano and Trinculo, Caliban embraces their drunkenness and, in return, entices them to help plan a heinous crime. Many critics justify Caliban's actions by pointing to Prospero's persecution of Caliban. But nowhere in this play does Shakespeare validate this kind of revenge. Prospero may enslave Caliban, but he does not threaten his very existence. Certainly there is no way to justify slavery, and Shakespeare makes no attempt to do so. In the end, Prospero leaves Caliban to his island and to the natural world that he craves. The conclusion is about redemption, the personal redemption that so many of the participants reach. Caliban's regret during this final scene indicates he, too, has found the way to reconciliation. Gonzalo is one of the few participants who has no need to ask forgiveness nor any cause to regret his actions. Upon discovering that Ferdinand is alive and that he is betrothed to Miranda, Gonzalo quite properly thanks God, who has "chalked forth the way" . Gonzalo also sees the irony in Miranda's offspring inheriting all that was her father's and all that belongs to his enemy. He also observes that there is much that has been restored: Ferdinand to his father, and with him, a wife. But there is more. Prospero's dukedom has been restored, as has the ship and all its missing crew. Yet more important than people or objects, other essential components of civilized society have been restored: authority, harmony, and order. Even before this reconciliation scene occurs, Prospero has promised to put aside his magic and dispose of his magic book and staff, which are the source of his power. He has used magic to work in concert with nature, not to control or evoke evil. Now that he has his enemies under his control, Prospero permits compassion to replace magic. This putting away of his magic also signifies that Prospero's game is at an end. He has used magic to restore harmony and now needs it no more. The play ends with the promise of Ariel's freedom and the restoration of Prospero to a life filled with all that nature and God intended. Glossary mantle to enclose or envelop. furtherer an accomplice. rapier a slender two-edged sword used chiefly in thrusting. subtleties here, the illusions. requite to make return or repayment to for a benefit, injury, and so on; reward. tight and yare sound and ready. The ship is ready to sail. coragio take courage . | 451 | 1,025 | [
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110 | false | novelguide | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/42.txt | finished_summaries/novelguide/Tess of the d'Urbervilles/section_5_part_7.txt | Tess of the d'Urbervilles.chapter xli | chapter xli | null | {"name": "Chapter XLI", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase5-chapter35-44", "summary": "Despite a variety of agricultural jobs, Tess runs short of money but sends her parents the money Angel gave her to repair their roof. She doesn't know that Angel is ill in Brazil. Marian, another milkmaid from Talbothays, has written telling Tess about a job, and Tess travels to join her. She meets the man whom Angel attacked for insulting her. She runs to hide and takes refuge for the night in a thicket of bushes. In the morning she discovers a flock of dying pheasants who sought refuge in the bushes during a hunt. Tearfully, she breaks their necks to put them out of their misery. She feels a personal affinity for the tortured birds and \"in the sight of such misery,\" realizes that comparatively she is not so bad off", "analysis": ""} |
From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to
an October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting
of Clare and Tess. We discover the latter in changed conditions;
instead of a bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see
her a lonely woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage,
as at an earlier time when she was no bride; instead of the ample
means that were projected by her husband for her comfort through
this probationary period, she can produce only a flattened purse.
After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the
spring and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers,
the time being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service
at dairy-work near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley,
equally remote from her native place and from Talbothays. She
preferred this to living on his allowance. Mentally she remained in
utter stagnation, a condition which the mechanical occupation rather
fostered than checked. Her consciousness was at that other dairy,
at that other season, in the presence of the tender lover who had
confronted her there--he who, the moment she had grasped him to keep
for her own, had disappeared like a shape in a vision.
The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she
had not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but
had done duty as a supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now
beginning, she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble
to find plenty of further occupation, and this continued till harvest
was done.
Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare's
allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a
contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which
she had put them, she had as yet spent but little. But there now
followed an unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was
obliged to fall back upon her sovereigns.
She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand,
had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had
consecrated them to souvenirs of himself--they appeared to have had
as yet no other history than such as was created by his and her own
experiences--and to disperse them was like giving away relics. But
she had to do it, and one by one they left her hands.
She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to
time, but she concealed her circumstances. When her money had almost
gone a letter from her mother reached her. Joan stated that they
were in dreadful difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the
thatch of the house, which required entire renewal; but this could
not be done because the previous thatching had never been paid for.
New rafters and a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which,
with the previous bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds. As
her husband was a man of means, and had doubtless returned by this
time, could she not send them the money?
Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel's
bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was
received she sent the twenty as requested. Part of the remainder
she was obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal
sum for the whole inclement season at hand. When the last pound
had gone, a remark of Angel's that whenever she required further
resources she was to apply to his father, remained to be considered.
But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant was she to
take it. The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be
called, on Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own
parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to
his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her.
They probably despised her already; how much more they would despise
her in the character of a mendicant! The consequence was that by no
effort could the parson's daughter-in-law bring herself to let him
know her state.
Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's parents might,
she thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the
reverse obtained. On her leaving their house after the short visit
subsequent to her marriage they were under the impression that she
was ultimately going to join her husband; and from that time to the
present she had done nothing to disturb their belief that she was
awaiting his return in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey
to Brazil would result in a short stay only, after which he would
come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to join him; in any
case that they would soon present a united front to their families
and the world. This hope she still fostered. To let her parents
know that she was a deserted wife, dependent, now that she had
relieved their necessities, on her own hands for a living, after the
_eclat_ of a marriage which was to nullify the collapse of the first
attempt, would be too much indeed.
The set of brilliants returned to her mind. Where Clare had
deposited them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were
true that she could only use and not sell them. Even were they
absolutely hers it would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal
title to them which was not essentially hers at all.
Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free from trial.
At this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near
Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and
persecuted by other hardships, in common with all the English farmers
and farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going
thither by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the
baseless assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on
English uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they
had been born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which
they were surprised on Brazilian plains.
To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns
had been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place,
while on account of the season she found it increasingly difficult
to get employment. Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence,
energy, health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained
from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses,
people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other
than rural. From that direction of gentility Black Care had come.
Society might be better than she supposed from her slight experience
of it. But she had no proof of this, and her instinct in the
circumstances was to avoid its purlieus.
The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she
had served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer
required no further aid. Room would probably have been made for her
at Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as
her life had been there, she could not go back. The anti-climax
would be too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon
her idolized husband. She could not have borne their pity, and their
whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though
she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every
individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the
mind of each. It was the interchange of ideas about her that made
her sensitiveness wince. Tess could not account for this
distinction; she simply knew that she felt it.
She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county,
to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had
reached her from Marian. Marian had somehow heard that Tess was
separated from her husband--probably through Izz Huett--and the
good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had
hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to
this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her
there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true
that she worked again as of old.
With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's
forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the
habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which
she rambled on--disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful
past at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to
accidents or contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her
whereabouts by others of importance to her own happiness, if not to
theirs.
Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was
the attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of
distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her
natural attractiveness. Whilst the clothes lasted which had been
prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused
her no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the
wrapper of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than
once; but nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular
November afternoon.
She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland
farm for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was
nearer to the home of her husband's father; and to hover about that
region unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at
the Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure. But having once decided to
try the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching
afoot towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass
the night.
The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of
the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware. She had reached
the top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length
in glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few
moments she was overtaken by a man. He stepped up alongside Tess and
said--
"Good night, my pretty maid": to which she civilly replied.
The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the
landscape was nearly dark. The man turned and stared hard at her.
"Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile--
young Squire d'Urberville's friend? I was there at that time, though
I don't live there now."
She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down
at the inn for addressing her coarsely. A spasm of anguish shot
through her, and she returned him no answer.
"Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was
true, though your fancy-man was so up about it--hey, my sly one? You
ought to beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering."
Still no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one escape for her
hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the
wind, and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she
came to a gate which opened directly into a plantation. Into this
she plunged, and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade
to be safe against any possibility of discovery.
Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes
which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off
draughts. She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed
them into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into
this Tess crept.
Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard
strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the
breeze. She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the
other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold. Was there
another such a wretched being as she in the world? Tess asked
herself; and, thinking of her wasted life, said, "All is vanity."
She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this
was a most inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought
as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself,
though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further. If all
were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than
vanity--injustice, punishment, exaction, death. The wife of Angel
Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of
her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she
did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare. "I wish
it were now," she said.
In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound
among the leaves. It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any
wind. Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes
it was a sort of gasp or gurgle. Soon she was certain that the
noises came from wild creatures of some kind, the more so when,
originating in the boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall
of a heavy body upon the ground. Had she been ensconced here under
other and more pleasant conditions she would have become alarmed;
but, outside humanity, she had at present no fear.
Day at length broke in the sky. When it had been day aloft for some
little while it became day in the wood.
Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's active hours
had grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and
looked around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to
disturb her. The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down
at this spot into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the
hedge being arable ground. Under the trees several pheasants lay
about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some
feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating
quickly, some contorted, some stretched out--all of them writhing in
agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the
night by the inability of nature to bear more.
Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had been driven
down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and
while those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before
nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded
birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the
thick boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew
weaker with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one
by one as she had heard them.
She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood,
looking over hedges, or peeping through bushes, and pointing their
guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes. She
had been told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they
were not like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil
persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like
the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made
it their purpose to destroy life--in this case harmless feathered
creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify
these propensities--at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards
their weaker fellows in Nature's teeming family.
With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as
much as for herself, Tess's first thought was to put the still living
birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she
broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie
where she had found them till the game-keepers should come--as they
probably would come--to look for them a second time.
"Poor darlings--to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth
in the sight o' such misery as yours!" she exclaimed, her tears
running down as she killed the birds tenderly. "And not a twinge of
bodily pain about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and
I have two hands to feed and clothe me." She was ashamed of herself
for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a
sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no
foundation in Nature.
| 2,621 | Chapter XLI | https://web.archive.org/web/20210213065711/https://www.novelguide.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/summaries/phase5-chapter35-44 | Despite a variety of agricultural jobs, Tess runs short of money but sends her parents the money Angel gave her to repair their roof. She doesn't know that Angel is ill in Brazil. Marian, another milkmaid from Talbothays, has written telling Tess about a job, and Tess travels to join her. She meets the man whom Angel attacked for insulting her. She runs to hide and takes refuge for the night in a thicket of bushes. In the morning she discovers a flock of dying pheasants who sought refuge in the bushes during a hunt. Tearfully, she breaks their necks to put them out of their misery. She feels a personal affinity for the tortured birds and "in the sight of such misery," realizes that comparatively she is not so bad off | null | 132 | 1 | [
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174 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/174-chapters/07.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Picture of Dorian Gray/section_6_part_0.txt | The Picture of Dorian Gray.chapter 7 | chapter 7 | null | {"name": "Chapter 7", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210304030722/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/picture-dorian-gray/summary/chapter-7", "summary": "The three friends meet up at the dingy theatre, where they're met by the manager. Dorian hates the guy more than ever, but Lord Henry claims to like him--then again, we're never sure how serious he is. The theatre sounds hellish--it's hot, noisy, and grotesque. Dorian promises that Sibyl will make this outing worth it, and Basil believes him. Finally, Sibyl comes on stage as Juliet, and Henry and Basil are both enraptured by her; Basil even jumps up and applauds. Her beauty is more remarkable than ever. Sibyl's acting, however, is worse than ever before. Every spark of her amazing talent is gone, and she's absolutely terrible. Dorian feels betrayed, and his friends are terribly disappointed. They wait for the famous balcony scene to pass judgment--and she fails miserably. Everyone in the theatre is bored and disappointed. Henry and Basil leave the theatre at intermission; Basil is willing to seek an explanation, saying that Sibyl must be ill. Dorian, however, can't believe it--he doesn't know what happened to the Sibyl he loves. Dorian, weeping, tells Henry and Basil to leave him alone with his heartbreak. The rest of the play is a disaster. Dorian sits through it, miserable, then rushes backstage to confront Sibyl. The girl is overjoyed to see her fiance. She happily tells him that she will never act well again--and, to make matters worse, it's Dorian's fault. Before she met Dorian, acting was the only real world to her, but now that she's in love with him, he's everything to her. She says that it would be profane for her to act at being in love on stage, since she's found real love with Dorian. This explanation isn't enough for Dorian, and he tells Sibyl that he doesn't love her anymore. He goes on in a fit of passion to tell her that she's basically worthless--he can't believe he ever loved her, and he wishes he hadn't. To add insult to injury, he calls her a \"third-rate\" actress. Sibyl is stunned and horrified--she can't believe Dorian's saying this . She begs him to reconsider, but, instead, he coldly leaves her in tears. Dorian flees the theatre, not paying attention to where he's going. He ends up in the flower market in Covent Garden, and eventually makes his way home in a cab around dawn. When he gets back to his opulently decorated house, Basil's portrait catches his eye. For some reason, Dorian thinks it looks different this morning, as though there's a new cruelty in his painted twin's expression. He quickly checks to make sure he doesn't look like that; his actual face bears no such change. Dorian remembers the rash wish he made in Basil's studio--he wished that the portrait could change and grow old, while he stayed the same. Could it be that his wish was granted?... Looking at the portrait's new expression, Dorian starts to feel bad for poor Sibyl. He can't stop looking at the picture, and realizes that it will keep changing for the worse if he himself does. He draws a screen in front of the portrait, and tries to put it out of his mind, vowing to go back to Sibyl and marry her. Dorian, certain that his love for her will return, feels like everything will be all right.", "analysis": ""} |
For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat
Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with
an oily tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box with a sort of
pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands and talking at the top
of his voice. Dorian Gray loathed him more than ever. He felt as if
he had come to look for Miranda and had been met by Caliban. Lord
Henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him. At least he declared he
did, and insisted on shaking him by the hand and assuring him that he
was proud to meet a man who had discovered a real genius and gone
bankrupt over a poet. Hallward amused himself with watching the faces
in the pit. The heat was terribly oppressive, and the huge sunlight
flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of yellow fire. The youths
in the gallery had taken off their coats and waistcoats and hung them
over the side. They talked to each other across the theatre and shared
their oranges with the tawdry girls who sat beside them. Some women
were laughing in the pit. Their voices were horribly shrill and
discordant. The sound of the popping of corks came from the bar.
"What a place to find one's divinity in!" said Lord Henry.
"Yes!" answered Dorian Gray. "It was here I found her, and she is
divine beyond all living things. When she acts, you will forget
everything. These common rough people, with their coarse faces and
brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage. They
sit silently and watch her. They weep and laugh as she wills them to
do. She makes them as responsive as a violin. She spiritualizes them,
and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self."
"The same flesh and blood as one's self! Oh, I hope not!" exclaimed
Lord Henry, who was scanning the occupants of the gallery through his
opera-glass.
"Don't pay any attention to him, Dorian," said the painter. "I
understand what you mean, and I believe in this girl. Any one you love
must be marvellous, and any girl who has the effect you describe must
be fine and noble. To spiritualize one's age--that is something worth
doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without
one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have
been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and
lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of
all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. This
marriage is quite right. I did not think so at first, but I admit it
now. The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you would have
been incomplete."
"Thanks, Basil," answered Dorian Gray, pressing his hand. "I knew that
you would understand me. Harry is so cynical, he terrifies me. But
here is the orchestra. It is quite dreadful, but it only lasts for
about five minutes. Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl
to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything
that is good in me."
A quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil of
applause, Sibyl Vane stepped on to the stage. Yes, she was certainly
lovely to look at--one of the loveliest creatures, Lord Henry thought,
that he had ever seen. There was something of the fawn in her shy
grace and startled eyes. A faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a
mirror of silver, came to her cheeks as she glanced at the crowded
enthusiastic house. She stepped back a few paces and her lips seemed
to tremble. Basil Hallward leaped to his feet and began to applaud.
Motionless, and as one in a dream, sat Dorian Gray, gazing at her.
Lord Henry peered through his glasses, murmuring, "Charming! charming!"
The scene was the hall of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his pilgrim's
dress had entered with Mercutio and his other friends. The band, such
as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began. Through
the crowd of ungainly, shabbily dressed actors, Sibyl Vane moved like a
creature from a finer world. Her body swayed, while she danced, as a
plant sways in the water. The curves of her throat were the curves of
a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.
Yet she was curiously listless. She showed no sign of joy when her
eyes rested on Romeo. The few words she had to speak--
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss--
with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly
artificial manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view
of tone it was absolutely false. It was wrong in colour. It took away
all the life from the verse. It made the passion unreal.
Dorian Gray grew pale as he watched her. He was puzzled and anxious.
Neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. She seemed to
them to be absolutely incompetent. They were horribly disappointed.
Yet they felt that the true test of any Juliet is the balcony scene of
the second act. They waited for that. If she failed there, there was
nothing in her.
She looked charming as she came out in the moonlight. That could not
be denied. But the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew
worse as she went on. Her gestures became absurdly artificial. She
overemphasized everything that she had to say. The beautiful passage--
Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night--
was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been
taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. When she
leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines--
Although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say, "It lightens." Sweet, good-night!
This bud of love by summer's ripening breath
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet--
she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her. It was
not nervousness. Indeed, so far from being nervous, she was absolutely
self-contained. It was simply bad art. She was a complete failure.
Even the common uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their
interest in the play. They got restless, and began to talk loudly and
to whistle. The Jew manager, who was standing at the back of the
dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage. The only person unmoved was
the girl herself.
When the second act was over, there came a storm of hisses, and Lord
Henry got up from his chair and put on his coat. "She is quite
beautiful, Dorian," he said, "but she can't act. Let us go."
"I am going to see the play through," answered the lad, in a hard
bitter voice. "I am awfully sorry that I have made you waste an
evening, Harry. I apologize to you both."
"My dear Dorian, I should think Miss Vane was ill," interrupted
Hallward. "We will come some other night."
"I wish she were ill," he rejoined. "But she seems to me to be simply
callous and cold. She has entirely altered. Last night she was a
great artist. This evening she is merely a commonplace mediocre
actress."
"Don't talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more
wonderful thing than art."
"They are both simply forms of imitation," remarked Lord Henry. "But
do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not
good for one's morals to see bad acting. Besides, I don't suppose you
will want your wife to act, so what does it matter if she plays Juliet
like a wooden doll? She is very lovely, and if she knows as little
about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful
experience. There are only two kinds of people who are really
fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know
absolutely nothing. Good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic!
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is
unbecoming. Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke
cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful.
What more can you want?"
"Go away, Harry," cried the lad. "I want to be alone. Basil, you must
go. Ah! can't you see that my heart is breaking?" The hot tears came
to his eyes. His lips trembled, and rushing to the back of the box, he
leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands.
"Let us go, Basil," said Lord Henry with a strange tenderness in his
voice, and the two young men passed out together.
A few moments afterwards the footlights flared up and the curtain rose
on the third act. Dorian Gray went back to his seat. He looked pale,
and proud, and indifferent. The play dragged on, and seemed
interminable. Half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots
and laughing. The whole thing was a _fiasco_. The last act was played
to almost empty benches. The curtain went down on a titter and some
groans.
As soon as it was over, Dorian Gray rushed behind the scenes into the
greenroom. The girl was standing there alone, with a look of triumph
on her face. Her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. There was a
radiance about her. Her parted lips were smiling over some secret of
their own.
When he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy
came over her. "How badly I acted to-night, Dorian!" she cried.
"Horribly!" he answered, gazing at her in amazement. "Horribly! It
was dreadful. Are you ill? You have no idea what it was. You have no
idea what I suffered."
The girl smiled. "Dorian," she answered, lingering over his name with
long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to
the red petals of her mouth. "Dorian, you should have understood. But
you understand now, don't you?"
"Understand what?" he asked, angrily.
"Why I was so bad to-night. Why I shall always be bad. Why I shall
never act well again."
He shrugged his shoulders. "You are ill, I suppose. When you are ill
you shouldn't act. You make yourself ridiculous. My friends were
bored. I was bored."
She seemed not to listen to him. She was transfigured with joy. An
ecstasy of happiness dominated her.
"Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one
reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I
thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the
other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia
were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted
with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world.
I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came--oh, my
beautiful love!--and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what
reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw
through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in
which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became
conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the
moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and
that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not
what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something
of which all art is but a reflection. You had made me understand what
love really is. My love! My love! Prince Charming! Prince of life!
I have grown sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever
be. What have I to do with the puppets of a play? When I came on
to-night, I could not understand how it was that everything had gone
from me. I thought that I was going to be wonderful. I found that I
could do nothing. Suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant.
The knowledge was exquisite to me. I heard them hissing, and I smiled.
What could they know of love such as ours? Take me away, Dorian--take
me away with you, where we can be quite alone. I hate the stage. I
might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that
burns me like fire. Oh, Dorian, Dorian, you understand now what it
signifies? Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for me to
play at being in love. You have made me see that."
He flung himself down on the sofa and turned away his face. "You have
killed my love," he muttered.
She looked at him in wonder and laughed. He made no answer. She came
across to him, and with her little fingers stroked his hair. She knelt
down and pressed his hands to her lips. He drew them away, and a
shudder ran through him.
Then he leaped up and went to the door. "Yes," he cried, "you have
killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even
stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because
you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you
realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the
shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and
stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been!
You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never
think of you. I will never mention your name. You don't know what you
were to me, once. Why, once ... Oh, I can't bear to think of it! I
wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of
my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art!
Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous,
splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you
would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with
a pretty face."
The girl grew white, and trembled. She clenched her hands together,
and her voice seemed to catch in her throat. "You are not serious,
Dorian?" she murmured. "You are acting."
"Acting! I leave that to you. You do it so well," he answered
bitterly.
She rose from her knees and, with a piteous expression of pain in her
face, came across the room to him. She put her hand upon his arm and
looked into his eyes. He thrust her back. "Don't touch me!" he cried.
A low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet and lay
there like a trampled flower. "Dorian, Dorian, don't leave me!" she
whispered. "I am so sorry I didn't act well. I was thinking of you
all the time. But I will try--indeed, I will try. It came so suddenly
across me, my love for you. I think I should never have known it if
you had not kissed me--if we had not kissed each other. Kiss me again,
my love. Don't go away from me. I couldn't bear it. Oh! don't go
away from me. My brother ... No; never mind. He didn't mean it. He
was in jest.... But you, oh! can't you forgive me for to-night? I will
work so hard and try to improve. Don't be cruel to me, because I love
you better than anything in the world. After all, it is only once that
I have not pleased you. But you are quite right, Dorian. I should
have shown myself more of an artist. It was foolish of me, and yet I
couldn't help it. Oh, don't leave me, don't leave me." A fit of
passionate sobbing choked her. She crouched on the floor like a
wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at
her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain. There is
always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has
ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic.
Her tears and sobs annoyed him.
"I am going," he said at last in his calm clear voice. "I don't wish
to be unkind, but I can't see you again. You have disappointed me."
She wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer. Her little
hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him. He
turned on his heel and left the room. In a few moments he was out of
the theatre.
Where he went to he hardly knew. He remembered wandering through dimly
lit streets, past gaunt, black-shadowed archways and evil-looking
houses. Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after
him. Drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves
like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon
door-steps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts.
As the dawn was just breaking, he found himself close to Covent Garden.
The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed
itself into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding lilies
rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with
the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an
anodyne for his pain. He followed into the market and watched the men
unloading their waggons. A white-smocked carter offered him some
cherries. He thanked him, wondered why he refused to accept any money
for them, and began to eat them listlessly. They had been plucked at
midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them. A long
line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red
roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge,
jade-green piles of vegetables. Under the portico, with its grey,
sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls,
waiting for the auction to be over. Others crowded round the swinging
doors of the coffee-house in the piazza. The heavy cart-horses slipped
and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings.
Some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. Iris-necked
and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds.
After a little while, he hailed a hansom and drove home. For a few
moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent
square, with its blank, close-shuttered windows and its staring blinds.
The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like
silver against it. From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke
was rising. It curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air.
In the huge gilt Venetian lantern, spoil of some Doge's barge, that
hung from the ceiling of the great, oak-panelled hall of entrance,
lights were still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals
of flame they seemed, rimmed with white fire. He turned them out and,
having thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library
towards the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the
ground floor that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had
decorated for himself and hung with some curious Renaissance tapestries
that had been discovered stored in a disused attic at Selby Royal. As
he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait
Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise.
Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he
had taken the button-hole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate.
Finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In
the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk
blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The
expression looked different. One would have said that there was a
touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange.
He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The
bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky
corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he
had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be
more intensified even. The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the
lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking
into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory
Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly
into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What
did it mean?
He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it
again. There were no signs of any change when he looked into the
actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression
had altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was
horribly apparent.
He threw himself into a chair and began to think. Suddenly there
flashed across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward's studio the
day the picture had been finished. Yes, he remembered it perfectly.
He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the
portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the
face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that
the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and
thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness
of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been
fulfilled? Such things were impossible. It seemed monstrous even to
think of them. And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the
touch of cruelty in the mouth.
Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl's fault, not his. He had
dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he
had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been
shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over
him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little
child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why
had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him?
But he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the
play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of
torture. His life was well worth hers. She had marred him for a
moment, if he had wounded her for an age. Besides, women were better
suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They
only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely
to have some one with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told
him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were. Why should he trouble
about Sibyl Vane? She was nothing to him now.
But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of
his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own
beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look
at it again?
No; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. The
horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it.
Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that
makes men mad. The picture had not changed. It was folly to think so.
Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel
smile. Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. Its blue eyes
met his own. A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the
painted image of himself, came over him. It had altered already, and
would alter more. Its gold would wither into grey. Its red and white
roses would die. For every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck
and wreck its fairness. But he would not sin. The picture, changed or
unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would
resist temptation. He would not see Lord Henry any more--would not, at
any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil
Hallward's garden had first stirred within him the passion for
impossible things. He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends,
marry her, try to love her again. Yes, it was his duty to do so. She
must have suffered more than he had. Poor child! He had been selfish
and cruel to her. The fascination that she had exercised over him
would return. They would be happy together. His life with her would
be beautiful and pure.
He got up from his chair and drew a large screen right in front of the
portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. "How horrible!" he murmured
to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it. When he
stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath. The fresh morning
air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions. He thought only of
Sibyl. A faint echo of his love came back to him. He repeated her
name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the
dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
| 4,408 | Chapter 7 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210304030722/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/picture-dorian-gray/summary/chapter-7 | The three friends meet up at the dingy theatre, where they're met by the manager. Dorian hates the guy more than ever, but Lord Henry claims to like him--then again, we're never sure how serious he is. The theatre sounds hellish--it's hot, noisy, and grotesque. Dorian promises that Sibyl will make this outing worth it, and Basil believes him. Finally, Sibyl comes on stage as Juliet, and Henry and Basil are both enraptured by her; Basil even jumps up and applauds. Her beauty is more remarkable than ever. Sibyl's acting, however, is worse than ever before. Every spark of her amazing talent is gone, and she's absolutely terrible. Dorian feels betrayed, and his friends are terribly disappointed. They wait for the famous balcony scene to pass judgment--and she fails miserably. Everyone in the theatre is bored and disappointed. Henry and Basil leave the theatre at intermission; Basil is willing to seek an explanation, saying that Sibyl must be ill. Dorian, however, can't believe it--he doesn't know what happened to the Sibyl he loves. Dorian, weeping, tells Henry and Basil to leave him alone with his heartbreak. The rest of the play is a disaster. Dorian sits through it, miserable, then rushes backstage to confront Sibyl. The girl is overjoyed to see her fiance. She happily tells him that she will never act well again--and, to make matters worse, it's Dorian's fault. Before she met Dorian, acting was the only real world to her, but now that she's in love with him, he's everything to her. She says that it would be profane for her to act at being in love on stage, since she's found real love with Dorian. This explanation isn't enough for Dorian, and he tells Sibyl that he doesn't love her anymore. He goes on in a fit of passion to tell her that she's basically worthless--he can't believe he ever loved her, and he wishes he hadn't. To add insult to injury, he calls her a "third-rate" actress. Sibyl is stunned and horrified--she can't believe Dorian's saying this . She begs him to reconsider, but, instead, he coldly leaves her in tears. Dorian flees the theatre, not paying attention to where he's going. He ends up in the flower market in Covent Garden, and eventually makes his way home in a cab around dawn. When he gets back to his opulently decorated house, Basil's portrait catches his eye. For some reason, Dorian thinks it looks different this morning, as though there's a new cruelty in his painted twin's expression. He quickly checks to make sure he doesn't look like that; his actual face bears no such change. Dorian remembers the rash wish he made in Basil's studio--he wished that the portrait could change and grow old, while he stayed the same. Could it be that his wish was granted?... Looking at the portrait's new expression, Dorian starts to feel bad for poor Sibyl. He can't stop looking at the picture, and realizes that it will keep changing for the worse if he himself does. He draws a screen in front of the portrait, and tries to put it out of his mind, vowing to go back to Sibyl and marry her. Dorian, certain that his love for her will return, feels like everything will be all right. | null | 551 | 1 | [
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5,658 | false | pinkmonkey | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/04.txt | finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Lord Jim/section_3_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapter 4 | chapter 4 | null | {"name": "Chapter 4", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim12.asp", "summary": "A month or so later Jim stands in the witness-box and painfully answers questions about the wreck of the Patna and the subsequent events. He is attending an official inquiry in the police court of an Eastern Port about the accident. Outside the court the sun shines brightly; inside the packed room, the intense and attentive eyes of the onlookers peer at him, making Jim feel hot and uncomfortable. In spite of his discomfort, he is determined to tell the truth about what has happened. He honestly explains how the ship had been moving as easily over the waters as a snake moves over a stick. As the presiding magistrate stares at him, the questions continue. \"You were ordered by your Captain to go and find out the extent of the damage after the ship had collided with something floating,\" one of the assessors says to Jim. \"I did not,\" replies Jim, \"I was told to call no one for fear of creating panic. I thought the precaution reasonable. So I took the lamp, lowered it and saw the forepeak was more than half full of water already. I knew that there must be a big hole below the water-line.\" Jim goes on to explain how he saw the second engineer, dazed and feeling that in no time the whole ship would go down like lead. The Captain was also worried and kept moving here and there on the bridge, mumbling to himself. He ordered the second engineer to go and stop the engines before the icy water damaged them. Jim is then made to answer the most critical question about whether he jumped ship. He says honestly and miserably, \"Yes, I did. \" The words make his mouth feel dry. He wipes his damp forehead, passes his tongue over his parched lips, and feels a shiver run down his back. He looks around the court and sees a white man sitting apart from the others in the audience. As the man looks at Jim, there is something different about his glance, as if he understands Jim's difficulties. Jim feels that he has seen him somewhere, but is sure he has never spoken to him. He looks away from the man, whose name is Marlow.", "analysis": "Notes This chapter leaves the sea and takes the reader to an official inquiry in the police court. The scene is carefully described, and Jim is pictured with \"burning cheeks in a cool lofty room.\" At first, the reader does not know why Jim is present or that the ship has been in a collision; but as Jim is questioned, the details of the accident are given and Jim's shame is revealed. The others in the inquiry try to save themselves, but Jim's only wish is to tell the truth. His total honesty is clearly displayed, but no one is ready to listen to him, which makes him feel helpless. The fourth chapter introduces Marlow, who becomes Jim's good friend and the second narrator of the novel. From this chapter forward, the story is told from Marlow's point of view. As a result, the reader is introduced to many new facets of Jim's character, but in a subjective manner. Introduction of a narrator, like Marlow, in the midst of a story is an original and effective Conrad device."} |
A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions,
tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he said, speaking
of the ship: 'She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling
over a stick.' The illustration was good: the questions were aiming at
facts, and the official Inquiry was being held in the police court of an
Eastern port. He stood elevated in the witness-box, with burning cheeks
in a cool lofty room: the big framework of punkahs moved gently to and
fro high above his head, and from below many eyes were looking at him
out of dark faces, out of white faces, out of red faces, out of faces
attentive, spellbound, as if all these people sitting in orderly rows
upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice.
It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only
sound audible in the world, for the terribly distinct questions that
extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain
within his breast,--came to him poignant and silent like the
terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court the sun
blazed--within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the
shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The
face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at
him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The
light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads
and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the
half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed of
staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him,
as if facts could explain anything!
'After you had concluded you had collided with something floating awash,
say a water-logged wreck, you were ordered by your captain to go forward
and ascertain if there was any damage done. Did you think it likely from
the force of the blow?' asked the assessor sitting to the left. He had
a thin horseshoe beard, salient cheek-bones, and with both elbows on
the desk clasped his rugged hands before his face, looking at Jim with
thoughtful blue eyes; the other, a heavy, scornful man, thrown back in
his seat, his left arm extended full length, drummed delicately with his
finger-tips on a blotting-pad: in the middle the magistrate upright in
the roomy arm-chair, his head inclined slightly on the shoulder, had his
arms crossed on his breast and a few flowers in a glass vase by the side
of his inkstand.
'I did not,' said Jim. 'I was told to call no one and to make no noise
for fear of creating a panic. I thought the precaution reasonable. I
took one of the lamps that were hung under the awnings and went forward.
After opening the forepeak hatch I heard splashing in there. I lowered
then the lamp the whole drift of its lanyard, and saw that the forepeak
was more than half full of water already. I knew then there must be a
big hole below the water-line.' He paused.
'Yes,' said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the blotting-pad;
his fingers played incessantly, touching the paper without noise.
'I did not think of danger just then. I might have been a little
startled: all this happened in such a quiet way and so very suddenly. I
knew there was no other bulkhead in the ship but the collision bulkhead
separating the forepeak from the forehold. I went back to tell the
captain. I came upon the second engineer getting up at the foot of the
bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed, and told me he thought his left arm was
broken; he had slipped on the top step when getting down while I was
forward. He exclaimed, "My God! That rotten bulkhead'll give way in a
minute, and the damned thing will go down under us like a lump of lead."
He pushed me away with his right arm and ran before me up the ladder,
shouting as he climbed. His left arm hung by his side. I followed up in
time to see the captain rush at him and knock him down flat on his back.
He did not strike him again: he stood bending over him and speaking
angrily but quite low. I fancy he was asking him why the devil he didn't
go and stop the engines, instead of making a row about it on deck. I
heard him say, "Get up! Run! fly!" He swore also. The engineer slid down
the starboard ladder and bolted round the skylight to the engine-room
companion which was on the port side. He moaned as he ran. . . .'
He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness; he
could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for
the better information of these men who wanted facts. After his first
feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a meticulous
precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the
appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager to know had
been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in
space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton
steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that
had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be
remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible,
a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent
soul in a detestable body. He was anxious to make this clear. This
had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost
importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on
talking for truth's sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his
utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the
serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off
from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself
imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round,
distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place
to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape.
This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in his
speech. . . .
'The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge; he seemed calm
enough, only he stumbled several times; and once as I stood speaking to
him he walked right into me as though he had been stone-blind. He made
no definite answer to what I had to tell. He mumbled to himself; all I
heard of it were a few words that sounded like "confounded steam!" and
"infernal steam!"--something about steam. I thought . . .'
He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his
speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and
weary. He was coming to that, he was coming to that--and now, checked
brutally, he had to answer by yes or no. He answered truthfully by a
curt 'Yes, I did'; and fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy
eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed
within him. He was made to answer another question so much to the point
and so useless, then waited again. His mouth was tastelessly dry, as
though he had been eating dust, then salt and bitter as after a drink
of sea-water. He wiped his damp forehead, passed his tongue over parched
lips, felt a shiver run down his back. The big assessor had dropped his
eyelids, and drummed on without a sound, careless and mournful; the eyes
of the other above the sunburnt, clasped fingers seemed to glow with
kindliness; the magistrate had swayed forward; his pale face hovered
near the flowers, and then dropping sideways over the arm of his chair,
he rested his temple in the palm of his hand. The wind of the punkahs
eddied down on the heads, on the dark-faced natives wound about in
voluminous draperies, on the Europeans sitting together very hot and in
drill suits that seemed to fit them as close as their skins, and holding
their round pith hats on their knees; while gliding along the walls the
court peons, buttoned tight in long white coats, flitted rapidly to and
fro, running on bare toes, red-sashed, red turban on head, as noiseless
as ghosts, and on the alert like so many retrievers.
Jim's eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers, rested upon a
white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded,
but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear. Jim
answered another question and was tempted to cry out, 'What's the good
of this! what's the good!' He tapped with his foot slightly, bit his
lip, and looked away over the heads. He met the eyes of the white man.
The glance directed at him was not the fascinated stare of the others.
It was an act of intelligent volition. Jim between two questions forgot
himself so far as to find leisure for a thought. This fellow--ran the
thought--looks at me as though he could see somebody or something past
my shoulder. He had come across that man before--in the street perhaps.
He was positive he had never spoken to him. For days, for many days,
he had spoken to no one, but had held silent, incoherent, and endless
converse with himself, like a prisoner alone in his cell or like a
wayfarer lost in a wilderness. At present he was answering questions
that did not matter though they had a purpose, but he doubted whether
he would ever again speak out as long as he lived. The sound of his own
truthful statements confirmed his deliberate opinion that speech was
of no use to him any longer. That man there seemed to be aware of his
hopeless difficulty. Jim looked at him, then turned away resolutely, as
after a final parting.
And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed
himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail
and audibly.
Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless
foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery
cigar-ends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent
listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and
expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in
profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes
overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the very
first word uttered Marlow's body, extended at rest in the seat, would
become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the
lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.
| 1,715 | Chapter 4 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180820051943/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmLordJim12.asp | A month or so later Jim stands in the witness-box and painfully answers questions about the wreck of the Patna and the subsequent events. He is attending an official inquiry in the police court of an Eastern Port about the accident. Outside the court the sun shines brightly; inside the packed room, the intense and attentive eyes of the onlookers peer at him, making Jim feel hot and uncomfortable. In spite of his discomfort, he is determined to tell the truth about what has happened. He honestly explains how the ship had been moving as easily over the waters as a snake moves over a stick. As the presiding magistrate stares at him, the questions continue. "You were ordered by your Captain to go and find out the extent of the damage after the ship had collided with something floating," one of the assessors says to Jim. "I did not," replies Jim, "I was told to call no one for fear of creating panic. I thought the precaution reasonable. So I took the lamp, lowered it and saw the forepeak was more than half full of water already. I knew that there must be a big hole below the water-line." Jim goes on to explain how he saw the second engineer, dazed and feeling that in no time the whole ship would go down like lead. The Captain was also worried and kept moving here and there on the bridge, mumbling to himself. He ordered the second engineer to go and stop the engines before the icy water damaged them. Jim is then made to answer the most critical question about whether he jumped ship. He says honestly and miserably, "Yes, I did. " The words make his mouth feel dry. He wipes his damp forehead, passes his tongue over his parched lips, and feels a shiver run down his back. He looks around the court and sees a white man sitting apart from the others in the audience. As the man looks at Jim, there is something different about his glance, as if he understands Jim's difficulties. Jim feels that he has seen him somewhere, but is sure he has never spoken to him. He looks away from the man, whose name is Marlow. | Notes This chapter leaves the sea and takes the reader to an official inquiry in the police court. The scene is carefully described, and Jim is pictured with "burning cheeks in a cool lofty room." At first, the reader does not know why Jim is present or that the ship has been in a collision; but as Jim is questioned, the details of the accident are given and Jim's shame is revealed. The others in the inquiry try to save themselves, but Jim's only wish is to tell the truth. His total honesty is clearly displayed, but no one is ready to listen to him, which makes him feel helpless. The fourth chapter introduces Marlow, who becomes Jim's good friend and the second narrator of the novel. From this chapter forward, the story is told from Marlow's point of view. As a result, the reader is introduced to many new facets of Jim's character, but in a subjective manner. Introduction of a narrator, like Marlow, in the midst of a story is an original and effective Conrad device. | 375 | 178 | [
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1,232 | true | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/chapters_1_to_2.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Prince/section_1_part_0.txt | The Prince.chapters 1-2 | chapters 1-2 | null | {"name": "Chapters 1-2", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201108110625/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-prince/summary-and-analysis/chapters-12", "summary": "There are two types of states: republics and principalities. Machiavelli declares that he will not discuss republics, examining only how principalities may be acquired and governed. Principalities are inherited or new. New principalities are either annexed to a ruler's existing territory or are completely new. New principalities are either used to being ruled by a prince or are used to being free. New principalities are acquired by luck or by strength. Hereditary principalities, which are used to being ruled by the prince's family, are easy to maintain, because tradition keeps the prince's position stable as long as he does not make himself hated.", "analysis": "In Chapter 1, Machiavelli traces the basic outlines of a discussion that will take him through Chapter 11: the different types of states, how to acquire them, and the difficulties they present to a ruler. Machiavelli refers to republics, which are governed by their citizens, and principalities or princely states, which are governed by a single, strong ruler . Because he is addressing one of those princes, he avoids any discussion of republican government, except to note that republics conquered by a new prince are used to living free, a theme he returns to in later chapters. In many of his other works, Machiavelli passionately defended republican forms of government, and he suffered for his defense of the Florentine republic which the Medici now ruled. Hereditary principalities are those in which rule is passed down among members of one family. Machiavelli considers these the easiest to govern and therefore disposes of the subject by observing that any minimally competent prince can hold onto one. At the end of Chapter 2, Machiavelli makes the first of his many observations about human nature, noting that people are inclined to forget that even old established governments were innovations once. Glossary Milan/Sforza Francesco Sforza became Duke of Milan in 1450. Naples/King of Spain Ferdinand had originally agreed to divide the Italian kingdom of Naples with Louis XII of France, but Ferdinand drove out the French forces and took over Naples in 1503. Duke of Ferrara actually two dukes, Ercole d'Este , who lost territory to the Venetians in 1484, and his successor, Alfonso d'Este , who managed to stay in power despite the opposition of three different popes. The d'Este family had ruled Ferrara for almost four centuries."} |
All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been
and are either republics or principalities.
Principalities are either hereditary, in which the family has been long
established; or they are new.
The new are either entirely new, as was Milan to Francesco Sforza, or
they are, as it were, members annexed to the hereditary state of the
prince who has acquired them, as was the kingdom of Naples to that of
the King of Spain.
Such dominions thus acquired are either accustomed to live under a
prince, or to live in freedom; and are acquired either by the arms of
the prince himself, or of others, or else by fortune or by ability.
I will leave out all discussion on republics, inasmuch as in another
place I have written of them at length, and will address myself only to
principalities. In doing so I will keep to the order indicated above,
and discuss how such principalities are to be ruled and preserved.
I say at once there are fewer difficulties in holding hereditary states,
and those long accustomed to the family of their prince, than new
ones; for it is sufficient only not to transgress the customs of his
ancestors, and to deal prudently with circumstances as they arise, for a
prince of average powers to maintain himself in his state, unless he
be deprived of it by some extraordinary and excessive force; and if he
should be so deprived of it, whenever anything sinister happens to the
usurper, he will regain it.
We have in Italy, for example, the Duke of Ferrara, who could not have
withstood the attacks of the Venetians in '84, nor those of Pope Julius
in '10, unless he had been long established in his dominions. For the
hereditary prince has less cause and less necessity to offend; hence it
happens that he will be more loved; and unless extraordinary vices cause
him to be hated, it is reasonable to expect that his subjects will be
naturally well disposed towards him; and in the antiquity and duration
of his rule the memories and motives that make for change are lost, for
one change always leaves the toothing for another.
| 338 | Chapters 1-2 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201108110625/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-prince/summary-and-analysis/chapters-12 | There are two types of states: republics and principalities. Machiavelli declares that he will not discuss republics, examining only how principalities may be acquired and governed. Principalities are inherited or new. New principalities are either annexed to a ruler's existing territory or are completely new. New principalities are either used to being ruled by a prince or are used to being free. New principalities are acquired by luck or by strength. Hereditary principalities, which are used to being ruled by the prince's family, are easy to maintain, because tradition keeps the prince's position stable as long as he does not make himself hated. | In Chapter 1, Machiavelli traces the basic outlines of a discussion that will take him through Chapter 11: the different types of states, how to acquire them, and the difficulties they present to a ruler. Machiavelli refers to republics, which are governed by their citizens, and principalities or princely states, which are governed by a single, strong ruler . Because he is addressing one of those princes, he avoids any discussion of republican government, except to note that republics conquered by a new prince are used to living free, a theme he returns to in later chapters. In many of his other works, Machiavelli passionately defended republican forms of government, and he suffered for his defense of the Florentine republic which the Medici now ruled. Hereditary principalities are those in which rule is passed down among members of one family. Machiavelli considers these the easiest to govern and therefore disposes of the subject by observing that any minimally competent prince can hold onto one. At the end of Chapter 2, Machiavelli makes the first of his many observations about human nature, noting that people are inclined to forget that even old established governments were innovations once. Glossary Milan/Sforza Francesco Sforza became Duke of Milan in 1450. Naples/King of Spain Ferdinand had originally agreed to divide the Italian kingdom of Naples with Louis XII of France, but Ferdinand drove out the French forces and took over Naples in 1503. Duke of Ferrara actually two dukes, Ercole d'Este , who lost territory to the Venetians in 1484, and his successor, Alfonso d'Este , who managed to stay in power despite the opposition of three different popes. The d'Este family had ruled Ferrara for almost four centuries. | 103 | 287 | [
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28,054 | false | shmoop | all_chapterized_books/28054-chapters/96.txt | finished_summaries/shmoop/The Brothers Karamazov/section_95_part_0.txt | The Brothers Karamazov.epilogue.chapter 3 | epilogue, chapter 3 | null | {"name": "Epilogue, Book 12, Chapter 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/epilogue-book-12-chapter-3", "summary": "The funeral is Ilyusha's. That's right, that angelic little boy from Book 10 died just a couple days after Dmitri was sentenced. All the boys have collected around Ilyusha's coffin, including Kolya. The narrator notes that Ilyusha's corpse doesn't smell. His body is covered in flowers donated by Lise Khokhlakov and Katerina Ivanovna. Captain Snegiryov is sober but still a mess. Mrs. Snegiryov and Ninochka are also at the coffin. Mrs. Snegiryov wants a white rose that has been placed in Ilyusha's hands, but the captain refuses to give it to her. The boys and Alyosha carry Ilyusha's coffin out a few hundred paces away to the church, accompanied by Snegiryov, who fusses over trivial details such as a crust of bread he had promised to crumble over his son's grave so that the swallows would visit it. The coffin is placed in the middle of the church, and everyone surrounds it as the funeral service is read. The coffin is then buried, and the children have to withhold Snegiryov from the open grave. On the way back, Snegiryov starts for the grave again and the children have to persuade him to follow them home. When they return Snegiryov gives his wife some flowers from the funeral, then breaks down in tears, as does the rest of the family, over the sight of his son's boots. Unable to bear it, Kolya suddenly leaves, along with the rest of the children and Alyosha. As they walk slowly down the path, they come upon Ilyusha's favorite stone. Overcome with emotion, Alyosha makes a little speech to the children about how he would like them to remember this moment as a time when they were all good and kind. The children declare their love for Alyosha. Kolya asks Alyosha about the afterlife, and Alyosha affirms that there is an afterlife where they will see Ilyusha again. Then they go back to the Snegiryovs' to eat pancakes. Really. The boys all cheer for Karamazov.", "analysis": ""} | Chapter III. Ilusha's Funeral. The Speech At The Stone
He really was late. They had waited for him and had already decided to
bear the pretty flower-decked little coffin to the church without him. It
was the coffin of poor little Ilusha. He had died two days after Mitya was
sentenced. At the gate of the house Alyosha was met by the shouts of the
boys, Ilusha's schoolfellows. They had all been impatiently expecting him
and were glad that he had come at last. There were about twelve of them,
they all had their school-bags or satchels on their shoulders. "Father
will cry, be with father," Ilusha had told them as he lay dying, and the
boys remembered it. Kolya Krassotkin was the foremost of them.
"How glad I am you've come, Karamazov!" he cried, holding out his hand to
Alyosha. "It's awful here. It's really horrible to see it. Snegiryov is
not drunk, we know for a fact he's had nothing to drink to-day, but he
seems as if he were drunk ... I am always manly, but this is awful.
Karamazov, if I am not keeping you, one question before you go in?"
"What is it, Kolya?" said Alyosha.
"Is your brother innocent or guilty? Was it he killed your father or was
it the valet? As you say, so it will be. I haven't slept for the last four
nights for thinking of it."
"The valet killed him, my brother is innocent," answered Alyosha.
"That's what I said," cried Smurov.
"So he will perish an innocent victim!" exclaimed Kolya; "though he is
ruined he is happy! I could envy him!"
"What do you mean? How can you? Why?" cried Alyosha surprised.
"Oh, if I, too, could sacrifice myself some day for truth!" said Kolya
with enthusiasm.
"But not in such a cause, not with such disgrace and such horror!" said
Alyosha.
"Of course ... I should like to die for all humanity, and as for disgrace,
I don't care about that--our names may perish. I respect your brother!"
"And so do I!" the boy, who had once declared that he knew who had founded
Troy, cried suddenly and unexpectedly, and he blushed up to his ears like
a peony as he had done on that occasion.
Alyosha went into the room. Ilusha lay with his hands folded and his eyes
closed in a blue coffin with a white frill round it. His thin face was
hardly changed at all, and strange to say there was no smell of decay from
the corpse. The expression of his face was serious and, as it were,
thoughtful. His hands, crossed over his breast, looked particularly
beautiful, as though chiseled in marble. There were flowers in his hands
and the coffin, inside and out, was decked with flowers, which had been
sent early in the morning by Lise Hohlakov. But there were flowers too
from Katerina Ivanovna, and when Alyosha opened the door, the captain had
a bunch in his trembling hands and was strewing them again over his dear
boy. He scarcely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, and he would not look
at any one, even at his crazy weeping wife, "mamma," who kept trying to
stand on her crippled legs to get a nearer look at her dead boy. Nina had
been pushed in her chair by the boys close up to the coffin. She sat with
her head pressed to it and she too was no doubt quietly weeping.
Snegiryov's face looked eager, yet bewildered and exasperated. There was
something crazy about his gestures and the words that broke from him. "Old
man, dear old man!" he exclaimed every minute, gazing at Ilusha. It was
his habit to call Ilusha "old man," as a term of affection when he was
alive.
"Father, give me a flower, too; take that white one out of his hand and
give it me," the crazy mother begged, whimpering. Either because the
little white rose in Ilusha's hand had caught her fancy or that she wanted
one from his hand to keep in memory of him, she moved restlessly,
stretching out her hands for the flower.
"I won't give it to any one, I won't give you anything," Snegiryov cried
callously. "They are his flowers, not yours! Everything is his, nothing is
yours!"
"Father, give mother a flower!" said Nina, lifting her face wet with
tears.
"I won't give away anything and to her less than any one! She didn't love
Ilusha. She took away his little cannon and he gave it to her," the
captain broke into loud sobs at the thought of how Ilusha had given up his
cannon to his mother. The poor, crazy creature was bathed in noiseless
tears, hiding her face in her hands.
The boys, seeing that the father would not leave the coffin and that it
was time to carry it out, stood round it in a close circle and began to
lift it up.
"I don't want him to be buried in the churchyard," Snegiryov wailed
suddenly; "I'll bury him by the stone, by our stone! Ilusha told me to. I
won't let him be carried out!"
He had been saying for the last three days that he would bury him by the
stone, but Alyosha, Krassotkin, the landlady, her sister and all the boys
interfered.
"What an idea, bury him by an unholy stone, as though he had hanged
himself!" the old landlady said sternly. "There in the churchyard the
ground has been crossed. He'll be prayed for there. One can hear the
singing in church and the deacon reads so plainly and verbally that it
will reach him every time just as though it were read over his grave."
At last the captain made a gesture of despair as though to say, "Take him
where you will." The boys raised the coffin, but as they passed the
mother, they stopped for a moment and lowered it that she might say good-
by to Ilusha. But on seeing that precious little face, which for the last
three days she had only looked at from a distance, she trembled all over
and her gray head began twitching spasmodically over the coffin.
"Mother, make the sign of the cross over him, give him your blessing, kiss
him," Nina cried to her. But her head still twitched like an automaton and
with a face contorted with bitter grief she began, without a word, beating
her breast with her fist. They carried the coffin past her. Nina pressed
her lips to her brother's for the last time as they bore the coffin by
her. As Alyosha went out of the house he begged the landlady to look after
those who were left behind, but she interrupted him before he had
finished.
"To be sure, I'll stay with them, we are Christians, too." The old woman
wept as she said it.
They had not far to carry the coffin to the church, not more than three
hundred paces. It was a still, clear day, with a slight frost. The church
bells were still ringing. Snegiryov ran fussing and distracted after the
coffin, in his short old summer overcoat, with his head bare and his soft,
old, wide-brimmed hat in his hand. He seemed in a state of bewildered
anxiety. At one minute he stretched out his hand to support the head of
the coffin and only hindered the bearers, at another he ran alongside and
tried to find a place for himself there. A flower fell on the snow and he
rushed to pick it up as though everything in the world depended on the
loss of that flower.
"And the crust of bread, we've forgotten the crust!" he cried suddenly in
dismay. But the boys reminded him at once that he had taken the crust of
bread already and that it was in his pocket. He instantly pulled it out
and was reassured.
"Ilusha told me to, Ilusha," he explained at once to Alyosha. "I was
sitting by him one night and he suddenly told me: 'Father, when my grave
is filled up crumble a piece of bread on it so that the sparrows may fly
down, I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone.' "
"That's a good thing," said Alyosha, "we must often take some."
"Every day, every day!" said the captain quickly, seeming cheered at the
thought.
They reached the church at last and set the coffin in the middle of it.
The boys surrounded it and remained reverently standing so, all through
the service. It was an old and rather poor church; many of the ikons were
without settings; but such churches are the best for praying in. During
the mass Snegiryov became somewhat calmer, though at times he had
outbursts of the same unconscious and, as it were, incoherent anxiety. At
one moment he went up to the coffin to set straight the cover or the
wreath, when a candle fell out of the candlestick he rushed to replace it
and was a fearful time fumbling over it, then he subsided and stood
quietly by the coffin with a look of blank uneasiness and perplexity.
After the Epistle he suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing
beside him, that the Epistle had not been read properly but did not
explain what he meant. During the prayer, "Like the Cherubim," he joined
in the singing but did not go on to the end. Falling on his knees, he
pressed his forehead to the stone floor and lay so for a long while.
At last came the funeral service itself and candles were distributed. The
distracted father began fussing about again, but the touching and
impressive funeral prayers moved and roused his soul. He seemed suddenly
to shrink together and broke into rapid, short sobs, which he tried at
first to smother, but at last he sobbed aloud. When they began taking
leave of the dead and closing the coffin, he flung his arms about, as
though he would not allow them to cover Ilusha, and began greedily and
persistently kissing his dead boy on the lips. At last they succeeded in
persuading him to come away from the step, but suddenly he impulsively
stretched out his hand and snatched a few flowers from the coffin. He
looked at them and a new idea seemed to dawn upon him, so that he
apparently forgot his grief for a minute. Gradually he seemed to sink into
brooding and did not resist when the coffin was lifted up and carried to
the grave. It was an expensive one in the churchyard close to the church,
Katerina Ivanovna had paid for it. After the customary rites the grave-
diggers lowered the coffin. Snegiryov with his flowers in his hands bent
down so low over the open grave that the boys caught hold of his coat in
alarm and pulled him back. He did not seem to understand fully what was
happening. When they began filling up the grave, he suddenly pointed
anxiously at the falling earth and began trying to say something, but no
one could make out what he meant, and he stopped suddenly. Then he was
reminded that he must crumble the bread and he was awfully excited,
snatched up the bread and began pulling it to pieces and flinging the
morsels on the grave.
"Come, fly down, birds, fly down, sparrows!" he muttered anxiously.
One of the boys observed that it was awkward for him to crumble the bread
with the flowers in his hands and suggested he should give them to some
one to hold for a time. But he would not do this and seemed indeed
suddenly alarmed for his flowers, as though they wanted to take them from
him altogether. And after looking at the grave, and as it were, satisfying
himself that everything had been done and the bread had been crumbled, he
suddenly, to the surprise of every one, turned, quite composedly even, and
made his way homewards. But his steps became more and more hurried, he
almost ran. The boys and Alyosha kept up with him.
"The flowers are for mamma, the flowers are for mamma! I was unkind to
mamma," he began exclaiming suddenly.
Some one called to him to put on his hat as it was cold. But he flung the
hat in the snow as though he were angry and kept repeating, "I won't have
the hat, I won't have the hat." Smurov picked it up and carried it after
him. All the boys were crying, and Kolya and the boy who discovered about
Troy most of all. Though Smurov, with the captain's hat in his hand, was
crying bitterly too, he managed, as he ran, to snatch up a piece of red
brick that lay on the snow of the path, to fling it at the flock of
sparrows that was flying by. He missed them, of course, and went on crying
as he ran. Half-way, Snegiryov suddenly stopped, stood still for half a
minute, as though struck by something, and suddenly turning back to the
church, ran towards the deserted grave. But the boys instantly overtook
him and caught hold of him on all sides. Then he fell helpless on the snow
as though he had been knocked down, and struggling, sobbing, and wailing,
he began crying out, "Ilusha, old man, dear old man!" Alyosha and Kolya
tried to make him get up, soothing and persuading him.
"Captain, give over, a brave man must show fortitude," muttered Kolya.
"You'll spoil the flowers," said Alyosha, "and mamma is expecting them,
she is sitting crying because you would not give her any before. Ilusha's
little bed is still there--"
"Yes, yes, mamma!" Snegiryov suddenly recollected, "they'll take away the
bed, they'll take it away," he added as though alarmed that they really
would. He jumped up and ran homewards again. But it was not far off and
they all arrived together. Snegiryov opened the door hurriedly and called
to his wife with whom he had so cruelly quarreled just before:
"Mamma, poor crippled darling, Ilusha has sent you these flowers," he
cried, holding out to her a little bunch of flowers that had been frozen
and broken while he was struggling in the snow. But at that instant he saw
in the corner, by the little bed, Ilusha's little boots, which the
landlady had put tidily side by side. Seeing the old, patched, rusty-
looking, stiff boots he flung up his hands and rushed to them, fell on his
knees, snatched up one boot and, pressing his lips to it, began kissing it
greedily, crying, "Ilusha, old man, dear old man, where are your little
feet?"
"Where have you taken him away? Where have you taken him?" the lunatic
cried in a heartrending voice. Nina, too, broke into sobs. Kolya ran out
of the room, the boys followed him. At last Alyosha too went out.
"Let them weep," he said to Kolya, "it's no use trying to comfort them
just now. Let us wait a minute and then go back."
"No, it's no use, it's awful," Kolya assented. "Do you know, Karamazov,"
he dropped his voice so that no one could hear them, "I feel dreadfully
sad, and if it were only possible to bring him back, I'd give anything in
the world to do it."
"Ah, so would I," said Alyosha.
"What do you think, Karamazov? Had we better come back here to-night?
He'll be drunk, you know."
"Perhaps he will. Let us come together, you and I, that will be enough, to
spend an hour with them, with the mother and Nina. If we all come together
we shall remind them of everything again," Alyosha suggested.
"The landlady is laying the table for them now--there'll be a funeral
dinner or something, the priest is coming; shall we go back to it,
Karamazov?"
"Of course," said Alyosha.
"It's all so strange, Karamazov, such sorrow and then pancakes after it,
it all seems so unnatural in our religion."
"They are going to have salmon, too," the boy who had discovered about
Troy observed in a loud voice.
"I beg you most earnestly, Kartashov, not to interrupt again with your
idiotic remarks, especially when one is not talking to you and doesn't
care to know whether you exist or not!" Kolya snapped out irritably. The
boy flushed crimson but did not dare to reply.
Meantime they were strolling slowly along the path and suddenly Smurov
exclaimed:
"There's Ilusha's stone, under which they wanted to bury him."
They all stood still by the big stone. Alyosha looked and the whole
picture of what Snegiryov had described to him that day, how Ilusha,
weeping and hugging his father, had cried, "Father, father, how he
insulted you," rose at once before his imagination.
A sudden impulse seemed to come into his soul. With a serious and earnest
expression he looked from one to another of the bright, pleasant faces of
Ilusha's schoolfellows, and suddenly said to them:
"Boys, I should like to say one word to you, here at this place."
The boys stood round him and at once bent attentive and expectant eyes
upon him.
"Boys, we shall soon part. I shall be for some time with my two brothers,
of whom one is going to Siberia and the other is lying at death's door.
But soon I shall leave this town, perhaps for a long time, so we shall
part. Let us make a compact here, at Ilusha's stone, that we will never
forget Ilusha and one another. And whatever happens to us later in life,
if we don't meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how
we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by
the bridge? and afterwards we all grew so fond of him. He was a fine boy,
a kind-hearted, brave boy, he felt for his father's honor and resented the
cruel insult to him and stood up for him. And so in the first place, we
will remember him, boys, all our lives. And even if we are occupied with
most important things, if we attain to honor or fall into great
misfortune--still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were
all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the
time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are. My little
doves--let me call you so, for you are very like them, those pretty blue
birds, at this minute as I look at your good dear faces. My dear children,
perhaps you won't understand what I am saying to you, because I often
speak very unintelligibly, but you'll remember it all the same and will
agree with my words some time. You must know that there is nothing higher
and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some
good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you
a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved
from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such
memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one
has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be
the means of saving us. Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be
unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men's tears and at those
people who say as Kolya did just now, 'I want to suffer for all men,' and
may even jeer spitefully at such people. But however bad we may
become--which God forbid--yet, when we recall how we buried Ilusha, how we
loved him in his last days, and how we have been talking like friends all
together, at this stone, the cruelest and most mocking of us--if we do
become so--will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at
this moment! What's more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great
evil and he will reflect and say, 'Yes, I was good and brave and honest
then!' Let him laugh to himself, that's no matter, a man often laughs at
what's good and kind. That's only from thoughtlessness. But I assure you,
boys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, 'No, I do wrong
to laugh, for that's not a thing to laugh at.' "
"That will be so, I understand you, Karamazov!" cried Kolya, with flashing
eyes.
The boys were excited and they, too, wanted to say something, but they
restrained themselves, looking with intentness and emotion at the speaker.
"I say this in case we become bad," Alyosha went on, "but there's no
reason why we should become bad, is there, boys? Let us be, first and
above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other! I
say that again. I give you my word for my part that I'll never forget one
of you. Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty
years. Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know
whether he exists or not. But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and
that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of
Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind, dear little eyes. Boys,
my dear boys, let us all be generous and brave like Ilusha, clever, brave
and generous like Kolya (though he will be ever so much cleverer when he
is grown up), and let us all be as modest, as clever and sweet as
Kartashov. But why am I talking about those two? You are all dear to me,
boys, from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I
beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me! Well, and who has united us
in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember
all our lives? Who, if not Ilusha, the good boy, the dear boy, precious to
us for ever! Let us never forget him. May his memory live for ever in our
hearts from this time forth!"
"Yes, yes, for ever, for ever!" the boys cried in their ringing voices,
with softened faces.
"Let us remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, his
coffin and his unhappy, sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him
alone against the whole school."
"We will remember, we will remember," cried the boys. "He was brave, he
was good!"
"Ah, how I loved him!" exclaimed Kolya.
"Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don't be afraid of life! How good life is
when one does something good and just!"
"Yes, yes," the boys repeated enthusiastically.
"Karamazov, we love you!" a voice, probably Kartashov's, cried
impulsively.
"We love you, we love you!" they all caught it up. There were tears in the
eyes of many of them.
"Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya shouted ecstatically.
"And may the dead boy's memory live for ever!" Alyosha added again with
feeling.
"For ever!" the boys chimed in again.
"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it be true what's taught us in religion,
that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each
other again, all, Ilusha too?"
"Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and
shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!"
Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.
"Ah, how splendid it will be!" broke from Kolya.
"Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner. Don't be
put out at our eating pancakes--it's a very old custom and there's
something nice in that!" laughed Alyosha. "Well, let us go! And now we go
hand in hand."
"And always so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya
cried once more rapturously, and once more the boys took up his
exclamation: "Hurrah for Karamazov!"
THE END
FOOTNOTES
1 In Russian, "silen."
2 A proverbial expression in Russia.
3 Grushenka.
4 i.e. setter dog.
5 Probably the public event was the Decabrist plot against the Tsar,
of December 1825, in which the most distinguished men in Russia were
concerned.--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
6 When a monk's body is carried out from the cell to the church and
from the church to the graveyard, the canticle "What earthly joy..."
is sung. If the deceased was a priest as well as a monk the canticle
"Our Helper and Defender" is sung instead.
7 i.e. a chime of bells.
8 Literally: "Did you get off with a long nose made at you?"--a
proverbial expression in Russia for failure.
9 Gogol is meant.
| 3,885 | Epilogue, Book 12, Chapter 3 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201023112808/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/brothers-karamazov/summary/epilogue-book-12-chapter-3 | The funeral is Ilyusha's. That's right, that angelic little boy from Book 10 died just a couple days after Dmitri was sentenced. All the boys have collected around Ilyusha's coffin, including Kolya. The narrator notes that Ilyusha's corpse doesn't smell. His body is covered in flowers donated by Lise Khokhlakov and Katerina Ivanovna. Captain Snegiryov is sober but still a mess. Mrs. Snegiryov and Ninochka are also at the coffin. Mrs. Snegiryov wants a white rose that has been placed in Ilyusha's hands, but the captain refuses to give it to her. The boys and Alyosha carry Ilyusha's coffin out a few hundred paces away to the church, accompanied by Snegiryov, who fusses over trivial details such as a crust of bread he had promised to crumble over his son's grave so that the swallows would visit it. The coffin is placed in the middle of the church, and everyone surrounds it as the funeral service is read. The coffin is then buried, and the children have to withhold Snegiryov from the open grave. On the way back, Snegiryov starts for the grave again and the children have to persuade him to follow them home. When they return Snegiryov gives his wife some flowers from the funeral, then breaks down in tears, as does the rest of the family, over the sight of his son's boots. Unable to bear it, Kolya suddenly leaves, along with the rest of the children and Alyosha. As they walk slowly down the path, they come upon Ilyusha's favorite stone. Overcome with emotion, Alyosha makes a little speech to the children about how he would like them to remember this moment as a time when they were all good and kind. The children declare their love for Alyosha. Kolya asks Alyosha about the afterlife, and Alyosha affirms that there is an afterlife where they will see Ilyusha again. Then they go back to the Snegiryovs' to eat pancakes. Really. The boys all cheer for Karamazov. | null | 330 | 1 | [
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23,042 | false | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/23042-chapters/7.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/The Tempest/section_2_part_3.txt | The Tempest.act 3.scene 3 | act 3, scene 3 | null | {"name": "act 3, Scene 3", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210309152602/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-tempest/study-guide/summary-act-iii", "summary": "Alonso, Adrian, Francisco, Sebastian, Antonio, and Gonzalo are still wandering about the island, and Alonzo has finally given up any hope of his son Ferdinand being alive. Antonio and Sebastian decide to make their murderous move later that night, but their conspiracy is interrupted by Prospero sending in a huge banquet via his spirits, with he himself there, but invisible. They are all amazed, but not too taken aback that they will not eat the food; but, as they are about to eat, a vengeful Ariel enters, taking credit for their shipwreck, and makes the banquet vanish. Alonso recognizes Ariel's words as being of Prospero's pen, and the great guilt of Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian begins to take them over, at the thought of Prospero being alive, and so nearby.", "analysis": "Ferdinand is stripped of the privileges of his rank by Prospero, who did the same to Caliban by making him a slave as well. Prospero's action in this case might not be fair, but Ferdinand bears it, and in so doing, legitimates Prospero's rule, just as Caliban did; this case again stresses the theme that willful obedience is a legitimate source of power. Prospero's tone, when speaking of Ferdinand in this act, is a curious mix of affection and distaste; he refers to Ferdinand as \"poor worm,\" which could be taken as a statement of endearment. However, the worm was often used as a symbol of corruption and lust, as mentioned in Act 2, scene 4 of Twelfth Night, and as it is represented in William Blake's poem \"The Rose\". In this case, the symbolic meaning foreshadows Prospero's suspicious warnings to the couple to wait until their wedding ceremony, and recalls his accusation of Ferdinand of treason and bad faith in the first act. In his speech in this act, Ferdinand employs paradox, overstatement, etc. in his many entreaties to Miranda. The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, and makes my labours pleasures,\" Ferdinand says, using paradoxes that communicate how magical and wonderful his beloved is, to turn the unpleasant pleasant. A contrast between Miranda and her father shows her to be much more pleasant than her father, who's \"composed of harshness\": yet, he declares, with overstatement, that he will carry \"some thousands of these logs\" for his stern taskmaster, because of the great sweetness of Miranda. Ferdinand overstates his resolve, in order to impress upon Miranda how much he would do for her; he swears that he would rather \"crack sinews, break back\" than see her work, though his work could scarcely be hard enough to cause these injuries. They make all the vows of marriage to each other; Ferdinand swears to \"love, prize, and honour\" Miranda, and in turn Miranda pledges to give him her \"modesty,\" meaning her virginity. They give each other their hands, and Miranda declares him her \"husband\"; the show of love is nice, but they know almost nothing about each other, and given that they have been together for less than twenty-four hours, the sentiment is rather rash, and almost foolish. Ferdinand and Miranda speak with a poetic, romantic, unrealistic tone that is very similar to the tone used by Romeo and Juliet when they spoke to each other; the same devices, of overstatement, paradox, contrast, and comparison are used to make elegant compliments to each other, and high-flown declarations of love. Ferdinand slips into conventional, polished phrases when speaking to this woman whom he hardly knows, an example being when he tells her \"'tis fresh morning with me when you are by at night,\" though they have not been through a night together at all. Indeed, Ferdinand and Miranda's love is the same sort of instant physical attraction that Romeo and Juliet had, though Romeo and Juliet's love was not influenced by a mischievous sprite like Ariel. Although Ferdinand hardly knows Miranda, he brazenly declares her \"perfect and peerless,\" though she cannot be either of those. The mood and feel of these passages is very different from those appearing before it, and are guided by a blind sort of idealism, and a naive, young love. The language in these sections of the play also turns distinctly sexual, with maidenly Miranda showing her hidden, but mature knowledge of desire and sexual politics. Miranda explains the urgency of her love to Ferdinand by telling him \"all the more it seeks to hide itself, the bigger bulk it shows\"; note the image of a concealed pregnancy in her description, which coincides with the increase in their declared desire. Miranda \"dare not offer what desire to give\" to Ferdinand, betraying the lust behind her maidenly exterior; and she acknowledges the sexual exchange inherent in marriage, that the \"jewel in dower\" is the main treasure which she has to attract a husband. Miranda may seem young and isolated, but this scene shows that she is far more knowledgeable about worldly matters than one might expect, given her upbringing on this remote island"} | SCENE III.
_Another part of the island._
_Enter ALONSO, SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, GONZALO, ADRIAN, FRANCISCO,
and others._
_Gon._ By'r lakin, I can go no further, sir;
My old bones ache: here's a maze trod, indeed,
Through forth-rights and meanders! By your patience,
I needs must rest me.
_Alon._ Old lord, I cannot blame thee,
Who am myself attach'd with weariness, 5
To the dulling of my spirits: sit down, and rest.
Even here I will put off my hope, and keep it
No longer for my flatterer: he is drown'd
Whom thus we stray to find; and the sea mocks
Our frustrate search on land. Well, let him go. 10
_Ant._ [_Aside to Seb._] I am right glad that he's so out of hope.
Do not, for one repulse, forego the purpose
That you resolved to effect.
_Seb._ [_Aside to Ant._] The next advantage
Will we take throughly.
_Ant._ [_Aside to Seb._] Let it be to-night;
For, now they are oppress'd with travel, they 15
Will not, nor cannot, use such vigilance
As when they are fresh.
_Seb._ [_Aside to Ant._] I say, to-night: no more.
[_Solemn and strange music._
_Alon._ What harmony is this?--My good friends, hark!
_Gon._ Marvellous sweet music!
_Enter PROSPERO above, invisible. Enter several strange Shapes,
bringing in a banquet: they dance about it with gentle actions of
salutation; and, inviting the King, &c. to eat, they depart._
_Alon._ Give us kind keepers, heavens!--What were these? 20
_Seb._ A living drollery. Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne; one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.
_Ant._ I'll believe both;
And what does else want credit, come to me, 25
And I'll be sworn 'tis true: travellers ne'er did lie,
Though fools at home condemn 'em.
_Gon._ If in Naples
I should report this now, would they believe me?
If I should say, I saw such islanders,--
For, certes, these are people of the island,-- 30
Who, though they are of monstrous shape, yet, note,
Their manners are more gentle-kind than of
Our human generation you shall find
Many, nay, almost any.
_Pros._ [_Aside_] Honest lord,
Thou hast said well; for some of you there present 35
Are worse than devils.
_Alon._ I cannot too much muse
Such shapes, such gesture, and such sound, expressing--
Although they want the use of tongue--a kind
Of excellent dumb discourse.
_Pros._ [_Aside_] Praise in departing.
_Fran._ They vanish'd strangely.
_Seb._ No matter, since 40
They have left their viands behind; for we have stomachs.--
Will't please you taste of what is here?
_Alon._ Not I.
_Gon._ Faith, sir, you need not fear. When we were boys,
Who would believe that there were mountaineers
Dew-lapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at 'em 45
Wallets of flesh? or that there were such men
Whose heads stood in their breasts? which now we find
Each putter-out of five for one will bring us
Good warrant of.
_Alon._ I will stand to, and feed,
Although my last: no matter, since I feel 50
The best is past. Brother, my lord the duke,
Stand to, and do as we.
_Thunder and lightning. Enter ARIEL, like a harpy; claps his
wings upon the table; and, with a quaint device, the banquet
vanishes._
_Ari._ You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,--
That hath to instrument this lower world
And what is in't,--the never-surfeited sea 55
Hath caused to belch up you; and on this island,
Where man doth not inhabit,--you 'mongst men
Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad;
And even with such-like valour men hang and drown
Their proper selves. [_Alon., Seb. &c. draw their swords._
You fools! I and my fellows 60
Are ministers of Fate: the elements,
Of whom your swords are temper'd, may as well
Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs
Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish
One dowle that's in my plume: my fellow-ministers 65
Are like invulnerable. If you could hurt,
Your swords are now too massy for your strengths,
And will not be uplifted. But remember,--
For that's my business to you,--that you three
From Milan did supplant good Prospero; 70
Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it,
Him and his innocent child: for which foul deed
The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have
Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures,
Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, 75
They have bereft; and do pronounce by me:
Lingering perdition--worse than any death
Can be at once--shall step by step attend
You and your ways; whose wraths to guard you from,--
Which here, in this most desolate isle, else falls 80
Upon your heads,--is nothing but heart-sorrow
And a clear life ensuing.
_He vanishes in thunder; then, to soft music, enter the Shapes
again, and dance, with mocks and mows, and carrying out the
table._
_Pros._ Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou
Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring:
Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated 85
In what thou hadst to say: so, with good life
And observation strange, my meaner ministers
Their several kinds have done. My high charms work,
And these mine enemies are all knit up
In their distractions: they now are in my power; 90
And in these fits I leave them, while I visit
Young Ferdinand,--whom they suppose is drown'd,--
And his and mine loved darling. [_Exit above._
_Gon._ I' the name of something holy, sir, why stand you
In this strange stare?
_Alon._ O, it is monstrous, monstrous! 95
Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i' th' ooze is bedded; and 100
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded. [_Exit._
_Seb._ But one fiend at a time,
I'll fight their legions o'er.
_Ant._ I'll be thy second.
[_Exeunt Seb. and Ant._
_Gon._ All three of them are desperate: their great guilt,
Like poison given to work a great time after, 105
Now 'gins to bite the spirits. I do beseech you,
That are of suppler joints, follow them swiftly,
And hinder them from what this ecstasy
May now provoke them to.
_Adr._ Follow, I pray you. [_Exeunt._
Notes: III, 3.
2: _ache_] _ake_ F2 F3 F4. _akes_ F1.
3: _forth-rights_] F2 F3 F4. _fourth rights_ F1.
8: _flatterer_] F1. _flatterers_ F2 F3 F4.
17: Prospero above] Malone. Prosper on the top Ff. See note (XIV).
20: _were_] F1 F2 F3. _are_ F4.
26: _'tis true_] _to 't_ Steevens conj.
_did lie_] _lied_ Hanmer.
29: _islanders_] F2 F3 F4. _islands_ F1.
32: _gentle-kind_] Theobald. _gentle, kind_ Ff. _gentle kind_ Rowe.
36: _muse_] F1 F2 F3. _muse_, F4. _muse_; Capell.
48: _of five for one_] Ff. _on five for one_ Theobald.
_of one for five_ Malone, (Thirlby conj.) See note (XV).
49-51: _I will ... past_] Mason conjectured that these lines formed
a rhyming couplet.
53: SCENE IV. Pope.
54: _instrument_] _instruments_ F4.
56: _belch up you_] F1 F2 F3. _belch you up_ F4. _belch up_ Theobald.
60: [... draw their swords] Hanmer.
65: _dowle_] _down_ Pope.]
_plume_] Rowe. _plumbe_ F1 F2 F3. _plumb_ F4.
67: _strengths_] _strength_ F4.
79: _wraths_] _wrath_ Theobald.
81: _heart-sorrow_] Edd. _hearts-sorrow_ Ff. _heart's-sorrow_ Rowe.
_heart's sorrow_ Pope.
82: mocks] mopps Theobald.
86: _life_] _list_ Johnson conj.
90: _now_] om. Pope.
92: _whom_] _who_ Hanmer.
93: _mine_] _my_ Rowe.
[Exit above] Theobald.]
94: _something holy, sir_,] _something, holy Sir_, F4.
99: _bass_] Johnson. _base_ Ff.
106: _do_] om. Pope.
| 1,916 | act 3, Scene 3 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210309152602/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-tempest/study-guide/summary-act-iii | Alonso, Adrian, Francisco, Sebastian, Antonio, and Gonzalo are still wandering about the island, and Alonzo has finally given up any hope of his son Ferdinand being alive. Antonio and Sebastian decide to make their murderous move later that night, but their conspiracy is interrupted by Prospero sending in a huge banquet via his spirits, with he himself there, but invisible. They are all amazed, but not too taken aback that they will not eat the food; but, as they are about to eat, a vengeful Ariel enters, taking credit for their shipwreck, and makes the banquet vanish. Alonso recognizes Ariel's words as being of Prospero's pen, and the great guilt of Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian begins to take them over, at the thought of Prospero being alive, and so nearby. | Ferdinand is stripped of the privileges of his rank by Prospero, who did the same to Caliban by making him a slave as well. Prospero's action in this case might not be fair, but Ferdinand bears it, and in so doing, legitimates Prospero's rule, just as Caliban did; this case again stresses the theme that willful obedience is a legitimate source of power. Prospero's tone, when speaking of Ferdinand in this act, is a curious mix of affection and distaste; he refers to Ferdinand as "poor worm," which could be taken as a statement of endearment. However, the worm was often used as a symbol of corruption and lust, as mentioned in Act 2, scene 4 of Twelfth Night, and as it is represented in William Blake's poem "The Rose". In this case, the symbolic meaning foreshadows Prospero's suspicious warnings to the couple to wait until their wedding ceremony, and recalls his accusation of Ferdinand of treason and bad faith in the first act. In his speech in this act, Ferdinand employs paradox, overstatement, etc. in his many entreaties to Miranda. The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, and makes my labours pleasures," Ferdinand says, using paradoxes that communicate how magical and wonderful his beloved is, to turn the unpleasant pleasant. A contrast between Miranda and her father shows her to be much more pleasant than her father, who's "composed of harshness": yet, he declares, with overstatement, that he will carry "some thousands of these logs" for his stern taskmaster, because of the great sweetness of Miranda. Ferdinand overstates his resolve, in order to impress upon Miranda how much he would do for her; he swears that he would rather "crack sinews, break back" than see her work, though his work could scarcely be hard enough to cause these injuries. They make all the vows of marriage to each other; Ferdinand swears to "love, prize, and honour" Miranda, and in turn Miranda pledges to give him her "modesty," meaning her virginity. They give each other their hands, and Miranda declares him her "husband"; the show of love is nice, but they know almost nothing about each other, and given that they have been together for less than twenty-four hours, the sentiment is rather rash, and almost foolish. Ferdinand and Miranda speak with a poetic, romantic, unrealistic tone that is very similar to the tone used by Romeo and Juliet when they spoke to each other; the same devices, of overstatement, paradox, contrast, and comparison are used to make elegant compliments to each other, and high-flown declarations of love. Ferdinand slips into conventional, polished phrases when speaking to this woman whom he hardly knows, an example being when he tells her "'tis fresh morning with me when you are by at night," though they have not been through a night together at all. Indeed, Ferdinand and Miranda's love is the same sort of instant physical attraction that Romeo and Juliet had, though Romeo and Juliet's love was not influenced by a mischievous sprite like Ariel. Although Ferdinand hardly knows Miranda, he brazenly declares her "perfect and peerless," though she cannot be either of those. The mood and feel of these passages is very different from those appearing before it, and are guided by a blind sort of idealism, and a naive, young love. The language in these sections of the play also turns distinctly sexual, with maidenly Miranda showing her hidden, but mature knowledge of desire and sexual politics. Miranda explains the urgency of her love to Ferdinand by telling him "all the more it seeks to hide itself, the bigger bulk it shows"; note the image of a concealed pregnancy in her description, which coincides with the increase in their declared desire. Miranda "dare not offer what desire to give" to Ferdinand, betraying the lust behind her maidenly exterior; and she acknowledges the sexual exchange inherent in marriage, that the "jewel in dower" is the main treasure which she has to attract a husband. Miranda may seem young and isolated, but this scene shows that she is far more knowledgeable about worldly matters than one might expect, given her upbringing on this remote island | 130 | 695 | [
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110 | false | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/110-chapters/09.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_0_part_9.txt | Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 9 | chapter 9 | null | {"name": "Chapter 9", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-1-chapters-1-11", "summary": "Tess begins to care for the birds in Mrs. d'Urberville's poultry house. Tess meets the old woman, who is blind, and asks Tess if she knows how to whistle. Although she knows that it is not a genteel trait, Tess admits to knowing how to whistle, and Mrs. d'Urberville tells her to practice it every day so that she can whistle to her bullfinches. Mrs. d'Urberville is not aware that Tess is a relative. The next day, Tess tries to whistle to the bullfinches, but becomes cross because she finds that she cannot do so. Alec finds her frustrated, and offers to give Tess a lesson. Repeated interaction with Alec d'Urberville removes Tess's original shyness toward him, without implanting any feeling which could engender a more tender shyness. One day, when Tess is whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs. d'Urberville's room while she is absent, Tess hears a rustling behind the bed. Alec has been hiding behind the curtains.", "analysis": "Tess's first meeting with Mrs. d'Urberville further serves to place Tess back to her original place in the social order. Mrs. d'Urberville is impersonal and condescending, treating Tess as a mere rural servant girl and not as a relative; indeed, she does not even know that Tess is a distant relation. This implies that Alec has brought her to the house under false pretenses; he has not brought her to claim kinship with him and his mother, but rather for his own personal reasons. Hardy further establishes Alec d'Urberville as a sexual predator in this chapter, a man who even stalks Tess as she whistles to the bullfinches. Nevertheless, Tess begins to become more accustomed to Alec, despite the sexual danger he presents to her. Alec ingratiates himself to Tess by aiding her in her work. This is the first evidence that Tess has let her guard down around a man whom she inherently suspects. While Tess still does not care for the villainous Alec d'Urberville, she is becoming increasingly familiar with him and receptive to him"} |
The community of fowls to which Tess had been appointed as
supervisor, purveyor, nurse, surgeon, and friend made its
headquarters in an old thatched cottage standing in an enclosure that
had once been a garden, but was now a trampled and sanded square.
The house was overrun with ivy, its chimney being enlarged by the
boughs of the parasite to the aspect of a ruined tower. The lower
rooms were entirely given over to the birds, who walked about them
with a proprietary air, as though the place had been built by
themselves, and not by certain dusty copyholders who now lay east
and west in the churchyard. The descendants of these bygone owners
felt it almost as a slight to their family when the house which had
so much of their affection, had cost so much of their forefathers'
money, and had been in their possession for several generations
before the d'Urbervilles came and built here, was indifferently
turned into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d'Urberville as soon as the
property fell into hand according to law. "'Twas good enough for
Christians in grandfather's time," they said.
The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now
resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in
coops occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate
agriculturists. The chimney-corner and once-blazing hearth was now
filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs;
while out of doors the plots that each succeeding householder had
carefully shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in wildest
fashion.
The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a wall, and
could only be entered through a door.
When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next morning in
altering and improving the arrangements, according to her skilled
ideas as the daughter of a professed poulterer, the door in the wall
opened and a servant in white cap and apron entered. She had come
from the manor-house.
"Mrs d'Urberville wants the fowls as usual," she said; but perceiving
that Tess did not quite understand, she explained, "Mis'ess is a old
lady, and blind."
"Blind!" said Tess.
Almost before her misgiving at the news could find time to shape
itself she took, under her companion's direction, two of the
most beautiful of the Hamburghs in her arms, and followed the
maid-servant, who had likewise taken two, to the adjacent mansion,
which, though ornate and imposing, showed traces everywhere on this
side that some occupant of its chambers could bend to the love of
dumb creatures--feathers floating within view of the front, and
hen-coops standing on the grass.
In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an armchair with
her back to the light, was the owner and mistress of the estate, a
white-haired woman of not more than sixty, or even less, wearing a
large cap. She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight
has decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and
reluctantly let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons
long sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to this lady with her
feathered charges--one sitting on each arm.
"Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my birds?" said Mrs
d'Urberville, recognizing a new footstep. "I hope you will be kind
to them. My bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person.
Well, where are they? Ah, this is Strut! But he is hardly so
lively to-day, is he? He is alarmed at being handled by a stranger,
I suppose. And Phena too--yes, they are a little frightened--aren't
you, dears? But they will soon get used to you."
While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other maid, in
obedience to her gestures, had placed the fowls severally in her lap,
and she had felt them over from head to tail, examining their beaks,
their combs, the manes of the cocks, their wings, and their claws.
Her touch enabled her to recognize them in a moment, and to discover
if a single feather were crippled or draggled. She handled their
crops, and knew what they had eaten, and if too little or too much;
her face enacting a vivid pantomime of the criticisms passing in her
mind.
The birds that the two girls had brought in were duly returned to the
yard, and the process was repeated till all the pet cocks and hens
had been submitted to the old woman--Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins,
Brahmas, Dorkings, and such other sorts as were in fashion just
then--her perception of each visitor being seldom at fault as she
received the bird upon her knees.
It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs d'Urberville was the
bishop, the fowls the young people presented, and herself and the
maid-servant the parson and curate of the parish bringing them up.
At the end of the ceremony Mrs d'Urberville abruptly asked Tess,
wrinkling and twitching her face into undulations, "Can you whistle?"
"Whistle, Ma'am?"
"Yes, whistle tunes."
Tess could whistle like most other country-girls, though the
accomplishment was one which she did not care to profess in genteel
company. However, she blandly admitted that such was the fact.
"Then you will have to practise it every day. I had a lad who did it
very well, but he has left. I want you to whistle to my bullfinches;
as I cannot see them, I like to hear them, and we teach 'em airs
that way. Tell her where the cages are, Elizabeth. You must begin
to-morrow, or they will go back in their piping. They have been
neglected these several days."
"Mr d'Urberville whistled to 'em this morning, ma'am," said
Elizabeth.
"He! Pooh!"
The old lady's face creased into furrows of repugnance, and she made
no further reply.
Thus the reception of Tess by her fancied kinswoman terminated, and
the birds were taken back to their quarters. The girl's surprise at
Mrs d'Urberville's manner was not great; for since seeing the size of
the house she had expected no more. But she was far from being aware
that the old lady had never heard a word of the so-called kinship.
She gathered that no great affection flowed between the blind woman
and her son. But in that, too, she was mistaken. Mrs d'Urberville
was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully,
and to be bitterly fond.
In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day before, Tess
inclined to the freedom and novelty of her new position in the
morning when the sun shone, now that she was once installed there;
and she was curious to test her powers in the unexpected direction
asked of her, so as to ascertain her chance of retaining her post.
As soon as she was alone within the walled garden she sat herself
down on a coop, and seriously screwed up her mouth for the
long-neglected practice. She found her former ability to have
degenerated to the production of a hollow rush of wind through the
lips, and no clear note at all.
She remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing, wondering how she
could have so grown out of the art which had come by nature, till
she became aware of a movement among the ivy-boughs which cloaked
the garden-wall no less then the cottage. Looking that way she
beheld a form springing from the coping to the plot. It was Alec
d'Urberville, whom she had not set eyes on since he had conducted
her the day before to the door of the gardener's cottage where she
had lodgings.
"Upon my honour!" cried he, "there was never before such a beautiful
thing in Nature or Art as you look, 'Cousin' Tess ('Cousin' had a
faint ring of mockery). I have been watching you from over the
wall--sitting like IM-patience on a monument, and pouting up that
pretty red mouth to whistling shape, and whooing and whooing, and
privately swearing, and never being able to produce a note. Why,
you are quite cross because you can't do it."
"I may be cross, but I didn't swear."
"Ah! I understand why you are trying--those bullies! My mother
wants you to carry on their musical education. How selfish of her!
As if attending to these curst cocks and hens here were not enough
work for any girl. I would flatly refuse, if I were you."
"But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be ready by to-morrow
morning."
"Does she? Well then--I'll give you a lesson or two."
"Oh no, you won't!" said Tess, withdrawing towards the door.
"Nonsense; I don't want to touch you. See--I'll stand on this side
of the wire-netting, and you can keep on the other; so you may feel
quite safe. Now, look here; you screw up your lips too harshly.
There 'tis--so."
He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of "Take, O
take those lips away." But the allusion was lost upon Tess.
"Now try," said d'Urberville.
She attempted to look reserved; her face put on a sculptural
severity. But he persisted in his demand, and at last, to get rid of
him, she did put up her lips as directed for producing a clear note;
laughing distressfully, however, and then blushing with vexation that
she had laughed.
He encouraged her with "Try again!"
Tess was quite serious, painfully serious by this time; and she
tried--ultimately and unexpectedly emitting a real round sound.
The momentary pleasure of success got the better of her; her eyes
enlarged, and she involuntarily smiled in his face.
"That's it! Now I have started you--you'll go on beautifully.
There--I said I would not come near you; and, in spite of such
temptation as never before fell to mortal man, I'll keep my
word... Tess, do you think my mother a queer old soul?"
"I don't know much of her yet, sir."
"You'll find her so; she must be, to make you learn to whistle to her
bullfinches. I am rather out of her books just now, but you will be
quite in favour if you treat her live-stock well. Good morning. If
you meet with any difficulties and want help here, don't go to the
bailiff, come to me."
It was in the economy of this _regime_ that Tess Durbeyfield had
undertaken to fill a place. Her first day's experiences were fairly
typical of those which followed through many succeeding days. A
familiarity with Alec d'Urberville's presence--which that young man
carefully cultivated in her by playful dialogue, and by jestingly
calling her his cousin when they were alone--removed much of her
original shyness of him, without, however, implanting any feeling
which could engender shyness of a new and tenderer kind. But she was
more pliable under his hands than a mere companionship would have
made her, owing to her unavoidable dependence upon his mother, and,
through that lady's comparative helplessness, upon him.
She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs
d'Urberville's room was no such onerous business when she had
regained the art, for she had caught from her musical mother numerous
airs that suited those songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory
time than when she practised in the garden was this whistling by the
cages each morning. Unrestrained by the young man's presence she
threw up her mouth, put her lips near the bars, and piped away in
easeful grace to the attentive listeners.
Mrs d'Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung with heavy
damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the same apartment,
where they flitted about freely at certain hours, and made little
white spots on the furniture and upholstery. Once while Tess was at
the window where the cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual,
she thought she heard a rustling behind the bed. The old lady was
not present, and turning round the girl had an impression that
the toes of a pair of boots were visible below the fringe of the
curtains. Thereupon her whistling became so disjointed that the
listener, if such there were, must have discovered her suspicion of
his presence. She searched the curtains every morning after that,
but never found anybody within them. Alec d'Urberville had evidently
thought better of his freak to terrify her by an ambush of that kind.
| 1,913 | Chapter 9 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-1-chapters-1-11 | Tess begins to care for the birds in Mrs. d'Urberville's poultry house. Tess meets the old woman, who is blind, and asks Tess if she knows how to whistle. Although she knows that it is not a genteel trait, Tess admits to knowing how to whistle, and Mrs. d'Urberville tells her to practice it every day so that she can whistle to her bullfinches. Mrs. d'Urberville is not aware that Tess is a relative. The next day, Tess tries to whistle to the bullfinches, but becomes cross because she finds that she cannot do so. Alec finds her frustrated, and offers to give Tess a lesson. Repeated interaction with Alec d'Urberville removes Tess's original shyness toward him, without implanting any feeling which could engender a more tender shyness. One day, when Tess is whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs. d'Urberville's room while she is absent, Tess hears a rustling behind the bed. Alec has been hiding behind the curtains. | Tess's first meeting with Mrs. d'Urberville further serves to place Tess back to her original place in the social order. Mrs. d'Urberville is impersonal and condescending, treating Tess as a mere rural servant girl and not as a relative; indeed, she does not even know that Tess is a distant relation. This implies that Alec has brought her to the house under false pretenses; he has not brought her to claim kinship with him and his mother, but rather for his own personal reasons. Hardy further establishes Alec d'Urberville as a sexual predator in this chapter, a man who even stalks Tess as she whistles to the bullfinches. Nevertheless, Tess begins to become more accustomed to Alec, despite the sexual danger he presents to her. Alec ingratiates himself to Tess by aiding her in her work. This is the first evidence that Tess has let her guard down around a man whom she inherently suspects. While Tess still does not care for the villainous Alec d'Urberville, she is becoming increasingly familiar with him and receptive to him | 159 | 177 | [
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1,200 | true | gradesaver | all_chapterized_books/1200-chapters/book_2_chapters_17_to_34.txt | finished_summaries/gradesaver/Gargantua and Pantagruel/section_3_part_0.txt | Gargantua and Pantagruel.book 2.chapters 17-34 | book 2, chapters 17-34 | null | {"name": "Book 2, Chapters 17-34", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180420203406/http://www.gradesaver.com/gargantua-and-pantagruel/study-guide/summary-book-2-chapters-17-34", "summary": "One day, the narrator finds Panurge looking sad, and he determines that Panurge is no doubt out of money. He questions Panurge and offers to give him some money, but Panurge will only accept a small sum, provided that the narrator go with him to different churches to look at reliquaries. Even though Panurge only has a small amount of money, as far as the narrator knows, Panurge somehow manages to pay money to each of the churches. After their adventure, they rest in a tavern and the narrator discovers that Panurge has somehow acquired a large amount of money. Panurge explains that he has stolen money from each of the churches through sleight-of-hand trickery. The narrator tells him that such actions are sinful, and then Panurge explains to the narrator why his actions are just. Panurge apparently served in the Crusades and provided services to various holy men of rank. Throughout that time, Panurge was promised large sums of money that he was never paid; so, Panurge believes he is getting his just reward. Panurge continues to tell the narrator stories of how he has acquired money over the years through lies and misdirection. One of his stories depicts how he made deals with some of the least attractive women around. Supposedly, these women were sexually promiscuous in their youth, and, as a result, never found husbands. His deals with these women included giving them money so that he could sell them as brides to drunkards. To do so, however, Panurge jokes that he had to cover the women's heads with bags. Panurge then tells the narrator how he has made many small fortunes by running scams in court, especially through frivolous lawsuits. While he has made money through these scams, Panurge comments that he has also lost money, since he has to invest money into the scams to make them work. The narrator concludes that while Panurge's many schemes do make him money, the only reason he has so many scams is because Panurge spends his money as quickly as he makes it, either by spending it on drink, women, or other materialistic trifles. Meanwhile, Thaumast, a learned man from England, has come to Paris to converse with Pantagruel. He has heard of Pantagruel's amazing intellect, and he wishes to discuss some of the greatest mysteries with Pantagruel. Before he can do so, however, he must test Pantagruel's intellect. He explains that if Pantagruel is truly as intelligent as people say, than he, Thaumast will forever pledge loyalty and servitude to Pantagruel, provided Pantagruel passes the challenge. For the challenge, Thaumast and Pantagruel will debate, but they will not do so with words, and instead will only use signs via hand gestures. Pantagruel agrees to the challenge, and the two men go to their dwellings to prepare. During the night, Pantagruel fears he will not prove worthy, and begins to study his books obsessively. Panurge tells Pantagruel that he worries too much. He then begs Pantagruel to let him take his place in the debate, for he is Pantagruel's student, so his ability to debate will prove Pantagruel's supremacy. Pantagruel agrees to Panurge's logic. The following day at the debate, Pantagruel announces that his student, Panurge, will take his place in the debate, if Thaumast agrees. Thaumast does agree, and the debate begins. While Thaumast starts the debate in perhaps a semi-serious manner, Panurge moves the debate into the lowbrow arena, as he uses gestures that signify derogatory statements and lewd sexual acts. Nevertheless, Thaumast responds, and the two go back and forth with their hand gestures until finally Thaumast declares that Panurge in indeed a master debater, and that his teacher, Pantagruel, has passed the challenge. Thaumast swears that he will write up a treatise explaining all the meanings to the signs, so that everyone can understand what was discussed, but the narrator does not include this information, and instead implies that the reader should go and find Thaumast's publication. Later on, Panurge becomes infatuated with a particular lady of Paris, although her name is never given. The woman is noted as incredibly beautiful and kind, but also married. Panurge tells her that he is pained by his love for her, and that he must be with her; yet she refuses again and again. Panurge persists on hounding her and trying to convince her to have sex with him. She refuses him openly, claiming that she will call out for help if he does not stop, and even threatens to tell her husband. Panurge acts as if he has given up on her. In the meantime, he finds a female dog that is in heat, takes it home, kills it, and then harvests the scent glands from the dog. The following day, during a religious ceremony, Panurge sits near the woman he has been pursuing. He says nothing to her, but secretly sprinkles her with the female dog's scent. Shortly thereafter, every male dog in the city comes to the woman to harass her and urinate upon her. Panurge is quite proud of his trick, and tells Pantagruel to come and see how all the dogs in the city have come to harass this woman. It is unclear whether Pantagruel knows that Panurge orchestrated the entire cruel prank, since Panurge never claims responsibility within the text. On a different note, Pantagruel receives word that his father has gone to visit the land of the fairies, presumably Avalon, just as King Arthur and Ogier the Dane had done. On top of this news, Pantagruel learns that the Dipsodes have invaded Pantagruel's homeland. Pantagruel and all of his comrades leave Paris in such a hurry that Pantagruel is unable to bid farewell to anyone, including the unnamed woman he had been courting. In response to his lack of goodbyes, this unnamed woman sends him a message that includes a gold ring and a piece of paper, but no message on the paper. At first, Panurge believes there is a secret message, but after trying method after method to uncover any secret words, he determines that no such message exists. As nothing appears to be written on the piece of paper, Pantagruel and everyone else examine the ring to find an inscription in Hebrew that translates into, \"Wherefore hast thou forsaken me?\" Panurge identifies that the diamond is false, therefore the entire message is \"false lover, wherefore hast thou forsaken me?\" Pantagruel feels guilty for having left his sweetheart without having said goodbye, but Pantagruel's friends tell him there is no time, and that it is better to save his homeland than to waste more time, to which Pantagruel agrees. All of Pantagruel's companions, Panurge, Carpalin, Eusthenes, and Epistemon, each pledge absolute loyalty to Pantagruel and to the cause of saving Pantagruel's homeland. They realize that the battle will be difficult, but each of them claims to have different skills that will prove valuable in the field of battle. Upon sailing to the land, they discover that six hundred and threescore horsemen plan to attack them onshore. Pantagruel is ready to fight, but his friends tell him to stay behind in the boat to let them prove themselves to him. Pantagruel agrees, and sits back to watch his friends fight the invading armies. Through the use of traps and great cunning, Panurge, Carpalin, Eusthenes, and Epistemon lay waste to the armies, and manage to capture one of the soldiers, who they plan to interrogate to find out more about the armies of the Dipsodes. Once on land, Carpalin goes hunting and catches a large deer, and several other large and small game animals, providing enough food for all to feast over their victory. Pantagruel and Panurge interrogate the prisoner, and discover that the Dipsodes have a massive army that includes giants, although the giants are not as big as Pantagruel. The leader of the army is also a giant who is certainly a match for Pantagruel, and his name is Loupgarou. The prisoner also explains that the King of the Dipsodes, Anarchus, is also traveling with the armies. Lastly, the prisoner tells Pantagruel and Panurge about how the army has thousands of soldiers of every type, along with support workers and even 150,000 whores. Panurge, of course, makes countless crass jokes about how he will join the battle just to get to the women. His comrades also joke about how they wish to have their turn with these women. Pantagruel decides that he will release the prisoner, but he commands the prisoner to return to his own King and tell Anarchus that Pantagruel and his mighty army are coming to fight them. Pantagruel exaggerates the size of his army in hopes that the prisoner will frighten Anarchus into acting rashly. Pantagruel also tells the prisoner that his army will arrive at noon the following day. Unfortunately, Pantagruel does such a good job at frightening the prisoner that the prisoner begs Pantagruel to let him stay as their prisoner forever instead of going back to Anarchus and eventually having to fight Pantagruel's army. Pantagruel refuses to let the prisoner stay, because he needs the prisoner to go and spread the word of Pantagruel's fictitious forces who will be arriving at noon. Pantagruel needs the prisoner to do so, since it will make the enemy armies expect the fight to start at a later time, which will allow Pantagruel and his actual armies to strike at their enemies when they least expect it. Since Pantagruel's actual armies are so much smaller than King Anarchus' armies, Pantagruel must depend on cleverness and the element of surprise to win the day. In addition to sending the prisoner back to Anarchus, Pantagruel gives the prisoner a gift to give to the King, and that gift is a strange mixture of herbs. Pantagruel tells the prisoner that if his King can take a spoonful of these herbs in his mouth and still command his armies afterwards, then Pantagruel himself will forfeit his lands and rights to King Anarchus. The prisoner returns to King Anarchus and warns him of Pantagruel and his immense army. The prisoner also gives Anarchus the gift and explains what Pantagruel has stated. Anarchus takes a spoonful of the mixture, but in doing so his throat seizes up with immense heat and dryness, making him unable to speak. His counselors try to give him drink to help him, but that only makes it worse. His counselors then decide that they shall try the challenge and take a spoonful of the mixture, but all of them suffer the same way as Anarchus. After recovering from the spice challenge, Anarchus and his military leader, Loupgarou, decide to prepare the men to fight immediately the following day at noon, as the prisoner has foretold. Back at Pantagruel's camp, Pantagruel and his friends make ready to leave for battle. Before they do so, they build monuments to the battle that occurred the previous day. They also make poetry about those battles and monuments, and enjoy each other's company. At one point, Pantagruel's friends are jumping about and bragging about their oncoming victory. In doing so, Pantagruel farts, which produces such a deafening sound and unnerving smell that it creates little people, both men and women. Pantagruel's friends are astounded that Pantagruel's passing of wind can create life, and they all decide to have the little people marry one another and start their own race, which they call the pygmies. After being satisfied with the monument and the creation of a new race, Pantagruel, his companions, and their soldiers make way to the big battle. They decide to move in and attack the enemy armies during the morning hours when their enemy is still asleep or hung-over from the pre-war festivities. On the way to the battle, Panurge convinces Pantagruel that the men should drink white wine to prepare themselves to fight. Panurge also has Pantagruel eat and drink certain items that will make him have highly acidic urine. When they arrive in the enemy territory, Pantagruel's friend and footmen, Carpalin, stealthily sneaks through the enemy camp to set fires and blow up the enemy's ammunitions. Before the fires and explosions are out of control, and while the enemy still sleeps, each man sleeping with his mouth open, Pantagruel urinates his acidic urine on to the enemy, drowning many of them. The fires and the explosions burned the majority of those who survived the urine. With a large portion of the regular soldiers killed or incapacitated, King Anarchus' legion of giants come to the fray, led by Loupgarou. Instead of all-out warfare between Pantagruel's army and this army of giants, Panurge steps in and somehow negotiates a battle between Loupgarou and Pantagruel. Loupgarou agrees and commands his giants to stay put and not assist him during the battle, else they shall be severely punished. Loupgarou and Pantagruel begin to fight, but Loupgarou possesses an enchanted mace, which gives him an unfair advantage. Nevertheless, Pantagruel holds his own for quite some time. When it appears that their leader, Loupgarou, is losing the battle, the giants decide to get involved against orders. Pantagruel sees the enemy giants approaching, so he picks up Loupgarou's body and uses it as a weapon to obliterate the giants. Pantagruel wins the day, but not without casualties. His dear friend, teacher, and tutor, Epistemon, has been decapitated in battle. While Pantagruel and the others mourn over there fallen compatriot, Panurge insists that they move Epistemon's body if they wish to save him. Through use of herbs and perhaps magic, Panurge sews on Epistemon's head and brings him back to life. Besides having a somewhat hoarse voice and having the need to drink far more heavily than before, Epistemon is completely healed. Epistemon then regales everyone with his story about what he saw in the land of the dead. In a nutshell, Epistemon saw all of the famous members of royalty and heroes performing mundane, boring, every-day duties. All of the philosophers and dedicated scholars, on the other hand, were held above and praised. After Pantagruel is satisfied with his friend, Epistemon, being fully healed, he and his friends begin to celebrate. Panurge notices that King Anarchus refuses to be joyous, having just lost the battle, and so Panurge asks Pantagruel what they should do about the King. Pantagruel does not seem to care about Anarchus' fate, and therefore states that King Anarchus will be Panurge's prisoner, and that Panurge may do what he likes with him. In the city of Amaurots, which is the city that was invaded by Anarchus' armies, Pantagruel discovers that all of the refugees have gathered there, and that there is not enough room to house everyone. Therefore, Pantagruel decides that he will take over Anarchus' country, the country of the Dipsodes, and give it to all of the people and refugees of Amaurots, so that they may have a place to live and thrive. With Anarchus as his prisoner, Panurge decides to punish him in a manner inspired by Epistemon's tale of the afterlife. Therefore, Panurge turns the King into a threadbare pauper and makes him sell green sauce throughout the town. To further embarrass and demean Anarchus, Panurge marries him to an old woman who carries a lantern. According to all reports, the old woman is abusive to her new husband, and Anarchus is apparently too bewildered or befuddled to defend himself from her. The following day, Pantagruel decides that he and his armies will take over the country of the Dipsodes. As they march, they also travel with all the people of Amaurots. A great rainstorm hits, and Pantagruel must cover everyone. The narrator of the story, who finally reveals his name as Alcofribas, explains that he was the last to try and find cover under Pantagruel, and therefore could not find sufficient cover. Pantagruel tries to provide even more protection to everyone by sticking his tongue out to further shelter the people on the ground. Alcofribas decides he will climb into Pantagruel's mouth to find shelter there. Within Pantagruel's enormous mouth, however, Alcofribas discovers a thriving world. Within each different part of the mouth is a different region, and everything that Pantagruel eats or drinks feeds not only the region but also the people who live within this strange other world. Alcofribas stays inside Pantagruel's mouth exploring for some six months before he finally comes out. Pantagruel asks him where he has been, and Alcofribas tells him of his journeys. In the conversation, Alcofribas learns how long he has been traveling, and that he missed the siege of the Dipsode's country. Shortly thereafter, Pantagruel becomes incredibly ill. The doctors give him medical remedies to help him urinate out his illness. In doing so, Pantagruel's hot urine accidentally creates the hot springs all throughout France and parts of Italy. Although the treatments have made Pantagruel much better, he still suffers from stomach pains. The doctors decide they must remove whatever is ailing Pantagruel's stomach, and so they along with other craftsmen construct giant copper balls that look like medicinal capsules, in which workers will use to travel safely into Pantagruel stomach to dig out whatever ails him. With all of the metal capsules locked and attached to one another by rope, Pantagruel swallows them down into his stomach, and inside his stomach the workers find the mass of wretched filth blocking the bottom of his gut. The workers dig it all out to cure Pantagruel of his ailments. After they complete their mission, Pantagruel vomits all of them out safely, and he is well thereafter. At the end of book 2, the narrator provides a teaser of what adventures will happen in the following books. The narrator also makes a note that these stories are meant for the true Pantagruelists, who wish to \"live in peace, joy, health, making yourselves always merry,\" . If anyone should find fault with these stories otherwise, then they are not the intended audience, and therefore have no right to ruin the stories for others.", "analysis": "The absence of women and the negativity toward women is a predominant theme in the last half of the second book. There very few women in this portion of the story, and the women who do appear typically remain unnamed. For example, the woman Panurge falls madly in love with and the woman who Pantagruel supposedly courts are never identified by name or social rank. Denying these women their names makes the side stories in which they are involved seem flat and unimportant, even though these side stories are included for the specific purpose of developing the main characters. For example, the narrator presents Panurge as a man who has sex with hundreds of women, yet he falls in love with the one woman who completely rejects him. Surely, such a woman who could not be wooed by such a womanizer deserves a proper name. Similarly, Pantagruel, the main character of the story, supposedly courts some woman, yet the narrator never reveals the tale of their romance. The relationship with this woman could not have been just some tryst or fling, for that would go against Pantagruel's character. In addition, the woman is so distraught upon Pantagruel abandoning her that she sends him a letter and a ring with a secret message that he must decipher. If the relationship were trivial or short-lived, sending Pantagruel such an elaborate puzzle would seem strange. If Pantagruel tricked this woman into believing he cared for her more deeply than his true feelings, then that would reveal a side of Pantagruel the reader has never seen, which would warrant even more reason for the woman to have a name. As if letting so many female characters walk around unnamed was not problematic enough, the overall negativity toward women within the framework of the story cannot be ignored. Throughout this book as well as in the third book, women are consistently describe as unfaithful and untrustworthy. When examining the walls of the city, Panurge even makes a crass comment that the city leaders could save money if they built the walls with female sexual organs, since the women offer their parts up so quickly or for such a cheap price. The negative perspective of women's promiscuity, as presented in this book, implies that these male characters, Panurge specifically, have no faith in the opposite sex, which is why many of these characters continually demean women and identify them as practically less than human. Even when the characters come in contact with a virtuous woman, such as the woman who resists Panurge, they cannot see her for what she represents. As they have constructed such negative and misogynistic views toward women, they have simultaneously created a twisted social perspective that deprives women of their subjectivity and reconstructs them as objects for members of the patriarchy to use or abuse. When a woman challenges this paradigm, as the virtuous woman does by remaining loyal to her husband, her existence as a woman of integrity disrupts the constructed social perspective. Thus, to maintain power within a social structure that places women as subordinate objects, a member of the patriarchy, Panurge, must punish this woman in a way so public that all the other women witness the level of shame and torment. The public display also serves to discredit the virtuous woman, because it makes people question how something so horrific could happen to a good person, therefore, in a Renaissance belief structure, the public assumes that the virtuous woman must have done something wrong to receive such punishment. The negative objectification of women, perhaps overemphasized as a result of the absence of women, continues throughout the story. For example, when the captured Dipsode soldier tells Pantagruel and his companions about King Anarchus's massive army and followers, he mentions that Anarchus has also brought 150,000 whores along for the duration of the battle. Panurge instantly claims the whores for himself, as if they were nothing but toys to be used, and then the other male characters, Carpalin, Eusthenes, and Epistemon, join in on joking about who will take possession of the pretty whores, the fat whores, or the ugly whores. Pantagruel does not state which of the whores he would desire, but he laughs at the jokes the other men make, which could imply that he sees nothing questionable in his comrades' actions of objectifying and claiming these women. The men then appear to forget their promises to Pantagruel or their oaths to protect Pantagruel's homelands, and instead their entire motivation for war seems solely based on this opportunity to claim these women as the spoils of war. Even if these women were voluntary prostitutes, and even if Panurge and his friends planned on paying these women for services rendered, the fact that the women are objectified by their levels of attractiveness and further reduced to their biological function to please men sexually further demeans them and diminishes the role of women in this story. Moving away from this discussion concerning the role of women within the story, or the lack thereof, we can look at the role of each of the male characters, since the story rests on this male-dominant structure. Of all the male characters other than the main character, Panurge receives the most attention within this part of the story. Although many elements symbolize Panurge's character, Florence M. Weinberg points out how Panurge's codpiece represents perhaps the best identifying symbol. During the Renaissance, more decorative codpieces, such as Panurge's, allowed males to announce sexual virility and, to some extent, a lascivious nature. Of course, the enlarged, ornate nature of the codpiece could represent a mask, since it hides the truth of his ability. By wearing such an \"astonishing braguette,\" Panurge need not show his true self and can, instead, play the cad without fear of repercussions . He even uses his codpiece as a prop to distract onlookers from his true self. As Weinberg explains, during the battle of wits through signs with Thaumast, Panurge utilizes his groin and codpiece to make the contest as debauched as possible, therefore taking matters out of the intellectual arena, and putting the mask of Panurge's codpiece and everything it represents on center stage. Perhaps Rabelais designed Panurge in this fashion to provide a better foil for Pantagruel. After all, Weinberg argues that, \"as foil to Pantagruel, role often caricatures his master's,\" implying that Panurge may be channeling a darker part of his master, and therefore acts out what Pantagruel cannot, due to Pantagruel's status as sovereign . Perhaps Panurge's ability to act out these darker impulses explains his friendship with Pantagruel, since Pantagruel can live vicariously through his servant. It may also explain why Rabelais chose not to disclose Pantagruel's relationship with his lover, since his darker impulses must be hidden behind the foil mask of Panurge. To maintain Pantagruel's reputation, it makes sense why Rabelais might choose to hide Pantagruel's affairs and instead offer his readers the elaborate side story that describes Panurge's pursuits of the virtuous woman."} | How Panurge gained the pardons, and married the old women, and of the suit
in law which he had at Paris.
One day I found Panurge very much out of countenance, melancholic, and
silent; which made me suspect that he had no money; whereupon I said unto
him, Panurge, you are sick, as I do very well perceive by your physiognomy,
and I know the disease. You have a flux in your purse; but take no care.
I have yet sevenpence halfpenny that never saw father nor mother, which
shall not be wanting, no more than the pox, in your necessity. Whereunto
he answered me, Well, well; for money one day I shall have but too much,
for I have a philosopher's stone which attracts money out of men's purses
as the adamant doth iron. But will you go with me to gain the pardons?
said he. By my faith, said I, I am no great pardon-taker in this world--if
I shall be any such in the other, I cannot tell; yet let us go, in God's
name; it is but one farthing more or less; But, said he, lend me then a
farthing upon interest. No, no, said I; I will give it you freely, and
from my heart. Grates vobis dominos, said he.
So we went along, beginning at St. Gervase, and I got the pardons at the
first box only, for in those matters very little contenteth me. Then did I
say my small suffrages and the prayers of St. Brigid; but he gained them
all at the boxes, and always gave money to everyone of the pardoners. From
thence we went to Our Lady's Church, to St. John's, to St. Anthony's, and
so to the other churches, where there was a banquet (bank) of pardons. For
my part, I gained no more of them, but he at all the boxes kissed the
relics, and gave at everyone. To be brief, when we were returned, he
brought me to drink at the castle-tavern, and there showed me ten or twelve
of his little bags full of money, at which I blessed myself, and made the
sign of the cross, saying, Where have you recovered so much money in so
little time? Unto which he answered me that he had taken it out of the
basins of the pardons. For in giving them the first farthing, said he, I
put it in with such sleight of hand and so dexterously that it appeared to
be a threepence; thus with one hand I took threepence, ninepence, or
sixpence at the least, and with the other as much, and so through all the
churches where we have been. Yea but, said I, you damn yourself like a
snake, and are withal a thief and sacrilegious person. True, said he, in
your opinion, but I am not of that mind; for the pardoners do give me it,
when they say unto me in presenting the relics to kiss, Centuplum accipies,
that is, that for one penny I should take a hundred; for accipies is spoken
according to the manner of the Hebrews, who use the future tense instead of
the imperative, as you have in the law, Diliges Dominum, that is, Dilige.
Even so, when the pardon-bearer says to me, Centuplum accipies, his meaning
is, Centuplum accipe; and so doth Rabbi Kimy and Rabbi Aben Ezra expound
it, and all the Massorets, et ibi Bartholus. Moreover, Pope Sixtus gave me
fifteen hundred francs of yearly pension, which in English money is a
hundred and fifty pounds, upon his ecclesiastical revenues and treasure,
for having cured him of a cankerous botch, which did so torment him that he
thought to have been a cripple by it all his life. Thus I do pay myself at
my own hand, for otherwise I get nothing upon the said ecclesiastical
treasure. Ho, my friend! said he, if thou didst know what advantage I
made, and how well I feathered my nest, by the Pope's bull of the crusade,
thou wouldst wonder exceedingly. It was worth to me above six thousand
florins, in English coin six hundred pounds. And what a devil is become of
them? said I; for of that money thou hast not one halfpenny. They returned
from whence they came, said he; they did no more but change their master.
But I employed at least three thousand of them, that is, three hundred
pounds English, in marrying--not young virgins, for they find but too many
husbands--but great old sempiternous trots which had not so much as one
tooth in their heads; and that out of the consideration I had that these
good old women had very well spent the time of their youth in playing at
the close-buttock game to all comers, serving the foremost first, till no
man would have any more dealing with them. And, by G--, I will have their
skin-coat shaken once yet before they die. By this means, to one I gave a
hundred florins, to another six score, to another three hundred, according
to that they were infamous, detestable, and abominable. For, by how much
the more horrible and execrable they were, so much the more must I needs
have given them, otherwise the devil would not have jummed them. Presently
I went to some great and fat wood-porter, or such like, and did myself make
the match. But, before I did show him the old hags, I made a fair muster
to him of the crowns, saying, Good fellow, see what I will give thee if
thou wilt but condescend to duffle, dinfredaille, or lecher it one good
time. Then began the poor rogues to gape like old mules, and I caused to
be provided for them a banquet, with drink of the best, and store of
spiceries, to put the old women in rut and heat of lust. To be short, they
occupied all, like good souls; only, to those that were horribly ugly and
ill-favoured, I caused their head to be put within a bag, to hide their
face.
Besides all this, I have lost a great deal in suits of law. And what
lawsuits couldst thou have? said I; thou hast neither house nor lands. My
friend, said he, the gentlewomen of this city had found out, by the
instigation of the devil of hell, a manner of high-mounted bands and
neckerchiefs for women, which did so closely cover their bosoms that men
could no more put their hands under. For they had put the slit behind, and
those neckcloths were wholly shut before, whereat the poor sad
contemplative lovers were much discontented. Upon a fair Tuesday I
presented a petition to the court, making myself a party against the said
gentlewomen, and showing the great interest that I pretended therein,
protesting that by the same reason I would cause the codpiece of my
breeches to be sewed behind, if the court would not take order for it. In
sum, the gentlewomen put in their defences, showing the grounds they went
upon, and constituted their attorney for the prosecuting of the cause. But
I pursued them so vigorously, that by a sentence of the court it was
decreed those high neckcloths should be no longer worn if they were not a
little cleft and open before; but it cost me a good sum of money. I had
another very filthy and beastly process against the dung-farmer called
Master Fifi and his deputies, that they should no more read privily the
pipe, puncheon, nor quart of sentences, but in fair full day, and that in
the Fodder schools, in face of the Arrian (Artitian) sophisters, where I
was ordained to pay the charges, by reason of some clause mistaken in the
relation of the sergeant. Another time I framed a complaint to the court
against the mules of the presidents, counsellors, and others, tending to
this purpose, that, when in the lower court of the palace they left them to
champ on their bridles, some bibs were made for them (by the counsellors'
wives), that with their drivelling they might not spoil the pavement; to
the end that the pages of the palace what play upon it with their dice, or
at the game of coxbody, at their own ease, without spoiling their breeches
at the knees. And for this I had a fair decree, but it cost me dear. Now
reckon up what expense I was at in little banquets which from day to day I
made to the pages of the palace. And to what end? said I. My friend, said
he, thou hast no pastime at all in this world. I have more than the king,
and if thou wilt join thyself with me, we will do the devil together. No,
no, said I; by St. Adauras, that will I not, for thou wilt be hanged one
time or another. And thou, said he, wilt be interred some time or other.
Now which is most honourable, the air or the earth? Ho, grosse pecore!
Whilst the pages are at their banqueting, I keep their mules, and to
someone I cut the stirrup-leather of the mounting side till it hang but by
a thin strap or thread, that when the great puffguts of the counsellor or
some other hath taken his swing to get up, he may fall flat on his side
like a pork, and so furnish the spectators with more than a hundred francs'
worth of laughter. But I laugh yet further to think how at his home-coming
the master-page is to be whipped like green rye, which makes me not to
repent what I have bestowed in feasting them. In brief, he had, as I said
before, three score and three ways to acquire money, but he had two hundred
and fourteen to spend it, besides his drinking.
How a great scholar of England would have argued against Pantagruel, and
was overcome by Panurge.
In that same time a certain learned man named Thaumast, hearing the fame
and renown of Pantagruel's incomparable knowledge, came out of his own
country of England with an intent only to see him, to try thereby and prove
whether his knowledge in effect was so great as it was reported to be. In
this resolution being arrived at Paris, he went forthwith unto the house of
the said Pantagruel, who was lodged in the palace of St. Denis, and was
then walking in the garden thereof with Panurge, philosophizing after the
fashion of the Peripatetics. At his first entrance he startled, and was
almost out of his wits for fear, seeing him so great and so tall. Then did
he salute him courteously as the manner is, and said unto him, Very true it
is, saith Plato the prince of philosophers, that if the image and knowledge
of wisdom were corporeal and visible to the eyes of mortals, it would stir
up all the world to admire her. Which we may the rather believe that the
very bare report thereof, scattered in the air, if it happen to be received
into the ears of men, who, for being studious and lovers of virtuous things
are called philosophers, doth not suffer them to sleep nor rest in quiet,
but so pricketh them up and sets them on fire to run unto the place where
the person is, in whom the said knowledge is said to have built her temple
and uttered her oracles. As it was manifestly shown unto us in the Queen
of Sheba, who came from the utmost borders of the East and Persian Sea, to
see the order of Solomon's house and to hear his wisdom; in Anacharsis, who
came out of Scythia, even unto Athens, to see Solon; in Pythagoras, who
travelled far to visit the memphitical vaticinators; in Plato, who went a
great way off to see the magicians of Egypt, and Architus of Tarentum; in
Apollonius Tyaneus, who went as far as unto Mount Caucasus, passed along
the Scythians, the Massagetes, the Indians, and sailed over the great river
Phison, even to the Brachmans to see Hiarchus; as likewise unto Babylon,
Chaldea, Media, Assyria, Parthia, Syria, Phoenicia, Arabia, Palestina, and
Alexandria, even unto Aethiopia, to see the Gymnosophists. The like
example have we of Titus Livius, whom to see and hear divers studious
persons came to Rome from the confines of France and Spain. I dare not
reckon myself in the number of those so excellent persons, but well would
be called studious, and a lover, not only of learning, but of learned men
also. And indeed, having heard the report of your so inestimable
knowledge, I have left my country, my friends, my kindred, and my house,
and am come thus far, valuing at nothing the length of the way, the
tediousness of the sea, nor strangeness of the land, and that only to see
you and to confer with you about some passages in philosophy, of geomancy,
and of the cabalistic art, whereof I am doubtful and cannot satisfy my
mind; which if you can resolve, I yield myself unto you for a slave
henceforward, together with all my posterity, for other gift have I none
that I can esteem a recompense sufficient for so great a favour. I will
reduce them into writing, and to-morrow publish them to all the learned men
in the city, that we may dispute publicly before them.
But see in what manner I mean that we shall dispute. I will not argue pro
et contra, as do the sottish sophisters of this town and other places.
Likewise I will not dispute after the manner of the Academics by
declamation; nor yet by numbers, as Pythagoras was wont to do, and as Picus
de la Mirandula did of late at Rome. But I will dispute by signs only
without speaking, for the matters are so abstruse, hard, and arduous, that
words proceeding from the mouth of man will never be sufficient for
unfolding of them to my liking. May it, therefore, please your
magnificence to be there; it shall be at the great hall of Navarre at seven
o'clock in the morning. When he had spoken these words, Pantagruel very
honourably said unto him: Sir, of the graces that God hath bestowed upon
me, I would not deny to communicate unto any man to my power. For whatever
comes from him is good, and his pleasure is that it should be increased
when we come amongst men worthy and fit to receive this celestial manna of
honest literature. In which number, because that in this time, as I do
already very plainly perceive, thou holdest the first rank, I give thee
notice that at all hours thou shalt find me ready to condescend to every
one of thy requests according to my poor ability; although I ought rather
to learn of thee than thou of me. But, as thou hast protested, we will
confer of these doubts together, and will seek out the resolution, even
unto the bottom of that undrainable well where Heraclitus says the truth
lies hidden. And I do highly commend the manner of arguing which thou hast
proposed, to wit, by signs without speaking; for by this means thou and I
shall understand one another well enough, and yet shall be free from this
clapping of hands which these blockish sophisters make when any of the
arguers hath gotten the better of the argument. Now to-morrow I will not
fail to meet thee at the place and hour that thou hast appointed, but let
me entreat thee that there be not any strife or uproar between us, and that
we seek not the honour and applause of men, but the truth only. To which
Thaumast answered: The Lord God maintain you in his favour and grace, and,
instead of my thankfulness to you, pour down his blessings upon you, for
that your highness and magnificent greatness hath not disdained to descend
to the grant of the request of my poor baseness. So farewell till
to-morrow! Farewell, said Pantagruel.
Gentlemen, you that read this present discourse, think not that ever men
were more elevated and transported in their thoughts than all this night
were both Thaumast and Pantagruel; for the said Thaumast said to the keeper
of the house of Cluny, where he was lodged, that in all his life he had
never known himself so dry as he was that night. I think, said he, that
Pantagruel held me by the throat. Give order, I pray you, that we may have
some drink, and see that some fresh water be brought to us, to gargle my
palate. On the other side, Pantagruel stretched his wits as high as he
could, entering into very deep and serious meditations, and did nothing all
that night but dote upon and turn over the book of Beda, De numeris et
signis; Plotin's book, De inenarrabilibus; the book of Proclus, De magia;
the book of Artemidorus peri Oneirokritikon; of Anaxagoras, peri Zemeion;
Dinarius, peri Aphaton; the books of Philiston; Hipponax, peri
Anekphoneton, and a rabble of others, so long, that Panurge said unto him:
My lord, leave all these thoughts and go to bed; for I perceive your
spirits to be so troubled by a too intensive bending of them, that you may
easily fall into some quotidian fever with this so excessive thinking and
plodding. But, having first drunk five and twenty or thirty good draughts,
retire yourself and sleep your fill, for in the morning I will argue
against and answer my master the Englishman, and if I drive him not ad
metam non loqui, then call me knave. Yea but, said he, my friend Panurge,
he is marvellously learned; how wilt thou be able to answer him? Very
well, answered Panurge; I pray you talk no more of it, but let me alone.
Is any man so learned as the devils are? No, indeed, said Pantagruel,
without God's especial grace. Yet for all that, said Panurge, I have
argued against them, gravelled and blanked them in disputation, and laid
them so squat upon their tails that I have made them look like monkeys.
Therefore be assured that to-morrow I will make this vain-glorious
Englishman to skite vinegar before all the world. So Panurge spent the
night with tippling amongst the pages, and played away all the points of
his breeches at primus secundus and at peck point, in French called La
Vergette. Yet, when the condescended on time was come, he failed not to
conduct his master Pantagruel to the appointed place, unto which, believe
me, there was neither great nor small in Paris but came, thinking with
themselves that this devilish Pantagruel, who had overthrown and vanquished
in dispute all these doting fresh-water sophisters, would now get full
payment and be tickled to some purpose. For this Englishman is a terrible
bustler and horrible coil-keeper. We will see who will be conqueror, for
he never met with his match before.
Thus all being assembled, Thaumast stayed for them, and then, when
Pantagruel and Panurge came into the hall, all the schoolboys, professors
of arts, senior sophisters, and bachelors began to clap their hands, as
their scurvy custom is. But Pantagruel cried out with a loud voice, as if
it had been the sound of a double cannon, saying, Peace, with a devil to
you, peace! By G--, you rogues, if you trouble me here, I will cut off the
heads of everyone of you. At which words they remained all daunted and
astonished like so many ducks, and durst not do so much as cough, although
they had swallowed fifteen pounds of feathers. Withal they grew so dry
with this only voice, that they laid out their tongues a full half foot
beyond their mouths, as if Pantagruel had salted all their throats. Then
began Panurge to speak, saying to the Englishman, Sir, are you come hither
to dispute contentiously in those propositions you have set down, or,
otherwise, but to learn and know the truth? To which answered Thaumast,
Sir, no other thing brought me hither but the great desire I had to learn
and to know that of which I have doubted all my life long, and have neither
found book nor man able to content me in the resolution of those doubts
which I have proposed. And, as for disputing contentiously, I will not do
it, for it is too base a thing, and therefore leave it to those sottish
sophisters who in their disputes do not search for the truth, but for
contradiction only and debate. Then said Panurge, If I, who am but a mean
and inconsiderable disciple of my master my lord Pantagruel, content and
satisfy you in all and everything, it were a thing below my said master
wherewith to trouble him. Therefore is it fitter that he be chairman, and
sit as a judge and moderator of our discourse and purpose, and give you
satisfaction in many things wherein perhaps I shall be wanting to your
expectation. Truly, said Thaumast, it is very well said; begin then. Now
you must note that Panurge had set at the end of his long codpiece a pretty
tuft of red silk, as also of white, green, and blue, and within it had put
a fair orange.
How Panurge put to a nonplus the Englishman that argued by signs.
Everybody then taking heed, and hearkening with great silence, the
Englishman lift up on high into the air his two hands severally, clunching
in all the tops of his fingers together, after the manner which, a la
Chinonnese, they call the hen's arse, and struck the one hand on the other
by the nails four several times. Then he, opening them, struck the one
with the flat of the other till it yielded a clashing noise, and that only
once. Again, in joining them as before, he struck twice, and afterwards
four times in opening them. Then did he lay them joined, and extended the
one towards the other, as if he had been devoutly to send up his prayers
unto God. Panurge suddenly lifted up in the air his right hand, and put
the thumb thereof into the nostril of the same side, holding his four
fingers straight out, and closed orderly in a parallel line to the point of
his nose, shutting the left eye wholly, and making the other wink with a
profound depression of the eyebrows and eyelids. Then lifted he up his
left hand, with hard wringing and stretching forth his four fingers and
elevating his thumb, which he held in a line directly correspondent to the
situation of his right hand, with the distance of a cubit and a half
between them. This done, in the same form he abased towards the ground
about the one and the other hand. Lastly, he held them in the midst, as
aiming right at the Englishman's nose. And if Mercury,--said the
Englishman. There Panurge interrupted him, and said, You have spoken,
Mask.
Then made the Englishman this sign. His left hand all open he lifted up
into the air, then instantly shut into his fist the four fingers thereof,
and his thumb extended at length he placed upon the gristle of his nose.
Presently after, he lifted up his right hand all open, and all open abased
and bent it downwards, putting the thumb thereof in the very place where
the little finger of the left hand did close in the fist, and the four
right-hand fingers he softly moved in the air. Then contrarily he did with
the right hand what he had done with the left, and with the left what he
had done with the right.
Panurge, being not a whit amazed at this, drew out into the air his
trismegist codpiece with the left hand, and with his right drew forth a
truncheon of a white ox-rib, and two pieces of wood of a like form, one of
black ebony and the other of incarnation brasil, and put them betwixt the
fingers of that hand in good symmetry; then, knocking them together, made
such a noise as the lepers of Brittany use to do with their clappering
clickets, yet better resounding and far more harmonious, and with his
tongue contracted in his mouth did very merrily warble it, always looking
fixedly upon the Englishman. The divines, physicians, and chirurgeons that
were there thought that by this sign he would have inferred that the
Englishman was a leper. The counsellors, lawyers, and decretalists
conceived that by doing this he would have concluded some kind of mortal
felicity to consist in leprosy, as the Lord maintained heretofore.
The Englishman for all this was nothing daunted, but holding up his two
hands in the air, kept them in such form that he closed the three
master-fingers in his fist, and passing his thumbs through his indical or
foremost and middle fingers, his auriculary or little fingers remained
extended and stretched out, and so presented he them to Panurge. Then
joined he them so that the right thumb touched the left, and the left little
finger touched the right. Hereat Panurge, without speaking one word, lift
up his hands and made this sign.
He put the nail of the forefinger of his left hand to the nail of the thumb
of the same, making in the middle of the distance as it were a buckle, and
of his right hand shut up all the fingers into his fist, except the
forefinger, which he often thrust in and out through the said two others of
the left hand. Then stretched he out the forefinger and middle finger or
medical of his right hand, holding them asunder as much as he could, and
thrusting them towards Thaumast. Then did he put the thumb of his left
hand upon the corner of his left eye, stretching out all his hand like the
wing of a bird or the fin of a fish, and moving it very daintily this way
and that way, he did as much with his right hand upon the corner of his
right eye. Thaumast began then to wax somewhat pale, and to tremble, and
made him this sign.
With the middle finger of his right hand he struck against the muscle of
the palm or pulp which is under the thumb. Then put he the forefinger of
the right hand in the like buckle of the left, but he put it under, and not
over, as Panurge did. Then Panurge knocked one hand against another, and
blowed in his palm, and put again the forefinger of his right hand into the
overture or mouth of the left, pulling it often in and out. Then held he
out his chin, most intentively looking upon Thaumast. The people there,
which understood nothing in the other signs, knew very well that therein he
demanded, without speaking a word to Thaumast, What do you mean by that?
In effect, Thaumast then began to sweat great drops, and seemed to all the
spectators a man strangely ravished in high contemplation. Then he
bethought himself, and put all the nails of his left hand against those of
his right, opening his fingers as if they had been semicircles, and with
this sign lift up his hands as high as he could. Whereupon Panurge
presently put the thumb of his right hand under his jaws, and the little
finger thereof in the mouth of the left hand, and in this posture made his
teeth to sound very melodiously, the upper against the lower. With this
Thaumast, with great toil and vexation of spirit, rose up, but in rising
let a great baker's fart, for the bran came after, and pissing withal very
strong vinegar, stunk like all the devils in hell. The company began to
stop their noses; for he had conskited himself with mere anguish and
perplexity. Then lifted he up his right hand, clunching it in such sort
that he brought the ends of all his fingers to meet together, and his left
hand he laid flat upon his breast. Whereat Panurge drew out his long
codpiece with his tuff, and stretched it forth a cubit and a half, holding
it in the air with his right hand, and with his left took out his orange,
and, casting it up into the air seven times, at the eighth he hid it in the
fist of his right hand, holding it steadily up on high, and then began to
shake his fair codpiece, showing it to Thaumast.
After that, Thaumast began to puff up his two cheeks like a player on a
bagpipe, and blew as if he had been to puff up a pig's bladder. Whereupon
Panurge put one finger of his left hand in his nockandrow, by some called
St. Patrick's hole, and with his mouth sucked in the air, in such a manner
as when one eats oysters in the shell, or when we sup up our broth. This
done, he opened his mouth somewhat, and struck his right hand flat upon it,
making therewith a great and a deep sound, as if it came from the
superficies of the midriff through the trachiartery or pipe of the lungs,
and this he did for sixteen times; but Thaumast did always keep blowing
like a goose. Then Panurge put the forefinger of his right hand into his
mouth, pressing it very hard to the muscles thereof; then he drew it out,
and withal made a great noise, as when little boys shoot pellets out of the
pot-cannons made of the hollow sticks of the branch of an alder-tree, and
he did it nine times.
Then Thaumast cried out, Ha, my masters, a great secret! With this he put
in his hand up to the elbow, then drew out a dagger that he had, holding it
by the point downwards. Whereat Panurge took his long codpiece, and shook
it as hard as he could against his thighs; then put his two hands entwined
in manner of a comb upon his head, laying out his tongue as far as he was
able, and turning his eyes in his head like a goat that is ready to die.
Ha, I understand, said Thaumast, but what? making such a sign that he put
the haft of his dagger against his breast, and upon the point thereof the
flat of his hand, turning in a little the ends of his fingers. Whereat
Panurge held down his head on the left side, and put his middle finger into
his right ear, holding up his thumb bolt upright. Then he crossed his two
arms upon his breast and coughed five times, and at the fifth time he
struck his right foot against the ground. Then he lift up his left arm,
and closing all his fingers into his fist, held his thumb against his
forehead, striking with his right hand six times against his breast. But
Thaumast, as not content therewith, put the thumb of his left hand upon the
top of his nose, shutting the rest of his said hand, whereupon Panurge set
his two master-fingers upon each side of his mouth, drawing it as much as
he was able, and widening it so that he showed all his teeth, and with his
two thumbs plucked down his two eyelids very low, making therewith a very
ill-favoured countenance, as it seemed to the company.
How Thaumast relateth the virtues and knowledge of Panurge.
Then Panurge rose up, and, putting off his cap, did very kindly thank the
said Panurge, and with a loud voice said unto all the people that were
there: My lords, gentlemen, and others, at this time may I to some good
purpose speak that evangelical word, Et ecce plus quam Salomon hic! You
have here in your presence an incomparable treasure, that is, my lord
Pantagruel, whose great renown hath brought me hither, out of the very
heart of England, to confer with him about the insoluble problems, both in
magic, alchemy, the cabal, geomancy, astrology, and philosophy, which I had
in my mind. But at present I am angry even with fame itself, which I think
was envious to him, for that it did not declare the thousandth part of the
worth that indeed is in him. You have seen how his disciple only hath
satisfied me, and hath told me more than I asked of him. Besides, he hath
opened unto me, and resolved other inestimable doubts, wherein I can assure
you he hath to me discovered the very true well, fountain, and abyss of the
encyclopaedia of learning; yea, in such a sort that I did not think I
should ever have found a man that could have made his skill appear in so
much as the first elements of that concerning which we disputed by signs,
without speaking either word or half word. But, in fine, I will reduce
into writing that which we have said and concluded, that the world may not
take them to be fooleries, and will thereafter cause them to be printed,
that everyone may learn as I have done. Judge, then, what the master had
been able to say, seeing the disciple hath done so valiantly; for, Non est
discipulus super magistrum. Howsoever, God be praised! and I do very
humbly thank you for the honour that you have done us at this act. God
reward you for it eternally! The like thanks gave Pantagruel to all the
company, and, going from thence, he carried Thaumast to dinner with him,
and believe that they drank as much as their skins could hold, or, as the
phrase is, with unbuttoned bellies (for in that age they made fast their
bellies with buttons, as we do now the collars of our doublets or jerkins),
even till they neither knew where they were nor whence they came. Blessed
Lady, how they did carouse it, and pluck, as we say, at the kid's leather!
And flagons to trot, and they to toot, Draw; give, page, some wine here;
reach hither; fill with a devil, so! There was not one but did drink five
and twenty or thirty pipes. Can you tell how? Even sicut terra sine aqua;
for the weather was hot, and, besides that, they were very dry. In matter
of the exposition of the propositions set down by Thaumast, and the
signification of the signs which they used in their disputation, I would
have set them down for you according to their own relation, but I have been
told that Thaumast made a great book of it, imprinted at London, wherein he
hath set down all, without omitting anything, and therefore at this time I
do pass by it.
How Panurge was in love with a lady of Paris.
Panurge began to be in great reputation in the city of Paris by means of
this disputation wherein he prevailed against the Englishman, and from
thenceforth made his codpiece to be very useful to him. To which effect he
had it pinked with pretty little embroideries after the Romanesca fashion.
And the world did praise him publicly, in so far that there was a song made
of him, which little children did use to sing when they were to fetch
mustard. He was withal made welcome in all companies of ladies and
gentlewomen, so that at last he became presumptuous, and went about to
bring to his lure one of the greatest ladies in the city. And, indeed,
leaving a rabble of long prologues and protestations, which ordinarily
these dolent contemplative lent-lovers make who never meddle with the
flesh, one day he said unto her, Madam, it would be a very great benefit to
the commonwealth, delightful to you, honourable to your progeny, and
necessary for me, that I cover you for the propagating of my race, and
believe it, for experience will teach it you. The lady at this word thrust
him back above a hundred leagues, saying, You mischievous fool, is it for
you to talk thus unto me? Whom do you think you have in hand? Begone,
never to come in my sight again; for, if one thing were not, I would have
your legs and arms cut off. Well, said he, that were all one to me, to
want both legs and arms, provided you and I had but one merry bout together
at the brangle-buttock game; for herewithin is--in showing her his long
codpiece--Master John Thursday, who will play you such an antic that you
shall feel the sweetness thereof even to the very marrow of your bones. He
is a gallant, and doth so well know how to find out all the corners,
creeks, and ingrained inmates in your carnal trap, that after him there
needs no broom, he'll sweep so well before, and leave nothing to his
followers to work upon. Whereunto the lady answered, Go, villain, go. If
you speak to me one such word more, I will cry out and make you to be
knocked down with blows. Ha, said he, you are not so bad as you say--no,
or else I am deceived in your physiognomy. For sooner shall the earth
mount up unto the heavens, and the highest heavens descend unto the hells,
and all the course of nature be quite perverted, than that in so great
beauty and neatness as in you is there should be one drop of gall or
malice. They say, indeed, that hardly shall a man ever see a fair woman
that is not also stubborn. Yet that is spoke only of those vulgar
beauties; but yours is so excellent, so singular, and so heavenly, that I
believe nature hath given it you as a paragon and masterpiece of her art,
to make us know what she can do when she will employ all her skill and all
her power. There is nothing in you but honey, but sugar, but a sweet and
celestial manna. To you it was to whom Paris ought to have adjudged the
golden apple, not to Venus, no, nor to Juno, nor to Minerva, for never was
there so much magnificence in Juno, so much wisdom in Minerva, nor so much
comeliness in Venus as there is in you. O heavenly gods and goddesses!
How happy shall that man be to whom you will grant the favour to embrace
her, to kiss her, and to rub his bacon with hers! By G--, that shall be I,
I know it well; for she loves me already her bellyful, I am sure of it, and
so was I predestinated to it by the fairies. And therefore, that we lose
no time, put on, thrust out your gammons!--and would have embraced her, but
she made as if she would put out her head at the window to call her
neighbours for help. Then Panurge on a sudden ran out, and in his running
away said, Madam, stay here till I come again; I will go call them myself;
do not you take so much pains. Thus went he away, not much caring for the
repulse he had got, nor made he any whit the worse cheer for it. The next
day he came to the church at the time she went to mass. At the door he
gave her some of the holy water, bowing himself very low before her.
Afterwards he kneeled down by her very familiarly and said unto her, Madam,
know that I am so amorous of you that I can neither piss nor dung for love.
I do not know, lady, what you mean, but if I should take any hurt by it,
how much you would be to blame! Go, said she, go! I do not care; let me
alone to say my prayers. Ay but, said he, equivocate upon this: a beau
mont le viconte, or, to fair mount the prick-cunts. I cannot, said she.
It is, said he, a beau con le vit monte, or to a fair c. . .the pr. .
.mounts. And upon this, pray to God to give you that which your noble
heart desireth, and I pray you give me these paternosters. Take them, said
she, and trouble me no longer. This done, she would have taken off her
paternosters, which were made of a kind of yellow stone called cestrin, and
adorned with great spots of gold, but Panurge nimbly drew out one of his
knives, wherewith he cut them off very handsomely, and whilst he was going
away to carry them to the brokers, he said to her, Will you have my knife?
No, no, said she. But, said he, to the purpose. I am at your commandment,
body and goods, tripes and bowels.
In the meantime the lady was not very well content with the want of her
paternosters, for they were one of her implements to keep her countenance
by in the church; then thought with herself, This bold flouting roister is
some giddy, fantastical, light-headed fool of a strange country. I shall
never recover my paternosters again. What will my husband say? He will no
doubt be angry with me. But I will tell him that a thief hath cut them off
from my hands in the church, which he will easily believe, seeing the end
of the ribbon left at my girdle. After dinner Panurge went to see her,
carrying in his sleeve a great purse full of palace-crowns, called
counters, and began to say unto her, Which of us two loveth other best, you
me, or I you? Whereunto she answered, As for me, I do not hate you; for,
as God commands, I love all the world. But to the purpose, said he; are
not you in love with me? I have, said she, told you so many times already
that you should talk so no more to me, and if you speak of it again I will
teach you that I am not one to be talked unto dishonestly. Get you hence
packing, and deliver me my paternosters, that my husband may not ask me for
them.
How now, madam, said he, your paternosters? Nay, by mine oath, I will not
do so, but I will give you others. Had you rather have them of gold well
enamelled in great round knobs, or after the manner of love-knots, or,
otherwise, all massive, like great ingots, or if you had rather have them
of ebony, of jacinth, or of grained gold, with the marks of fine
turquoises, or of fair topazes, marked with fine sapphires, or of baleu
rubies, with great marks of diamonds of eight and twenty squares? No, no,
all this is too little. I know a fair bracelet of fine emeralds, marked
with spotted ambergris, and at the buckle a Persian pearl as big as an
orange. It will not cost above five and twenty thousand ducats. I will
make you a present of it, for I have ready coin enough,--and withal he made
a noise with his counters, as if they had been French crowns.
Will you have a piece of velvet, either of the violet colour or of crimson
dyed in grain, or a piece of broached or crimson satin? Will you have
chains, gold, tablets, rings? You need no more but say, Yes; so far as
fifty thousand ducats may reach, it is but as nothing to me. By the virtue
of which words he made the water come in her mouth; but she said unto him,
No, I thank you, I will have nothing of you. By G--, said he, but I will
have somewhat of you; yet shall it be that which shall cost you nothing,
neither shall you have a jot the less when you have given it. Hold!
--showing his long codpiece--this is Master John Goodfellow, that asks for
lodging!--and with that would have embraced her; but she began to cry out,
yet not very loud. Then Panurge put off his counterfeit garb, changed his
false visage, and said unto her, You will not then otherwise let me do a
little? A turd for you! You do not deserve so much good, nor so much
honour; but, by G--, I will make the dogs ride you;--and with this he ran
away as fast as he could, for fear of blows, whereof he was naturally
fearful.
How Panurge served a Parisian lady a trick that pleased her not very well.
Now you must note that the next day was the great festival of Corpus
Christi, called the Sacre, wherein all women put on their best apparel, and
on that day the said lady was clothed in a rich gown of crimson satin,
under which she wore a very costly white velvet petticoat.
The day of the eve, called the vigil, Panurge searched so long of one side
and another that he found a hot or salt bitch, which, when he had tied her
with his girdle, he led to his chamber and fed her very well all that day
and night. In the morning thereafter he killed her, and took that part of
her which the Greek geomancers know, and cut it into several small pieces
as small as he could. Then, carrying it away as close as might be, he went
to the place where the lady was to come along to follow the procession, as
the custom is upon the said holy day; and when she came in Panurge
sprinkled some holy water on her, saluting her very courteously. Then, a
little while after she had said her petty devotions, he sat down close by
her upon the same bench, and gave her this roundelay in writing, in manner
as followeth.
A Roundelay.
For this one time, that I to you my love
Discovered, you did too cruel prove,
To send me packing, hopeless, and so soon,
Who never any wrong to you had done,
In any kind of action, word, or thought:
So that, if my suit liked you not, you ought
T' have spoke more civilly, and to this sense,
My friend, be pleased to depart from hence,
For this one time.
What hurt do I, to wish you to remark,
With favour and compassion, how a spark
Of your great beauty hath inflamed my heart
With deep affection, and that, for my part,
I only ask that you with me would dance
The brangle gay in feats of dalliance,
For this one time?
And, as she was opening this paper to see what it was, Panurge very
promptly and lightly scattered the drug that he had upon her in divers
places, but especially in the plaits of her sleeves and of her gown. Then
said he unto her, Madam, the poor lovers are not always at ease. As for
me, I hope that those heavy nights, those pains and troubles, which I
suffer for love of you, shall be a deduction to me of so much pain in
purgatory; yet, at the least, pray to God to give me patience in my misery.
Panurge had no sooner spoke this but all the dogs that were in the church
came running to this lady with the smell of the drugs that he had strewed
upon her, both small and great, big and little, all came, laying out their
member, smelling to her, and pissing everywhere upon her--it was the
greatest villainy in the world. Panurge made the fashion of driving them
away; then took his leave of her and withdrew himself into some chapel or
oratory of the said church to see the sport; for these villainous dogs did
compiss all her habiliments, and left none of her attire unbesprinkled with
their staling; insomuch that a tall greyhound pissed upon her head, others
in her sleeves, others on her crupper-piece, and the little ones pissed
upon her pataines; so that all the women that were round about her had much
ado to save her. Whereat Panurge very heartily laughing, he said to one of
the lords of the city, I believe that same lady is hot, or else that some
greyhound hath covered her lately. And when he saw that all the dogs were
flocking about her, yarring at the retardment of their access to her, and
every way keeping such a coil with her as they are wont to do about a proud
or salt bitch, he forthwith departed from thence, and went to call
Pantagruel, not forgetting in his way alongst the streets through which he
went, where he found any dogs to give them a bang with his foot, saying,
Will you not go with your fellows to the wedding? Away, hence, avant,
avant, with a devil avant! And being come home, he said to Pantagruel,
Master, I pray you come and see all the dogs of the country, how they are
assembled about a lady, the fairest in the city, and would duffle and line
her. Whereunto Pantagruel willingly condescended, and saw the mystery,
which he found very pretty and strange. But the best was at the
procession, in which were seen above six hundred thousand and fourteen dogs
about her, which did very much trouble and molest her, and whithersoever
she passed, those dogs that came afresh, tracing her footsteps, followed
her at the heels, and pissed in the way where her gown had touched. All
the world stood gazing at this spectacle, considering the countenance of
those dogs, who, leaping up, got about her neck and spoiled all her
gorgeous accoutrements, for the which she could find no remedy but to
retire unto her house, which was a palace. Thither she went, and the dogs
after her; she ran to hide herself, but the chambermaids could not abstain
from laughing. When she was entered into the house and had shut the door
upon herself, all the dogs came running of half a league round, and did so
well bepiss the gate of her house that there they made a stream with their
urine wherein a duck might have very well swimmed, and it is the same
current that now runs at St. Victor, in which Gobelin dyeth scarlet, for
the specifical virtue of these piss-dogs, as our master Doribus did
heretofore preach publicly. So may God help you, a mill would have ground
corn with it. Yet not so much as those of Basacle at Toulouse.
How Pantagruel departed from Paris, hearing news that the Dipsodes had
invaded the land of the Amaurots; and the cause wherefore the leagues are
so short in France.
A little while after Pantagruel heard news that his father Gargantua had
been translated into the land of the fairies by Morgue, as heretofore were
Ogier and Arthur; as also, (In the original edition it stands 'together,
and that.'--M.) that the report of his translation being spread abroad, the
Dipsodes had issued out beyond their borders, with inroads had wasted a
great part of Utopia, and at that very time had besieged the great city of
the Amaurots. Whereupon departing from Paris without bidding any man
farewell, for the business required diligence, he came to Rouen.
Now Pantagruel in his journey seeing that the leagues of that little
territory about Paris called France were very short in regard of those of
other countries, demanded the cause and reason of it from Panurge, who told
him a story which Marotus of the Lac, monachus, set down in the Acts of the
Kings of Canarre, saying that in old times countries were not distinguished
into leagues, miles, furlongs, nor parasangs, until that King Pharamond
divided them, which was done in manner as followeth. The said king chose
at Paris a hundred fair, gallant, lusty, brisk young men, all resolute and
bold adventurers in Cupid's duels, together with a hundred comely, pretty,
handsome, lovely and well-complexioned wenches of Picardy, all which he
caused to be well entertained and highly fed for the space of eight days.
Then having called for them, he delivered to every one of the young men his
wench, with store of money to defray their charges, and this injunction
besides, to go unto divers places here and there. And wheresoever they
should biscot and thrum their wenches, that, they setting a stone there, it
should be accounted for a league. Thus went away those brave fellows and
sprightly blades most merrily, and because they were fresh and had been at
rest, they very often jummed and fanfreluched almost at every field's end,
and this is the cause why the leagues about Paris are so short. But when
they had gone a great way, and were now as weary as poor devils, all the
oil in their lamps being almost spent, they did not chink and duffle so
often, but contented themselves (I mean for the men's part) with one scurvy
paltry bout in a day, and this is that which makes the leagues in Brittany,
Delanes, Germany, and other more remote countries so long. Other men give
other reasons for it, but this seems to me of all other the best. To which
Pantagruel willingly adhered. Parting from Rouen, they arrived at
Honfleur, where they took shipping, Pantagruel, Panurge, Epistemon,
Eusthenes, and Carpalin.
In which place, waiting for a favourable wind, and caulking their ship,
he received from a lady of Paris, which I (he) had formerly kept and
entertained a good long time, a letter directed on the outside thus,
--To the best beloved of the fair women, and least loyal of the valiant men
--P.N.T.G.R.L.
A letter which a messenger brought to Pantagruel from a lady of Paris,
together with the exposition of a posy written in a gold ring.
When Pantagruel had read the superscription he was much amazed, and
therefore demanded of the said messenger the name of her that had sent it.
Then opened he the letter, and found nothing written in it, nor otherwise
enclosed, but only a gold ring, with a square table diamond. Wondering at
this, he called Panurge to him, and showed him the case. Whereupon Panurge
told him that the leaf of paper was written upon, but with such cunning and
artifice that no man could see the writing at the first sight. Therefore,
to find it out, he set it by the fire to see if it was made with sal
ammoniac soaked in water. Then put he it into the water, to see if the
letter was written with the juice of tithymalle. After that he held it up
against the candle, to see if it was written with the juice of white
onions.
Then he rubbed one part of it with oil of nuts, to see if it were not
written with the lee of a fig-tree, and another part of it with the milk of
a woman giving suck to her eldest daughter, to see if it was written with
the blood of red toads or green earth-frogs. Afterwards he rubbed one
corner with the ashes of a swallow's nest, to see if it were not written
with the dew that is found within the herb alcakengy, called the
winter-cherry. He rubbed, after that, one end with ear-wax, to see if it
were not written with the gall of a raven. Then did he dip it into vinegar,
to try if it was not written with the juice of the garden spurge. After
that he greased it with the fat of a bat or flittermouse, to see if it was
not written with the sperm of a whale, which some call ambergris. Then put
it very fairly into a basinful of fresh water, and forthwith took it out, to
see whether it were written with stone-alum. But after all experiments,
when he perceived that he could find out nothing, he called the messenger
and asked him, Good fellow, the lady that sent thee hither, did she not give
thee a staff to bring with thee? thinking that it had been according to the
conceit whereof Aulus Gellius maketh mention. And the messenger answered
him, No, sir. Then Panurge would have caused his head to be shaven, to see
whether the lady had written upon his bald pate, with the hard lye whereof
soap is made, that which she meant; but, perceiving that his hair was very
long, he forbore, considering that it could not have grown to so great a
length in so short a time.
Then he said to Pantagruel, Master, by the virtue of G--, I cannot tell
what to do nor say in it. For, to know whether there be anything written
upon this or no, I have made use of a good part of that which Master
Francisco di Nianto, the Tuscan, sets down, who hath written the manner of
reading letters that do not appear; that which Zoroastes published, Peri
grammaton acriton; and Calphurnius Bassus, De literis illegibilibus. But I
can see nothing, nor do I believe that there is anything else in it than
the ring. Let us, therefore, look upon it. Which when they had done, they
found this in Hebrew written within, Lamach saba(ch)thani; whereupon they
called Epistemon, and asked him what that meant. To which he answered that
they were Hebrew words, signifying, Wherefore hast thou forsaken me? Upon
that Panurge suddenly replied, I know the mystery. Do you see this
diamond? It is a false one. This, then, is the exposition of that which
the lady means, Diamant faux, that is, false lover, why hast thou forsaken
me? Which interpretation Pantagruel presently understood, and withal
remembering that at his departure he had not bid the lady farewell, he was
very sorry, and would fain have returned to Paris to make his peace with
her. But Epistemon put him in mind of Aeneas's departure from Dido, and
the saying of Heraclitus of Tarentum, That the ship being at anchor, when
need requireth we must cut the cable rather than lose time about untying of
it,--and that he should lay aside all other thoughts to succour the city of
his nativity, which was then in danger. And, indeed, within an hour after
that the wind arose at the north-north-west, wherewith they hoist sail, and
put out, even into the main sea, so that within few days, passing by Porto
Sancto and by the Madeiras, they went ashore in the Canary Islands.
Parting from thence, they passed by Capobianco, by Senege, by Capoverde, by
Gambre, by Sagres, by Melli, by the Cap di Buona Speranza, and set ashore
again in the kingdom of Melinda. Parting from thence, they sailed away
with a tramontane or northerly wind, passing by Meden, by Uti, by Uden, by
Gelasim, by the Isles of the Fairies, and alongst the kingdom of Achorie,
till at last they arrived at the port of Utopia, distant from the city of
the Amaurots three leagues and somewhat more.
When they were ashore, and pretty well refreshed, Pantagruel said,
Gentlemen, the city is not far from hence; therefore, were it not amiss,
before we set forward, to advise well what is to be done, that we be not
like the Athenians, who never took counsel until after the fact? Are you
resolved to live and die with me? Yes, sir, said they all, and be as
confident of us as of your own fingers. Well, said he, there is but one
thing that keeps my mind in great doubt and suspense, which is this, that I
know not in what order nor of what number the enemy is that layeth siege to
the city; for, if I were certain of that, I should go forward and set on
with the better assurance. Let us therefore consult together, and bethink
ourselves by what means we may come to this intelligence. Whereunto they
all said, Let us go thither and see, and stay you here for us; for this
very day, without further respite, do we make account to bring you a
certain report thereof.
Myself, said Panurge, will undertake to enter into their camp, within the
very midst of their guards, unespied by their watch, and merrily feast and
lecher it at their cost, without being known of any, to see the artillery
and the tents of all the captains, and thrust myself in with a grave and
magnific carriage amongst all their troops and companies, without being
discovered. The devil would not be able to peck me out with all his
circumventions, for I am of the race of Zopyrus.
And I, said Epistemon, know all the plots and strategems of the valiant
captains and warlike champions of former ages, together with all the tricks
and subtleties of the art of war. I will go, and, though I be detected and
revealed, I will escape by making them believe of you whatever I please,
for I am of the race of Sinon.
I, said Eusthenes, will enter and set upon them in their trenches, in spite
of their sentries and all their guards; for I will tread upon their bellies
and break their legs and arms, yea, though they were every whit as strong
as the devil himself, for I am of the race of Hercules.
And I, said Carpalin, will get in there if the birds can enter, for I am so
nimble of body, and light withal, that I shall have leaped over their
trenches, and ran clean through all their camp, before that they perceive
me; neither do I fear shot, nor arrow, nor horse, how swift soever, were he
the Pegasus of Perseus or Pacolet, being assured that I shall be able to
make a safe and sound escape before them all without any hurt. I will
undertake to walk upon the ears of corn or grass in the meadows, without
making either of them do so much as bow under me, for I am of the race of
Camilla the Amazon.
How Panurge, Carpalin, Eusthenes, and Epistemon, the gentlemen attendants
of Pantagruel, vanquished and discomfited six hundred and threescore
horsemen very cunningly.
As he was speaking this, they perceived six hundred and threescore light
horsemen, gallantly mounted, who made an outroad thither to see what ship
it was that was newly arrived in the harbour, and came in a full gallop to
take them if they had been able. Then said Pantagruel, My lads, retire
yourselves unto the ship; here are some of our enemies coming apace, but I
will kill them here before you like beasts, although they were ten times so
many; in the meantime, withdraw yourselves, and take your sport at it.
Then answered Panurge, No, sir; there is no reason that you should do so,
but, on the contrary, retire you unto the ship, both you and the rest, for
I alone will here discomfit them; but we must not linger; come, set
forward. Whereunto the others said, It is well advised, sir; withdraw
yourself, and we will help Panurge here, so shall you know what we are able
to do. Then said Pantagruel, Well, I am content; but, if that you be too
weak, I will not fail to come to your assistance. With this Panurge took
two great cables of the ship and tied them to the kemstock or capstan which
was on the deck towards the hatches, and fastened them in the ground,
making a long circuit, the one further off, the other within that. Then
said he to Epistemon, Go aboard the ship, and, when I give you a call, turn
about the capstan upon the orlop diligently, drawing unto you the two
cable-ropes; and said to Eusthenes and to Carpalin, My bullies, stay you
here, and offer yourselves freely to your enemies. Do as they bid you, and
make as if you would yield unto them, but take heed you come not within the
compass of the ropes--be sure to keep yourselves free of them. And
presently he went aboard the ship, and took a bundle of straw and a barrel
of gunpowder, strewed it round about the compass of the cords, and stood by
with a brand of fire or match lighted in his hand. Presently came the
horsemen with great fury, and the foremost ran almost home to the ship,
and, by reason of the slipperiness of the bank, they fell, they and their
horses, to the number of four and forty; which the rest seeing, came on,
thinking that resistance had been made them at their arrival. But Panurge
said unto them, My masters, I believe that you have hurt yourselves; I pray
you pardon us, for it is not our fault, but the slipperiness of the
sea-water that is always flowing; we submit ourselves to your good pleasure.
So said likewise his two other fellows, and Epistemon that was upon the
deck. In the meantime Panurge withdrew himself, and seeing that they were
all within the compass of the cables, and that his two companions were
retired, making room for all those horses which came in a crowd, thronging
upon the neck of one another to see the ship and such as were in it, cried
out on a sudden to Epistemon, Draw, draw! Then began Epistemon to wind
about the capstan, by doing whereof the two cables so entangled and
empestered the legs of the horses, that they were all of them thrown down
to the ground easily, together with their riders. But they, seeing that,
drew their swords, and would have cut them; whereupon Panurge set fire to
the train, and there burnt them up all like damned souls, both men and
horses, not one escaping save one alone, who being mounted on a fleet
Turkey courser, by mere speed in flight got himself out of the circle of
the ropes. But when Carpalin perceived him, he ran after him with such
nimbleness and celerity that he overtook him in less than a hundred paces;
then, leaping close behind him upon the crupper of his horse, clasped him
in his arms, and brought him back to the ship.
This exploit being ended, Pantagruel was very jovial, and wondrously
commended the industry of these gentlemen, whom he called his
fellow-soldiers, and made them refresh themselves and feed well and merrily
upon the seashore, and drink heartily with their bellies upon the ground,
and their prisoner with them, whom they admitted to that familiarity; only
that the poor devil was somewhat afraid that Pantagruel would have eaten him
up whole, which, considering the wideness of his mouth and capacity of his
throat was no great matter for him to have done; for he could have done it
as easily as you would eat a small comfit, he showing no more in his throat
than would a grain of millet-seed in the mouth of an ass.
How Pantagruel and his company were weary in eating still salt meats; and
how Carpalin went a-hunting to have some venison.
Thus as they talked and chatted together, Carpalin said, And, by the belly
of St. Quenet, shall we never eat any venison? This salt meat makes me
horribly dry. I will go fetch you a quarter of one of those horses which
we have burnt; it is well roasted already. As he was rising up to go about
it, he perceived under the side of a wood a fair great roebuck, which was
come out of his fort, as I conceive, at the sight of Panurge's fire. Him
did he pursue and run after with as much vigour and swiftness as if it had
been a bolt out of a crossbow, and caught him in a moment; and whilst he
was in his course he with his hands took in the air four great bustards,
seven bitterns, six and twenty grey partridges, two and thirty red-legged
ones, sixteen pheasants, nine woodcocks, nineteen herons, two and thirty
cushats and ringdoves; and with his feet killed ten or twelve hares and
rabbits, which were then at relief and pretty big withal, eighteen rails in
a knot together, with fifteen young wild-boars, two little beavers, and
three great foxes. So, striking the kid with his falchion athwart the
head, he killed him, and, bearing him on his back, he in his return took up
his hares, rails, and young wild-boars, and, as far off as he could be
heard, cried out and said, Panurge, my friend, vinegar, vinegar! Then the
good Pantagruel, thinking he had fainted, commanded them to provide him
some vinegar; but Panurge knew well that there was some good prey in hands,
and forthwith showed unto noble Pantagruel how he was bearing upon his back
a fair roebuck, and all his girdle bordered with hares. Then immediately
did Epistemon make, in the name of the nine Muses, nine antique wooden
spits. Eusthenes did help to flay, and Panurge placed two great cuirassier
saddles in such sort that they served for andirons, and making their
prisoner to be their cook, they roasted their venison by the fire wherein
the horsemen were burnt; and making great cheer with a good deal of
vinegar, the devil a one of them did forbear from his victuals--it was a
triumphant and incomparable spectacle to see how they ravened and devoured.
Then said Pantagruel, Would to God every one of you had two pairs of little
anthem or sacring bells hanging at your chin, and that I had at mine the
great clocks of Rennes, of Poictiers, of Tours, and of Cambray, to see what
a peal they would ring with the wagging of our chaps. But, said Panurge,
it were better we thought a little upon our business, and by what means we
might get the upper hand of our enemies. That is well remembered, said
Pantagruel. Therefore spoke he thus to the prisoner, My friend, tell us
here the truth, and do not lie to us at all, if thou wouldst not be flayed
alive, for it is I that eat the little children. Relate unto us at full
the order, the number, and the strength of the army. To which the prisoner
answered, Sir, know for a truth that in the army there are three hundred
giants, all armed with armour of proof, and wonderful great. Nevertheless,
not fully so great as you, except one that is their head, named Loupgarou,
who is armed from head to foot with cyclopical anvils. Furthermore, one
hundred three score and three thousand foot, all armed with the skins of
hobgoblins, strong and valiant men; eleven thousand four hundred
men-at-arms or cuirassiers; three thousand six hundred double cannons, and
arquebusiers without number; four score and fourteen thousand pioneers; one
hundred and fifty thousand whores, fair like goddesses--(That is for me,
said Panurge)--whereof some are Amazons, some Lionnoises, others
Parisiennes, Taurangelles, Angevines, Poictevines, Normandes, and High
Dutch--there are of them of all countries and all languages.
Yea but, said Pantagruel, is the king there? Yes, sir, said the prisoner;
he is there in person, and we call him Anarchus, king of the Dipsodes,
which is as much to say as thirsty people, for you never saw men more
thirsty, nor more willing to drink, and his tent is guarded by the giants.
It is enough, said Pantagruel. Come, brave boys, are you resolved to go
with me? To which Panurge answered, God confound him that leaves you! I
have already bethought myself how I will kill them all like pigs, and so
the devil one leg of them shall escape. But I am somewhat troubled about
one thing. And what is that? said Pantagruel. It is, said Panurge, how I
shall be able to set forward to the justling and bragmardizing of all the
whores that be there this afternoon, in such sort that there escape not one
unbumped by me, breasted and jummed after the ordinary fashion of man and
women in the Venetian conflict. Ha, ha, ha, ha, said Pantagruel.
And Carpalin said: The devil take these sink-holes, if, by G--, I do not
bumbaste some one of them. Then said Eusthenes: What! shall not I have
any, whose paces, since we came from Rouen, were never so well winded up as
that my needle could mount to ten or eleven o'clock, till now that I have
it hard, stiff, and strong, like a hundred devils? Truly, said Panurge,
thou shalt have of the fattest, and of those that are most plump and in the
best case.
How now! said Epistemon; everyone shall ride, and I must lead the ass? The
devil take him that will do so. We will make use of the right of war, Qui
potest capere, capiat. No, no, said Panurge, but tie thine ass to a crook,
and ride as the world doth. And the good Pantagruel laughed at all this,
and said unto them, You reckon without your host. I am much afraid that,
before it be night, I shall see you in such taking that you will have no
great stomach to ride, but more like to be rode upon with sound blows of
pike and lance. Baste, said Epistemon, enough of that! I will not fail to
bring them to you, either to roast or boil, to fry or put in paste. They
are not so many in number as were in the army of Xerxes, for he had thirty
hundred thousand fighting-men, if you will believe Herodotus and Trogus
Pompeius, and yet Themistocles with a few men overthrew them all. For
God's sake, take you no care for that. Cobsminny, cobsminny, said Panurge;
my codpiece alone shall suffice to overthrow all the men; and my St.
Sweephole, that dwells within it, shall lay all the women squat upon their
backs. Up then, my lads, said Pantagruel, and let us march along.
How Pantagruel set up one trophy in memorial of their valour, and Panurge
another in remembrance of the hares. How Pantagruel likewise with his
farts begat little men, and with his fisgs little women; and how Panurge
broke a great staff over two glasses.
Before we depart hence, said Pantagruel, in remembrance of the exploit that
you have now performed I will in this place erect a fair trophy. Then
every man amongst them, with great joy and fine little country songs, set
up a huge big post, whereunto they hanged a great cuirassier saddle, the
fronstal of a barbed horse, bridle-bosses, pulley-pieces for the knees,
stirrup-leathers, spurs, stirrups, a coat of mail, a corslet tempered with
steel, a battle-axe, a strong, short, and sharp horseman's sword, a
gauntlet, a horseman's mace, gushet-armour for the armpits, leg-harness,
and a gorget, with all other furniture needful for the decorement of a
triumphant arch, in sign of a trophy. And then Pantagruel, for an eternal
memorial, wrote this victorial ditton, as followeth:--
Here was the prowess made apparent of
Four brave and valiant champions of proof,
Who, without any arms but wit, at once,
Like Fabius, or the two Scipions,
Burnt in a fire six hundred and threescore
Crablice, strong rogues ne'er vanquished before.
By this each king may learn, rook, pawn, and knight,
That sleight is much more prevalent than might.
For victory,
As all men see,
Hangs on the ditty
Of that committee
Where the great God
Hath his abode.
Nor doth he it to strong and great men give,
But to his elect, as we must believe;
Therefore shall he obtain wealth and esteem,
Who thorough faith doth put his trust in him.
Whilst Pantagruel was writing these foresaid verses, Panurge halved and
fixed upon a great stake the horns of a roebuck, together with the skin and
the right forefoot thereof, the ears of three leverets, the chine of a
coney, the jaws of a hare, the wings of two bustards, the feet of four
queest-doves, a bottle or borracho full of vinegar, a horn wherein to put
salt, a wooden spit, a larding stick, a scurvy kettle full of holes, a
dripping-pan to make sauce in, an earthen salt-cellar, and a goblet of
Beauvais. Then, in imitation of Pantagruel's verses and trophy, wrote that
which followeth:--
Here was it that four jovial blades sat down
To a profound carousing, and to crown
Their banquet with those wines which please best great
Bacchus, the monarch of their drinking state.
Then were the reins and furch of a young hare,
With salt and vinegar, displayed there,
Of which to snatch a bit or two at once
They all fell on like hungry scorpions.
For th' Inventories
Of Defensories
Say that in heat
We must drink neat
All out, and of
The choicest stuff.
But it is bad to eat of young hare's flesh,
Unless with vinegar we it refresh.
Receive this tenet, then, without control,
That vinegar of that meat is the soul.
Then said Pantagruel, Come, my lads, let us begone! we have stayed here too
long about our victuals; for very seldom doth it fall out that the greatest
eaters do the most martial exploits. There is no shadow like that of
flying colours, no smoke like that of horses, no clattering like that of
armour. At this Epistemon began to smile, and said, There is no shadow
like that of the kitchen, no smoke like that of pasties, and no clattering
like that of goblets. Unto which answered Panurge, There is no shadow like
that of curtains, no smoke like that of women's breasts, and no clattering
like that of ballocks. Then forthwith rising up he gave a fart, a leap,
and a whistle, and most joyfully cried out aloud, Ever live Pantagruel!
When Pantagruel saw that, he would have done as much; but with the fart
that he let the earth trembled nine leagues about, wherewith and with the
corrupted air he begot above three and fifty thousand little men,
ill-favoured dwarfs, and with one fisg that he let he made as many little
women, crouching down, as you shall see in divers places, which never grow
but like cow's tails, downwards, or, like the Limosin radishes, round. How
now! said Panurge, are your farts so fertile and fruitful? By G--, here be
brave farted men and fisgued women; let them be married together; they will
beget fine hornets and dorflies. So did Pantagruel, and called them
pigmies. Those he sent to live in an island thereby, where since that time
they are increased mightily. But the cranes make war with them
continually, against which they do most courageously defend themselves; for
these little ends of men and dandiprats (whom in Scotland they call
whiphandles and knots of a tar-barrel) are commonly very testy and
choleric; the physical reason whereof is, because their heart is near their
spleen.
At this same time Panurge took two drinking glasses that were there, both
of one bigness, and filled them with water up to the brim, and set one of
them upon one stool and the other upon another, placing them about one foot
from one another. Then he took the staff of a javelin, about five foot and
a half long, and put it upon the two glasses, so that the two ends of the
staff did come just to the brims of the glasses. This done, he took a
great stake or billet of wood, and said to Pantagruel and to the rest, My
masters, behold how easily we shall have the victory over our enemies; for
just as I shall break this staff here upon these glasses, without either
breaking or crazing of them, nay, which is more, without spilling one drop
of the water that is within them, even so shall we break the heads of our
Dipsodes without receiving any of us any wound or loss in our person or
goods. But, that you may not think there is any witchcraft in this, hold!
said he to Eusthenes, strike upon the midst as hard as thou canst with this
log. Eusthenes did so, and the staff broke in two pieces, and not one drop
of the water fell out of the glasses. Then said he, I know a great many
such other tricks; let us now therefore march boldly and with assurance.
How Pantagruel got the victory very strangely over the Dipsodes and the
Giants.
After all this talk, Pantagruel took the prisoner to him and sent him away,
saying, Go thou unto thy king in his camp, and tell him tidings of what
thou hast seen, and let him resolve to feast me to-morrow about noon; for,
as soon as my galleys shall come, which will be to-morrow at furthest, I
will prove unto him by eighteen hundred thousand fighting-men and seven
thousand giants, all of them greater than I am, that he hath done foolishly
and against reason thus to invade my country. Wherein Pantagruel feigned
that he had an army at sea. But the prisoner answered that he would yield
himself to be his slave, and that he was content never to return to his own
people, but rather with Pantagruel to fight against them, and for God's
sake besought him that he might be permitted so to do. Whereunto
Pantagruel would not give consent, but commanded him to depart thence
speedily and begone as he had told him, and to that effect gave him a
boxful of euphorbium, together with some grains of the black chameleon
thistle, steeped into aqua vitae, and made up into the condiment of a wet
sucket, commanding him to carry it to his king, and to say unto him, that
if he were able to eat one ounce of that without drinking after it, he
might then be able to resist him without any fear or apprehension of
danger.
The prisoner then besought him with joined hands that in the hour of the
battle he would have compassion upon him. Whereat Pantagruel said unto
him, After that thou hast delivered all unto the king, put thy whole
confidence in God, and he will not forsake thee; because, although for my
part I be mighty, as thou mayst see, and have an infinite number of men in
arms, I do nevertheless trust neither in my force nor in mine industry, but
all my confidence is in God my protector, who doth never forsake those that
in him do put their trust and confidence. This done, the prisoner
requested him that he would afford him some reasonable composition for his
ransom. To which Pantagruel answered, that his end was not to rob nor
ransom men, but to enrich them and reduce them to total liberty. Go thy
way, said he, in the peace of the living God, and never follow evil
company, lest some mischief befall thee. The prisoner being gone,
Pantagruel said to his men, Gentlemen, I have made this prisoner believe
that we have an army at sea; as also that we will not assault them till
to-morrow at noon, to the end that they, doubting of the great arrival of
our men, may spend this night in providing and strengthening themselves,
but in the meantime my intention is that we charge them about the hour
of the first sleep.
Let us leave Pantagruel here with his apostles, and speak of King Anarchus
and his army. When the prisoner was come he went unto the king and told
him how there was a great giant come, called Pantagruel, who had overthrown
and made to be cruelly roasted all the six hundred and nine and fifty
horsemen, and he alone escaped to bring the news. Besides that, he was
charged by the said giant to tell him that the next day, about noon, he
must make a dinner ready for him, for at that hour he was resolved to set
upon him. Then did he give him that box wherein were those confitures.
But as soon as he had swallowed down one spoonful of them, he was taken
with such a heat in the throat, together with an ulceration in the flap of
the top of the windpipe, that his tongue peeled with it in such sort that,
for all they could do unto him, he found no ease at all but by drinking
only without cessation; for as soon as ever he took the goblet from his
head, his tongue was on a fire, and therefore they did nothing but still
pour in wine into his throat with a funnel. Which when his captains,
bashaws, and guard of his body did see, they tasted of the same drugs to
try whether they were so thirst-procuring and alterative or no. But it so
befell them as it had done their king, and they plied the flagon so well
that the noise ran throughout all the camp, how the prisoner was returned;
that the next day they were to have an assault; that the king and his
captains did already prepare themselves for it, together with his guards,
and that with carousing lustily and quaffing as hard as they could. Every
man, therefore, in the army began to tipple, ply the pot, swill and guzzle
it as fast as they could. In sum, they drunk so much, and so long, that
they fell asleep like pigs, all out of order throughout the whole camp.
Let us now return to the good Pantagruel, and relate how he carried himself
in this business. Departing from the place of the trophies, he took the
mast of their ship in his hand like a pilgrim's staff, and put within the
top of it two hundred and seven and thirty puncheons of white wine of
Anjou, the rest was of Rouen, and tied up to his girdle the bark all full
of salt, as easily as the lansquenets carry their little panniers, and so
set onward on his way with his fellow-soldiers. When he was come near to
the enemy's camp, Panurge said unto him, Sir, if you would do well, let
down this white wine of Anjou from the scuttle of the mast of the ship,
that we may all drink thereof, like Bretons.
Hereunto Pantagruel very willingly consented, and they drank so neat that
there was not so much as one poor drop left of two hundred and seven and
thirty puncheons, except one boracho or leathern bottle of Tours which
Panurge filled for himself, for he called that his vademecum, and some
scurvy lees of wine in the bottom, which served him instead of vinegar.
After they had whittled and curried the can pretty handsomely, Panurge gave
Pantagruel to eat some devilish drugs compounded of lithotripton, which is
a stone-dissolving ingredient, nephrocatarticon, that purgeth the reins,
the marmalade of quinces, called codiniac, a confection of cantharides,
which are green flies breeding on the tops of olive-trees, and other kinds
of diuretic or piss-procuring simples. This done, Pantagruel said to
Carpalin, Go into the city, scrambling like a cat against the wall, as you
can well do, and tell them that now presently they come out and charge
their enemies as rudely as they can, and having said so, come down, taking
a lighted torch with you, wherewith you shall set on fire all the tents and
pavilions in the camp; then cry as loud as you are able with your great
voice, and then come away from thence. Yea but, said Carpalin, were it not
good to cloy all their ordnance? No, no, said Pantagruel, only blow up all
their powder. Carpalin, obeying him, departed suddenly and did as he was
appointed by Pantagruel, and all the combatants came forth that were in the
city, and when he had set fire in the tents and pavilions, he passed so
lightly through them, and so highly and profoundly did they snort and
sleep, that they never perceived him. He came to the place where their
artillery was, and set their munition on fire. But here was the danger.
The fire was so sudden that poor Carpalin had almost been burnt. And had
it not been for his wonderful agility he had been fried like a roasting
pig. But he departed away so speedily that a bolt or arrow out of a
crossbow could not have had a swifter motion. When he was clear of their
trenches, he shouted aloud, and cried out so dreadfully, and with such
amazement to the hearers, that it seemed all the devils of hell had been
let loose. At which noise the enemies awaked, but can you tell how? Even
no less astonished than are monks at the ringing of the first peal to
matins, which in Lusonnois is called rub-ballock.
In the meantime Pantagruel began to sow the salt that he had in his bark,
and because they slept with an open gaping mouth, he filled all their
throats with it, so that those poor wretches were by it made to cough like
foxes. Ha, Pantagruel, how thou addest greater heat to the firebrand that
is in us! Suddenly Pantagruel had will to piss, by means of the drugs
which Panurge had given him, and pissed amidst the camp so well and so
copiously that he drowned them all, and there was a particular deluge ten
leagues round about, of such considerable depth that the history saith, if
his father's great mare had been there, and pissed likewise, it would
undoubtedly have been a more enormous deluge than that of Deucalion; for
she did never piss but she made a river greater than is either the Rhone or
the Danube. Which those that were come out of the city seeing, said, They
are all cruelly slain; see how the blood runs along. But they were
deceived in thinking Pantagruel's urine had been the blood of their
enemies, for they could not see but by the light of the fire of the
pavilions and some small light of the moon.
The enemies, after that they were awaked, seeing on one side the fire in
the camp, and on the other the inundation of the urinal deluge, could not
tell what to say nor what to think. Some said that it was the end of the
world and the final judgment, which ought to be by fire. Others again
thought that the sea-gods, Neptune, Proteus, Triton, and the rest of them,
did persecute them, for that indeed they found it to be like sea-water and
salt.
O who were able now condignly to relate how Pantagruel did demean himself
against the three hundred giants! O my Muse, my Calliope, my Thalia,
inspire me at this time, restore unto me my spirits; for this is the
logical bridge of asses! Here is the pitfall, here is the difficulty, to
have ability enough to express the horrible battle that was fought. Ah,
would to God that I had now a bottle of the best wine that ever those drank
who shall read this so veridical history!
How Pantagruel discomfited the three hundred giants armed with free-stone,
and Loupgarou their captain.
The giants, seeing all their camp drowned, carried away their king Anarchus
upon their backs as well as they could out of the fort, as Aeneas did to
his father Anchises, in the time of the conflagration of Troy. When
Panurge perceived them, he said to Pantagruel, Sir, yonder are the giants
coming forth against you; lay on them with your mast gallantly, like an old
fencer; for now is the time that you must show yourself a brave man and an
honest. And for our part we will not fail you. I myself will kill to you
a good many boldly enough; for why, David killed Goliath very easily; and
then this great lecher, Eusthenes, who is stronger than four oxen, will not
spare himself. Be of good courage, therefore, and valiant; charge amongst
them with point and edge, and by all manner of means. Well, said
Pantagruel, of courage I have more than for fifty francs, but let us be
wise, for Hercules first never undertook against two. That is well cacked,
well scummered, said Panurge; do you compare yourself with Hercules? You
have, by G--, more strength in your teeth, and more scent in your bum, than
ever Hercules had in all his body and soul. So much is a man worth as he
esteems himself. Whilst they spake those words, behold! Loupgarou was come
with all his giants, who, seeing Pantagruel in a manner alone, was carried
away with temerity and presumption, for hopes that he had to kill the good
man. Whereupon he said to his companions the giants, You wenchers of the
low country, by Mahoom! if any of you undertake to fight against these men
here, I will put you cruelly to death. It is my will that you let me fight
single. In the meantime you shall have good sport to look upon us.
Then all the other giants retired with their king to the place where the
flagons stood, and Panurge and his comrades with them, who counterfeited
those that have had the pox, for he wreathed about his mouth, shrunk up his
fingers, and with a harsh and hoarse voice said unto them, I forsake -od,
fellow-soldiers, if I would have it to be believed that we make any war at
all. Give us somewhat to eat with you whilest our masters fight against
one another. To this the king and giants jointly condescended, and
accordingly made them to banquet with them. In the meantime Panurge told
them the follies of Turpin, the examples of St. Nicholas, and the tale of a
tub. Loupgarou then set forward towards Pantagruel, with a mace all of
steel, and that of the best sort, weighing nine thousand seven hundred
quintals and two quarterons, at the end whereof were thirteen pointed
diamonds, the least whereof was as big as the greatest bell of Our Lady's
Church at Paris--there might want perhaps the thickness of a nail, or at
most, that I may not lie, of the back of those knives which they call
cutlugs or earcutters, but for a little off or on, more or less, it is no
matter--and it was enchanted in such sort that it could never break, but,
contrarily, all that it did touch did break immediately. Thus, then, as he
approached with great fierceness and pride of heart, Pantagruel, casting up
his eyes to heaven, recommended himself to God with all his soul, making
such a vow as followeth.
O thou Lord God, who hast always been my protector and my saviour! thou
seest the distress wherein I am at this time. Nothing brings me hither but
a natural zeal, which thou hast permitted unto mortals, to keep and defend
themselves, their wives and children, country and family, in case thy own
proper cause were not in question, which is the faith; for in such a
business thou wilt have no coadjutors, only a catholic confession and
service of thy word, and hast forbidden us all arming and defence. For
thou art the Almighty, who in thine own cause, and where thine own business
is taken to heart, canst defend it far beyond all that we can conceive,
thou who hast thousand thousands of hundreds of millions of legions of
angels, the least of which is able to kill all mortal men, and turn about
the heavens and earth at his pleasure, as heretofore it very plainly
appeared in the army of Sennacherib. If it may please thee, therefore, at
this time to assist me, as my whole trust and confidence is in thee alone,
I vow unto thee, that in all countries whatsoever wherein I shall have any
power or authority, whether in this of Utopia or elsewhere, I will cause
thy holy gospel to be purely, simply, and entirely preached, so that the
abuses of a rabble of hypocrites and false prophets, who by human
constitutions and depraved inventions have empoisoned all the world, shall
be quite exterminated from about me.
This vow was no sooner made, but there was heard a voice from heaven
saying, Hoc fac et vinces; that is to say, Do this, and thou shalt
overcome. Then Pantagruel, seeing that Loupgarou with his mouth wide open
was drawing near to him, went against him boldly, and cried out as loud as
he was able, Thou diest, villain, thou diest! purposing by his horrible cry
to make him afraid, according to the discipline of the Lacedaemonians.
Withal, he immediately cast at him out of his bark, which he wore at his
girdle, eighteen cags and four bushels of salt, wherewith he filled both
his mouth, throat, nose, and eyes. At this Loupgarou was so highly
incensed that, most fiercely setting upon him, he thought even then with a
blow of his mace to have beat out his brains. But Pantagruel was very
nimble, and had always a quick foot and a quick eye, and therefore with his
left foot did he step back one pace, yet not so nimbly but that the blow,
falling upon the bark, broke it in four thousand four score and six pieces,
and threw all the rest of the salt about the ground. Pantagruel, seeing
that, most gallantly displayed the vigour of his arms, and, according to
the art of the axe, gave him with the great end of his mast a homethrust a
little above the breast; then, bringing along the blow to the left side,
with a slash struck him between the neck and shoulders. After that,
advancing his right foot, he gave him a push upon the couillons with the
upper end of his said mast, wherewith breaking the scuttle on the top
thereof, he spilt three or four puncheons of wine that were left therein.
Upon that Loupgarou thought that he had pierced his bladder, and that the
wine that came forth had been his urine. Pantagruel, being not content
with this, would have doubled it by a side-blow; but Loupgarou, lifting
up his mace, advanced one step upon him, and with all his force would
have dashed it upon Pantagruel, wherein, to speak the truth, he so
sprightfully carried himself, that, if God had not succoured the good
Pantagruel, he had been cloven from the top of his head to the bottom of
his milt. But the blow glanced to the right side by the brisk nimbleness
of Pantagruel, and his mace sank into the ground above threescore and
thirteen foot, through a huge rock, out of which the fire did issue greater
than nine thousand and six tons. Pantagruel, seeing him busy about
plucking out his mace, which stuck in the ground between the rocks, ran
upon him, and would have clean cut off his head, if by mischance his mast
had not touched a little against the stock of Loupgarou's mace, which was
enchanted, as we have said before. By this means his mast broke off about
three handfuls above his hand, whereat he stood amazed like a bell-founder,
and cried out, Ah, Panurge, where art thou? Panurge, seeing that, said to
the king and the giants, By G--, they will hurt one another if they be not
parted. But the giants were as merry as if they had been at a wedding.
Then Carpalin would have risen from thence to help his master; but one of
the giants said unto him, By Golfarin, the nephew of Mahoom, if thou stir
hence I will put thee in the bottom of my breeches instead of a
suppository, which cannot choose but do me good. For in my belly I am very
costive, and cannot well cagar without gnashing my teeth and making many
filthy faces. Then Pantagruel, thus destitute of a staff, took up the end
of his mast, striking athwart and alongst upon the giant, but he did him no
more hurt than you would do with a fillip upon a smith's anvil. In the
(mean) time Loupgarou was drawing his mace out of the ground, and, having
already plucked it out, was ready therewith to have struck Pantagruel, who,
being very quick in turning, avoided all his blows in taking only the
defensive part in hand, until on a sudden he saw that Loupgarou did
threaten him with these words, saying, Now, villain, will not I fail to
chop thee as small as minced meat, and keep thee henceforth from ever
making any more poor men athirst! For then, without any more ado,
Pantagruel struck him such a blow with his foot against the belly that he
made him fall backwards, his heels over his head, and dragged him thus
along at flay-buttock above a flight-shot. Then Loupgarou cried out,
bleeding at the throat, Mahoom, Mahoom, Mahoom! at which noise all the
giants arose to succour him. But Panurge said unto them, Gentlemen, do not
go, if will believe me, for our master is mad, and strikes athwart and
alongst, he cares not where; he will do you a mischief. But the giants
made no account of it, seeing that Pantagruel had never a staff.
And when Pantagruel saw those giants approach very near unto him, he took
Loupgarou by the two feet, and lift up his body like a pike in the air,
wherewith, it being harnessed with anvils, he laid such heavy load amongst
those giants armed with free-stone, that, striking them down as a mason
doth little knobs of stones, there was not one of them that stood before
him whom he threw not flat to the ground. And by the breaking of this
stony armour there was made such a horrible rumble as put me in mind of the
fall of the butter-tower of St. Stephen's at Bourges when it melted before
the sun. Panurge, with Carpalin and Eusthenes, did cut in the mean time
the throats of those that were struck down, in such sort that there escaped
not one. Pantagruel to any man's sight was like a mower, who with his
scythe, which was Loupgarou, cut down the meadow grass, to wit, the giants;
but with this fencing of Pantagruel's Loupgarou lost his head, which
happened when Pantagruel struck down one whose name was Riflandouille, or
Pudding-plunderer, who was armed cap-a-pie with Grison stones, one chip
whereof splintering abroad cut off Epistemon's neck clean and fair. For
otherwise the most part of them were but lightly armed with a kind of sandy
brittle stone, and the rest with slates. At last, when he saw that they
were all dead, he threw the body of Loupgarou as hard as he could against
the city, where falling like a frog upon his belly in the great Piazza
thereof, he with the said fall killed a singed he-cat, a wet she-cat, a
farting duck, and a bridled goose.
How Epistemon, who had his head cut off, was finely healed by Panurge, and
of the news which he brought from the devils, and of the damned people in
hell.
This gigantal victory being ended, Pantagruel withdrew himself to the place
of the flagons, and called for Panurge and the rest, who came unto him safe
and sound, except Eusthenes, whom one of the giants had scratched a little
in the face whilst he was about the cutting of his throat, and Epistemon,
who appeared not at all. Whereat Pantagruel was so aggrieved that he would
have killed himself. But Panurge said unto him, Nay, sir, stay a while,
and we will search for him amongst the dead, and find out the truth of all.
Thus as they went seeking after him, they found him stark dead, with his
head between his arms all bloody. Then Eusthenes cried out, Ah, cruel
death! hast thou taken from me the perfectest amongst men? At which words
Pantagruel rose up with the greatest grief that ever any man did see, and
said to Panurge, Ha, my friend! the prophecy of your two glasses and the
javelin staff was a great deal too deceitful. But Panurge answered, My
dear bullies all, weep not one drop more, for, he being yet all hot, I will
make him as sound as ever he was. In saying this, he took the head and
held it warm foregainst his codpiece, that the wind might not enter into
it. Eusthenes and Carpalin carried the body to the place where they had
banqueted, not out of any hope that ever he would recover, but that
Pantagruel might see it.
Nevertheless Panurge gave him very good comfort, saying, If I do not heal
him, I will be content to lose my head, which is a fool's wager. Leave
off, therefore, crying, and help me. Then cleansed he his neck very well
with pure white wine, and, after that, took his head, and into it synapised
some powder of diamerdis, which he always carried about him in one of his
bags. Afterwards he anointed it with I know not what ointment, and set it
on very just, vein against vein, sinew against sinew, and spondyle against
spondyle, that he might not be wry-necked--for such people he mortally
hated. This done, he gave it round about some fifteen or sixteen stitches
with a needle that it might not fall off again; then, on all sides and
everywhere, he put a little ointment on it, which he called resuscitative.
Suddenly Epistemon began to breathe, then opened his eyes, yawned, sneezed,
and afterwards let a great household fart. Whereupon Panurge said, Now,
certainly, he is healed,--and therefore gave him to drink a large full
glass of strong white wine, with a sugared toast. In this fashion was
Epistemon finely healed, only that he was somewhat hoarse for above three
weeks together, and had a dry cough of which he could not be rid but by the
force of continual drinking. And now he began to speak, and said that he
had seen the devil, had spoken with Lucifer familiarly, and had been very
merry in hell and in the Elysian fields, affirming very seriously before
them all that the devils were boon companions and merry fellows. But, in
respect of the damned, he said he was very sorry that Panurge had so soon
called him back into this world again; for, said he, I took wonderful
delight to see them. How so? said Pantagruel. Because they do not use
them there, said Epistemon, so badly as you think they do. Their estate
and condition of living is but only changed after a very strange manner;
for I saw Alexander the Great there amending and patching on clouts upon
old breeches and stockings, whereby he got but a very poor living.
Xerxes was a crier of mustard.
Romulus, a salter and patcher of pattens.
Numa, a nailsmith.
Tarquin, a porter.
Piso, a clownish swain.
Sylla, a ferryman.
Cyrus, a cowherd.
Themistocles, a glass-maker.
Epaminondas, a maker of mirrors or looking-glasses.
Brutus and Cassius, surveyors or measurers of land.
Demosthenes, a vine-dresser.
Cicero, a fire-kindler.
Fabius, a threader of beads.
Artaxerxes, a rope-maker.
Aeneas, a miller.
Achilles was a scaldpated maker of hay-bundles.
Agamemnon, a lick-box.
Ulysses, a hay-mower.
Nestor, a door-keeper or forester.
Darius, a gold-finder or jakes-farmer.
Ancus Martius, a ship-trimmer.
Camillus, a foot-post.
Marcellus, a sheller of beans.
Drusus, a taker of money at the doors of playhouses.
Scipio Africanus, a crier of lee in a wooden slipper.
Asdrubal, a lantern-maker.
Hannibal, a kettlemaker and seller of eggshells.
Priamus, a seller of old clouts.
Lancelot of the Lake was a flayer of dead horses.
All the Knights of the Round Table were poor day-labourers, employed to row
over the rivers of Cocytus, Phlegeton, Styx, Acheron, and Lethe, when my
lords the devils had a mind to recreate themselves upon the water, as in
the like occasion are hired the boatmen at Lyons, the gondoliers of Venice,
and oars at London. But with this difference, that these poor knights have
only for their fare a bob or flirt on the nose, and in the evening a morsel
of coarse mouldy bread.
Trajan was a fisher of frogs.
Antoninus, a lackey.
Commodus, a jet-maker.
Pertinax, a peeler of walnuts.
Lucullus, a maker of rattles and hawks'-bells.
Justinian, a pedlar.
Hector, a snap-sauce scullion.
Paris was a poor beggar.
Cambyses, a mule-driver.
Nero, a base blind fiddler, or player on that instrument which is called a
windbroach. Fierabras was his serving-man, who did him a thousand
mischievous tricks, and would make him eat of the brown bread and drink of
the turned wine when himself did both eat and drink of the best.
Julius Caesar and Pompey were boat-wrights and tighters of ships.
Valentine and Orson did serve in the stoves of hell, and were sweat-rubbers
in hot houses.
Giglan and Govian (Gauvin) were poor swineherds.
Geoffrey with the great tooth was a tinder-maker and seller of matches.
Godfrey de Bouillon, a hood-maker.
Jason was a bracelet-maker.
Don Pietro de Castille, a carrier of indulgences.
Morgan, a beer-brewer.
Huon of Bordeaux, a hooper of barrels.
Pyrrhus, a kitchen-scullion.
Antiochus, a chimney-sweeper.
Octavian, a scraper of parchment.
Nerva, a mariner.
Pope Julius was a crier of pudding-pies, but he left off wearing there his
great buggerly beard.
John of Paris was a greaser of boots.
Arthur of Britain, an ungreaser of caps.
Perce-Forest, a carrier of faggots.
Pope Boniface the Eighth, a scummer of pots.
Pope Nicholas the Third, a maker of paper.
Pope Alexander, a ratcatcher.
Pope Sixtus, an anointer of those that have the pox.
What, said Pantagruel, have they the pox there too? Surely, said
Epistemon, I never saw so many: there are there, I think, above a hundred
millions; for believe, that those who have not had the pox in this world
must have it in the other.
Cotsbody, said Panurge, then I am free; for I have been as far as the hole
of Gibraltar, reached unto the outmost bounds of Hercules, and gathered of
the ripest.
Ogier the Dane was a furbisher of armour.
The King Tigranes, a mender of thatched houses.
Galien Restored, a taker of moldwarps.
The four sons of Aymon were all toothdrawers.
Pope Calixtus was a barber of a woman's sine qua non.
Pope Urban, a bacon-picker.
Melusina was a kitchen drudge-wench.
Matabrune, a laundress.
Cleopatra, a crier of onions.
Helen, a broker for chambermaids.
Semiramis, the beggars' lice-killer.
Dido did sell mushrooms.
Penthesilea sold cresses.
Lucretia was an alehouse-keeper.
Hortensia, a spinstress.
Livia, a grater of verdigris.
After this manner, those that had been great lords and ladies here, got but
a poor scurvy wretched living there below. And, on the contrary, the
philosophers and others, who in this world had been altogether indigent and
wanting, were great lords there in their turn. I saw Diogenes there strut
it out most pompously, and in great magnificence, with a rich purple gown
on him, and a golden sceptre in his right hand. And, which is more, he
would now and then make Alexander the Great mad, so enormously would he
abuse him when he had not well patched his breeches; for he used to pay his
skin with sound bastinadoes. I saw Epictetus there, most gallantly
apparelled after the French fashion, sitting under a pleasant arbour, with
store of handsome gentlewomen, frolicking, drinking, dancing, and making
good cheer, with abundance of crowns of the sun. Above the lattice were
written these verses for his device:
To leap and dance, to sport and play,
And drink good wine both white and brown,
Or nothing else do all the day
But tell bags full of many a crown.
When he saw me, he invited me to drink with him very courteously, and I
being willing to be entreated, we tippled and chopined together most
theologically. In the meantime came Cyrus to beg one farthing of him for
the honour of Mercury, therewith to buy a few onions for his supper. No,
no, said Epictetus, I do not use in my almsgiving to bestow farthings.
Hold, thou varlet, there's a crown for thee; be an honest man. Cyrus was
exceeding glad to have met with such a booty; but the other poor rogues,
the kings that are there below, as Alexander, Darius, and others, stole it
away from him by night. I saw Pathelin, the treasurer of Rhadamanthus,
who, in cheapening the pudding-pies that Pope Julius cried, asked him how
much a dozen. Three blanks, said the Pope. Nay, said Pathelin, three
blows with a cudgel. Lay them down here, you rascal, and go fetch more.
The poor Pope went away weeping, who, when he came to his master, the
pie-maker, told him that they had taken away his pudding-pies. Whereupon
his master gave him such a sound lash with an eel-skin, that his own would
have been worth nothing to make bag-pipe-bags of. I saw Master John Le
Maire there personate the Pope in such fashion that he made all the poor
kings and popes of this world kiss his feet, and, taking great state upon
him, gave them his benediction, saying, Get the pardons, rogues, get the
pardons; they are good cheap. I absolve you of bread and pottage, and
dispense with you to be never good for anything. Then, calling Caillet and
Triboulet to him, he spoke these words, My lords the cardinals, despatch
their bulls, to wit, to each of them a blow with a cudgel upon the reins.
Which accordingly was forthwith performed. I heard Master Francis Villon
ask Xerxes, How much the mess of mustard? A farthing, said Xerxes. To
which the said Villon answered, The pox take thee for a villain! As much of
square-eared wheat is not worth half that price, and now thou offerest to
enhance the price of victuals. With this he pissed in his pot, as the
mustard-makers of Paris used to do. I saw the trained bowman of the bathing
tub, known by the name of the Francarcher de Baignolet, who, being one of
the trustees of the Inquisition, when he saw Perce-Forest making water
against a wall in which was painted the fire of St. Anthony, declared him
heretic, and would have caused him to be burnt alive had it not been for
Morgant, who, for his proficiat and other small fees, gave him nine tuns of
beer.
Well, said Pantagruel, reserve all these fair stories for another time,
only tell us how the usurers are there handled. I saw them, said
Epistemon, all very busily employed in seeking of rusty pins and old nails
in the kennels of the streets, as you see poor wretched rogues do in this
world. But the quintal, or hundredweight, of this old ironware is there
valued but at the price of a cantle of bread, and yet they have but a very
bad despatch and riddance in the sale of it. Thus the poor misers are
sometimes three whole weeks without eating one morsel or crumb of bread,
and yet work both day and night, looking for the fair to come.
Nevertheless, of all this labour, toil, and misery, they reckon nothing, so
cursedly active they are in the prosecution of that their base calling, in
hopes, at the end of the year, to earn some scurvy penny by it.
Come, said Pantagruel, let us now make ourselves merry one bout, and drink,
my lads, I beseech you, for it is very good drinking all this month. Then
did they uncase their flagons by heaps and dozens, and with their
leaguer-provision made excellent good cheer. But the poor King Anarchus
could not all this while settle himself towards any fit of mirth; whereupon
Panurge said, Of what trade shall we make my lord the king here, that he may
be skilful in the art when he goes thither to sojourn amongst all the devils
of hell? Indeed, said Pantagruel, that was well advised of thee. Do with
him what thou wilt, I give him to thee. Gramercy, said Panurge, the present
is not to be refused, and I love it from you.
How Pantagruel entered into the city of the Amaurots, and how Panurge
married King Anarchus to an old lantern-carrying hag, and made him a crier
of green sauce.
After this wonderful victory, Pantagruel sent Carpalin unto the city of the
Amaurots to declare and signify unto them how the King Anarchus was taken
prisoner and all the enemies of the city overthrown. Which news when they
heard all the inhabitants of the city came forth to meet him in good order,
and with a great triumphant pomp, conducting him with a heavenly joy into
the city, where innumerable bonfires were set on through all the parts
thereof, and fair round tables, which were furnished with store of good
victuals, set out in the middle of the streets. This was a renewing of the
golden age in the time of Saturn, so good was the cheer which then they
made.
But Pantagruel, having assembled the whole senate and common councilmen of
the town, said, My masters, we must now strike the iron whilst it is hot.
It is therefore my will that, before we frolic it any longer, we advise how
to assault and take the whole kingdom of the Dipsodes. To which effect let
those that will go with me provide themselves against to-morrow after
drinking, for then will I begin to march. Not that I need any more men
than I have to help me to conquer it, for I could make it as sure that way
as if I had it already; but I see this city is so full of inhabitants that
they scarce can turn in the streets. I will, therefore, carry them as a
colony into Dipsody, and will give them all that country, which is fair,
wealthy, fruitful, and pleasant, above all other countries in the world, as
many of you can tell who have been there heretofore. Everyone of you,
therefore, that will go along, let him provide himself as I have said.
This counsel and resolution being published in the city, the next morning
there assembled in the piazza before the palace to the number of eighteen
hundred fifty-six thousand and eleven, besides women and little children.
Thus began they to march straight into Dipsody, in such good order as did
the people of Israel when they departed out of Egypt to pass over the Red
Sea.
But before we proceed any further in this purpose, I will tell you how
Panurge handled his prisoner the King Anarchus; for, having remembered that
which Epistemon had related, how the kings and rich men in this world were
used in the Elysian fields, and how they got their living there by base and
ignoble trades, he, therefore, one day apparelled his king in a pretty
little canvas doublet, all jagged and pinked like the tippet of a light
horseman's cap, together with a pair of large mariner's breeches, and
stockings without shoes,--For, said he, they would but spoil his sight,
--and a little peach-coloured bonnet with a great capon's feather in it--I
lie, for I think he had two--and a very handsome girdle of a sky-colour and
green (in French called pers et vert), saying that such a livery did become
him well, for that he had always been perverse, and in this plight bringing
him before Pantagruel, said unto him, Do you know this roister? No,
indeed, said Pantagruel. It is, said Panurge, my lord the king of the
three batches, or threadbare sovereign. I intend to make him an honest
man. These devilish kings which we have here are but as so many calves;
they know nothing and are good for nothing but to do a thousand mischiefs
to their poor subjects, and to trouble all the world with war for their
unjust and detestable pleasure. I will put him to a trade, and make him a
crier of green sauce. Go to, begin and cry, Do you lack any green sauce?
and the poor devil cried. That is too low, said Panurge; then took him by
the ear, saying, Sing higher in Ge, sol, re, ut. So, so poor devil, thou
hast a good throat; thou wert never so happy as to be no longer king. And
Pantagruel made himself merry with all this; for I dare boldly say that he
was the best little gaffer that was to be seen between this and the end of
a staff. Thus was Anarchus made a good crier of green sauce. Two days
thereafter Panurge married him with an old lantern-carrying hag, and he
himself made the wedding with fine sheep's heads, brave haslets with
mustard, gallant salligots with garlic, of which he sent five horseloads
unto Pantagruel, which he ate up all, he found them so appetizing.
And for their drink they had a kind of small well-watered wine, and some
sorbapple-cider. And, to make them dance, he hired a blind man that
made music to them with a wind-broach.
After dinner he led them to the palace and showed them to Pantagruel, and
said, pointing to the married woman, You need not fear that she will crack.
Why? said Pantagruel. Because, said Panurge, she is well slit and broke up
already. What do you mean by that? said Pantagruel. Do not you see, said
Panurge, that the chestnuts which are roasted in the fire, if they be whole
they crack as if they were mad, and, to keep them from cracking, they make
an incision in them and slit them? So this new bride is in her lower parts
well slit before, and therefore will not crack behind.
Pantagruel gave them a little lodge near the lower street and a mortar of
stone wherein to bray and pound their sauce, and in this manner did they do
their little business, he being as pretty a crier of green sauce as ever
was seen in the country of Utopia. But I have been told since that his
wife doth beat him like plaister, and the poor sot dare not defend himself,
he is so simple.
How Pantagruel with his tongue covered a whole army, and what the author
saw in his mouth.
Thus, as Pantagruel with all his army had entered into the country of the
Dipsodes, everyone was glad of it, and incontinently rendered themselves
unto him, bringing him out of their own good wills the keys of all the
cities where he went, the Almirods only excepted, who, being resolved to
hold out against him, made answer to his heralds that they would not yield
but upon very honourable and good conditions.
What! said Pantagruel, do they ask any better terms than the hand at the
pot and the glass in their fist? Come, let us go sack them, and put them
all to the sword. Then did they put themselves in good order, as being
fully determined to give an assault, but by the way, passing through a
large field, they were overtaken with a great shower of rain, whereat they
began to shiver and tremble, to crowd, press, and thrust close to one
another. When Pantagruel saw that, he made their captains tell them that
it was nothing, and that he saw well above the clouds that it would be
nothing but a little dew; but, howsoever, that they should put themselves
in order, and he would cover them. Then did they put themselves in a close
order, and stood as near to (each) other as they could, and Pantagruel drew
out his tongue only half-way and covered them all, as a hen doth her
chickens. In the meantime, I, who relate to you these so veritable
stories, hid myself under a burdock-leaf, which was not much less in
largeness than the arch of the bridge of Montrible, but when I saw them
thus covered, I went towards them to shelter myself likewise; which I could
not do, for that they were so, as the saying is, At the yard's end there is
no cloth left. Then, as well as I could, I got upon it, and went along
full two leagues upon his tongue, and so long marched that at last I came
into his mouth. But, O gods and goddesses! what did I see there? Jupiter
confound me with his trisulc lightning if I lie! I walked there as they do
in Sophia (at) Constantinople, and saw there great rocks, like the
mountains in Denmark--I believe that those were his teeth. I saw also fair
meadows, large forests, great and strong cities not a jot less than Lyons
or Poictiers. The first man I met with there was a good honest fellow
planting coleworts, whereat being very much amazed, I asked him, My friend,
what dost thou make here? I plant coleworts, said he. But how, and
wherewith? said I. Ha, sir, said he, everyone cannot have his ballocks as
heavy as a mortar, neither can we be all rich. Thus do I get my poor
living, and carry them to the market to sell in the city which is here
behind. Jesus! said I, is there here a new world? Sure, said he, it is
never a jot new, but it is commonly reported that, without this, there is
an earth, whereof the inhabitants enjoy the light of a sun and a moon, and
that it is full of and replenished with very good commodities; but yet this
is more ancient than that. Yea but, said I, my friend, what is the name of
that city whither thou carriest thy coleworts to sell? It is called
Aspharage, said he, and all the indwellers are Christians, very honest men,
and will make you good cheer. To be brief, I resolved to go thither. Now,
in my way, I met with a fellow that was lying in wait to catch pigeons, of
whom I asked, My friend, from whence come these pigeons? Sir, said he,
they come from the other world. Then I thought that, when Pantagruel
yawned, the pigeons went into his mouth in whole flocks, thinking that it
had been a pigeon-house.
Then I went into the city, which I found fair, very strong, and seated in a
good air; but at my entry the guard demanded of me my pass or ticket.
Whereat I was much astonished, and asked them, My masters, is there any
danger of the plague here? O Lord! said they, they die hard by here so
fast that the cart runs about the streets. Good God! said I, and where?
Whereunto they answered that it was in Larynx and Pharynx, which are two
great cities such as Rouen and Nantes, rich and of great trading. And the
cause of the plague was by a stinking and infectious exhalation which
lately vapoured out of the abysms, whereof there have died above two and
twenty hundred and threescore thousand and sixteen persons within this
sevennight. Then I considered, calculated, and found that it was a rank
and unsavoury breathing which came out of Pantagruel's stomach when he did
eat so much garlic, as we have aforesaid.
Parting from thence, I passed amongst the rocks, which were his teeth, and
never left walking till I got up on one of them; and there I found the
pleasantest places in the world, great large tennis-courts, fair galleries,
sweet meadows, store of vines, and an infinite number of banqueting summer
outhouses in the fields, after the Italian fashion, full of pleasure and
delight, where I stayed full four months, and never made better cheer in my
life as then. After that I went down by the hinder teeth to come to the
chaps. But in the way I was robbed by thieves in a great forest that is in
the territory towards the ears. Then, after a little further travelling, I
fell upon a pretty petty village--truly I have forgot the name of it--where
I was yet merrier than ever, and got some certain money to live by. Can
you tell how? By sleeping. For there they hire men by the day to sleep,
and they get by it sixpence a day, but they that can snort hard get at
least ninepence. How I had been robbed in the valley I informed the
senators, who told me that, in very truth, the people of that side were bad
livers and naturally thievish, whereby I perceived well that, as we have
with us the countries Cisalpine and Transalpine, that is, behither and
beyond the mountains, so have they there the countries Cidentine and
Tradentine, that is, behither and beyond the teeth. But it is far better
living on this side, and the air is purer. Then I began to think that it
is very true which is commonly said, that the one half of the world knoweth
not how the other half liveth; seeing none before myself had ever written
of that country, wherein are above five-and-twenty kingdoms inhabited,
besides deserts, and a great arm of the sea. Concerning which purpose I
have composed a great book, entitled, The History of the Throttias, because
they dwell in the throat of my master Pantagruel.
At last I was willing to return, and, passing by his beard, I cast myself
upon his shoulders, and from thence slid down to the ground, and fell
before him. As soon as I was perceived by him, he asked me, Whence comest
thou, Alcofribas? I answered him, Out of your mouth, my lord. And how
long hast thou been there? said he. Since the time, said I, that you went
against the Almirods. That is about six months ago, said he. And
wherewith didst thou live? What didst thou drink? I answered, My lord, of
the same that you did, and of the daintiest morsels that passed through
your throat I took toll. Yea but, said he, where didst thou shite? In
your throat, my lord, said I. Ha, ha! thou art a merry fellow, said he.
We have with the help of God conquered all the land of the Dipsodes; I will
give thee the Chastelleine, or Lairdship of Salmigondin. Gramercy, my
lord, said I, you gratify me beyond all that I have deserved of you.
How Pantagruel became sick, and the manner how he was recovered.
A while after this the good Pantagruel fell sick, and had such an
obstruction in his stomach that he could neither eat nor drink; and,
because mischief seldom comes alone, a hot piss seized on him, which
tormented him more than you would believe. His physicians nevertheless
helped him very well, and with store of lenitives and diuretic drugs made
him piss away his pain. His urine was so hot that since that time it is
not yet cold, and you have of it in divers places of France, according to
the course that it took, and they are called the hot baths, as--
At Coderets.
At Limous.
At Dast.
At Ballervie (Balleruc).
At Neric.
At Bourbonansie, and elsewhere in Italy.
At Mongros.
At Appone.
At Sancto Petro de Padua.
At St. Helen.
At Casa Nuova.
At St. Bartholomew, in the county of Boulogne.
At the Porrette, and a thousand other places.
And I wonder much at a rabble of foolish philosophers and physicians, who
spend their time in disputing whence the heat of the said waters cometh,
whether it be by reason of borax, or sulphur, or alum, or saltpetre, that
is within the mine. For they do nothing but dote, and better were it for
them to rub their arse against a thistle than to waste away their time thus
in disputing of that whereof they know not the original; for the resolution
is easy, neither need we to inquire any further than that the said baths
came by a hot piss of the good Pantagruel.
Now to tell you after what manner he was cured of his principal disease. I
let pass how for a minorative or gentle potion he took four hundred pound
weight of colophoniac scammony, six score and eighteen cartloads of cassia,
an eleven thousand and nine hundred pound weight of rhubarb, besides other
confuse jumblings of sundry drugs. You must understand that by the advice
of the physicians it was ordained that what did offend his stomach should
be taken away; and therefore they made seventeen great balls of copper,
each whereof was bigger than that which is to be seen on the top of St.
Peter's needle at Rome, and in such sort that they did open in the midst
and shut with a spring. Into one of them entered one of his men carrying a
lantern and a torch lighted, and so Pantagruel swallowed him down like a
little pill. Into seven others went seven country-fellows, having every
one of them a shovel on his neck. Into nine others entered nine
wood-carriers, having each of them a basket hung at his neck, and so were
they swallowed down like pills. When they were in his stomach, every one
undid his spring, and came out of their cabins. The first whereof was he
that carried the lantern, and so they fell more than half a league into a
most horrible gulf, more stinking and infectious than ever was Mephitis, or
the marshes of the Camerina, or the abominably unsavoury lake of Sorbona,
whereof Strabo maketh mention. And had it not been that they had very well
antidoted their stomach, heart, and wine-pot, which is called the noddle,
they had been altogether suffocated and choked with these detestable
vapours. O what a perfume! O what an evaporation wherewith to bewray the
masks or mufflers of young mangy queans. After that, with groping and
smelling they came near to the faecal matter and the corrupted humours.
Finally, they found a montjoy or heap of ordure and filth. Then fell the
pioneers to work to dig it up, and the rest with their shovels filled the
baskets; and when all was cleansed every one retired himself into his ball.
This done, Pantagruel enforcing himself to vomit, very easily brought them
out, and they made no more show in his mouth than a fart in yours. But,
when they came merrily out of their pills, I thought upon the Grecians
coming out of the Trojan horse. By this means was he healed and brought
unto his former state and convalescence; and of these brazen pills, or
rather copper balls, you have one at Orleans, upon the steeple of the Holy
Cross Church.
The conclusion of this present book, and the excuse of the author.
Now, my masters, you have heard a beginning of the horrific history of my
lord and master Pantagruel. Here will I make an end of the first book. My
head aches a little, and I perceive that the registers of my brain are
somewhat jumbled and disordered with this Septembral juice. You shall have
the rest of the history at Frankfort mart next coming, and there shall you
see how Panurge was married and made a cuckold within a month after his
wedding; how Pantagruel found out the philosopher's stone, the manner how
he found it, and the way how to use it; how he passed over the Caspian
mountains, and how he sailed through the Atlantic sea, defeated the
Cannibals, and conquered the isles of Pearls; how he married the daughter
of the King of India, called Presthan; how he fought against the devil and
burnt up five chambers of hell, ransacked the great black chamber, threw
Proserpina into the fire, broke five teeth to Lucifer, and the horn that
was in his arse; how he visited the regions of the moon to know whether
indeed the moon were not entire and whole, or if the women had three
quarters of it in their heads, and a thousand other little merriments all
veritable. These are brave things truly. Good night, gentlemen.
Perdonate mi, and think not so much upon my faults that you forget your
own.
If you say to me, Master, it would seem that you were not very wise in
writing to us these flimflam stories and pleasant fooleries; I answer you,
that you are not much wiser to spend your time in reading them.
Nevertheless, if you read them to make yourselves merry, as in manner of
pastime I wrote them, you and I both are far more worthy of pardon than a
great rabble of squint-minded fellows, dissembling and counterfeit saints,
demure lookers, hypocrites, pretended zealots, tough friars, buskin-monks,
and other such sects of men, who disguise themselves like masquers to
deceive the world. For, whilst they give the common people to understand
that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and devotion in
fastings and maceration of their sensuality--and that only to sustain and
aliment the small frailty of their humanity--it is so far otherwise that,
on the contrary, God knows what cheer they make; Et Curios simulant, sed
Bacchanalia vivunt. You may read it in great letters in the colouring of
their red snouts, and gulching bellies as big as a tun, unless it be when
they perfume themselves with sulphur. As for their study, it is wholly
taken up in reading of Pantagruelian books, not so much to pass the time
merrily as to hurt someone or other mischievously, to wit, in articling,
sole-articling, wry-neckifying, buttock-stirring, ballocking, and
diabliculating, that is, calumniating. Wherein they are like unto the poor
rogues of a village that are busy in stirring up and scraping in the ordure
and filth of little children, in the season of cherries and guinds, and
that only to find the kernels, that they may sell them to the druggists to
make thereof pomander oil. Fly from these men, abhor and hate them as much
as I do, and upon my faith you will find yourselves the better for it. And
if you desire to be good Pantagruelists, that is to say, to live in peace,
joy, health, making yourselves always merry, never trust those men that
always peep out at one hole.
End of Book II.
BOOK III.
THE THIRD BOOK
Francois Rabelais to the Soul of the Deceased Queen of Navarre.
Abstracted soul, ravished with ecstasies,
Gone back, and now familiar in the skies,
Thy former host, thy body, leaving quite,
Which to obey thee always took delight,--
Obsequious, ready,--now from motion free,
Senseless, and as it were in apathy,
Wouldst thou not issue forth for a short space,
From that divine, eternal, heavenly place,
To see the third part, in this earthy cell,
Of the brave acts of good Pantagruel?
| 22,092 | Book 2, Chapters 17-34 | https://web.archive.org/web/20180420203406/http://www.gradesaver.com/gargantua-and-pantagruel/study-guide/summary-book-2-chapters-17-34 | One day, the narrator finds Panurge looking sad, and he determines that Panurge is no doubt out of money. He questions Panurge and offers to give him some money, but Panurge will only accept a small sum, provided that the narrator go with him to different churches to look at reliquaries. Even though Panurge only has a small amount of money, as far as the narrator knows, Panurge somehow manages to pay money to each of the churches. After their adventure, they rest in a tavern and the narrator discovers that Panurge has somehow acquired a large amount of money. Panurge explains that he has stolen money from each of the churches through sleight-of-hand trickery. The narrator tells him that such actions are sinful, and then Panurge explains to the narrator why his actions are just. Panurge apparently served in the Crusades and provided services to various holy men of rank. Throughout that time, Panurge was promised large sums of money that he was never paid; so, Panurge believes he is getting his just reward. Panurge continues to tell the narrator stories of how he has acquired money over the years through lies and misdirection. One of his stories depicts how he made deals with some of the least attractive women around. Supposedly, these women were sexually promiscuous in their youth, and, as a result, never found husbands. His deals with these women included giving them money so that he could sell them as brides to drunkards. To do so, however, Panurge jokes that he had to cover the women's heads with bags. Panurge then tells the narrator how he has made many small fortunes by running scams in court, especially through frivolous lawsuits. While he has made money through these scams, Panurge comments that he has also lost money, since he has to invest money into the scams to make them work. The narrator concludes that while Panurge's many schemes do make him money, the only reason he has so many scams is because Panurge spends his money as quickly as he makes it, either by spending it on drink, women, or other materialistic trifles. Meanwhile, Thaumast, a learned man from England, has come to Paris to converse with Pantagruel. He has heard of Pantagruel's amazing intellect, and he wishes to discuss some of the greatest mysteries with Pantagruel. Before he can do so, however, he must test Pantagruel's intellect. He explains that if Pantagruel is truly as intelligent as people say, than he, Thaumast will forever pledge loyalty and servitude to Pantagruel, provided Pantagruel passes the challenge. For the challenge, Thaumast and Pantagruel will debate, but they will not do so with words, and instead will only use signs via hand gestures. Pantagruel agrees to the challenge, and the two men go to their dwellings to prepare. During the night, Pantagruel fears he will not prove worthy, and begins to study his books obsessively. Panurge tells Pantagruel that he worries too much. He then begs Pantagruel to let him take his place in the debate, for he is Pantagruel's student, so his ability to debate will prove Pantagruel's supremacy. Pantagruel agrees to Panurge's logic. The following day at the debate, Pantagruel announces that his student, Panurge, will take his place in the debate, if Thaumast agrees. Thaumast does agree, and the debate begins. While Thaumast starts the debate in perhaps a semi-serious manner, Panurge moves the debate into the lowbrow arena, as he uses gestures that signify derogatory statements and lewd sexual acts. Nevertheless, Thaumast responds, and the two go back and forth with their hand gestures until finally Thaumast declares that Panurge in indeed a master debater, and that his teacher, Pantagruel, has passed the challenge. Thaumast swears that he will write up a treatise explaining all the meanings to the signs, so that everyone can understand what was discussed, but the narrator does not include this information, and instead implies that the reader should go and find Thaumast's publication. Later on, Panurge becomes infatuated with a particular lady of Paris, although her name is never given. The woman is noted as incredibly beautiful and kind, but also married. Panurge tells her that he is pained by his love for her, and that he must be with her; yet she refuses again and again. Panurge persists on hounding her and trying to convince her to have sex with him. She refuses him openly, claiming that she will call out for help if he does not stop, and even threatens to tell her husband. Panurge acts as if he has given up on her. In the meantime, he finds a female dog that is in heat, takes it home, kills it, and then harvests the scent glands from the dog. The following day, during a religious ceremony, Panurge sits near the woman he has been pursuing. He says nothing to her, but secretly sprinkles her with the female dog's scent. Shortly thereafter, every male dog in the city comes to the woman to harass her and urinate upon her. Panurge is quite proud of his trick, and tells Pantagruel to come and see how all the dogs in the city have come to harass this woman. It is unclear whether Pantagruel knows that Panurge orchestrated the entire cruel prank, since Panurge never claims responsibility within the text. On a different note, Pantagruel receives word that his father has gone to visit the land of the fairies, presumably Avalon, just as King Arthur and Ogier the Dane had done. On top of this news, Pantagruel learns that the Dipsodes have invaded Pantagruel's homeland. Pantagruel and all of his comrades leave Paris in such a hurry that Pantagruel is unable to bid farewell to anyone, including the unnamed woman he had been courting. In response to his lack of goodbyes, this unnamed woman sends him a message that includes a gold ring and a piece of paper, but no message on the paper. At first, Panurge believes there is a secret message, but after trying method after method to uncover any secret words, he determines that no such message exists. As nothing appears to be written on the piece of paper, Pantagruel and everyone else examine the ring to find an inscription in Hebrew that translates into, "Wherefore hast thou forsaken me?" Panurge identifies that the diamond is false, therefore the entire message is "false lover, wherefore hast thou forsaken me?" Pantagruel feels guilty for having left his sweetheart without having said goodbye, but Pantagruel's friends tell him there is no time, and that it is better to save his homeland than to waste more time, to which Pantagruel agrees. All of Pantagruel's companions, Panurge, Carpalin, Eusthenes, and Epistemon, each pledge absolute loyalty to Pantagruel and to the cause of saving Pantagruel's homeland. They realize that the battle will be difficult, but each of them claims to have different skills that will prove valuable in the field of battle. Upon sailing to the land, they discover that six hundred and threescore horsemen plan to attack them onshore. Pantagruel is ready to fight, but his friends tell him to stay behind in the boat to let them prove themselves to him. Pantagruel agrees, and sits back to watch his friends fight the invading armies. Through the use of traps and great cunning, Panurge, Carpalin, Eusthenes, and Epistemon lay waste to the armies, and manage to capture one of the soldiers, who they plan to interrogate to find out more about the armies of the Dipsodes. Once on land, Carpalin goes hunting and catches a large deer, and several other large and small game animals, providing enough food for all to feast over their victory. Pantagruel and Panurge interrogate the prisoner, and discover that the Dipsodes have a massive army that includes giants, although the giants are not as big as Pantagruel. The leader of the army is also a giant who is certainly a match for Pantagruel, and his name is Loupgarou. The prisoner also explains that the King of the Dipsodes, Anarchus, is also traveling with the armies. Lastly, the prisoner tells Pantagruel and Panurge about how the army has thousands of soldiers of every type, along with support workers and even 150,000 whores. Panurge, of course, makes countless crass jokes about how he will join the battle just to get to the women. His comrades also joke about how they wish to have their turn with these women. Pantagruel decides that he will release the prisoner, but he commands the prisoner to return to his own King and tell Anarchus that Pantagruel and his mighty army are coming to fight them. Pantagruel exaggerates the size of his army in hopes that the prisoner will frighten Anarchus into acting rashly. Pantagruel also tells the prisoner that his army will arrive at noon the following day. Unfortunately, Pantagruel does such a good job at frightening the prisoner that the prisoner begs Pantagruel to let him stay as their prisoner forever instead of going back to Anarchus and eventually having to fight Pantagruel's army. Pantagruel refuses to let the prisoner stay, because he needs the prisoner to go and spread the word of Pantagruel's fictitious forces who will be arriving at noon. Pantagruel needs the prisoner to do so, since it will make the enemy armies expect the fight to start at a later time, which will allow Pantagruel and his actual armies to strike at their enemies when they least expect it. Since Pantagruel's actual armies are so much smaller than King Anarchus' armies, Pantagruel must depend on cleverness and the element of surprise to win the day. In addition to sending the prisoner back to Anarchus, Pantagruel gives the prisoner a gift to give to the King, and that gift is a strange mixture of herbs. Pantagruel tells the prisoner that if his King can take a spoonful of these herbs in his mouth and still command his armies afterwards, then Pantagruel himself will forfeit his lands and rights to King Anarchus. The prisoner returns to King Anarchus and warns him of Pantagruel and his immense army. The prisoner also gives Anarchus the gift and explains what Pantagruel has stated. Anarchus takes a spoonful of the mixture, but in doing so his throat seizes up with immense heat and dryness, making him unable to speak. His counselors try to give him drink to help him, but that only makes it worse. His counselors then decide that they shall try the challenge and take a spoonful of the mixture, but all of them suffer the same way as Anarchus. After recovering from the spice challenge, Anarchus and his military leader, Loupgarou, decide to prepare the men to fight immediately the following day at noon, as the prisoner has foretold. Back at Pantagruel's camp, Pantagruel and his friends make ready to leave for battle. Before they do so, they build monuments to the battle that occurred the previous day. They also make poetry about those battles and monuments, and enjoy each other's company. At one point, Pantagruel's friends are jumping about and bragging about their oncoming victory. In doing so, Pantagruel farts, which produces such a deafening sound and unnerving smell that it creates little people, both men and women. Pantagruel's friends are astounded that Pantagruel's passing of wind can create life, and they all decide to have the little people marry one another and start their own race, which they call the pygmies. After being satisfied with the monument and the creation of a new race, Pantagruel, his companions, and their soldiers make way to the big battle. They decide to move in and attack the enemy armies during the morning hours when their enemy is still asleep or hung-over from the pre-war festivities. On the way to the battle, Panurge convinces Pantagruel that the men should drink white wine to prepare themselves to fight. Panurge also has Pantagruel eat and drink certain items that will make him have highly acidic urine. When they arrive in the enemy territory, Pantagruel's friend and footmen, Carpalin, stealthily sneaks through the enemy camp to set fires and blow up the enemy's ammunitions. Before the fires and explosions are out of control, and while the enemy still sleeps, each man sleeping with his mouth open, Pantagruel urinates his acidic urine on to the enemy, drowning many of them. The fires and the explosions burned the majority of those who survived the urine. With a large portion of the regular soldiers killed or incapacitated, King Anarchus' legion of giants come to the fray, led by Loupgarou. Instead of all-out warfare between Pantagruel's army and this army of giants, Panurge steps in and somehow negotiates a battle between Loupgarou and Pantagruel. Loupgarou agrees and commands his giants to stay put and not assist him during the battle, else they shall be severely punished. Loupgarou and Pantagruel begin to fight, but Loupgarou possesses an enchanted mace, which gives him an unfair advantage. Nevertheless, Pantagruel holds his own for quite some time. When it appears that their leader, Loupgarou, is losing the battle, the giants decide to get involved against orders. Pantagruel sees the enemy giants approaching, so he picks up Loupgarou's body and uses it as a weapon to obliterate the giants. Pantagruel wins the day, but not without casualties. His dear friend, teacher, and tutor, Epistemon, has been decapitated in battle. While Pantagruel and the others mourn over there fallen compatriot, Panurge insists that they move Epistemon's body if they wish to save him. Through use of herbs and perhaps magic, Panurge sews on Epistemon's head and brings him back to life. Besides having a somewhat hoarse voice and having the need to drink far more heavily than before, Epistemon is completely healed. Epistemon then regales everyone with his story about what he saw in the land of the dead. In a nutshell, Epistemon saw all of the famous members of royalty and heroes performing mundane, boring, every-day duties. All of the philosophers and dedicated scholars, on the other hand, were held above and praised. After Pantagruel is satisfied with his friend, Epistemon, being fully healed, he and his friends begin to celebrate. Panurge notices that King Anarchus refuses to be joyous, having just lost the battle, and so Panurge asks Pantagruel what they should do about the King. Pantagruel does not seem to care about Anarchus' fate, and therefore states that King Anarchus will be Panurge's prisoner, and that Panurge may do what he likes with him. In the city of Amaurots, which is the city that was invaded by Anarchus' armies, Pantagruel discovers that all of the refugees have gathered there, and that there is not enough room to house everyone. Therefore, Pantagruel decides that he will take over Anarchus' country, the country of the Dipsodes, and give it to all of the people and refugees of Amaurots, so that they may have a place to live and thrive. With Anarchus as his prisoner, Panurge decides to punish him in a manner inspired by Epistemon's tale of the afterlife. Therefore, Panurge turns the King into a threadbare pauper and makes him sell green sauce throughout the town. To further embarrass and demean Anarchus, Panurge marries him to an old woman who carries a lantern. According to all reports, the old woman is abusive to her new husband, and Anarchus is apparently too bewildered or befuddled to defend himself from her. The following day, Pantagruel decides that he and his armies will take over the country of the Dipsodes. As they march, they also travel with all the people of Amaurots. A great rainstorm hits, and Pantagruel must cover everyone. The narrator of the story, who finally reveals his name as Alcofribas, explains that he was the last to try and find cover under Pantagruel, and therefore could not find sufficient cover. Pantagruel tries to provide even more protection to everyone by sticking his tongue out to further shelter the people on the ground. Alcofribas decides he will climb into Pantagruel's mouth to find shelter there. Within Pantagruel's enormous mouth, however, Alcofribas discovers a thriving world. Within each different part of the mouth is a different region, and everything that Pantagruel eats or drinks feeds not only the region but also the people who live within this strange other world. Alcofribas stays inside Pantagruel's mouth exploring for some six months before he finally comes out. Pantagruel asks him where he has been, and Alcofribas tells him of his journeys. In the conversation, Alcofribas learns how long he has been traveling, and that he missed the siege of the Dipsode's country. Shortly thereafter, Pantagruel becomes incredibly ill. The doctors give him medical remedies to help him urinate out his illness. In doing so, Pantagruel's hot urine accidentally creates the hot springs all throughout France and parts of Italy. Although the treatments have made Pantagruel much better, he still suffers from stomach pains. The doctors decide they must remove whatever is ailing Pantagruel's stomach, and so they along with other craftsmen construct giant copper balls that look like medicinal capsules, in which workers will use to travel safely into Pantagruel stomach to dig out whatever ails him. With all of the metal capsules locked and attached to one another by rope, Pantagruel swallows them down into his stomach, and inside his stomach the workers find the mass of wretched filth blocking the bottom of his gut. The workers dig it all out to cure Pantagruel of his ailments. After they complete their mission, Pantagruel vomits all of them out safely, and he is well thereafter. At the end of book 2, the narrator provides a teaser of what adventures will happen in the following books. The narrator also makes a note that these stories are meant for the true Pantagruelists, who wish to "live in peace, joy, health, making yourselves always merry," . If anyone should find fault with these stories otherwise, then they are not the intended audience, and therefore have no right to ruin the stories for others. | The absence of women and the negativity toward women is a predominant theme in the last half of the second book. There very few women in this portion of the story, and the women who do appear typically remain unnamed. For example, the woman Panurge falls madly in love with and the woman who Pantagruel supposedly courts are never identified by name or social rank. Denying these women their names makes the side stories in which they are involved seem flat and unimportant, even though these side stories are included for the specific purpose of developing the main characters. For example, the narrator presents Panurge as a man who has sex with hundreds of women, yet he falls in love with the one woman who completely rejects him. Surely, such a woman who could not be wooed by such a womanizer deserves a proper name. Similarly, Pantagruel, the main character of the story, supposedly courts some woman, yet the narrator never reveals the tale of their romance. The relationship with this woman could not have been just some tryst or fling, for that would go against Pantagruel's character. In addition, the woman is so distraught upon Pantagruel abandoning her that she sends him a letter and a ring with a secret message that he must decipher. If the relationship were trivial or short-lived, sending Pantagruel such an elaborate puzzle would seem strange. If Pantagruel tricked this woman into believing he cared for her more deeply than his true feelings, then that would reveal a side of Pantagruel the reader has never seen, which would warrant even more reason for the woman to have a name. As if letting so many female characters walk around unnamed was not problematic enough, the overall negativity toward women within the framework of the story cannot be ignored. Throughout this book as well as in the third book, women are consistently describe as unfaithful and untrustworthy. When examining the walls of the city, Panurge even makes a crass comment that the city leaders could save money if they built the walls with female sexual organs, since the women offer their parts up so quickly or for such a cheap price. The negative perspective of women's promiscuity, as presented in this book, implies that these male characters, Panurge specifically, have no faith in the opposite sex, which is why many of these characters continually demean women and identify them as practically less than human. Even when the characters come in contact with a virtuous woman, such as the woman who resists Panurge, they cannot see her for what she represents. As they have constructed such negative and misogynistic views toward women, they have simultaneously created a twisted social perspective that deprives women of their subjectivity and reconstructs them as objects for members of the patriarchy to use or abuse. When a woman challenges this paradigm, as the virtuous woman does by remaining loyal to her husband, her existence as a woman of integrity disrupts the constructed social perspective. Thus, to maintain power within a social structure that places women as subordinate objects, a member of the patriarchy, Panurge, must punish this woman in a way so public that all the other women witness the level of shame and torment. The public display also serves to discredit the virtuous woman, because it makes people question how something so horrific could happen to a good person, therefore, in a Renaissance belief structure, the public assumes that the virtuous woman must have done something wrong to receive such punishment. The negative objectification of women, perhaps overemphasized as a result of the absence of women, continues throughout the story. For example, when the captured Dipsode soldier tells Pantagruel and his companions about King Anarchus's massive army and followers, he mentions that Anarchus has also brought 150,000 whores along for the duration of the battle. Panurge instantly claims the whores for himself, as if they were nothing but toys to be used, and then the other male characters, Carpalin, Eusthenes, and Epistemon, join in on joking about who will take possession of the pretty whores, the fat whores, or the ugly whores. Pantagruel does not state which of the whores he would desire, but he laughs at the jokes the other men make, which could imply that he sees nothing questionable in his comrades' actions of objectifying and claiming these women. The men then appear to forget their promises to Pantagruel or their oaths to protect Pantagruel's homelands, and instead their entire motivation for war seems solely based on this opportunity to claim these women as the spoils of war. Even if these women were voluntary prostitutes, and even if Panurge and his friends planned on paying these women for services rendered, the fact that the women are objectified by their levels of attractiveness and further reduced to their biological function to please men sexually further demeans them and diminishes the role of women in this story. Moving away from this discussion concerning the role of women within the story, or the lack thereof, we can look at the role of each of the male characters, since the story rests on this male-dominant structure. Of all the male characters other than the main character, Panurge receives the most attention within this part of the story. Although many elements symbolize Panurge's character, Florence M. Weinberg points out how Panurge's codpiece represents perhaps the best identifying symbol. During the Renaissance, more decorative codpieces, such as Panurge's, allowed males to announce sexual virility and, to some extent, a lascivious nature. Of course, the enlarged, ornate nature of the codpiece could represent a mask, since it hides the truth of his ability. By wearing such an "astonishing braguette," Panurge need not show his true self and can, instead, play the cad without fear of repercussions . He even uses his codpiece as a prop to distract onlookers from his true self. As Weinberg explains, during the battle of wits through signs with Thaumast, Panurge utilizes his groin and codpiece to make the contest as debauched as possible, therefore taking matters out of the intellectual arena, and putting the mask of Panurge's codpiece and everything it represents on center stage. Perhaps Rabelais designed Panurge in this fashion to provide a better foil for Pantagruel. After all, Weinberg argues that, "as foil to Pantagruel, role often caricatures his master's," implying that Panurge may be channeling a darker part of his master, and therefore acts out what Pantagruel cannot, due to Pantagruel's status as sovereign . Perhaps Panurge's ability to act out these darker impulses explains his friendship with Pantagruel, since Pantagruel can live vicariously through his servant. It may also explain why Rabelais chose not to disclose Pantagruel's relationship with his lover, since his darker impulses must be hidden behind the foil mask of Panurge. To maintain Pantagruel's reputation, it makes sense why Rabelais might choose to hide Pantagruel's affairs and instead offer his readers the elaborate side story that describes Panurge's pursuits of the virtuous woman. | 3,012 | 1,171 | [
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5,658 | true | novelguide | all_chapterized_books/5658-chapters/chapters_9_to_11.txt | finished_summaries/novelguide/Lord Jim/section_4_part_0.txt | Lord Jim.chapters 9-11 | chapters 9-11 | null | {"name": "Chapters 9-11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210215030710/https://www.novelguide.com/lord-jim/summaries/chapter9-11", "summary": "Ten and Eleven . On board the Patna, in Chapter Nine, the chief engineer asked Jim for help to free their lifeboat from the ship and pointed to the approaching squall. Jim kept his distance from them and the second engineer ran for the hammer in order to release the chock . In their panic, 'they had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention'. Jim closed his eyes and felt the ship dip its bows and tells Marlow he too would have felt like leaping into a boat. Whilst watching the men still around the boat, George, the third engineer, collapsed and died . When the remaining white crewmen got in the boat, Jim heard them shouting for George to jump in too. He felt as though he could hear all 800 passengers shouting for George to jump. The rain swept over the ship and Jim's cap blew off; he also believed the ship was going down. He tells Marlow, 'I had jumped...' and Marlow feels the pity an old man experiences, 'helpless before a childish disaster'. Jim recounts how he knew nothing about jumping until he looked up. He felt like he had jumped into a well, into 'an everlasting deep hole'. . . In Chapter Ten, Marlow says that nothing could be truer: 'He had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again.' . . As their boat moved away, one of them cried out, 'she's gone', as the ships lights had gone out. They hear nothing, though, and Jim thought this was strange, but Marlow sees this as understandable: 'He must have had an unconscious conviction that the reality could not be half as bad, not half as anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the created terror of his imagination.' Jim tells Marlow he fought back his impulse to swim back to the sea. . . It was completely dark in the boat and the other men abused Jim for taking so long to join them. They were taken aback initially when they realized their mistake, but then became angry with him for not helping to release the boat. This anger stopped Jim from tipping back to fall into the sea: it kept him alive. They also pretended that they thought Jim had harmed George and the chief engineer called him a 'murdering coward'. Jim felt as though they were all in a 'roomy grave' and that nothing mattered; Marlow sees that such irrational thoughts can be the effect of being on a boat on the high seas. Jim spent six hours on the defensive and in the daylight he saw the other three men sitting together in the stern 'like three dirty owls' and they begged him to drop his piece of wood. The other men agreed to make up a story and these three went under the spread out sail, while Jim stayed in the sun with his head bared. After Marlow prompts him, Jim admits that he deliberated as to whether he should kill himself. . . Jim tells Marlow, in Chapter Eleven, that he is a good sort for listening to him and Marlow demonstrates his identification with him: 'He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been...' Jim explains why he did not kill himself, gentleman to gentleman, and says that if he had stayed on the ship he would have tried to save himself. He adds that his suicide would have ended nothing and the proper action was to face the consequences. .", "analysis": "Ten and Eleven . Jim's fateful decision to jump from the ship into the boat haunts him through the novel. The fragmented explanation of why he followed the others comes in Chapter Ten and is, therefore, crucial to understanding his later torment. Jim did not want to stay on what he thought was the sinking ship; but he also did not want to join the other men. Indecision and panic appear to have ruled him and he goes on to punish himself for not staying and for acting in a way that he deems cowardly. If one remembers his dreams of being a hero, it is evident that he has let himself down by not performing in the way he imagined he would in a crisis. . . Although Marlow is the cipher for Jim's story on the Patna, he is a central character as the readers see Jim through his eyes. Chapter Eleven gives a useful example of his connection to Jim as he clearly identifies with this younger man and, consequently, his partiality for him is made explicit."} | '"I was saying to myself, 'Sink--curse you! Sink!'" These were the
words with which he began again. He wanted it over. He was severely left
alone, and he formulated in his head this address to the ship in a
tone of imprecation, while at the same time he enjoyed the privilege of
witnessing scenes--as far as I can judge--of low comedy. They were still
at that bolt. The skipper was ordering, "Get under and try to lift"; and
the others naturally shirked. You understand that to be squeezed flat
under the keel of a boat wasn't a desirable position to be caught in if
the ship went down suddenly. "Why don't you--you the strongest?" whined
the little engineer. "Gott-for-dam! I am too thick," spluttered the
skipper in despair. It was funny enough to make angels weep. They stood
idle for a moment, and suddenly the chief engineer rushed again at Jim.
'"Come and help, man! Are you mad to throw your only chance away? Come
and help, man! Man! Look there--look!"
'And at last Jim looked astern where the other pointed with maniacal
insistence. He saw a silent black squall which had eaten up already
one-third of the sky. You know how these squalls come up there about
that time of the year. First you see a darkening of the horizon--no
more; then a cloud rises opaque like a wall. A straight edge of vapour
lined with sickly whitish gleams flies up from the southwest, swallowing
the stars in whole constellations; its shadow flies over the waters, and
confounds sea and sky into one abyss of obscurity. And all is still.
No thunder, no wind, no sound; not a flicker of lightning. Then in
the tenebrous immensity a livid arch appears; a swell or two like
undulations of the very darkness run past, and suddenly, wind and rain
strike together with a peculiar impetuosity as if they had burst through
something solid. Such a cloud had come up while they weren't looking.
They had just noticed it, and were perfectly justified in surmising
that if in absolute stillness there was some chance for the ship to keep
afloat a few minutes longer, the least disturbance of the sea would make
an end of her instantly. Her first nod to the swell that precedes the
burst of such a squall would be also her last, would become a plunge,
would, so to speak, be prolonged into a long dive, down, down to the
bottom. Hence these new capers of their fright, these new antics in
which they displayed their extreme aversion to die.
'"It was black, black," pursued Jim with moody steadiness. "It had
sneaked upon us from behind. The infernal thing! I suppose there had
been at the back of my head some hope yet. I don't know. But that was
all over anyhow. It maddened me to see myself caught like this. I was
angry, as though I had been trapped. I _was_ trapped! The night was hot,
too, I remember. Not a breath of air."
'He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat
and choke before my eyes. No doubt it maddened him; it knocked him over
afresh--in a manner of speaking--but it made him also remember that
important purpose which had sent him rushing on that bridge only to slip
clean out of his mind. He had intended to cut the lifeboats clear of the
ship. He whipped out his knife and went to work slashing as though he
had seen nothing, had heard nothing, had known of no one on board. They
thought him hopelessly wrong-headed and crazy, but dared not protest
noisily against this useless loss of time. When he had done he returned
to the very same spot from which he had started. The chief was there,
ready with a clutch at him to whisper close to his head, scathingly, as
though he wanted to bite his ear--
'"You silly fool! do you think you'll get the ghost of a show when all
that lot of brutes is in the water? Why, they will batter your head for
you from these boats."
'He wrung his hands, ignored, at Jim's elbow. The skipper kept up a
nervous shuffle in one place and mumbled, "Hammer! hammer! Mein Gott!
Get a hammer."
'The little engineer whimpered like a child, but, broken arm and all,
he turned out the least craven of the lot as it seems, and, actually,
mustered enough pluck to run an errand to the engine-room. No trifle, it
must be owned in fairness to him. Jim told me he darted desperate looks
like a cornered man, gave one low wail, and dashed off. He was back
instantly clambering, hammer in hand, and without a pause flung himself
at the bolt. The others gave up Jim at once and ran off to assist.
He heard the tap, tap of the hammer, the sound of the released chock
falling over. The boat was clear. Only then he turned to look--only
then. But he kept his distance--he kept his distance. He wanted me to
know he had kept his distance; that there was nothing in common between
him and these men--who had the hammer. Nothing whatever. It is more than
probable he thought himself cut off from them by a space that could
not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm
without bottom. He was as far as he could get from them--the whole
breadth of the ship.
'His feet were glued to that remote spot and his eyes to their
indistinct group bowed together and swaying strangely in the common
torment of fear. A hand-lamp lashed to a stanchion above a little table
rigged up on the bridge--the Patna had no chart-room amidships--threw a
light on their labouring shoulders, on their arched and bobbing backs.
They pushed at the bow of the boat; they pushed out into the night; they
pushed, and would no more look back at him. They had given him up as if
indeed he had been too far, too hopelessly separated from themselves, to
be worth an appealing word, a glance, or a sign. They had no leisure to
look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention.
The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for
an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their
self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate
exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns
in a farce. They pushed with their hands, with their heads, they pushed
for dear life with all the weight of their bodies, they pushed with all
the might of their souls--only no sooner had they succeeded in canting
the stem clear of the davit than they would leave off like one man and
start a wild scramble into her. As a natural consequence the boat would
swing in abruptly, driving them back, helpless and jostling against each
other. They would stand nonplussed for a while, exchanging in fierce
whispers all the infamous names they could call to mind, and go at it
again. Three times this occurred. He described it to me with morose
thoughtfulness. He hadn't lost a single movement of that comic business.
"I loathed them. I hated them. I had to look at all that," he said
without emphasis, turning upon me a sombrely watchful glance. "Was ever
there any one so shamefully tried?"
'He took his head in his hands for a moment, like a man driven to
distraction by some unspeakable outrage. These were things he could not
explain to the court--and not even to me; but I would have been little
fitted for the reception of his confidences had I not been able at times
to understand the pauses between the words. In this assault upon
his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and
vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal--a
degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour.
'He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of
time I couldn't recall his very words: I only remember that he managed
wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare
recital of events. Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude
that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again.
Each time he noted the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of
the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed
to have extinguished every sound of her teeming life. He could no longer
hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed
his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out
for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the
dim struggle of four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. "They
would fall back before it time after time, stand swearing at each other,
and suddenly make another rush in a bunch. . . . Enough to make you
die laughing," he commented with downcast eyes; then raising them for a
moment to my face with a dismal smile, "I ought to have a merry life
of it, by God! for I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet
before I die." His eyes fell again. "See and hear. . . . See and hear,"
he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring.
'He roused himself.
'"I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut," he said, "and I couldn't. I
couldn't, and I don't care who knows it. Let them go through that kind
of thing before they talk. Just let them--and do better--that's all. The
second time my eyelids flew open and my mouth too. I had felt the
ship move. She just dipped her bows--and lifted them gently--and slow!
everlastingly slow; and ever so little. She hadn't done that much for
days. The cloud had raced ahead, and this first swell seemed to travel
upon a sea of lead. There was no life in that stir. It managed, though,
to knock over something in my head. What would you have done? You are
sure of yourself--aren't you? What would you do if you felt now--this
minute--the house here move, just move a little under your chair. Leap!
By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in
that clump of bushes yonder."
'He flung his arm out at the night beyond the stone balustrade. I held
my peace. He looked at me very steadily, very severe. There could be no
mistake: I was being bullied now, and it behoved me to make no sign lest
by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about
myself which would have had some bearing on the case. I was not disposed
to take any risk of that sort. Don't forget I had him before me, and
really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous. But if you
want to know I don't mind telling you that I did, with a rapid glance,
estimate the distance to the mass of denser blackness in the middle of
the grass-plot before the verandah. He exaggerated. I would have landed
short by several feet--and that's the only thing of which I am fairly
certain.
'The last moment had come, as he thought, and he did not move. His feet
remained glued to the planks if his thoughts were knocking about loose
in his head. It was at this moment too that he saw one of the men around
the boat step backwards suddenly, clutch at the air with raised arms,
totter and collapse. He didn't exactly fall, he only slid gently into a
sitting posture, all hunched up, and with his shoulders propped against
the side of the engine-room skylight. "That was the donkey-man.
A haggard, white-faced chap with a ragged moustache. Acted third
engineer," he explained.
'"Dead," I said. We had heard something of that in court.
'"So they say," he pronounced with sombre indifference. "Of course I
never knew. Weak heart. The man had been complaining of being out of
sorts for some time before. Excitement. Over-exertion. Devil only knows.
Ha! ha! ha! It was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll,
isn't it? May I be shot if he hadn't been fooled into killing himself!
Fooled--neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as
I . . . Ah! If he had only kept still; if he had only told them to go to
the devil when they came to rush him out of his bunk because the ship
was sinking! If he had only stood by with his hands in his pockets and
called them names!"
'He got up, shook his fist, glared at me, and sat down.
'"A chance missed, eh?" I murmured.
'"Why don't you laugh?" he said. "A joke hatched in hell. Weak
heart! . . . I wish sometimes mine had been."
'This irritated me. "Do you?" I exclaimed with deep-rooted irony. "Yes!
Can't _you_ understand?" he cried. "I don't know what more you could
wish for," I said angrily. He gave me an utterly uncomprehending glance.
This shaft had also gone wide of the mark, and he was not the man to
bother about stray arrows. Upon my word, he was too unsuspecting; he was
not fair game. I was glad that my missile had been thrown away,--that he
had not even heard the twang of the bow.
'Of course he could not know at the time the man was dead. The next
minute--his last on board--was crowded with a tumult of events and
sensations which beat about him like the sea upon a rock. I use the
simile advisedly, because from his relation I am forced to believe
he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as
though he had not acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the
infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical
joke. The first thing that came to him was the grinding surge of the
heavy davits swinging out at last--a jar which seemed to enter his body
from the deck through the soles of his feet, and travel up his spine to
the crown of his head. Then, the squall being very near now, another
and a heavier swell lifted the passive hull in a threatening heave that
checked his breath, while his brain and his heart together were pierced
as with daggers by panic-stricken screams. "Let go! For God's sake,
let go! Let go! She's going." Following upon that the boat-falls ripped
through the blocks, and a lot of men began to talk in startled tones
under the awnings. "When these beggars did break out, their yelps were
enough to wake the dead," he said. Next, after the splashing shock
of the boat literally dropped in the water, came the hollow noises of
stamping and tumbling in her, mingled with confused shouts: "Unhook!
Unhook! Shove! Unhook! Shove for your life! Here's the squall down on
us. . . ." He heard, high above his head, the faint muttering of the
wind; he heard below his feet a cry of pain. A lost voice alongside
started cursing a swivel hook. The ship began to buzz fore and aft
like a disturbed hive, and, as quietly as he was telling me of all
this--because just then he was very quiet in attitude, in face, in
voice--he went on to say without the slightest warning as it were, "I
stumbled over his legs."
'This was the first I heard of his having moved at all. I could not
restrain a grunt of surprise. Something had started him off at last, but
of the exact moment, of the cause that tore him out of his immobility,
he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it
low. All this had come to him: the sounds, the sights, the legs of the
dead man--by Jove! The infernal joke was being crammed devilishly down
his throat, but--look you--he was not going to admit of any sort of
swallowing motion in his gullet. It's extraordinary how he could cast
upon you the spirit of his illusion. I listened as if to a tale of black
magic at work upon a corpse.
'"He went over sideways, very gently, and this is the last thing I
remember seeing on board," he continued. "I did not care what he did.
It looked as though he were picking himself up: I thought he was picking
himself up, of course: I expected him to bolt past me over the rail and
drop into the boat after the others. I could hear them knocking about
down there, and a voice as if crying up a shaft called out 'George!'
Then three voices together raised a yell. They came to me separately:
one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough!"
'He shivered a little, and I beheld him rise slowly as if a steady
hand from above had been pulling him out of the chair by his hair. Up,
slowly--to his full height, and when his knees had locked stiff the hand
let him go, and he swayed a little on his feet. There was a suggestion
of awful stillness in his face, in his movements, in his very voice when
he said "They shouted"--and involuntarily I pricked up my ears for
the ghost of that shout that would be heard directly through the false
effect of silence. "There were eight hundred people in that ship," he
said, impaling me to the back of my seat with an awful blank stare.
"Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead
man to come down and be saved. 'Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!' I stood
by with my hand on the davit. I was very quiet. It had come over pitch
dark. You could see neither sky nor sea. I heard the boat alongside go
bump, bump, and not another sound down there for a while, but the ship
under me was full of talking noises. Suddenly the skipper howled 'Mein
Gott! The squall! The squall! Shove off!' With the first hiss of rain,
and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch
you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like
a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into
my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild
screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first
under me. . . ."
'He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions
with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and
afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before
he blurted out--
'"I had jumped . . ." He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . "It
seems," he added.
'His clear blue eyes turned to me with a piteous stare, and looking at
him standing before me, dumfounded and hurt, I was oppressed by a sad
sense of resigned wisdom, mingled with the amused and profound pity of
an old man helpless before a childish disaster.
'"Looks like it," I muttered.
'"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And
that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small
boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never
happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a
thwart. He felt as though all his ribs on his left side must be broken;
then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising
above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire
on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a
wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . I wished I could die,"
he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a
well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . ."'
'He locked his fingers together and tore them apart. Nothing could be
more true: he had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had
tumbled from a height he could never scale again. By that time the boat
had gone driving forward past the bows. It was too dark just then
for them to see each other, and, moreover, they were blinded and half
drowned with rain. He told me it was like being swept by a flood through
a cavern. They turned their backs to the squall; the skipper, it seems,
got an oar over the stern to keep the boat before it, and for two or
three minutes the end of the world had come through a deluge in a pitchy
blackness. The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles." That's his
simile, not mine. I fancy there was not much wind after the first gust;
and he himself had admitted at the inquiry that the sea never got up
that night to any extent. He crouched down in the bows and stole a
furtive glance back. He saw just one yellow gleam of the mast-head light
high up and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve. "It terrified me
to see it still there," he said. That's what he said. What terrified him
was the thought that the drowning was not over yet. No doubt he wanted
to be done with that abomination as quickly as possible. Nobody in the
boat made a sound. In the dark she seemed to fly, but of course she
could not have had much way. Then the shower swept ahead, and the great,
distracting, hissing noise followed the rain into distance and died out.
There was nothing to be heard then but the slight wash about the boat's
sides. Somebody's teeth were chattering violently. A hand touched his
back. A faint voice said, "You there?" Another cried out shakily,
"She's gone!" and they all stood up together to look astern. They saw no
lights. All was black. A thin cold drizzle was driving into their faces.
The boat lurched slightly. The teeth chattered faster, stopped, and
began again twice before the man could master his shiver sufficiently to
say, "Ju-ju-st in ti-ti-me. . . . Brrrr." He recognised the voice of the
chief engineer saying surlily, "I saw her go down. I happened to turn my
head." The wind had dropped almost completely.
'They watched in the dark with their heads half turned to windward as if
expecting to hear cries. At first he was thankful the night had covered
up the scene before his eyes, and then to know of it and yet to have
seen and heard nothing appeared somehow the culminating point of an
awful misfortune. "Strange, isn't it?" he murmured, interrupting himself
in his disjointed narrative.
'It did not seem so strange to me. He must have had an unconscious
conviction that the reality could not be half as bad, not half as
anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the created terror of his
imagination. I believe that, in this first moment, his heart was wrung
with all the suffering, that his soul knew the accumulated savour of all
the fear, all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human beings
pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death, else why should
he have said, "It seemed to me that I must jump out of that accursed
boat and swim back to see--half a mile--more--any distance--to the very
spot . . ."? Why this impulse? Do you see the significance? Why back to
the very spot? Why not drown alongside--if he meant drowning? Why back
to the very spot, to see--as if his imagination had to be soothed by the
assurance that all was over before death could bring relief? I defy any
one of you to offer another explanation. It was one of those bizarre and
exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure.
He let it out as the most natural thing one could say. He fought down
that impulse and then he became conscious of the silence. He mentioned
this to me. A silence of the sea, of the sky, merged into one indefinite
immensity still as death around these saved, palpitating lives.
"You might have heard a pin drop in the boat," he said with a queer
contraction of his lips, like a man trying to master his sensibilities
while relating some extremely moving fact. A silence! God alone, who had
willed him as he was, knows what he made of it in his heart. "I didn't
think any spot on earth could be so still," he said. "You couldn't
distinguish the sea from the sky; there was nothing to see and nothing
to hear. Not a glimmer, not a shape, not a sound. You could have
believed that every bit of dry land had gone to the bottom; that every
man on earth but I and these beggars in the boat had got drowned." He
leaned over the table with his knuckles propped amongst coffee-cups,
liqueur-glasses, cigar-ends. "I seemed to believe it. Everything was
gone and--all was over . . ." he fetched a deep sigh . . . "with me."'
Marlow sat up abruptly and flung away his cheroot with force. It made
a darting red trail like a toy rocket fired through the drapery of
creepers. Nobody stirred.
'Hey, what do you think of it?' he cried with sudden animation. 'Wasn't
he true to himself, wasn't he? His saved life was over for want of
ground under his feet, for want of sights for his eyes, for want of
voices in his ears. Annihilation--hey! And all the time it was only a
clouded sky, a sea that did not break, the air that did not stir. Only a
night; only a silence.
'It lasted for a while, and then they were suddenly and unanimously
moved to make a noise over their escape. "I knew from the first she
would go." "Not a minute too soon." "A narrow squeak, b'gosh!" He said
nothing, but the breeze that had dropped came back, a gentle draught
freshened steadily, and the sea joined its murmuring voice to this
talkative reaction succeeding the dumb moments of awe. She was gone! She
was gone! Not a doubt of it. Nobody could have helped. They repeated the
same words over and over again as though they couldn't stop themselves.
Never doubted she would go. The lights were gone. No mistake. The
lights were gone. Couldn't expect anything else. She had to go. . . . He
noticed that they talked as though they had left behind them nothing but
an empty ship. They concluded she would not have been long when she once
started. It seemed to cause them some sort of satisfaction. They assured
each other that she couldn't have been long about it--"Just shot down
like a flat-iron." The chief engineer declared that the mast-head light
at the moment of sinking seemed to drop "like a lighted match you throw
down." At this the second laughed hysterically. "I am g-g-glad, I am
gla-a-a-d." His teeth went on "like an electric rattle," said Jim,
"and all at once he began to cry. He wept and blubbered like a child,
catching his breath and sobbing 'Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!' He would
be quiet for a while and start suddenly, 'Oh, my poor arm! oh, my poor
a-a-a-arm!' I felt I could knock him down. Some of them sat in the
stern-sheets. I could just make out their shapes. Voices came to me,
mumble, mumble, grunt, grunt. All this seemed very hard to bear. I was
cold too. And I could do nothing. I thought that if I moved I would have
to go over the side and . . ."
'His hand groped stealthily, came in contact with a liqueur-glass, and
was withdrawn suddenly as if it had touched a red-hot coal. I pushed the
bottle slightly. "Won't you have some more?" I asked. He looked at me
angrily. "Don't you think I can tell you what there is to tell without
screwing myself up?" he asked. The squad of globe-trotters had gone to
bed. We were alone but for a vague white form erect in the shadow, that,
being looked at, cringed forward, hesitated, backed away silently. It
was getting late, but I did not hurry my guest.
'In the midst of his forlorn state he heard his companions begin to
abuse some one. "What kept you from jumping, you lunatic?" said a
scolding voice. The chief engineer left the stern-sheets, and could
be heard clambering forward as if with hostile intentions against "the
greatest idiot that ever was." The skipper shouted with rasping effort
offensive epithets from where he sat at the oar. He lifted his head
at that uproar, and heard the name "George," while a hand in the dark
struck him on the breast. "What have you got to say for yourself, you
fool?" queried somebody, with a sort of virtuous fury. "They were after
me," he said. "They were abusing me--abusing me . . . by the name of
George."
'He paused to stare, tried to smile, turned his eyes away and went on.
"That little second puts his head right under my nose, 'Why, it's that
blasted mate!' 'What!' howls the skipper from the other end of the boat.
'No!' shrieks the chief. And he too stooped to look at my face."
'The wind had left the boat suddenly. The rain began to fall again, and
the soft, uninterrupted, a little mysterious sound with which the sea
receives a shower arose on all sides in the night. "They were too taken
aback to say anything more at first," he narrated steadily, "and what
could I have to say to them?" He faltered for a moment, and made an
effort to go on. "They called me horrible names." His voice, sinking to
a whisper, now and then would leap up suddenly, hardened by the passion
of scorn, as though he had been talking of secret abominations. "Never
mind what they called me," he said grimly. "I could hear hate in their
voices. A good thing too. They could not forgive me for being in that
boat. They hated it. It made them mad. . . ." He laughed short. . . .
"But it kept me from--Look! I was sitting with my arms crossed, on the
gunwale! . . ." He perched himself smartly on the edge of the table and
crossed his arms. . . . "Like this--see? One little tilt backwards and
I would have been gone--after the others. One little tilt--the least
bit--the least bit." He frowned, and tapping his forehead with the tip
of his middle finger, "It was there all the time," he said impressively.
"All the time--that notion. And the rain--cold, thick, cold as melted
snow--colder--on my thin cotton clothes--I'll never be so cold again in
my life, I know. And the sky was black too--all black. Not a star, not
a light anywhere. Nothing outside that confounded boat and those two
yapping before me like a couple of mean mongrels at a tree'd thief. Yap!
yap! 'What you doing here? You're a fine sort! Too much of a bloomin'
gentleman to put your hand to it. Come out of your trance, did you? To
sneak in? Did you?' Yap! yap! 'You ain't fit to live!' Yap! yap! Two of
them together trying to out-bark each other. The other would bay from
the stern through the rain--couldn't see him--couldn't make it out--some
of his filthy jargon. Yap! yap! Bow-ow-ow-ow-ow! Yap! yap! It was sweet
to hear them; it kept me alive, I tell you. It saved my life. At it they
went, as if trying to drive me overboard with the noise! . . . 'I wonder
you had pluck enough to jump. You ain't wanted here. If I had known who
it was, I would have tipped you over--you skunk! What have you done with
the other? Where did you get the pluck to jump--you coward? What's to
prevent us three from firing you overboard?' . . . They were out of
breath; the shower passed away upon the sea. Then nothing. There was
nothing round the boat, not even a sound. Wanted to see me overboard,
did they? Upon my soul! I think they would have had their wish if they
had only kept quiet. Fire me overboard! Would they? 'Try,' I said. 'I
would for twopence.' 'Too good for you,' they screeched together. It was
so dark that it was only when one or the other of them moved that I was
quite sure of seeing him. By heavens! I only wish they had tried."
'I couldn't help exclaiming, "What an extraordinary affair!"
'"Not bad--eh?" he said, as if in some sort astounded. "They pretended
to think I had done away with that donkey-man for some reason or other.
Why should I? And how the devil was I to know? Didn't I get somehow
into that boat? into that boat--I . . ." The muscles round his lips
contracted into an unconscious grimace that tore through the mask of his
usual expression--something violent, short-lived and illuminating like
a twist of lightning that admits the eye for an instant into the secret
convolutions of a cloud. "I did. I was plainly there with them--wasn't
I? Isn't it awful a man should be driven to do a thing like that--and be
responsible? What did I know about their George they were howling after?
I remembered I had seen him curled up on the deck. 'Murdering coward!'
the chief kept on calling me. He didn't seem able to remember any other
two words. I didn't care, only his noise began to worry me. 'Shut up,' I
said. At that he collected himself for a confounded screech. 'You killed
him! You killed him!' 'No,' I shouted, 'but I will kill you directly.' I
jumped up, and he fell backwards over a thwart with an awful loud thump.
I don't know why. Too dark. Tried to step back I suppose. I stood still
facing aft, and the wretched little second began to whine, 'You
ain't going to hit a chap with a broken arm--and you call yourself a
gentleman, too.' I heard a heavy tramp--one--two--and wheezy grunting.
The other beast was coming at me, clattering his oar over the stern. I
saw him moving, big, big--as you see a man in a mist, in a dream. 'Come
on,' I cried. I would have tumbled him over like a bale of shakings. He
stopped, muttered to himself, and went back. Perhaps he had heard the
wind. I didn't. It was the last heavy gust we had. He went back to his
oar. I was sorry. I would have tried to--to . . ."
'He opened and closed his curved fingers, and his hands had an eager and
cruel flutter. "Steady, steady," I murmured.
'"Eh? What? I am not excited," he remonstrated, awfully hurt, and with
a convulsive jerk of his elbow knocked over the cognac bottle. I started
forward, scraping my chair. He bounced off the table as if a mine had
been exploded behind his back, and half turned before he alighted,
crouching on his feet to show me a startled pair of eyes and a face
white about the nostrils. A look of intense annoyance succeeded.
"Awfully sorry. How clumsy of me!" he mumbled, very vexed, while the
pungent odour of spilt alcohol enveloped us suddenly with an atmosphere
of a low drinking-bout in the cool, pure darkness of the night. The
lights had been put out in the dining-hall; our candle glimmered
solitary in the long gallery, and the columns had turned black from
pediment to capital. On the vivid stars the high corner of the Harbour
Office stood out distinct across the Esplanade, as though the sombre
pile had glided nearer to see and hear.
'He assumed an air of indifference.
'"I dare say I am less calm now than I was then. I was ready for
anything. These were trifles. . . ."
'"You had a lively time of it in that boat," I remarked
'"I was ready," he repeated. "After the ship's lights had gone, anything
might have happened in that boat--anything in the world--and the world
no wiser. I felt this, and I was pleased. It was just dark enough too.
We were like men walled up quick in a roomy grave. No concern with
anything on earth. Nobody to pass an opinion. Nothing mattered." For the
third time during this conversation he laughed harshly, but there was
no one about to suspect him of being only drunk. "No fear, no law, no
sounds, no eyes--not even our own, till--till sunrise at least."
'I was struck by the suggestive truth of his words. There is something
peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from
under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world
that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls
of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set
free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. Of course, as
with belief, thought, love, hate, conviction, or even the visual aspect
of material things, there are as many shipwrecks as there are men, and
in this one there was something abject which made the isolation more
complete--there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off
more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had
never undergone the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke. They were
exasperated with him for being a half-hearted shirker: he focussed on
them his hatred of the whole thing; he would have liked to take a signal
revenge for the abhorrent opportunity they had put in his way. Trust
a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the
bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion. It was part of
the burlesque meanness pervading that particular disaster at sea that
they did not come to blows. It was all threats, all a terribly effective
feint, a sham from beginning to end, planned by the tremendous disdain
of the Dark Powers whose real terrors, always on the verge of triumph,
are perpetually foiled by the steadfastness of men. I asked, after
waiting for a while, "Well, what happened?" A futile question. I knew
too much already to hope for the grace of a single uplifting touch, for
the favour of hinted madness, of shadowed horror. "Nothing," he said. "I
meant business, but they meant noise only. Nothing happened."
'And the rising sun found him just as he had jumped up first in the bows
of the boat. What a persistence of readiness! He had been holding the
tiller in his hand, too, all the night. They had dropped the rudder
overboard while attempting to ship it, and I suppose the tiller got
kicked forward somehow while they were rushing up and down that boat
trying to do all sorts of things at once so as to get clear of the
side. It was a long heavy piece of hard wood, and apparently he had been
clutching it for six hours or so. If you don't call that being ready!
Can you imagine him, silent and on his feet half the night, his face to
the gusts of rain, staring at sombre forms watchful of vague movements,
straining his ears to catch rare low murmurs in the stern-sheets!
Firmness of courage or effort of fear? What do you think? And the
endurance is undeniable too. Six hours more or less on the defensive;
six hours of alert immobility while the boat drove slowly or floated
arrested, according to the caprice of the wind; while the sea, calmed,
slept at last; while the clouds passed above his head; while the sky
from an immensity lustreless and black, diminished to a sombre and
lustrous vault, scintillated with a greater brilliance, faded to the
east, paled at the zenith; while the dark shapes blotting the low
stars astern got outlines, relief became shoulders, heads, faces,
features,--confronted him with dreary stares, had dishevelled hair, torn
clothes, blinked red eyelids at the white dawn. "They looked as though
they had been knocking about drunk in gutters for a week," he described
graphically; and then he muttered something about the sunrise being of a
kind that foretells a calm day. You know that sailor habit of referring
to the weather in every connection. And on my side his few mumbled words
were enough to make me see the lower limb of the sun clearing the
line of the horizon, the tremble of a vast ripple running over all the
visible expanse of the sea, as if the waters had shuddered, giving birth
to the globe of light, while the last puff of the breeze would stir the
air in a sigh of relief.
'"They sat in the stern shoulder to shoulder, with the skipper in the
middle, like three dirty owls, and stared at me," I heard him say
with an intention of hate that distilled a corrosive virtue into the
commonplace words like a drop of powerful poison falling into a glass
of water; but my thoughts dwelt upon that sunrise. I could imagine
under the pellucid emptiness of the sky these four men imprisoned in the
solitude of the sea, the lonely sun, regardless of the speck of life,
ascending the clear curve of the heaven as if to gaze ardently from a
greater height at his own splendour reflected in the still ocean. "They
called out to me from aft," said Jim, "as though we had been chums
together. I heard them. They were begging me to be sensible and drop
that 'blooming piece of wood.' Why _would_ I carry on so? They hadn't
done me any harm--had they? There had been no harm. . . . No harm!"
'His face crimsoned as though he could not get rid of the air in his
lungs.
'"No harm!" he burst out. "I leave it to you. You can understand. Can't
you? You see it--don't you? No harm! Good God! What more could they have
done? Oh yes, I know very well--I jumped. Certainly. I jumped! I told
you I jumped; but I tell you they were too much for any man. It was
their doing as plainly as if they had reached up with a boat-hook and
pulled me over. Can't you see it? You must see it. Come. Speak--straight
out."
'His uneasy eyes fastened upon mine, questioned, begged, challenged,
entreated. For the life of me I couldn't help murmuring, "You've been
tried." "More than is fair," he caught up swiftly. "I wasn't given half
a chance--with a gang like that. And now they were friendly--oh, so
damnably friendly! Chums, shipmates. All in the same boat. Make the best
of it. They hadn't meant anything. They didn't care a hang for George.
George had gone back to his berth for something at the last moment and
got caught. The man was a manifest fool. Very sad, of course. . . .
Their eyes looked at me; their lips moved; they wagged their heads at
the other end of the boat--three of them; they beckoned--to me. Why
not? Hadn't I jumped? I said nothing. There are no words for the sort of
things I wanted to say. If I had opened my lips just then I would have
simply howled like an animal. I was asking myself when I would wake up.
They urged me aloud to come aft and hear quietly what the skipper had to
say. We were sure to be picked up before the evening--right in the track
of all the Canal traffic; there was smoke to the north-west now.
'"It gave me an awful shock to see this faint, faint blur, this low
trail of brown mist through which you could see the boundary of sea and
sky. I called out to them that I could hear very well where I was. The
skipper started swearing, as hoarse as a crow. He wasn't going to talk
at the top of his voice for _my_ accommodation. 'Are you afraid they
will hear you on shore?' I asked. He glared as if he would have liked to
claw me to pieces. The chief engineer advised him to humour me. He
said I wasn't right in my head yet. The other rose astern, like a thick
pillar of flesh--and talked--talked. . . ."
'Jim remained thoughtful. "Well?" I said. "What did I care what story
they agreed to make up?" he cried recklessly. "They could tell what they
jolly well liked. It was their business. I knew the story. Nothing
they could make people believe could alter it for me. I let him talk,
argue--talk, argue. He went on and on and on. Suddenly I felt my legs
give way under me. I was sick, tired--tired to death. I let fall the
tiller, turned my back on them, and sat down on the foremost thwart. I
had enough. They called to me to know if I understood--wasn't it true,
every word of it? It was true, by God! after their fashion. I did not
turn my head. I heard them palavering together. 'The silly ass won't say
anything.' 'Oh, he understands well enough.' 'Let him be; he will be all
right.' 'What can he do?' What could I do? Weren't we all in the same
boat? I tried to be deaf. The smoke had disappeared to the northward.
It was a dead calm. They had a drink from the water-breaker, and I drank
too. Afterwards they made a great business of spreading the boat-sail
over the gunwales. Would I keep a look-out? They crept under, out of my
sight, thank God! I felt weary, weary, done up, as if I hadn't had one
hour's sleep since the day I was born. I couldn't see the water for the
glitter of the sunshine. From time to time one of them would creep out,
stand up to take a look all round, and get under again. I could hear
spells of snoring below the sail. Some of them could sleep. One of them
at least. I couldn't! All was light, light, and the boat seemed to be
falling through it. Now and then I would feel quite surprised to find
myself sitting on a thwart. . . ."
'He began to walk with measured steps to and fro before my chair, one
hand in his trousers-pocket, his head bent thoughtfully, and his right
arm at long intervals raised for a gesture that seemed to put out of his
way an invisible intruder.
'"I suppose you think I was going mad," he began in a changed tone. "And
well you may, if you remember I had lost my cap. The sun crept all the
way from east to west over my bare head, but that day I could not come
to any harm, I suppose. The sun could not make me mad. . . ." His right
arm put aside the idea of madness. . . . "Neither could it kill
me. . . ." Again his arm repulsed a shadow. . . . "_That_ rested with
me."
'"Did it?" I said, inexpressibly amazed at this new turn, and I looked
at him with the same sort of feeling I might be fairly conceived to
experience had he, after spinning round on his heel, presented an
altogether new face.
'"I didn't get brain fever, I did not drop dead either," he went on. "I
didn't bother myself at all about the sun over my head. I was thinking
as coolly as any man that ever sat thinking in the shade. That greasy
beast of a skipper poked his big cropped head from under the canvas
and screwed his fishy eyes up at me. 'Donnerwetter! you will die,' he
growled, and drew in like a turtle. I had seen him. I had heard him. He
didn't interrupt me. I was thinking just then that I wouldn't."
'He tried to sound my thought with an attentive glance dropped on me
in passing. "Do you mean to say you had been deliberating with yourself
whether you would die?" I asked in as impenetrable a tone as I could
command. He nodded without stopping. "Yes, it had come to that as I sat
there alone," he said. He passed on a few steps to the imaginary end
of his beat, and when he flung round to come back both his hands were
thrust deep into his pockets. He stopped short in front of my chair and
looked down. "Don't you believe it?" he inquired with tense curiosity.
I was moved to make a solemn declaration of my readiness to believe
implicitly anything he thought fit to tell me.'
'He heard me out with his head on one side, and I had another glimpse
through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being. The dim
candle spluttered within the ball of glass, and that was all I had to
see him by; at his back was the dark night with the clear stars, whose
distant glitter disposed in retreating planes lured the eye into the
depths of a greater darkness; and yet a mysterious light seemed to show
me his boyish head, as if in that moment the youth within him had, for
a moment, glowed and expired. "You are an awful good sort to listen like
this," he said. "It does me good. You don't know what it is to me. You
don't" . . . words seemed to fail him. It was a distinct glimpse. He was
a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like
to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims
the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct,
cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give
a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light . . . of
heat! . . . Yes; I had a glimpse of him then . . . and it was not the
last of that kind. . . . "You don't know what it is for a fellow in my
position to be believed--make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It
is so difficult--so awfully unfair--so hard to understand."
'The mists were closing again. I don't know how old I appeared to
him--and how much wise. Not half as old as I felt just then; not half
as uselessly wise as I knew myself to be. Surely in no other craft as in
that of the sea do the hearts of those already launched to sink or swim
go out so much to the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes upon
that glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his
own glances full of fire. There is such magnificent vagueness in
the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious
indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own
and only reward. What we get--well, we won't talk of that; but can one
of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more
wide of reality--in no other is the beginning _all_ illusion--the
disenchantment more swift--the subjugation more complete. Hadn't we all
commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried
the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of
imprecation? What wonder that when some heavy prod gets home the bond
is found to be close; that besides the fellowship of the craft there is
felt the strength of a wider feeling--the feeling that binds a man to a
child. He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find
a remedy against the pain of truth, giving me a glimpse of himself as a
young fellow in a scrape that is the very devil of a scrape, the sort
of scrape greybeards wag at solemnly while they hide a smile. And he
had been deliberating upon death--confound him! He had found that to
meditate about because he thought he had saved his life, while all its
glamour had gone with the ship in the night. What more natural! It
was tragic enough and funny enough in all conscience to call aloud for
compassion, and in what was I better than the rest of us to refuse him
my pity? And even as I looked at him the mists rolled into the rent, and
his voice spoke--
'"I was so lost, you know. It was the sort of thing one does not expect
to happen to one. It was not like a fight, for instance."
'"It was not," I admitted. He appeared changed, as if he had suddenly
matured.
'"One couldn't be sure," he muttered.
'"Ah! You were not sure," I said, and was placated by the sound of
a faint sigh that passed between us like the flight of a bird in the
night.
'"Well, I wasn't," he said courageously. "It was something like that
wretched story they made up. It was not a lie--but it wasn't truth all
the same. It was something. . . . One knows a downright lie. There was
not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of
this affair."
'"How much more did you want?" I asked; but I think I spoke so low that
he did not catch what I said. He had advanced his argument as though
life had been a network of paths separated by chasms. His voice sounded
reasonable.
'"Suppose I had not--I mean to say, suppose I had stuck to the ship?
Well. How much longer? Say a minute--half a minute. Come. In thirty
seconds, as it seemed certain then, I would have been overboard; and do
you think I would not have laid hold of the first thing that came in my
way--oar, life-buoy, grating--anything? Wouldn't you?"
'"And be saved," I interjected.
'"I would have meant to be," he retorted. "And that's more than I meant
when I" . . . he shivered as if about to swallow some nauseous
drug . . . "jumped," he pronounced with a convulsive effort, whose
stress, as if propagated by the waves of the air, made my body stir a
little in the chair. He fixed me with lowering eyes. "Don't you believe
me?" he cried. "I swear! . . . Confound it! You got me here to talk,
and . . . You must! . . . You said you would believe." "Of course I do,"
I protested, in a matter-of-fact tone which produced a calming effect.
"Forgive me," he said. "Of course I wouldn't have talked to you about
all this if you had not been a gentleman. I ought to have known . . . I
am--I am--a gentleman too . . ." "Yes, yes," I said hastily. He was
looking me squarely in the face, and withdrew his gaze slowly. "Now you
understand why I didn't after all . . . didn't go out in that way. I
wasn't going to be frightened at what I had done. And, anyhow, if I had
stuck to the ship I would have done my best to be saved. Men have been
known to float for hours--in the open sea--and be picked up not much the
worse for it. I might have lasted it out better than many others.
There's nothing the matter with my heart." He withdrew his right fist
from his pocket, and the blow he struck on his chest resounded like a
muffled detonation in the night.
'"No," I said. He meditated, with his legs slightly apart and his
chin sunk. "A hair's-breadth," he muttered. "Not the breadth of a hair
between this and that. And at the time . . ."
'"It is difficult to see a hair at midnight," I put in, a little
viciously I fear. Don't you see what I mean by the solidarity of the
craft? I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me--me!--of
a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as
though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour.
"And so you cleared out--at once."
'"Jumped," he corrected me incisively. "Jumped--mind!" he repeated, and
I wondered at the evident but obscure intention. "Well, yes! Perhaps I
could not see then. But I had plenty of time and any amount of light
in that boat. And I could think, too. Nobody would know, of course, but
this did not make it any easier for me. You've got to believe that, too.
I did not want all this talk. . . . No . . . Yes . . . I won't
lie . . . I wanted it: it is the very thing I wanted--there. Do you
think you or anybody could have made me if I . . . I am--I am not afraid
to tell. And I wasn't afraid to think either. I looked it in the face. I
wasn't going to run away. At first--at night, if it hadn't been for
those fellows I might have . . . No! by heavens! I was not going to give
them that satisfaction. They had done enough. They made up a story, and
believed it for all I know. But I knew the truth, and I would live it
down--alone, with myself. I wasn't going to give in to such a beastly
unfair thing. What did it prove after all? I was confoundedly cut up.
Sick of life--to tell you the truth; but what would have been the good
to shirk it--in--in--that way? That was not the way. I believe--I
believe it would have--it would have ended--nothing."
'He had been walking up and down, but with the last word he turned short
at me.
'"What do _you_ believe?" he asked with violence. A pause ensued, and
suddenly I felt myself overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue, as
though his voice had startled me out of a dream of wandering through
empty spaces whose immensity had harassed my soul and exhausted my body.
'". . . Would have ended nothing," he muttered over me obstinately,
after a little while. "No! the proper thing was to face it out--alone
for myself--wait for another chance--find out . . ."' | 9,152 | Chapters 9-11 | https://web.archive.org/web/20210215030710/https://www.novelguide.com/lord-jim/summaries/chapter9-11 | Ten and Eleven . On board the Patna, in Chapter Nine, the chief engineer asked Jim for help to free their lifeboat from the ship and pointed to the approaching squall. Jim kept his distance from them and the second engineer ran for the hammer in order to release the chock . In their panic, 'they had no leisure to look back upon his passive heroism, to feel the sting of his abstention'. Jim closed his eyes and felt the ship dip its bows and tells Marlow he too would have felt like leaping into a boat. Whilst watching the men still around the boat, George, the third engineer, collapsed and died . When the remaining white crewmen got in the boat, Jim heard them shouting for George to jump in too. He felt as though he could hear all 800 passengers shouting for George to jump. The rain swept over the ship and Jim's cap blew off; he also believed the ship was going down. He tells Marlow, 'I had jumped...' and Marlow feels the pity an old man experiences, 'helpless before a childish disaster'. Jim recounts how he knew nothing about jumping until he looked up. He felt like he had jumped into a well, into 'an everlasting deep hole'. . . In Chapter Ten, Marlow says that nothing could be truer: 'He had indeed jumped into an everlasting deep hole. He had tumbled from a height he could never scale again.' . . As their boat moved away, one of them cried out, 'she's gone', as the ships lights had gone out. They hear nothing, though, and Jim thought this was strange, but Marlow sees this as understandable: 'He must have had an unconscious conviction that the reality could not be half as bad, not half as anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the created terror of his imagination.' Jim tells Marlow he fought back his impulse to swim back to the sea. . . It was completely dark in the boat and the other men abused Jim for taking so long to join them. They were taken aback initially when they realized their mistake, but then became angry with him for not helping to release the boat. This anger stopped Jim from tipping back to fall into the sea: it kept him alive. They also pretended that they thought Jim had harmed George and the chief engineer called him a 'murdering coward'. Jim felt as though they were all in a 'roomy grave' and that nothing mattered; Marlow sees that such irrational thoughts can be the effect of being on a boat on the high seas. Jim spent six hours on the defensive and in the daylight he saw the other three men sitting together in the stern 'like three dirty owls' and they begged him to drop his piece of wood. The other men agreed to make up a story and these three went under the spread out sail, while Jim stayed in the sun with his head bared. After Marlow prompts him, Jim admits that he deliberated as to whether he should kill himself. . . Jim tells Marlow, in Chapter Eleven, that he is a good sort for listening to him and Marlow demonstrates his identification with him: 'He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been...' Jim explains why he did not kill himself, gentleman to gentleman, and says that if he had stayed on the ship he would have tried to save himself. He adds that his suicide would have ended nothing and the proper action was to face the consequences. . | Ten and Eleven . Jim's fateful decision to jump from the ship into the boat haunts him through the novel. The fragmented explanation of why he followed the others comes in Chapter Ten and is, therefore, crucial to understanding his later torment. Jim did not want to stay on what he thought was the sinking ship; but he also did not want to join the other men. Indecision and panic appear to have ruled him and he goes on to punish himself for not staying and for acting in a way that he deems cowardly. If one remembers his dreams of being a hero, it is evident that he has let himself down by not performing in the way he imagined he would in a crisis. . . Although Marlow is the cipher for Jim's story on the Patna, he is a central character as the readers see Jim through his eyes. Chapter Eleven gives a useful example of his connection to Jim as he clearly identifies with this younger man and, consequently, his partiality for him is made explicit. | 617 | 180 | [
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1,232 | false | cliffnotes | all_chapterized_books/1232-chapters/15.txt | finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Prince/section_13_part_0.txt | The Prince.chapter 15 | chapter 15 | null | {"name": "Chapter 15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201108110625/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-prince/summary-and-analysis/chapter-15", "summary": "The proper behavior of princes toward subjects and allies remains to be discussed. Many others have treated this subject, but Machiavelli bases his observations on the real world, not on an imagined ideal. There is so much difference between the way people should act and the way they do act that any prince who tries to do what he should will ruin himself. A prince must know when to act immorally. Everyone agrees that a prince should have all good qualities, but because that is impossible, a wise prince will avoid those vices that would destroy his power and not worry about the rest. Some actions that seem virtuous will ruin a prince, while others that seem like vices will make a prince prosper.", "analysis": "In this chapter, Machiavelli introduces the theme that will occupy much of the rest of the book: how princes should act. He announces his intention to turn the reader's expectations upside down by recommending that princes be bad rather than good. He was consciously going against a long tradition of advice books for rulers, the \"Mirror for Princes\" genre, which predictably recommended that leaders be models of virtue, always upholding the highest moral standards and being honest, trustworthy, generous, and merciful. Machiavelli declares that this is fine if you are an imaginary model prince living in a perfect world, but in the real world, a prince is surrounded by unscrupulous people and must compete with them if he is to survive. To put it in modern terms, he must learn to swim with the sharks. Therefore, the prince must know how to behave badly and to use this knowledge as a tool to maintain his power. Machiavelli recognizes that princes are always in the public eye. Their behavior will affect their public image, and their reputation will affect their ability to keep power. With this in mind, Machiavelli advises that it is fine to avoid vices, but because no one can avoid them all, the prince should be careful to avoid those that will most severely damage his reputation and, therefore, his power. His consciousness of a prince's need to control his public image would not seem out of place in the media age, where public relations experts carefully groom and prepare politicians for public consumption. Apparently flaunting all conventional moral advice, he says that many things that appear good will damage a prince's power, while those that appear bad will enhance it. The contrast between the imaginary world of virtues and the real world of vices could not be more plain. Now that he has everyone's attention, he proceeds to dissect these so-called virtues in the next three chapters. Glossary Tuscan the variety of Italian spoken in Tuscany, the region of Italy where Florence is located."} |
It remains now to see what ought to be the rules of conduct for a prince
towards subject and friends. And as I know that many have written on
this point, I expect I shall be considered presumptuous in mentioning it
again, especially as in discussing it I shall depart from the methods of
other people. But, it being my intention to write a thing which shall
be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to
follow up the real truth of the matter than the imagination of it; for
many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never
been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one
ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to
be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who
wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with
what destroys him among so much that is evil.
Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know
how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity.
Therefore, putting on one side imaginary things concerning a prince, and
discussing those which are real, I say that all men when they are spoken
of, and chiefly princes for being more highly placed, are remarkable
for some of those qualities which bring them either blame or praise; and
thus it is that one is reputed liberal, another miserly, using a Tuscan
term (because an avaricious person in our language is still he who
desires to possess by robbery, whilst we call one miserly who deprives
himself too much of the use of his own); one is reputed generous,
one rapacious; one cruel, one compassionate; one faithless, another
faithful; one effeminate and cowardly, another bold and brave; one
affable, another haughty; one lascivious, another chaste; one sincere,
another cunning; one hard, another easy; one grave, another frivolous;
one religious, another unbelieving, and the like. And I know that every
one will confess that it would be most praiseworthy in a prince to
exhibit all the above qualities that are considered good; but because
they can neither be entirely possessed nor observed, for human
conditions do not permit it, it is necessary for him to be sufficiently
prudent that he may know how to avoid the reproach of those vices which
would lose him his state; and also to keep himself, if it be possible,
from those which would not lose him it; but this not being possible, he
may with less hesitation abandon himself to them. And again, he need
not make himself uneasy at incurring a reproach for those vices without
which the state can only be saved with difficulty, for if everything is
considered carefully, it will be found that something which looks like
virtue, if followed, would be his ruin; whilst something else, which
looks like vice, yet followed brings him security and prosperity.
| 466 | Chapter 15 | https://web.archive.org/web/20201108110625/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/the-prince/summary-and-analysis/chapter-15 | The proper behavior of princes toward subjects and allies remains to be discussed. Many others have treated this subject, but Machiavelli bases his observations on the real world, not on an imagined ideal. There is so much difference between the way people should act and the way they do act that any prince who tries to do what he should will ruin himself. A prince must know when to act immorally. Everyone agrees that a prince should have all good qualities, but because that is impossible, a wise prince will avoid those vices that would destroy his power and not worry about the rest. Some actions that seem virtuous will ruin a prince, while others that seem like vices will make a prince prosper. | In this chapter, Machiavelli introduces the theme that will occupy much of the rest of the book: how princes should act. He announces his intention to turn the reader's expectations upside down by recommending that princes be bad rather than good. He was consciously going against a long tradition of advice books for rulers, the "Mirror for Princes" genre, which predictably recommended that leaders be models of virtue, always upholding the highest moral standards and being honest, trustworthy, generous, and merciful. Machiavelli declares that this is fine if you are an imaginary model prince living in a perfect world, but in the real world, a prince is surrounded by unscrupulous people and must compete with them if he is to survive. To put it in modern terms, he must learn to swim with the sharks. Therefore, the prince must know how to behave badly and to use this knowledge as a tool to maintain his power. Machiavelli recognizes that princes are always in the public eye. Their behavior will affect their public image, and their reputation will affect their ability to keep power. With this in mind, Machiavelli advises that it is fine to avoid vices, but because no one can avoid them all, the prince should be careful to avoid those that will most severely damage his reputation and, therefore, his power. His consciousness of a prince's need to control his public image would not seem out of place in the media age, where public relations experts carefully groom and prepare politicians for public consumption. Apparently flaunting all conventional moral advice, he says that many things that appear good will damage a prince's power, while those that appear bad will enhance it. The contrast between the imaginary world of virtues and the real world of vices could not be more plain. Now that he has everyone's attention, he proceeds to dissect these so-called virtues in the next three chapters. Glossary Tuscan the variety of Italian spoken in Tuscany, the region of Italy where Florence is located. | 124 | 337 | [
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