Chapter XVII
'Her welcome, spoke in faltering phrase.'
'There is Henry Knight, I declare!' said Mrs. Swancourt one day.
They were gazing from the jutting angle of a wild enclosure not
far from The Crags, which almost overhung the valley already
described as leading up from the sea and little port of Castle
Boterel. The stony escarpment upon which they stood had the
contour of a man's face, and it was covered with furze as with a
beard. People in the field above were preserved from an
accidental roll down these prominences and hollows by a hedge on
the very crest, which was doing that kindly service for Elfride
and her mother now.
Scrambling higher into the hedge and stretching her neck further
over the furze, Elfride beheld the individual signified. He was
walking leisurely along the little green path at the bottom,
beside the stream, a satchel slung upon his left hip, a stout
walking-stick in his hand, and a brown-holland sun-hat upon his
head. The satchel was worn and old, and the outer polished
surface of the leather was cracked and peeling off.
Knight having arrived over the hills to Castle Boterel upon the
top of a crazy omnibus, preferred to walk the remaining two miles
up the valley, leaving his luggage to be brought on.
Behind him wandered, helter-skelter, a boy of whom Knight had
briefly inquired the way to Endelstow; and by that natural law of
physics which causes lesser bodies to gravitate towards the
greater, this boy had kept near to Knight, and trotted like a
little dog close at his heels, whistling as he went, with his eyes
fixed upon Knight's boots as they rose and fell.
When they had reached a point precisely opposite that in which
Mrs. and Miss Swancourt lay in ambush, Knight stopped and turned
round.
'Look here, my boy,' he said.
The boy parted his lips, opened his eyes, and answered nothing.
'Here's sixpence for you, on condition that you don't again come
within twenty yards of my heels, all the way up the valley.'
The boy, who apparently had not known he had been looking at
Knight's heels at all, took the sixpence mechanically, and Knight
went on again, wrapt in meditation.
'A nice voice,' Elfride thought; 'but what a singular temper!'
'Now we must get indoors before he ascends the slope,' said Mrs.
Swancourt softly. And they went across by a short cut over a
stile, entering the lawn by a side door, and so on to the house.
Mr. Swancourt had gone into the village with the curate, and
Elfride felt too nervous to await their visitor's arrival in the
drawing-room with Mrs. Swancourt. So that when the elder lady
entered, Elfride made some pretence of perceiving a new variety of
crimson geranium, and lingered behind among the flower beds.
There was nothing gained by this, after all, she thought; and a
few minutes after boldly came into the house by the glass side-
door. She walked along the corridor, and entered the drawing-
room. Nobody was there.
A window at the angle of the room opened directly into an
octagonal conservatory, enclosing the corner of the building.
From the conservatory came voices in conversation--Mrs.
Swancourt's and the stranger's.
She had expected him to talk brilliantly. To her surprise he was
asking questions in quite a learner's manner, on subjects
connected with the flowers and shrubs that she had known for
years. When after the lapse of a few minutes he spoke at some
length, she considered there was a hard square decisiveness in the
shape of his sentences, as if, unlike her own and Stephen's, they
were not there and then newly constructed, but were drawn forth
from a large store ready-made. They were now approaching the
window to come in again.
'That is a flesh-coloured variety,' said Mrs. Swancourt. 'But
oleanders, though they are such bulky shrubs, are so very easily
wounded as to be unprunable--giants with the sensitiveness of
young ladies. Oh, here is Elfride!'
Elfride looked as guilty and crestfallen as Lady Teazle at the
dropping of the screen. Mrs. Swancourt presented him half
comically, and Knight in a minute or two placed himself beside the
young lady.
A complexity of instincts checked Elfride's conventional smiles of
complaisance and hospitality; and, to make her still less
comfortable, Mrs. Swancourt immediately afterwards left them
together to seek her husband. Mr. Knight, however, did not seem
at all incommoded by his feelings, and he said with light
easefulness:
'So, Miss Swancourt, I have met you at last. You escaped me by a
few minutes only when we were in London.'
'Yes. I found that you had seen Mrs. Swancourt.'
'And now reviewer and reviewed are face to face,' he added
unconcernedly.
'Yes: though the fact of your being a relation of Mrs. Swancourt's
takes off the edge of it. It was strange that you should be one
of her family all the time.' Elfride began to recover herself now,
and to look into Knight's face. 'I was merely anxious to let you
know my REAL meaning in writing the book--extremely anxious.'
'I can quite understand the wish; and I was gratified that my
remarks should have reached home. They very seldom do, I am
afraid.'
Elfride drew herself in. Here he was, sticking to his opinions as
firmly as if friendship and politeness did not in the least
require an immediate renunciation of them.
'You made me very uneasy and sorry by writing such things!' she
murmured, suddenly dropping the mere cacueterie of a fashionable
first introduction, and speaking with some of the dudgeon of a
child towards a severe schoolmaster.
'That is rather the object of honest critics in such a case. Not
to cause unnecessary sorrow, but: "To make you sorry after a
proper manner, that ye may receive damage by us in nothing," as a
powerful pen once wrote to the Gentiles. Are you going to write
another romance?'
'Write another?' she said. 'That somebody may pen a condemnation
and "nail't wi' Scripture" again, as you do now, Mr. Knight?'
'You may do better next time,' he said placidly: 'I think you
will. But I would advise you to confine yourself to domestic
scenes.'
'Thank you. But never again!'
'Well, you may be right. That a young woman has taken to writing
is not by any means the best thing to hear about her.'
'What is the best?'
'I prefer not to say.'
'Do you know? Then, do tell me, please.'
'Well'--(Knight was evidently changing his meaning)--'I suppose to
hear that she has married.'
Elfride hesitated. 'And what when she has been married?' she said
at last, partly in order to withdraw her own person from the
argument.
'Then to hear no more about her. It is as Smeaton said of his
lighthouse: her greatest real praise, when the novelty of her
inauguration has worn off, is that nothing happens to keep the
talk of her alive.'
'Yes, I see,' said Elfride softly and thoughtfully. 'But of
course it is different quite with men. Why don't you write
novels, Mr. Knight?'
'Because I couldn't write one that would interest anybody.'
'Why?'
'For several reasons. It requires a judicious omission of your
real thoughts to make a novel popular, for one thing.'
'Is that really necessary? Well, I am sure you could learn to do
that with practice,' said Elfride with an ex-cathedra air, as
became a person who spoke from experience in the art. 'You would
make a great name for certain,' she continued.
'So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more
distinguished to remain in obscurity.'
'Tell me seriously--apart from the subject--why don't you write a
volume instead of loose articles?' she insisted.
'Since you are pleased to make me talk of myself, I will tell you
seriously,' said Knight, not less amused at this catechism by his
young friend than he was interested in her appearance. 'As I have
implied, I have not the wish. And if I had the wish, I could not
now concentrate sufficiently. We all have only our one cruse of
energy given us to make the best of. And where that energy has
been leaked away week by week, quarter by quarter, as mine has for
the last nine or ten years, there is not enough dammed back behind
the mill at any given period to supply the force a complete book
on any subject requires. Then there is the self-confidence and
waiting power. Where quick results have grown customary, they are
fatal to a lively faith in the future.'
'Yes, I comprehend; and so you choose to write in fragments?'
'No, I don't choose to do it in the sense you mean; choosing from
a whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the
constraint of accident merely. Not that I object to the
accident.'
'Why don't you object--I mean, why do you feel so quiet about
things?' Elfride was half afraid to question him so, but her
intense curiosity to see what the inside of literary Mr. Knight
was like, kept her going on.
Knight certainly did not mind being frank with her. Instances of
this trait in men who are not without feeling, but are reticent
from habit, may be recalled by all of us. When they find a
listener who can by no possibility make use of them, rival them,
or condemn them, reserved and even suspicious men of the world
become frank, keenly enjoying the inner side of their frankness.
'Why I don't mind the accidental constraint,' he replied, 'is
because, in making beginnings, a chance limitation of direction is
often better than absolute freedom.'
'I see--that is, I should if I quite understood what all those
generalities mean.'
'Why, this: That an arbitrary foundation for one's work, which no
length of thought can alter, leaves the attention free to fix
itself on the work itself, and make the best of it.'
'Lateral compression forcing altitude, as would be said in that
tongue,' she said mischievously. 'And I suppose where no limit
exists, as in the case of a rich man with a wide taste who wants
to do something, it will be better to choose a limit capriciously
than to have none.'
'Yes,' he said meditatively. 'I can go as far as that.'
'Well,' resumed Elfride, 'I think it better for a man's nature if
he does nothing in particular.'
'There is such a case as being obliged to.'
'Yes, yes; I was speaking of when you are not obliged for any
other reason than delight in the prospect of fame. I have thought
many times lately that a thin widespread happiness, commencing
now, and of a piece with the days of your life, is preferable to
an anticipated heap far away in the future, and none now.'
'Why, that's the very thing I said just now as being the principle
of all ephemeral doers like myself.'
'Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,' she said with some
confusion. 'Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not
trying to be famous.' And she added, with the quickness of
conviction characteristic of her mind: 'There is much littleness
in trying to be great. A man must think a good deal of himself,
and be conceited enough to believe in himself, before he tries at
all.'
'But it is soon enough to say there is harm in a man's thinking a
good deal of himself when it is proved he has been thinking wrong,
and too soon then sometimes. Besides, we should not conclude that
a man who strives earnestly for success does so with a strong
sense of his own merit. He may see how little success has to do
with merit, and his motive may be his very humility.'
This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner
did she agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took
the other side. 'Ah,' she thought inwardly, 'I shall have nothing
to do with a man of this kind, though he is our visitor.'
'I think you will find,' resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation
more for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject
than for engaging her attention, 'that in actual life it is merely
a matter of instinct with men--this trying to push on. They awake
to a recognition that they have, without premeditation, begun to
try a little, and they say to themselves, "Since I have tried thus
much, I will try a little more." They go on because they have
begun.'
Elfride, in her turn, was not particularly attending to his words
at this moment. She had, unconsciously to herself, a way of
seizing any point in the remarks of an interlocutor which
interested her, and dwelling upon it, and thinking thoughts of her
own thereupon, totally oblivious of all that he might say in
continuation. On such occasions she artlessly surveyed the person
speaking; and then there was a time for a painter. Her eyes
seemed to look at you, and past you, as you were then, into your
future; and past your future into your eternity--not reading it,
but gazing in an unused, unconscious way--her mind still clinging
to its original thought.
This is how she was looking at Knight.
Suddenly Elfride became conscious of what she was doing, and was
painfully confused.
'What were you so intent upon in me?' he inquired.
'As far as I was thinking of you at all, I was thinking how clever
you are,' she said, with a want of premeditation that was
startling in its honesty and simplicity.
Feeling restless now that she had so unwittingly spoken, she arose
and stepped to the window, having heard the voices of her father
and Mrs. Swancourt coming up below the terrace. 'Here they are,'
she said, going out. Knight walked out upon the lawn behind her.
She stood upon the edge of the terrace, close to the stone
balustrade, and looked towards the sun, hanging over a glade just
now fair as Tempe's vale, up which her father was walking.
Knight could not help looking at her. The sun was within ten
degrees of the horizon, and its warm light flooded her face and
heightened the bright rose colour of her cheeks to a vermilion
red, their moderate pink hue being only seen in its natural tone
where the cheek curved round into shadow. The ends of her hanging
hair softly dragged themselves backwards and forwards upon her
shoulder as each faint breeze thrust against or relinquished it.
Fringes and ribbons of her dress, moved by the same breeze, licked
like tongues upon the parts around them, and fluttering forward
from shady folds caught likewise their share of the lustrous
orange glow.
Mr. Swancourt shouted out a welcome to Knight from a distance of
about thirty yards, and after a few preliminary words proceeded to
a conversation of deep earnestness on Knight's fine old family
name, and theories as to lineage and intermarriage connected
therewith. Knight's portmanteau having in the meantime arrived,
they soon retired to prepare for dinner, which had been postponed
two hours later than the usual time of that meal.
An arrival was an event in the life of Elfride, now that they were
again in the country, and that of Knight necessarily an engrossing
one. And that evening she went to bed for the first time without
thinking of Stephen at all.
