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The Lifted Veil
by
CHAPTER II
Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged to each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take place early in the next spring. In spite of the certainty I had felt from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife, my constitutional timidity and distrust had continued to benumb me, and the words in which I had sometimes premeditated a confession of my love, had died away unuttered. The same conflict had gone on within me as before–the longing for an assurance of love from Bertha’s lips, the dread lest a word of contempt and denial should fall upon me like a corrosive acid. What was the conviction of a distant necessity to me? I trembled under a present glance, I hungered after a present joy, I was clogged and chilled by a present fear. And so the days passed on: I witnessed Bertha’s engagement and heard her marriage discussed as if I were under a conscious nightmare–knowing it was a dream that would vanish, but feeling stifled under the grasp of hard-clutching fingers.
When I was not in Bertha’s presence–and I was with her very often, for she continued to treat me with a playful patronage that wakened no jealousy in my brother–I spent my time chiefly in wandering, in strolling, or taking long rides while the daylight lasted, and then shutting myself up with my unread books; for books had lost the power of chaining my attention. My self-consciousness was heightened to that pitch of intensity in which our own emotions take the form of a drama which urges itself imperatively on our contemplation, and we begin to weep, less under the sense of our suffering than at the thought of it. I felt a sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot: the lot of a being finely organized for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to pleasure–to whom the idea of future evil robbed the present of its joy, and for whom the idea of future good did not still the uneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread. I went dumbly through that stage of the poet’s suffering, in which he feels the delicious pang of utterance, and makes an image of his sorrows.
I was left entirely without remonstrance concerning this dreamy wayward life: I knew my father’s thought about me: “That lad will never be good for anything in life: he may waste his years in an insignificant way on the income that falls to him: I shall not trouble myself about a career for him.”
One mild morning in the beginning of November, it happened that I was standing outside the portico patting lazy old Caesar, a Newfoundland almost blind with age, the only dog that ever took any notice of me–for the very dogs shunned me, and fawned on the happier people about me–when the groom brought up my brother’s horse which was to carry him to the hunt, and my brother himself appeared at the door, florid, broad-chested, and self-complacent, feeling what a good-natured fellow he was not to behave insolently to us all on the strength of his great advantages.
“Latimer, old boy,” he said to me in a tone of compassionate cordiality, “what a pity it is you don’t have a run with the hounds now and then! The finest thing in the world for low spirits!”
“Low spirits!” I thought bitterly, as he rode away; “that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows. It is to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dulness, healthy selfishness, good-tempered conceit–these are the keys to happiness.”