A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)
“M. M. appears and causes much guessing. It is praised and criticized, and I enjoy the fun, especially when friends say, 'I know you didn't write it, for you can't hide your peculiar style.”
-Alcott's journal entry, April 1877
“The unknown author - who, of whichever sex, writes in this instance with both the defects and the merits of a woman's pen - has given a new, fantastic dress to a world-old story.”
-Edward R. Burlingame
“We should judge, aften reading a hundred pages of this book, that it was written by a young person, probably a girl, with much literary facility and fluency, and an excellent grasp of plot, but with little experience of life . . . The language is stilted and dramatic sometimes, but never degenerates into slang or vulgarity. With advancing years and a larger experience the author may make her mark.”
-Godey's Lady's Book
“We have not much doubt that Julian Hawthorne is the author of A Modern Mephistopheles . . . The language is vigorous and clear, having a sculpturesque effect, and the sucession of periods and paragraphs is often so admirable that many pages together seem to be set to solemn rhythm.”
-The Atlantic Monthly
In 1876 Thomas Niles, the same partner of Roberts Brothers Publishing who suggest that Alcott write a novel for girls, had another great idea. A series of books published anonymously so that the public might have the fun of guessing the authors. The idea appealed to Alcott's sense of humor, and she was certainly no stranger to publishing under another name. For inspiration she turned to an old favorite, Goethe's Faust. Although she used the original title of A Long Fatal Love Chase for it, the two books are fairly different. ALFLC takes place in four countries, while AMM is set almost entirely in the one house.
In 1888 Alcott gave her publisher permission to reprint it with her name, along with "A Whisper in the Dark" to satisfy the curiosity of all the readers who wondered about Jo's sensation stories. The book came out posthumously.
Two epigraphs. One given to all the No Name Series - "Is the gentleman anonymous? Is he quite unknown?" from Daniel Deronda, ironic since so many of the authors were women. The other from Faust part 2 - “The Indescribable, Here it is done: The Woman-Soul leadeth us Upward and on!”
Chapter One
Without, a midwinter twilight, where wandering snowflakes eddied in the bitter wind between a leaden sky and frost-bound earth. Within, a garret; gloomy, bare, and cold as the bleak night coming down.
Felix Canaris, 19, attempts to kill himself by burning his rejected manuscript but is interrupted by Jasper Helwyze, who heard about him from the rejecting publisher. From the beginning Helwyze's motive is ambiguous - he says to himself that he wants excitement. On the other hand, he offers to hire Felix as a secretary for a month. Felix's mother was English and his father Greek, which leads him to kiss Helwyze's hand.
The chapter jumps to a month later. A noble library, secluded, warm, and still; the reposeful atmosphere that students love pervaded it; rare books lined its lofty walls: poets and philosophers looked down upon their work with immortal satisfaction on their marble countenances; and the two living occupants well became their sumptuous surroundings.
Helwyze leaned in a great chair beside a table strewn with books which curiously betrayed the bent of a strong mind made morbid by physical suffering. Doré’s “Dante” spread its awful pages before him; the old Greek tragedies were scattered about, and Goethe’s “Faust” was in his hand.
Felix agrees to continue his service to his “master.” Helwyze jokes that he only keeps him because he's damned good-looking. Also he's going to bring out Felix's book. The boy really wants fame. “Give me this and I am yours, body and soul; I have nothing else to offer.”
Chapter Two
The scene opens on a “vine-clad villa” where our beautiful Felix overheards the maiden Gladys singing. He wrote the verses and she came up with the air. They talk about his book and she says “Hereafter all you write may be more perfect in form but less true in spirit, because you will have the fear of the world, and loss of fame before your eyes.” She always sings best when alone.
He tells her how Helwyze was a wild rover until, at thirty, he had a bad fall, and his lover abandoned him. Her husband is dead now, and she still loves Helwyze but he won't forgive her. Gladys is troubled because although Felix names no names, she recognizes the woman as her friend.
If I remember correctly, the story's location is never specified. The English mother hints that it might take place in England.
Chapter Three
OLIVIA: Aw, look at the cute young things.
HELWYZE: And we're Mephistopheles and Martha.
OLIVIA: Don't call me Martha. What hold do you have over that guy, anyway?
HELWYZE: He's my Greek slave.
OLIVIA: And when you get tired of him?
HELWYZE: If you care so much why don't you MARRY HIM?
OLIVIA: Fine, I will! Then you can marry Gladys.
HELWYZE: “Bah! what have I to do with love? Thank Heaven my passions are all dead, else life would be a hell, not the purgatory it is.”
Also, they are cousins, which I had forgotten. I only read this book once, back around 2010. Cleolinda once wrote in a post - I think a recap of Varney the Vampire - that part of the reason so many 19th century novels have married cousins is that girls and boys didn't often mix together when they were young. So if you want your OTP to have a history together, they're related. Cousin marriages IRL were sometimes to keep titles, land, and money in the same family, like Mary and Matthew in Downton Abbey. Abba Alcott's father pressured her to marry one of her cousins and the two clashed over it.
Chapter Four
HELWYZE: You should get married.
FELIX: Whoa now.
HELWYZE: I gave you success, you should give me obedience.
FELIX: Okay, but I get to choose my wife!
HELWYZE: You're already wooing Gladys.
FELIX: Am not!
HELWYZE: Or do you prefer Olivia?
FELIX: why are you like this
Chapter Five
Felix exits the house to propose to Olivia. “LOL no,” she says. Helwyze takes the chance to chat with Gladys.
“Musing here alone? Not sorrowfully, I hope?”
“I never feel alone, sir, and seldom sorrowful.”
“‘ They never are alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts;’ yet it would not be unnatural if you felt both sad and solitary, so young, so isolated, in this big, bad world of ours.”
“A beautiful and happy world to me, sir. Even loneliness is pleasant, because with it comes- liberty.”
He asks if she would be interested in being companion to an invalid, and she responds yes indeed, not understanding that he means himself, and then realizing it. Still she agrees and begins right away to play and sing.
Chapter Six
So the days went by, fast and fair in outward seeming, while an undercurrent of unquiet emotion rolled below. Helwyze made no sign of impatience, but silently forwarded his wish, by devoting himself to Olivia; thereby making a green oasis in the desert of her life, and leaving the young pair to themselves.
After Olivia's rejection Felix hangs out more with Gladys. But he insists to Helwyze that he won't marry her, because he can't lie about loving her. “Yet that is the commonest, most easily forgiven falsehood a man can utter. Is it so hard for you to deceive?” the master replies, foreshadowing the future reveal. And if Felix won't marry her, then he will. Felix objects, they argue briefly, and Felix storms out of the room.
Chapter Seven
The next morning Felix runs into Gladys outside. Someone left a string of pearls in her work-basket, and she thinks the gift is from him. He informs her it's from Helwyze, “a generous master,” and she protests she has no master.
“May I be your master, Gladys?”
“Not even you.”
“Your slave, then?”
“Never that.”
“Your lover?”
“Yes.”
“But I can give you nothing except myself.”
“Love is enough;” and finding his arms about her, his face, warm and wistful, close to hers, Gladys bent to give and take the first kiss, which was all they had to bestow upon each other.
Felix suggests she keep the pearls as a wedding gift, and she asks why brides wear pearls when they mean tears. I didn't know that?
Felix announces it to Helwyze, who asks him if he told Gladys the secret sin. “I have not told her; and I will not, till I have atoned for the meanest of them. May I ask you to be silent also for her sake?” Helwyze doesn't answer the question, only says “You are wise.”
They get married a week later, the first Sunday in September.
Chapter Eight
It's October and husband and wife return home. Gladys is delighted with her rooms, one scarlet and one white. And there's even a kind of sunroom filled with plants.
She explores the rest of the house. One recess held a single picture glowing with the warm splendor of the East. A divan, a Persian rug, an amber-mouthed nargileh [a hookah], and a Turkish coffee service, all gold and scarlet, completed the illusion. In another shadowy nook tinkled a little fountain guarded by one white-limbed nymph, who seemed to watch with placid interest the curious sea-creatures peopling the basin below. The third showed a study-chair, a shaded lamp, and certain favorite books, left open, as if to be taken up again when the mood returned. In one of these places Gladys lingered with fresh compassion stirring at her heart, though it looked the least inviting of them all. Behind the curtains of a window looking out upon the broad street on which the mansion faced stood a single chair, and nothing more.
She finds the guys in the library, looking over a manuscript. Helwyze asks if she's jealous of her husband's poetry, and she says no, she sits next to him and copies the verses. Felix shows her his writing nook; it's too cold and dark for her.
They have dinner and Gladys surprises them by saying grace. She drinks water and Felix drinks wine. After she immediately goes to the piano.
FELIX: “I, too, shall work, and give Gladys reason to be proud of me, if nothing more.”
HELWYZE: “I see: it is the old passion under a new name. May your virtuous aspirations be blest!”
Chapter Nine
The public takes a brief interest in Felix's sudden marriage. He shuts himself up with his pen, occasionally taking Gladys to a play or ball. She devotes herself to Helwyze and explores his library.
Though not a scholar, in the learned sense of the word, he had the eager, sceptical nature which interrogates all things, yet believes only in itself. This had kept him roaming solitarily up and down the earth for years, observing men and manners; now it drove him to books; and, as suffering and seclusion wrought upon body and brain, his choice of mute companions changed from the higher, healthier class to those who, like himself, leaned towards the darker, sadder side of human nature. Lawless here, as elsewhere, he let his mind wander at will, as once he had let his heart, learning too late that both are sacred gifts, and cannot safely be tampered with.
They read Montaigne, Voltaire, Carlyle, Heine and De Quincy. Also George Sand, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, Shakespeare, Browning, Byron, and Poe. My goodness. And not only do they read but they discuss their reading.
This was the double life Gladys now began to lead. Heart and mind were divided between the two, who soon absorbed every feeling, every thought. To the younger man she was a teacher, to the elder a pupil; in the one world she ruled, in the other served; unconsciously Canaris stirred emotion to its depths, consciously Helwyze stimulated intellect to its heights; while the soul of the woman, receiving no food from either, seemed to sit apart in the wilderness of its new experience, tempted by evil as well as sustained by good spirits, who guard their own.
Helwyze begins to grow jealous of Felix's larger influence on her and tries to gift her a treasure from his collection. She rejects a gauzy veil and a bracelet with the nine muses. She's delighted by the carvings of Hindoo [sic] gods particularly “Kama, the Indian Cupid, bearing his bow of sugar-cane strung with bees, to typify love’s sting as well as sweetness.”
Thus the conversation turns to religion. He's been reading about Buddha and is impartial to all gods. She's a true Christian, saying “Sir, I know little about those older religions; I am not wise enough even to argue about my own: I can only believe in it, love it, and hold fast to it, since it is all I need.” His atheisism dismays her, and she insists he'll believe someday.
LMA describes Thalia as having a broken nose like Henry Fielding's Amelia. She read the novel in 18-- and “thought it coarse and queer.” I for one enjoy Fielding. Fanny Matthews and the educated Mrs. Atkinson are both interesting characters.
Chapter Ten
“Where is Felix?” she asks to change the subject. Helwyze says he might have fallen asleep and she should wake him. She does and he complains about writing. “It torments me, and I cannot escape from it; because, though it is all here in my brain, it will not be expressed in words.” She tells him to rest.
While he does so Helwyze reads the manuscript to her. A metrical romance, such as many a lover might have imagined in the first inspiration of the great passion, but few could have painted with such skill. A very human story, but all the truer and sweeter for that fact. The men and women in it were full of vitality and color; their faces spoke, hearts beat, words glowed; and they seemed to live before the listener’s eye, as if endowed with eloquent flesh and blood. Gladys thinks the heroine sort of resembles her. The hero's death makes her cry. Felix is like, hey, this might be good after all. She suggests the heroine should die instead and Helwyze disagrees but Felix decides to change it.
Chapter Eleven
The book is published and Felix basks in praise. He goes out more and comes home late. Gladys says he talks in his sleep but only in French and Italian which she doesn't understand. Oh no, he's been gambling. She's upset that Helwyze encourages all his vices. “I will defend you, if he tries to harm the husband God has given me,” she says. Felix confesses he wants to break away and she agrees. But “While he lives I must stay, if he wants me. I cannot be ungrateful." Come on, Felix, you don't owe someone your whole life even if he did save you.
She solves the problem of money by saying that she can embroider and make lace and he can translate some Spanish book. They set to work together, conversing happily.
Helwyze was quick to perceive the new change which came over Felix, the happy peace which had returned to Gladys. He “did care, and he did find out,” what the young people were about. At first he smiled at the girl’s delusion in believing that she could fix a nature so mercurial as that of Canaris, but did not wonder at his yielding, for a time at least, to such tender persuasion; and, calling them “a pair of innocents,” Helwyze let them alone, till he discovered that his power was in danger.
It's now March. Helwyze writes to Olivia that he wants her to return because he's “deadly dull.”
Chapter Twelve
Gladys tried to welcome the new guest cordially, as an unsuspicious dove might have welcomed a falcon to its peaceful cote; but her heart sunk when she found her happy quiet sorely disturbed, her husband’s place deserted, and the old glamour slowly returning to separate them, in spite of all her gentle arts. For Canaris, feeling quite safe in the sincere affection which now bound him to his wife, was foolhardy in his desire to show Olivia how heart-whole he had become. This piqued her irresistibly, because Helwyze was looking on, and she would win his approval at any cost. So these three, from divers motives, joined together to teach poor Gladys how much a woman can suffer with silent fortitude and make no sign.
Helwyze comes across Gladys watering plants and tells her she's just like the cyclamen. “Out of these strong sombre leaves rises a wraith-like blossom, with white, softly folded petals, a rosy color on its modest face, and a most sweet perfume for those whose sense is fine enough to perceive it. Most of all, perhaps, it resembles you in this,- it hides its heart, and, if one tries to look too closely, there is danger of snapping the slender stem.”
He says something about comforting her, and she responds that any sorrow of hers is between her and God, telling him to mind his own business in the politest way possible.
Later when she mentions having trouble sleeping he gives her hashish. At dinner Felix compliments her looks. “Not Olivia in all her splendor is arrayed so much to my taste as you, my Sancta Simplicitas.”
Olivia comes overs and guess what they decide to do? Tableux!
Chapter Thirteen
A series from Tennyson with Gladys singing the verses. First, Olivia as Enid. Second, Olivia as Merlin and Gladys as Vivien sitting on her lap. Props to LMA for putting subtext in every pairing within the OT4. “She is so unlike herself, I do not know her,” says Felix. Then Olivia as Guinevere in the nunnery and Gladys as a novice.
Finally, The “lily maid of Astolat” could not have looked more wan and weird than Gladys, as she stood in her trailing robes of dead white, with loosely gathered locks, hands clasped over the gay bit of tapestry which simulated the cover of the shield, eyes that seemed to see something invisible to those about her, and began her song, in a veiled voice, at once so sad and solemn, that Helwyze held his breath, and Canaris felt as if she called him from beyond the grave.
Gladys faints and then goes to bed. Helwyze tells Olivia about the hashish. “How dared you?” she says.
Then Helwyze did an evil thing,- a thing few men could or would have done. He deliberately violated the sanctity of a human soul, robbing it alike of its most secret and most precious thoughts. Hasheesh had lulled the senses which guarded the treasure; now the magnetism of a potent will forced the reluctant lips to give up the key.
He learns that Gladys doesn't trust him, she loves and forgives Felix, and she hopes for freedom - “When you die.” Ouch.
Chapter Fourteen
The next morning Gladys remembers the acting but not the interrogation. Olivia catches her singing a lullaby and realizes she's pregnant, which reminds Olivia of her own baby who died. Their friendship is renewed.
Helwyze and Gladys have a slightly repetitive conversation about themselves. Felix comes in singing “one of the few perfect love songs in the world,- Che farò senza Eurydice.”
Chapter Fifteen
Felix and Gladys return from a vacation at the seaside. It's September again. Felix notices that Helwyze is in poor health. The narration tells us he's missed Gladys.
Felix declares he shall write a novel or a play; Helwyze suggests the play since he doesn't have the experience to write a novel, citing Goethe. “The novel goes slowly forward, the drama must hasten. In the novel, some degree of scope may be allowed to chance; but it must be led and guided by the sentiments of the personages. Fate, on the other hand, which, by means of outward, unconnected circumstances, carries forward men, without their own concurrence, to an unforeseen catastrophe, can only have place in the drama. Chance may produce pathetic situations, but not tragic ones.”
Then he says Felix would make a good actor because he's dramatic, which is true but the pot calling the kettle black.
The two are very happy with each other after their second honeymoon, making Helwyze so jealous he considers telling Gladys the big secret. He sees her reading The Scarlet Letter. She admires Hester for not lying about her sin and pities Dimmesdale while detesting his deceit. She doesn't like Roger at all. “The keeping of the secret makes the romance; the confession of it is the moral, showing how falsehood can ruin a life, and truth only save it at the last.” No wonder people speculated Julian Hawthorne wrote this.
Blah blah Helwyze knows the big secret and Gladys tells him not to tell her.
Chapter Sixteen
Felix overhears the end of their conversation, gets angry, and storms out of the house, wandering the city. He returns to find Gladys sleeping, noting that her wedding ring has grown too large for her hand, even though she's pregnant. He's unable to fall asleep and heads to the library. He hears Helwyze talking in his sleep and almost kills him with a drug overdose but Gladys arrives in time to stop him. Then he makes his confession: Helwyze wrote the majority of the poems in his first book and the entirity of his second. How very meta. He wanted to confess when the poems got so much praise but Helwyze objected.
“It was so paltry, weak, and selfish. You must despise me,” he says. I feel like I've heard that first sentence somewhere before or I'm having deja vu. Maybe I'm thinking of Wentworth's letter.
She responds that “I do despise the sin, not the dear sinner who repents and is an honest man again.”
Helwyze's valet Stern comes in the library and suggests Felix take her upstairs for she looks half-dead.
Chapter Seventeen
Opens with Stern telling Helwyze that it's past two and Canaris Jr. arrived at dawn. “Precipitate, like his father,” he says. He gets his breakfast and Olivia comes in to ask if he knows what's bothering the new father. Then she picks up the book where Felix crossed out his name and wrote Helwyze's. She had already guessed it because she recognized some of the lovering as things Helwyze once said to her.
Gladys and the boy both die. “I have murdered both,” Felix says.
Chapter Eighteen
“For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come. Is this one?” was the vague feeling, rather than thought, of which Helwyze was dimly conscious, as he lay in what seemed a grave, so cold, so dead he felt; so powerless and pent, in what he fancied was his coffin. He remembered the slow rising of a tide of helplessness which chilled his blood and benumbed his brain, till the last idea to be distinguished was, “I am dying: shall I meet Gladys?” then came oblivion, and now, what was this?
He's now paralyzed and the doctor says his brain will soon follow. He's appalled. Olivia on the other hand has changed from a “haughty queen” to “a sad woman, wearing for her sole ornaments constancy and love.”
Felix tells Helwyze he's leaving to find whatever honest work he can. He refuses to take anything from his former master and gives him a lock of Gladys's hair. Helwyze laments that he ever dared to play Mephistopheles. His closing line rivals Philip Tempest's: “Life before was Purgatory, now it is Hell; because I loved her, and I have no hope to follow and find her again.”
What a downer ending, eh? I know Gladys's death is following the scource material, but Olivia is stuck nursing a man who doesn't love her back and then mourning his death. She apparently has no interests outside of him. Felix fares best of the four, and he's a widower with a dead baby.
This entry was originally posted at https://nocowardsoul.dreamwidth.org/43086.html
-Alcott's journal entry, April 1877
“The unknown author - who, of whichever sex, writes in this instance with both the defects and the merits of a woman's pen - has given a new, fantastic dress to a world-old story.”
-Edward R. Burlingame
“We should judge, aften reading a hundred pages of this book, that it was written by a young person, probably a girl, with much literary facility and fluency, and an excellent grasp of plot, but with little experience of life . . . The language is stilted and dramatic sometimes, but never degenerates into slang or vulgarity. With advancing years and a larger experience the author may make her mark.”
-Godey's Lady's Book
“We have not much doubt that Julian Hawthorne is the author of A Modern Mephistopheles . . . The language is vigorous and clear, having a sculpturesque effect, and the sucession of periods and paragraphs is often so admirable that many pages together seem to be set to solemn rhythm.”
-The Atlantic Monthly
In 1876 Thomas Niles, the same partner of Roberts Brothers Publishing who suggest that Alcott write a novel for girls, had another great idea. A series of books published anonymously so that the public might have the fun of guessing the authors. The idea appealed to Alcott's sense of humor, and she was certainly no stranger to publishing under another name. For inspiration she turned to an old favorite, Goethe's Faust. Although she used the original title of A Long Fatal Love Chase for it, the two books are fairly different. ALFLC takes place in four countries, while AMM is set almost entirely in the one house.
In 1888 Alcott gave her publisher permission to reprint it with her name, along with "A Whisper in the Dark" to satisfy the curiosity of all the readers who wondered about Jo's sensation stories. The book came out posthumously.
Two epigraphs. One given to all the No Name Series - "Is the gentleman anonymous? Is he quite unknown?" from Daniel Deronda, ironic since so many of the authors were women. The other from Faust part 2 - “The Indescribable, Here it is done: The Woman-Soul leadeth us Upward and on!”
Chapter One
Without, a midwinter twilight, where wandering snowflakes eddied in the bitter wind between a leaden sky and frost-bound earth. Within, a garret; gloomy, bare, and cold as the bleak night coming down.
Felix Canaris, 19, attempts to kill himself by burning his rejected manuscript but is interrupted by Jasper Helwyze, who heard about him from the rejecting publisher. From the beginning Helwyze's motive is ambiguous - he says to himself that he wants excitement. On the other hand, he offers to hire Felix as a secretary for a month. Felix's mother was English and his father Greek, which leads him to kiss Helwyze's hand.
The chapter jumps to a month later. A noble library, secluded, warm, and still; the reposeful atmosphere that students love pervaded it; rare books lined its lofty walls: poets and philosophers looked down upon their work with immortal satisfaction on their marble countenances; and the two living occupants well became their sumptuous surroundings.
Helwyze leaned in a great chair beside a table strewn with books which curiously betrayed the bent of a strong mind made morbid by physical suffering. Doré’s “Dante” spread its awful pages before him; the old Greek tragedies were scattered about, and Goethe’s “Faust” was in his hand.
Felix agrees to continue his service to his “master.” Helwyze jokes that he only keeps him because he's damned good-looking. Also he's going to bring out Felix's book. The boy really wants fame. “Give me this and I am yours, body and soul; I have nothing else to offer.”
Chapter Two
The scene opens on a “vine-clad villa” where our beautiful Felix overheards the maiden Gladys singing. He wrote the verses and she came up with the air. They talk about his book and she says “Hereafter all you write may be more perfect in form but less true in spirit, because you will have the fear of the world, and loss of fame before your eyes.” She always sings best when alone.
He tells her how Helwyze was a wild rover until, at thirty, he had a bad fall, and his lover abandoned him. Her husband is dead now, and she still loves Helwyze but he won't forgive her. Gladys is troubled because although Felix names no names, she recognizes the woman as her friend.
If I remember correctly, the story's location is never specified. The English mother hints that it might take place in England.
Chapter Three
OLIVIA: Aw, look at the cute young things.
HELWYZE: And we're Mephistopheles and Martha.
OLIVIA: Don't call me Martha. What hold do you have over that guy, anyway?
HELWYZE: He's my Greek slave.
OLIVIA: And when you get tired of him?
HELWYZE: If you care so much why don't you MARRY HIM?
OLIVIA: Fine, I will! Then you can marry Gladys.
HELWYZE: “Bah! what have I to do with love? Thank Heaven my passions are all dead, else life would be a hell, not the purgatory it is.”
Also, they are cousins, which I had forgotten. I only read this book once, back around 2010. Cleolinda once wrote in a post - I think a recap of Varney the Vampire - that part of the reason so many 19th century novels have married cousins is that girls and boys didn't often mix together when they were young. So if you want your OTP to have a history together, they're related. Cousin marriages IRL were sometimes to keep titles, land, and money in the same family, like Mary and Matthew in Downton Abbey. Abba Alcott's father pressured her to marry one of her cousins and the two clashed over it.
Chapter Four
HELWYZE: You should get married.
FELIX: Whoa now.
HELWYZE: I gave you success, you should give me obedience.
FELIX: Okay, but I get to choose my wife!
HELWYZE: You're already wooing Gladys.
FELIX: Am not!
HELWYZE: Or do you prefer Olivia?
FELIX: why are you like this
Chapter Five
Felix exits the house to propose to Olivia. “LOL no,” she says. Helwyze takes the chance to chat with Gladys.
“Musing here alone? Not sorrowfully, I hope?”
“I never feel alone, sir, and seldom sorrowful.”
“‘ They never are alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts;’ yet it would not be unnatural if you felt both sad and solitary, so young, so isolated, in this big, bad world of ours.”
“A beautiful and happy world to me, sir. Even loneliness is pleasant, because with it comes- liberty.”
He asks if she would be interested in being companion to an invalid, and she responds yes indeed, not understanding that he means himself, and then realizing it. Still she agrees and begins right away to play and sing.
Chapter Six
So the days went by, fast and fair in outward seeming, while an undercurrent of unquiet emotion rolled below. Helwyze made no sign of impatience, but silently forwarded his wish, by devoting himself to Olivia; thereby making a green oasis in the desert of her life, and leaving the young pair to themselves.
After Olivia's rejection Felix hangs out more with Gladys. But he insists to Helwyze that he won't marry her, because he can't lie about loving her. “Yet that is the commonest, most easily forgiven falsehood a man can utter. Is it so hard for you to deceive?” the master replies, foreshadowing the future reveal. And if Felix won't marry her, then he will. Felix objects, they argue briefly, and Felix storms out of the room.
Chapter Seven
The next morning Felix runs into Gladys outside. Someone left a string of pearls in her work-basket, and she thinks the gift is from him. He informs her it's from Helwyze, “a generous master,” and she protests she has no master.
“May I be your master, Gladys?”
“Not even you.”
“Your slave, then?”
“Never that.”
“Your lover?”
“Yes.”
“But I can give you nothing except myself.”
“Love is enough;” and finding his arms about her, his face, warm and wistful, close to hers, Gladys bent to give and take the first kiss, which was all they had to bestow upon each other.
Felix suggests she keep the pearls as a wedding gift, and she asks why brides wear pearls when they mean tears. I didn't know that?
Felix announces it to Helwyze, who asks him if he told Gladys the secret sin. “I have not told her; and I will not, till I have atoned for the meanest of them. May I ask you to be silent also for her sake?” Helwyze doesn't answer the question, only says “You are wise.”
They get married a week later, the first Sunday in September.
Chapter Eight
It's October and husband and wife return home. Gladys is delighted with her rooms, one scarlet and one white. And there's even a kind of sunroom filled with plants.
She explores the rest of the house. One recess held a single picture glowing with the warm splendor of the East. A divan, a Persian rug, an amber-mouthed nargileh [a hookah], and a Turkish coffee service, all gold and scarlet, completed the illusion. In another shadowy nook tinkled a little fountain guarded by one white-limbed nymph, who seemed to watch with placid interest the curious sea-creatures peopling the basin below. The third showed a study-chair, a shaded lamp, and certain favorite books, left open, as if to be taken up again when the mood returned. In one of these places Gladys lingered with fresh compassion stirring at her heart, though it looked the least inviting of them all. Behind the curtains of a window looking out upon the broad street on which the mansion faced stood a single chair, and nothing more.
She finds the guys in the library, looking over a manuscript. Helwyze asks if she's jealous of her husband's poetry, and she says no, she sits next to him and copies the verses. Felix shows her his writing nook; it's too cold and dark for her.
They have dinner and Gladys surprises them by saying grace. She drinks water and Felix drinks wine. After she immediately goes to the piano.
FELIX: “I, too, shall work, and give Gladys reason to be proud of me, if nothing more.”
HELWYZE: “I see: it is the old passion under a new name. May your virtuous aspirations be blest!”
Chapter Nine
The public takes a brief interest in Felix's sudden marriage. He shuts himself up with his pen, occasionally taking Gladys to a play or ball. She devotes herself to Helwyze and explores his library.
Though not a scholar, in the learned sense of the word, he had the eager, sceptical nature which interrogates all things, yet believes only in itself. This had kept him roaming solitarily up and down the earth for years, observing men and manners; now it drove him to books; and, as suffering and seclusion wrought upon body and brain, his choice of mute companions changed from the higher, healthier class to those who, like himself, leaned towards the darker, sadder side of human nature. Lawless here, as elsewhere, he let his mind wander at will, as once he had let his heart, learning too late that both are sacred gifts, and cannot safely be tampered with.
They read Montaigne, Voltaire, Carlyle, Heine and De Quincy. Also George Sand, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, Shakespeare, Browning, Byron, and Poe. My goodness. And not only do they read but they discuss their reading.
This was the double life Gladys now began to lead. Heart and mind were divided between the two, who soon absorbed every feeling, every thought. To the younger man she was a teacher, to the elder a pupil; in the one world she ruled, in the other served; unconsciously Canaris stirred emotion to its depths, consciously Helwyze stimulated intellect to its heights; while the soul of the woman, receiving no food from either, seemed to sit apart in the wilderness of its new experience, tempted by evil as well as sustained by good spirits, who guard their own.
Helwyze begins to grow jealous of Felix's larger influence on her and tries to gift her a treasure from his collection. She rejects a gauzy veil and a bracelet with the nine muses. She's delighted by the carvings of Hindoo [sic] gods particularly “Kama, the Indian Cupid, bearing his bow of sugar-cane strung with bees, to typify love’s sting as well as sweetness.”
Thus the conversation turns to religion. He's been reading about Buddha and is impartial to all gods. She's a true Christian, saying “Sir, I know little about those older religions; I am not wise enough even to argue about my own: I can only believe in it, love it, and hold fast to it, since it is all I need.” His atheisism dismays her, and she insists he'll believe someday.
LMA describes Thalia as having a broken nose like Henry Fielding's Amelia. She read the novel in 18-- and “thought it coarse and queer.” I for one enjoy Fielding. Fanny Matthews and the educated Mrs. Atkinson are both interesting characters.
Chapter Ten
“Where is Felix?” she asks to change the subject. Helwyze says he might have fallen asleep and she should wake him. She does and he complains about writing. “It torments me, and I cannot escape from it; because, though it is all here in my brain, it will not be expressed in words.” She tells him to rest.
While he does so Helwyze reads the manuscript to her. A metrical romance, such as many a lover might have imagined in the first inspiration of the great passion, but few could have painted with such skill. A very human story, but all the truer and sweeter for that fact. The men and women in it were full of vitality and color; their faces spoke, hearts beat, words glowed; and they seemed to live before the listener’s eye, as if endowed with eloquent flesh and blood. Gladys thinks the heroine sort of resembles her. The hero's death makes her cry. Felix is like, hey, this might be good after all. She suggests the heroine should die instead and Helwyze disagrees but Felix decides to change it.
Chapter Eleven
The book is published and Felix basks in praise. He goes out more and comes home late. Gladys says he talks in his sleep but only in French and Italian which she doesn't understand. Oh no, he's been gambling. She's upset that Helwyze encourages all his vices. “I will defend you, if he tries to harm the husband God has given me,” she says. Felix confesses he wants to break away and she agrees. But “While he lives I must stay, if he wants me. I cannot be ungrateful." Come on, Felix, you don't owe someone your whole life even if he did save you.
She solves the problem of money by saying that she can embroider and make lace and he can translate some Spanish book. They set to work together, conversing happily.
Helwyze was quick to perceive the new change which came over Felix, the happy peace which had returned to Gladys. He “did care, and he did find out,” what the young people were about. At first he smiled at the girl’s delusion in believing that she could fix a nature so mercurial as that of Canaris, but did not wonder at his yielding, for a time at least, to such tender persuasion; and, calling them “a pair of innocents,” Helwyze let them alone, till he discovered that his power was in danger.
It's now March. Helwyze writes to Olivia that he wants her to return because he's “deadly dull.”
Chapter Twelve
Gladys tried to welcome the new guest cordially, as an unsuspicious dove might have welcomed a falcon to its peaceful cote; but her heart sunk when she found her happy quiet sorely disturbed, her husband’s place deserted, and the old glamour slowly returning to separate them, in spite of all her gentle arts. For Canaris, feeling quite safe in the sincere affection which now bound him to his wife, was foolhardy in his desire to show Olivia how heart-whole he had become. This piqued her irresistibly, because Helwyze was looking on, and she would win his approval at any cost. So these three, from divers motives, joined together to teach poor Gladys how much a woman can suffer with silent fortitude and make no sign.
Helwyze comes across Gladys watering plants and tells her she's just like the cyclamen. “Out of these strong sombre leaves rises a wraith-like blossom, with white, softly folded petals, a rosy color on its modest face, and a most sweet perfume for those whose sense is fine enough to perceive it. Most of all, perhaps, it resembles you in this,- it hides its heart, and, if one tries to look too closely, there is danger of snapping the slender stem.”
He says something about comforting her, and she responds that any sorrow of hers is between her and God, telling him to mind his own business in the politest way possible.
Later when she mentions having trouble sleeping he gives her hashish. At dinner Felix compliments her looks. “Not Olivia in all her splendor is arrayed so much to my taste as you, my Sancta Simplicitas.”
Olivia comes overs and guess what they decide to do? Tableux!
Chapter Thirteen
A series from Tennyson with Gladys singing the verses. First, Olivia as Enid. Second, Olivia as Merlin and Gladys as Vivien sitting on her lap. Props to LMA for putting subtext in every pairing within the OT4. “She is so unlike herself, I do not know her,” says Felix. Then Olivia as Guinevere in the nunnery and Gladys as a novice.
Finally, The “lily maid of Astolat” could not have looked more wan and weird than Gladys, as she stood in her trailing robes of dead white, with loosely gathered locks, hands clasped over the gay bit of tapestry which simulated the cover of the shield, eyes that seemed to see something invisible to those about her, and began her song, in a veiled voice, at once so sad and solemn, that Helwyze held his breath, and Canaris felt as if she called him from beyond the grave.
Gladys faints and then goes to bed. Helwyze tells Olivia about the hashish. “How dared you?” she says.
Then Helwyze did an evil thing,- a thing few men could or would have done. He deliberately violated the sanctity of a human soul, robbing it alike of its most secret and most precious thoughts. Hasheesh had lulled the senses which guarded the treasure; now the magnetism of a potent will forced the reluctant lips to give up the key.
He learns that Gladys doesn't trust him, she loves and forgives Felix, and she hopes for freedom - “When you die.” Ouch.
Chapter Fourteen
The next morning Gladys remembers the acting but not the interrogation. Olivia catches her singing a lullaby and realizes she's pregnant, which reminds Olivia of her own baby who died. Their friendship is renewed.
Helwyze and Gladys have a slightly repetitive conversation about themselves. Felix comes in singing “one of the few perfect love songs in the world,- Che farò senza Eurydice.”
Chapter Fifteen
Felix and Gladys return from a vacation at the seaside. It's September again. Felix notices that Helwyze is in poor health. The narration tells us he's missed Gladys.
Felix declares he shall write a novel or a play; Helwyze suggests the play since he doesn't have the experience to write a novel, citing Goethe. “The novel goes slowly forward, the drama must hasten. In the novel, some degree of scope may be allowed to chance; but it must be led and guided by the sentiments of the personages. Fate, on the other hand, which, by means of outward, unconnected circumstances, carries forward men, without their own concurrence, to an unforeseen catastrophe, can only have place in the drama. Chance may produce pathetic situations, but not tragic ones.”
Then he says Felix would make a good actor because he's dramatic, which is true but the pot calling the kettle black.
The two are very happy with each other after their second honeymoon, making Helwyze so jealous he considers telling Gladys the big secret. He sees her reading The Scarlet Letter. She admires Hester for not lying about her sin and pities Dimmesdale while detesting his deceit. She doesn't like Roger at all. “The keeping of the secret makes the romance; the confession of it is the moral, showing how falsehood can ruin a life, and truth only save it at the last.” No wonder people speculated Julian Hawthorne wrote this.
Blah blah Helwyze knows the big secret and Gladys tells him not to tell her.
Chapter Sixteen
Felix overhears the end of their conversation, gets angry, and storms out of the house, wandering the city. He returns to find Gladys sleeping, noting that her wedding ring has grown too large for her hand, even though she's pregnant. He's unable to fall asleep and heads to the library. He hears Helwyze talking in his sleep and almost kills him with a drug overdose but Gladys arrives in time to stop him. Then he makes his confession: Helwyze wrote the majority of the poems in his first book and the entirity of his second. How very meta. He wanted to confess when the poems got so much praise but Helwyze objected.
“It was so paltry, weak, and selfish. You must despise me,” he says. I feel like I've heard that first sentence somewhere before or I'm having deja vu. Maybe I'm thinking of Wentworth's letter.
She responds that “I do despise the sin, not the dear sinner who repents and is an honest man again.”
Helwyze's valet Stern comes in the library and suggests Felix take her upstairs for she looks half-dead.
Chapter Seventeen
Opens with Stern telling Helwyze that it's past two and Canaris Jr. arrived at dawn. “Precipitate, like his father,” he says. He gets his breakfast and Olivia comes in to ask if he knows what's bothering the new father. Then she picks up the book where Felix crossed out his name and wrote Helwyze's. She had already guessed it because she recognized some of the lovering as things Helwyze once said to her.
Gladys and the boy both die. “I have murdered both,” Felix says.
Chapter Eighteen
“For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come. Is this one?” was the vague feeling, rather than thought, of which Helwyze was dimly conscious, as he lay in what seemed a grave, so cold, so dead he felt; so powerless and pent, in what he fancied was his coffin. He remembered the slow rising of a tide of helplessness which chilled his blood and benumbed his brain, till the last idea to be distinguished was, “I am dying: shall I meet Gladys?” then came oblivion, and now, what was this?
He's now paralyzed and the doctor says his brain will soon follow. He's appalled. Olivia on the other hand has changed from a “haughty queen” to “a sad woman, wearing for her sole ornaments constancy and love.”
Felix tells Helwyze he's leaving to find whatever honest work he can. He refuses to take anything from his former master and gives him a lock of Gladys's hair. Helwyze laments that he ever dared to play Mephistopheles. His closing line rivals Philip Tempest's: “Life before was Purgatory, now it is Hell; because I loved her, and I have no hope to follow and find her again.”
What a downer ending, eh? I know Gladys's death is following the scource material, but Olivia is stuck nursing a man who doesn't love her back and then mourning his death. She apparently has no interests outside of him. Felix fares best of the four, and he's a widower with a dead baby.
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