Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Wickham came to Meryton the following week, the way frost comes: overnight, beautifully, and over everything.
He came in a lieutenant's coat, with Mr. Denny's introduction, and within three days the town had taken him to its heart as the most agreeable man the regiment had yet produced.
The Miss Bennets met him on the pavement by the milliner's, Lydia and Kitty having detected the new officer at ninety yards through a shop window; and Elizabeth could not honestly say his reputation lied.
The address was easy, the countenance fine.
But it was the technique she found herself reading, now that she had the vocabulary for it.
He attended to people in a particular way — turned toward them with his whole body when they spoke, as if the street existed only incidentally.
He remembered small details mid-sentence, weaving them back in: Lydia's mention of the ball, circled back to with a compliment for her taste; Kitty's name, used once precisely, not twice, so it did not feel performed.
He selected his interest carefully, like a man choosing which candles to light, and the effect was a warm and intimate room that you noticed only later had been constructed very fast from very little.
The charm had an architecture. She could see the joinery.
And when the name of Darcy was mentioned — Lydia produced it, naturally, Netherfield and its ball being the only news in the county — Elizabeth was watching his face.
The cloud, when it came, was done in three beats: first the check, barely a hesitation, the pause of a man who has heard a cue he had hoped not to hear; then the management, the glance that went briefly away and returned — reluctance visible enough to be readable, controlled enough to seem involuntary; and then the expression that settled, which was rueful, confiding, perfectly calibrated to the distance from a stranger.
It was beautiful work. She had never before understood how beautiful, because she had never before been looking at a performance with the eyes of someone who had recently seen the alternative.
"You are acquainted with Mr. Darcy?" Elizabeth asked.
"From the cradle, Miss Bennet." The smile was rueful, confiding, perfectly weighted.
"Our histories are — entangled. I had better say nothing; I would not for the world disturb a neighbourhood's good opinion of a man so" — the pause selected its word with closed eyes, like a connoisseur — "established.
Though I confess I had not expected to find him so warmly received here. He is not everywhere so fortunate."
A month ago that sentence would have unlocked her like a key.
Elizabeth made the calculation on the walk home, with Lydia ahead of her complaining to Kitty about the shortness of their new acquaintance, and found she could be precise about it.
A month ago she would have received Wickham's I had not expected to find him so warmly received as a gift.
It was built for her old door: it flattered her judgment, validated what she had already decided, invited her dislike of Darcy as a form of superior perception.
She would have walked home with her prejudice on his arm, feeling clever.
She would have told Jane that evening, with pleasure and at length, that she had encountered someone who saw what everyone else was too dazzled to see.
She would have received his confiding manner as sincerity, because a month ago she did not know what sincerity looked like when it had been carefully arranged for an audience.
She knew now. She had sat in a cold library and read a man's crossed-out lines.
She had seen what it looked like when a person revised himself in private with no one watching — the blots, the false starts, the honest murder of his own earlier sentence.
She had seen that a correction was the opposite of performance: you only struck through a line when there was no longer any advantage in keeping it.
Mr. Wickham had no struck-through lines.
He had arrived in Meryton complete, finished, sealed — a fair copy of himself from the first sentence.
His history with Darcy was perfectly phrased.
His reluctance was timed to the syllable.
Even his best effect — the confiding pause, the selected word — had the quality of a passage read so many times it no longer needed the page.
Now she watched it with a connoisseurship of her own, lately and expensively acquired, and found she had only one thought, and the thought would not be dislodged:
everything this man says is fair copy.
Fluent, finished, sealed, directed — and not a crossing-out anywhere about him.
No line ruled through; no I answered as a careful man and have learned what my carefulness is worth; no seam where a worse sentence had been honestly murdered.
She had seen what a man's hand looked like when it corrected itself in private, and she had seen what the correction cost, and what it bought.
Mr. Wickham's account of himself had no drafts.
It came into the world perfect, which meant it had been made for the world entire.
"You take no notice of our new officer, Lizzy," said Lydia on the walk home, scandalized. "He looked at you the whole time, and you stood there like Tuesday's milk."
"I noticed him exceedingly," said Elizabeth. "I am only grown slow in my reading, Lydia. I find I no longer trust a hand I cannot see the blots in."