Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (136 page)

The tall iron gates swung inward, and I saw a girl on a bicycle curve out, at the top of the sunny street. She glided, very clear, small, and defined, against the glowing wall, leaned aslant for the turn, and came shining down toward me. My heart leapt; she brought the whole thing into composition — the whole of that slumbrous, sunny street. The bright sky fell back into place, the red roofs, the blue shadows, the red and blue of the sign-board, the blue of the pigeons walking round my feet, the bright red of a postman’s cart. She was gliding toward me, growing and growing into the central figure. She descended and stood close to me.

“You?” I said. “What blessed chance brought you here?”

“Oh, I am your aunt’s companion,” she answered, “her niece, you know.”

“Then you must be a cousin,” I said.

“No; sister,” she corrected, “I assure you it’s sister. Ask anyone — ask your aunt.” I was braced into a state of puzzled buoyancy.

“But really, you know,” I said. She was smiling, standing up squarely to me, leaning a little back, swaying her machine with the motion of her body.

“It’s a little ridiculous, isn’t it?” she said.

“Very,” I answered, “but even at that, I don’t see — . And I’m not phenomenally dense.”

“Not phenomenally,” she answered.

“Considering that I’m not a — not a Dimensionist,” I bantered. “But you have really palmed yourself off on my aunt?”

“Really,” she answered, “she doesn’t know any better. She believes in me immensely. I am such a real Granger, there never was a more typical one. And we shake our heads together over you.” My bewilderment was infinite, but it stopped short of being unpleasant.

“Might I call on my aunt?” I asked. “It wouldn’t interfere — ”

“Oh, it wouldn’t interfere,” she said, “but we leave for Paris to-morrow. We are very busy. We — that is, my aunt; I am too young and too, too discreet — have a little salon where we hatch plots against half the régimes in Europe. You have no idea how Legitimate we are.”

“I don’t understand in the least,” I said; “not in the least.”

“Oh, you must take me literally if you want to understand,” she answered, “and you won’t do that. I tell you plainly that I find my account in unsettled states, and that I am unsettling them. Everywhere. You will see.”

She spoke with her monstrous dispassionateness, and I felt a shiver pass down my spine, very distinctly. I was thinking what she might do if ever she became in earnest, and if ever I chanced to stand in her way — as her husband, for example.

“I wish you would talk sense — for one blessed minute,” I said; “I want to get things a little settled in my mind.”

“Oh, I’ll talk sense,” she said, “by the hour, but you won’t listen. Take your friend, Churchill, now. He’s the man that we’re going to bring down. I mentioned it to you, and so….”

“But this is sheer madness,” I answered.

“Oh, no, it’s a bald statement of fact,” she went on.

“I don’t see how,” I said, involuntarily.

“Your article in the Hour will help. Every trifle will help,” she said. “Things that you understand and others that you cannot…. He is identifying himself with the Duc de Mersch. That looks nothing, but it’s fatal. There will be friendships … and desertions.”

“Ah!” I said. I had had an inkling of this, and it made me respect her insight into home politics. She must have been alluding to Gurnard, whom everybody — perhaps from fear — pretended to trust. She looked at me and smiled again. It was still the same smile; she was not radiant to-day and pensive to-morrow. “Do you know I don’t like to hear that?” I began.

“Oh, there’s irony in it, and pathos, and that sort of thing,” she said, with the remotest chill of mockery in her intonation. “He goes into it clean-handed enough and he only half likes it. But he sees that it’s his last chance. It’s not that he’s worn out — but he feels that his time has come — unless he does something. And so he’s going to do something. You understand?”

“Not in the least,” I said, light-heartedly.

“Oh, it’s the System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions — the Greenland affair of my friend de Mersch. Churchill is going to make a grand coup with that — to keep himself from slipping down hill, and, of course, it would add immensely to your national prestige. And he only half sees what de Mersch is or isn’t.”

“This is all Greek to me,” I muttered rebelliously.

“Oh, I know, I know,” she said. “But one has to do these things, and I want you to understand. So Churchill doesn’t like the whole business. But he’s under the shadow. He’s been thinking a good deal lately that his day is over — I’ll prove it to you in a minute — and so — oh, he’s going to make a desperate effort to get in touch with the spirit of the times that he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand. So he lets you get his atmosphere. That’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all,” I said, ironically.

“Of course he’d have liked to go on playing the stand-off to chaps like you and me,” she mimicked the tone and words of Fox himself.

“This is witchcraft,” I said. “How in the world do you know what Fox said to me?”

“Oh, I know,” she said. It seemed to me that she was playing me with all this nonsense — as if she must have known that I had a tenderness for her and were fooling me to the top of her bent. I tried to get my hook in.

“Now look here,” I said, “we must get things settled. You …”

She carried the speech off from under my nose.

“Oh, you won’t denounce me,” she said, “not any more than you did before; there are so many reasons. There would be a scene, and you’re afraid of scenes — and our aunt would back me up. She’d have to. My money has been reviving the glories of the Grangers. You can see, they’ve been regilding the gate.”

I looked almost involuntarily at the tall iron gates through which she had passed into my view. It was true enough — some of the scroll work was radiant with new gold.

“Well,” I said, “I will give you credit for not wishing to — to prey upon my aunt. But still …” I was trying to make the thing out. It struck me that she was an American of the kind that subsidizes households like that of Etchingham Manor. Perhaps my aunt had even forced her to take the family name, to save appearances. The old woman was capable of anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister. And I should not be thanked if I interfered. This skeleton of swift reasoning passed between word and word … “You are no sister of mine!” I was continuing my sentence quite amiably.

Her face brightened to greet someone approaching behind me.

“Did you hear him?” she said. “Did you hear him, Mr. Churchill. He casts off — he disowns me. Isn’t he a stern brother? And the quarrel is about nothing.” The impudence — or the presence of mind of it — overwhelmed me.

Churchill smiled pleasantly.

“Oh — one always quarrels about nothing,” Churchill answered. He spoke a few words to her; about my aunt; about the way her machine ran — that sort of thing. He behaved toward her as if she were an indulged child, impertinent with licence and welcome enough. He himself looked rather like the short-sighted, but indulgent and very meagre lion that peers at the unicorn across a plum-cake.

“So you are going back to Paris,” he said. “Miss Churchill will be sorry. And you are going to continue to — to break up the universe?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered, “we are going on with that, my aunt would never give it up. She couldn’t, you know.”

“You’ll get into trouble,” Churchill said, as if he were talking to a child intent on stealing apples. “And when is our turn coming? You’re going to restore the Stuarts, aren’t you?” It was his idea of badinage, amiable without consequence.

“Oh, not quite that,” she answered, “not quite that.” It was curious to watch her talking to another man — to a man, not a bagman like Callan. She put aside the face she always showed me and became at once what Churchill took her for — a spoiled child. At times she suggested a certain kind of American, and had that indefinable air of glib acquaintance with the names, and none of the spirit of tradition. One half expected her to utter rhapsodies about donjon-keeps.

“Oh, you know,” she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, “we shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like — ” Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the road, he had produced a big “C H U.” She had erased it with the point of her foot — ”like that,” she concluded.

He laid his head back and laughed almost heartily.

“Dear me,” he said, “I had no idea that I was so much in the way of — of yourself and Mrs. Granger.”

“Oh, it’s not only that,” she said, with a little smile and a cast of the eye to me. “But you’ve got to make way for the future.”

Churchill’s face changed suddenly. He looked rather old, and grey, and wintry, even a little frail. I understood what she was proving to me, and I rather disliked her for it. It seemed wantonly cruel to remind a man of what he was trying to forget.

“Ah, yes,” he said, with the gentle sadness of quite an old man, “I dare say there is more in that than you think. Even you will have to learn.”

“But not for a long time,” she interrupted audaciously.

“I hope not,” he answered, “I hope not.” She nodded and glided away.

We resumed the road in silence. Mr. Churchill smiled at his own thoughts once or twice.

“A most amusing …” he said at last. “She does me a great deal of good, a great deal.”

I think he meant that she distracted his thoughts.

“Does she always talk like that?” I asked. He had hardly spoken to me, and I felt as if I were interrupting a reverie — but I wanted to know.

“I should say she did,” he answered; “I should say so. But Miss Churchill says that she has a real genius for organization. She used to see a good deal of them, before they went to Paris, you know.”

“What are they doing there?” It was as if I were extracting secrets from a sleep-walker.

“Oh, they have a kind of a meeting place, for all kinds of Legitimist pretenders — French and Spanish, and that sort of thing. I believe Mrs. Granger takes it very seriously.” He looked at me suddenly. “But you ought to know more about it than I do,” he said.

“Oh, we see very little of each other,” I answered, “you could hardly call us brother and sister.”

“Oh, I see,” he answered. I don’t know what he saw. For myself, I saw nothing.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I succeeded in giving Fox what his journal wanted; I got the atmosphere of Churchill and his house, in a way that satisfied the people for whom it was meant. His house was a pleasant enough place, of the sort where they do you well, but not nauseously well. It stood in a tranquil countryside, and stood there modestly. Architecturally speaking, it was gently commonplace; one got used to it and liked it. And Churchill himself, when one had become accustomed to his manner, one liked very well — very well indeed. He had a dainty, dilettante mind, delicately balanced, with strong limitations, a fantastic temperament for a person in his walk of life — but sane, mind you, persistent. After a time, I amused myself with a theory that his heart was not in his work, that circumstance had driven him into the career of politics and ironical fate set him at its head. For myself, I had an intense contempt for the political mind, and it struck me that he had some of the same feeling. He had little personal quaintnesses, too, a deference, a modesty, an open-mindedness.

I was with him for the greater part of his weekend holiday; hung, perforce, about him whenever he had any leisure. I suppose he found me tiresome — but one has to do these things. He talked, and I talked; heavens, how we talked! He was almost always deferential, I almost always dogmatic; perhaps because the conversation kept on my own ground. Politics we never touched. I seemed to feel that if I broached them, I should be checked — politely, but very definitely. Perhaps he actually contrived to convey as much to me; perhaps I evolved the idea that if I were to say:

“What do you think about the ‘Greenland System’“ — he would answer:

“I try not to think about it,” or whatever gently closuring phrase his mind conceived. But I never did so; there were so many other topics.

He was then writing his Life of Cromwell and his mind was very full of his subject. Once he opened his heart, after delicately sounding me for signs of boredom. It happened, by the merest chance — one of those blind chances that inevitably lead in the future — that I, too, was obsessed at that moment by the Lord Oliver. A great many years before, when I was a yearling of tremendous plans, I had set about one of those glorious novels that one plans — a splendid thing with Old Noll as the hero or the heavy father. I had haunted the bookstalls in search of local colour and had wonderfully well invested my half-crowns. Thus a company of seventeenth century tracts, dog-eared, coverless, but very glorious under their dust, accompany me through life. One parts last with those relics of a golden age, and during my late convalescence I had reread many of them, the arbitrary half-remembered phrases suggesting all sorts of scenes — lamplight in squalid streets, trays full of weather-beaten books. So, even then, my mind was full of Mercurius Rusticus. Mr. Churchill on Cromwell amused me immensely and even excited me. It was life, this attending at a self-revelation of an impossible temperament. It did me good, as he had said of my pseudo-sister. It was fantastic — as fantastic as herself — and it came out more in his conversation than in the book itself. I had something to do with that, of course. But imagine the treatment accorded to Cromwell by this delicate, negative, obstinately judicial personality. It was the sort of thing one wants to get into a novel. It was a lesson to me — in temperament, in point of view; I went with his mood, tried even to outdo him, in the hope of spurring him to outdo himself. I only mention it because I did it so well that it led to extraordinary consequences.

We were walking up and down his lawn, in the twilight, after his Sunday supper. The pale light shone along the gleaming laurels and dwelt upon the soft clouds of orchard blossoms that shimmered above them. It dwelt, too, upon the silver streaks in his dark hair and made his face seem more pallid, and more old. It affected me like some intense piece of irony. It was like hearing a dying man talk of the year after next. I had the sense of the unreality of things strong upon me. Why should nightingale upon nightingale pour out volley upon volley of song for the delight of a politician whose heart was not in his task of keeping back the waters of the deluge, but who grew animated at the idea of damning one of the titans who had let loose the deluge?