Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (138 page)

She left Churchill pacing nervously up and down.

“I could go on with something else, if you like,” I said.

“But I don’t like,” he said, energetically; “I’d much rather not see the man. You know the sort of person he is.”

“Why, no,” I answered, “I never studied the Almanac de Gotha.”

“Oh, I forgot,” he said. He seemed vexed with himself.

Churchill’s dinners were frequently rather trying to me. Personages of enormous importance used to drop in — and reveal themselves as rather asinine. At the best of times they sat dimly opposite to me, discomposed me, and disappeared. Sometimes they stared me down. That night there were two of them.

Gurnard I had heard of. One can’t help hearing of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The books of reference said that he was the son of one William Gurnard, Esq., of Grimsby; but I remember that once in my club a man who professed to know everything, assured me that W. Gurnard, Esq. (whom he had described as a fish salesman), was only an adoptive father. His rapid rise seemed to me inexplicable till the same man accounted for it with a shrug: “When a man of such ability believes in nothing, and sticks at nothing, there’s no saying how far he may go. He has kicked away every ladder. He doesn’t mean to come down.”

This, no doubt, explained much; but not everything in his fabulous career. His adherents called him an inspired statesman; his enemies set him down a mere politician. He was a man of forty-five, thin, slightly bald, and with an icy assurance of manner. He was indifferent to attacks upon his character, but crushed mercilessly every one who menaced his position. He stood alone, and a little mysterious; his own party was afraid of him.

Gurnard was quite hidden from me by table ornaments; the Duc de Mersch glowed with light and talked voluminously, as if he had for years and years been starved of human society. He glowed all over, it seemed to me. He had a glorious beard, that let one see very little of his florid face and took the edge away from an almost non-existent forehead and depressingly wrinkled eyelids. He spoke excellent English, rather slowly, as if he were forever replying to toasts to his health. It struck me that he seemed to treat Churchill in nuances as an inferior, whilst for the invisible Gurnard, he reserved an attitude of nervous self-assertion. He had apparently come to dilate on the Système Groënlandais, and he dilated. Some mistaken persons had insinuated that the Système was neither more nor less than a corporate exploitation of unhappy Esquimaux. De Mersch emphatically declared that those mistaken people were mistaken, declared it with official finality. The Esquimaux were not unhappy. I paid attention to my dinner, and let the discourse on the affairs of the Hyperborean Protectorate lapse into an unheeded murmur. I tried to be the simple amanuensis at the feast.

Suddenly, however, it struck me that de Mersch was talking at me; that he had by the merest shade raised his intonation. He was dilating upon the immense international value of the proposed Trans-Greenland Railway. Its importance to British trade was indisputable; even the opposition had no serious arguments to offer. It was the obvious duty of the British Government to give the financial guarantee. He would not insist upon the moral aspect of the work — it was unnecessary. Progress, improvement, civilisation, a little less evil in the world — more light! It was our duty not to count the cost of humanising a lower race. Besides, the thing would pay like another Suez Canal. Its terminus and the British coaling station would be on the west coast of the island…. I knew the man was talking at me — I wondered why.

Suddenly he turned his glowing countenance full upon me.

“I think I must have met a member of your family,” he said. The solution occurred to me. I was a journalist, he a person interested in a railway that he wished the Government to back in some way or another. His attempts to capture my suffrage no longer astonished me. I murmured:

“Indeed!”

“In Paris — Mrs. Etchingham Granger,” he said.

I said, “Oh, yes.”

Miss Churchill came to the rescue.

“The Duc de Mersch means our friend, your aunt,” she explained. I had an unpleasant sensation. Through fronds of asparagus fern I caught the eyes of Gurnard fixed upon me as though something had drawn his attention. I returned his glance, tried to make his face out. It had nothing distinctive in its half-hidden pallid oval; nothing that one could seize upon. But it gave the impression of never having seen the light of day, of never having had the sun upon it. But the conviction that I had aroused his attention disturbed me. What could the man know about me? I seemed to feel his glance bore through the irises of my eyes into the back of my skull. The feeling was almost physical; it was as if some incredibly concentrant reflector had been turned upon me. Then the eyelids dropped over the metallic rings beneath them. Miss Churchill continued to explain.

“She has started a sort of Salon des Causes Perdues in the Faubourg Saint Germain.” She was recording the vagaries of my aunt. The Duc laughed.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “what a menagerie — Carlists, and Orleanists, and

Papal Blacks. I wonder she has not held a bazaar in favour of your White

Rose League.”

“Ah, yes,” I echoed, “I have heard that she was mad about the divine right of kings.”

Miss Churchill rose, as ladies rise at the end of a dinner. I followed her out of the room, in obedience to some minute signal.

We were on the best of terms — we two. She mothered me, as she mothered everybody not beneath contempt or above a certain age. I liked her immensely — the masterful, absorbed, brown lady. As she walked up the stairs, she said, in half apology for withdrawing me.

“They’ve got things to talk about.”

“Why, yes,” I answered; “I suppose the railway matter has to be settled.” She looked at me fixedly.

“You — you mustn’t talk,” she warned.

“Oh,” I answered, “I’m not indiscreet — not essentially.”

The other three were somewhat tardy in making their drawing-room appearance. I had a sense of them, leaning their heads together over the edges of the table. In the interim a rather fierce political dowager convoyed two well-controlled, blond daughters into the room. There was a continual coming and going of such people in the house; they did with Miss Churchill social business of some kind, arranged electoral rarée-shows, and what not; troubled me very little. On this occasion the blond daughters were types of the sixties’ survivals — the type that unemotionally inspected albums. I was convoying them through a volume of views of Switzerland, the dowager was saying to Miss Churchill:

“You think, then, it will be enough if we have….” When the door opened behind my back. I looked round negligently and hastily returned to the consideration of a shining photograph of the Dent du Midi. A very gracious figure of a girl was embracing the grim Miss Churchill, as a gracious girl should virginally salute a grim veteran.

“Ah, my dear Miss Churchill!” a fluting voice filled the large room, “we were very nearly going back to Paris without once coming to see you. We are only over for two days — for the Tenants’ Ball, and so my aunt … but surely that is Arthur….”

I turned eagerly. It was the Dimensionist girl. She continued talking to Miss Churchill. “We meet so seldom, and we are never upon terms,” she said lightly. “I assure you we are like cat and dog.” She came toward me and the blond maidens disappeared, everybody, everything disappeared. I had not seen her for nearly a year. I had vaguely gathered from Miss Churchill that she was regarded as a sister of mine, that she had, with wealth inherited from a semi-fabulous Australian uncle, revived the glories of my aunt’s house. I had never denied it, because I did not want to interfere with my aunt’s attempts to regain some of the family’s prosperity. It even had my sympathy to a small extent, for, after all, the family was my family too.

As a memory my pseudo-sister had been something bright and clear-cut and rather small; seen now, she was something that one could not look at for glow. She moved toward me, smiling and radiant, as a ship moves beneath towers of shining canvas. I was simply overwhelmed. I don’t know what she said, what I said, what she did or I. I have an idea that we conversed for some minutes. I remember that she said, at some point,

“Go away now; I want to talk to Mr. Gurnard.”

As a matter of fact, Gurnard was making toward her — a deliberate, slow progress. She greeted him with nonchalance, as, beneath eyes, a woman greets a man she knows intimately. I found myself hating him, thinking that he was not the sort of man she ought to know.

“It’s settled?” she asked him, as he came within range. He looked at me inquiringly — insolently. She said, “My brother,” and he answered:

“Oh, yes,” as I moved away. I hated the man and I could not keep my eyes off him and her. I went and stood against the mantel-piece. The Duc de Mersch bore down upon them, and I welcomed his interruption until I saw that he, too, was intimate with her, intimate with a pomposity of flourishes as irritating as Gurnard’s nonchalance.

I stood there and glowered at them. I noted her excessive beauty; her almost perilous self-possession while she stood talking to those two men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation — she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empressé, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that — there was something … something. I could not quite make out his face, I never could. I never did, any more than I could ever quite visualise hers. I wondered vaguely how Churchill could work in harness with such a man, how he could bring himself to be closeted, as he had just been, with him and with a fool like de Mersch — I should have been afraid.

As for de Mersch, standing between those two, he seemed like a country lout between confederate sharpers. It struck me that she let me see, made me see, that she and Gurnard had an understanding, made manifest to me by glances that passed when the Duc had his unobservant eyes turned elsewhere.

I saw Churchill, in turn, move desultorily toward them, drawn in, like a straw toward a little whirlpool. I turned my back in a fury of jealousy.

CHAPTER NINE

I had a pretty bad night after that, and was not much in the mood for Fox on the morrow. The sight of her had dwarfed everything; the thought of her disgusted me with everything, made me out of conceit with the world — with that part of the world that had become my world. I wanted to get up into hers — and I could not see any way. The room in which Fox sat seemed to be hopelessly off the road — to be hopelessly off any road to any place; to be the end of a blind alley. One day I might hope to occupy such a room — in my shirt-sleeves, like Fox. But that was not the end of my career — not the end that I desired. She had upset me.

“You’ve just missed Polehampton,” Fox said; “wanted to get hold of your

‘Atmospheres.’“

“Oh, damn Polehampton,” I said, “and particularly damn the

‘Atmospheres.’“

“Willingly,” Fox said, “but I told Mr. P. that you were willing if….”

“I don’t want to know,” I repeated. “I tell you I’m sick of the things.”

“What a change,” he asserted, sympathetically, “I thought you would.”

It struck me as disgusting that a person like Fox should think about me at all. “Oh, I’ll see it through,” I said. “Who’s the next?”

“We’ve got to have the Duc de Mersch now,” he answered, “De Mersch as State Founder — written as large as you can — all across the page. The moment’s come and we’ve got to rope it in, that’s all. I’ve been middling good to you…. You understand….”

He began to explain in his dark sentences. The time had come for an energetically engineered boom in de Mersch — a boom all along the line. And I was to commence the campaign. Fox had been good to me and I was to repay him. I listened in a sort of apathetic indifference.

“Oh, very well,” I said. I was subconsciously aware that, as far as I was concerned, the determining factor of the situation was the announcement that de Mersch was to be in Paris. If he had been in his own particular grand duchy I wouldn’t have gone after him. For a moment I thought of the interview as taking place in London. But Fox — ostensibly, at least — wasn’t even aware of de Mersch’s visit; spoke of him as being in Paris — in a flat in which he was accustomed to interview the continental financiers who took up so much of his time.

I realised that I wanted to go to Paris because she was there. She had said that she was going to Paris on the morrow of yesterday. The name was pleasant to me, and it turned the scale.

Fox’s eyes remained upon my face.

“Do you good, eh?” he dimly interpreted my thoughts. “A run over. I thought you’d like it and, look here, Polehampton’s taken over the Bi-Monthly; wants to get new blood into it, see? He’d take something. I’ve been talking to him — a short series…. ‘Aspects.’ That sort of thing.” I tried to work myself into some sort of enthusiasm of gratitude. I knew that Fox had spoken well of me to Polehampton — as a sort of set off.

“You go and see Mr. P.,” he confirmed; “it’s really all arranged. And then get off to Paris as fast as you can and have a good time.”

“Have I been unusually cranky lately?” I asked.

“Oh, you’ve been a little off the hooks, I thought, for the last week or so.”

He took up a large bottle of white mucilage, and I accepted it as a sign of dismissal. I was touched by his solicitude for my health. It always did touch me, and I found myself unusually broad-minded in thought as I went down the terra-cotta front steps into the streets. For all his frank vulgarity, for all his shirt-sleeves — I somehow regarded that habit of his as the final mark of the Beast — and the Louis Quinze accessories, I felt a warm good-feeling for the little man.

I made haste to see Polehampton, to beard him in a sort of den that contained a number of shelves of books selected for their glittering back decoration. They gave the impression that Mr. Polehampton wished to suggest to his visitors the fitness and propriety of clothing their walls with the same gilt cloth. They gave that idea, but I think that, actually, Mr. Polehampton took an aesthetic delight in the gilding. He was not a publisher by nature. He had drifted into the trade and success, but beneath a polish of acquaintance retained a fine awe for a book as such. In early life he had had such shining things on a shiny table in a parlour. He had a similar awe for his daughter, who had been born after his entry into the trade, and who had the literary flavour — a flavour so pronounced that he dragged her by the heels into any conversation with us who hewed his raw material, expecting, I suppose, to cow us. For the greater good of this young lady he had bought the Bi-Monthly — one of the portentous political organs. He had, they said, ideas of forcing a seat out of the party as a recompense.