Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (134 page)

“Of course,” he was proceeding, “the Churchill gang would like to go on playing the stand-off to us. But it won’t do, they’ve got to come in or see themselves left. Gurnard has pretty well nobbled their old party press, so they’ve got to begin all over again.”

That was it — that was precisely it. Churchill ought to have played the stand-off to people like us — to have gone on playing it at whatever cost. That was what I demanded of the world as I conceived it. It was so much less troublesome in that way. On the other hand, this was life — I was living now and the cost of living is disillusionment; it was the price I had to pay. Obviously, a Foreign Minister had to have a semi-official organ, or I supposed so…. “Mind you,” Fox whispered on, “I think myself, that it’s a pity he is supporting the Greenland business. The thing’s not altogether straight. But it’s going to be made to pay like hell, and there’s the national interest to be considered. If this Government didn’t take it up, some other would — and that would give Gurnard and a lot of others a peg against Churchill and his. We can’t afford to lose any more coaling stations in Greenland or anywhere else. And, mind you, Mr. C. can look after the interests of the niggers a good deal better if he’s a hand in the pie. You see the position, eh?”

I wasn’t actually listening to him, but I nodded at proper intervals. I knew that he wanted me to take that line in confidential conversations with fellows seeking copy. I was quite resigned to that. Incidentally, I was overcome by the conviction — perhaps it was no more than a sensation — that that girl was mixed up in this thing, that her shadow was somewhere among the others flickering upon the sheet. I wanted to ask Fox if he knew her. But, then, in that absurd business, I did not even know her name, and the whole story would have sounded a little mad. Just now, it suited me that Fox should have a moderate idea of my sanity. Besides, the thing was out of tone, I idealised her then. One wouldn’t talk about her in a smoking-room full of men telling stories, and one wouldn’t talk about her at all to Fox.

The musical critic had been prowling about the room with Fox’s eyes upon him. He edged suddenly nearer, pushed a chair aside, and came toward us.

“Hullo,” he said, in an ostentatiously genial, after-dinner voice, “what are you two chaps a-talking about?”

“Private matters,” Fox answered, without moving a hair.

“Then I suppose I’m in the way?” the other muttered. Fox did not answer.

“Wants a job,” he said, watching the discomfited Teuton’s retreat, “but, as I was saying — oh, it pays both ways.” He paused and fixed his eyes on me. He had been explaining the financial details of the matter, in which the Duc de Mersch and Callan and Mrs. Hartly and all these people clubbed together and started a paper which they hired Fox to run, which was to bring their money back again, which was to scratch their backs, which…. It was like the house that Jack built; I wondered who Jack was. That was it, who was Jack? It all hinged upon that.

“Why, yes,” I said. “It seems rather neat.”

“Of course,” Fox wandered on, “you are wondering why the deuce I tell you all this. Fact is, you’d hear it all if I didn’t, and a good deal more that isn’t true besides. But I believe you’re the sort of chap to respect a confidence.”

I didn’t rise to the sentiment. I knew as well as he did that he was bamboozling me, that he was, as he said, only telling me — not the truth, but just what I should hear everywhere. I did not bear him any ill-will; it was part of the game, that. But the question was, who was Jack? It might be Fox himself…. There might, after all, be some meaning in the farrago of nonsense that that fantastic girl had let off upon me. Fox really and in a figure of speech such as she allowed herself, might be running a team consisting of the Duc de Mersch and Mr. Churchill.

He might really be backing a foreign, philanthropic ruler and State-founder, and a British Foreign Minister, against the rather sinister Chancellor of the Exchequer that Mr. Gurnard undoubtedly was. It might suit him; perhaps he had shares in something or other that depended on the success of the Duc de Mersch’s Greenland Protectorate. I knew well enough, you must remember, that Fox was a big man — one of those big men that remain permanently behind the curtain, perhaps because they have a certain lack of comeliness of one sort or another and don’t look well on the stage itself. And I understood now that if he had abandoned — as he had done — half a dozen enterprises of his own for the sake of the Hour, it must be because it was very well worth his while. It was not merely a question of the editorship of a paper; there was something very much bigger in the background. My Dimensionist young lady, again, might have other shares that depended on the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s blocking the way. In that way she might very well talk allegorically of herself as in alliance with Gurnard against Fox and Churchill. I was at sea in that sort of thing — but I understood vaguely that something of the sort was remotely possible.

I didn’t feel called upon to back out of it on that account, yet I very decidedly wished that the thing could have been otherwise. For myself, I came into the matter with clean hands — and I was going to keep my hands clean; otherwise, I was at Fox’s disposal.

“I understand,” I said, the speech marking my decision, “I shall have dealings with a good many of the proprietors — I am the scratcher, in fact, and you don’t want me to make a fool of myself.”

“Well,” he answered, gauging me with his blue, gimlet eyes, “it’s just as well to know.”

“It’s just as well to know,” I echoed. It was just as well to know.

CHAPTER FIVE

I had gone out into the blackness of the night with a firmer step, with a new assurance. I had had my interview, the thing was definitely settled; the first thing in my life that had ever been definitely settled; and I felt I must tell Lea before I slept. Lea had helped me a good deal in the old days — he had helped everybody, for that matter. You would probably find traces of Lea’s influence in the beginnings of every writer of about my decade; of everybody who ever did anything decent, and of some who never got beyond the stage of burgeoning decently. He had given me the material help that a publisher’s reader could give, until his professional reputation was endangered, and he had given me the more valuable help that so few can give. I had grown ashamed of this one-sided friendship. It was, indeed, partly because of that that I had taken to the wilds — to a hut near a wood, and all the rest of what now seemed youthful foolishness. I had desired to live alone, not to be helped any more, until I could make some return. As a natural result I had lost nearly all my friends and found myself standing there as naked as on the day I was born.

All around me stretched an immense town — an immense blackness. People — thousands of people hurried past me, had errands, had aims, had others to talk to, to trifle with. But I had nobody. This immense city, this immense blackness, had no interiors for me. There were house fronts, staring windows, closed doors, but nothing within; no rooms, no hollow places. The houses meant nothing to me, nothing more than the solid earth. Lea remained the only one the thought of whom was not like the reconsideration of an ancient, a musty pair of gloves.

He lived just anywhere. Being a publisher’s reader, he had to report upon the probable commercial value of the manuscripts that unknown authors sent to his employer, and I suppose he had a settled plan of life, of the sort that brought him within the radius of a given spot at apparently irregular, but probably ordered, intervals. It seemed to be no more than a piece of good luck that let me find him that night in a little room in one of the by-ways of Bloomsbury. He was sprawling angularly on a cane lounge, surrounded by whole rubbish heaps of manuscript, a grey scrawl in a foam of soiled paper. He peered up at me as I stood in the doorway.

“Hullo!” he said, “what’s brought you here? Have a manuscript?” He waved an abstracted hand round him. “You’ll find a chair somewhere.” A claret bottle stood on the floor beside him. He took it by the neck and passed it to me.

He bent his head again and continued his reading. I displaced three bulky folio sheaves of typewritten matter from a chair and seated myself behind him. He continued to read.

“I hadn’t seen these rooms before,” I said, for want of something to say.

The room was not so much scantily as arbitrarily furnished. It contained a big mahogany sideboard; a common deal table, an extraordinary kind of folding wash-hand-stand; a deal bookshelf, the cane lounge, and three unrelated chairs. There were three framed Dutch prints on the marble mantel-shelf; striped curtains before the windows. A square, cheap looking-glass, with a razor above it, hung between them. And on the floor, on the chairs, on the sideboard, on the unmade bed, the profusion of manuscripts.

He scribbled something on a blue paper and began to roll a cigarette. He took off his glasses, rubbed them, and closed his eyes tightly.

“Well, and how’s Sussex?” he asked.

I felt a sudden attack of what, essentially, was nostalgia. The fact that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you see, stood for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside. He stood for the aspiration. The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish qualities, were my own importations. I was a little ashamed to tell him, that — that I was going to live, in fact. Some of the glory of it had gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out. But I told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job at last.

“Oh, I congratulate you,” he said.

“You see,” I began to combat the objections he had not had time to utter, “even for my work it will be a good thing — I wasn’t seeing enough of life to be able to….”

“Oh, of course not,” he answered — ”it’ll be a good thing. You must have been having a pretty bad time.”

It struck me as abominably unfair. I hadn’t taken up with the Hour because I was tired of having a bad time, but for other reasons: because I had felt my soul being crushed within me.

“You’re mistaken,” I said. And I explained. He answered, “Yes, yes,” but I fancied that he was adding to himself — ”They all say that.” I grew more angry. Lea’s opinion formed, to some extent, the background of my life. For many years I had been writing quite as much to satisfy him as to satisfy myself, and his coldness chilled me. He thought that my heart was not in my work, and I did not want Lea to think that of me. I tried to explain as much to him — but it was difficult, and he gave me no help.

I knew there had been others that he had fostered, only to see them, in the end, drift into the back-wash. And now he thought I was going too….

“Here,” he said, suddenly breaking away from the subject, “look at that.”

He threw a heavy, ribbon-bound mass of matter into my lap, and recommenced writing his report upon its saleability as a book. He was of opinion that it was too delicately good to attract his employer’s class of readers. I began to read it to get rid of my thoughts. The heavy black handwriting of the manuscript sticks in my mind’s eye. It must have been good, but probably not so good as I then thought it — I have entirely forgotten all about it; otherwise, I remember that we argued afterward: I for its publication; he against. I was thinking of the wretched author whose fate hung in the balance. He became a pathetic possibility, hidden in the heart of the white paper that bore pen-markings of a kind too good to be marketable. There was something appalling in Lea’s careless — ”Oh, it’s too good!” He was used to it, but as for me, in arguing that man’s case I suddenly became aware that I was pleading my own — pleading the case of my better work. Everything that Lea said of this work, of this man, applied to my work; and to myself. “There’s no market for that sort of thing, no public; this book’s been all round the trade. I’ve had it before. The man will never come to the front. He’ll take to inn-keeping, and that will finish him off.” That’s what he said, and he seemed to be speaking of me. Some one was knocking at the door of the room — tentative knocks of rather flabby knuckles. It was one of those sounds that one does not notice immediately. The man might have been knocking for ten minutes. It happened to be Lea’s employer, the publisher of my first book. He opened the door at last, and came in rather peremptorily. He had the air of having worked himself into a temper — of being intellectually rather afraid of Lea, but of being, for this occasion, determined to assert himself.

The introduction to myself — I had never met him — which took place after he had hastily brought out half a sentence or so, had the effect of putting him out of his stride, but, after having remotely acknowledged the possibility of my existence, he began again.

The matter was one of some delicacy. I myself should have hesitated to broach it before a third party, even one so negligible as myself. But Mr. Polehampton apparently did not. He had to catch the last post.

Lea, it appeared, had advised him to publish a manuscript by a man called Howden — a moderately known writer….

“But I am disturbed to find, Mr. Lea, that is, my daughter tells me that the manuscript is not … is not at all the thing…. In fact, it’s quite — and — eh … I suppose it’s too late to draw back?”

“Oh, it’s altogether too late for that” Lea said, nonchalantly.

“Besides, Howden’s theories always sell.”

“Oh, yes, of course, of course,” Mr. Polehampton interjected, hastily, “but don’t you think now … I mean, taking into consideration the damage it may do our reputation … that we ought to ask Mr. Howden to accept, say fifty pounds less than….”

“I should think it’s an excellent idea,” Lea said. Mr. Polehampton glanced at him suspiciously, then turned to me.

“You see,” he began to explain, “one has to be so careful about these things.”

“Oh, I can quite understand,” I answered. There was something so naïve in the man’s point of view that I had felt my heart go out to him. And he had taught me at last how it is that the godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous. Mr. Polehampton, however, was not fat. He was even rather thin, and his peaked grey hair, though it was actually well brushed, looked as if it ought not to have been. He had even an anxious expression. People said he speculated in some stock or other, and I should say they were right.