Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (146 page)

“Oh, as for me, I am going to marry Gurnard.”

I don’t know just what I said then, but I remember that I found myself repeating over and over again, the phrases running metrically up and down my mind: “You couldn’t marry Gurnard; you don’t know what he is. You couldn’t marry Gurnard; you don’t know what he is.” I don’t suppose that I knew anything to the discredit of Gurnard — but he struck me in that way at that moment; struck me convincingly — more than any array of facts could have done.

“Oh — as for what he is — ” she said, and paused. “I know….” and then suddenly she began to speak very fast.

“Don’t you see? — can’t you see? — that I don’t marry Gurnard for what he is in that sense, but for what he is in the other. It isn’t a marriage in your sense at all. And … and it doesn’t affect you … don’t you see? We have to have done with one another, because … because….”

I had an inspiration.

“I believe,” I said, very slowly, “I believe … you do care….”

She said nothing.

“You care,” I repeated.

She spoke then with an energy that had something of a threat in it. “Do you think I would? Do you think I could?… or dare? Don’t you understand?” She faltered — ”but then….” she added, and was silent for a long minute. I felt the throb of a thousand pulses in my head, on my temples. “Oh, yes, I care,” she said slowly, “but that — that makes it all the worse. Why, yes, I care — yes, yes. It hurts me to see you. I might…. It would draw me away. I have my allotted course. And you — Don’t you see, you would influence me; you would be — you are — a disease — for me.”

“But,” I said, “I could — I would — do anything.”

I had only the faintest of ideas of what I would do — for her sake.

“Ah, no,” she said, “you must not say that. You don’t understand…. Even that would mean misery for you — and I — I could not bear. Don’t you see? Even now, before you have done your allotted part, I am wanting — oh, wanting — to let you go…. But I must not; I must not. You must go on … and bear it for a little while more — and then….”

There was a tension somewhere, a string somewhere that was stretched tight and vibrating. I was tremulous with an excitement that overmastered my powers of speech, that surpassed my understanding.

“Don’t you see …” she asked again, “you are the past — the passing. We could never meet. You are … for me … only the portrait of a man — of a man who has been dead — oh, a long time; and I, for you, only a possibility … a conception…. You work to bring me on — to make me possible.”

“But — ” I said. The idea was so difficult to grasp. “I will — there must be a way — ”

“No,” she answered, “there is no way — you must go back; must try. There will be Churchill and what he stands for — He won’t die, he won’t even care much for losing this game … not much…. And you will have to forget me. There is no other way — no bridge. We can’t meet, you and I….”

The words goaded me to fury. I began to pace furiously up and down. I wanted to tell her that I would throw away everything for her, would crush myself out, would be a lifeless tool, would do anything. But I could tear no words out of the stone that seemed to surround me.

“You may even tell him, if you like, what I and Gurnard are going to do. It will make no difference; he will fall. But you would like him to — to make a good fight for it, wouldn’t you? That is all I can do … for your sake.”

I began to speak — as if I had not spoken for years. The house seemed to be coming to life; there were noises of opening doors, of voices outside.

“I believe you care enough,” I said “to give it all up for me. I believe you do, and I want you.” I continued to pace up and down. The noises of returning day grew loud; frightfully loud. It was as if I must hasten, must get said what I had to say, as if I must raise my voice to make it heard amid the clamour of a world awakening to life.

“I believe you do … I believe you do….” I said again and again, “and I want you.” My voice rose higher and higher. She stood motionless, an inscrutable white figure, like some silent Greek statue, a harmony of falling folds of heavy drapery perfectly motionless.

“I want you,” I said — ”I want you, I want you, I want you.” It was unbearable to myself.

“Oh, be quiet,” she said at last. “Be quiet! If you had wanted me I have been here. It is too late. All these days; all these — ”

“But …” I said.

From without someone opened the great shutters of the windows, and the light from the outside world burst in upon us.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We parted in London next day, I hardly know where. She seemed so part of my being, was for me so little more than an intellectual force, so little of a physical personality, that I cannot remember where my eyes lost sight of her.

I had desolately made the crossing from country to country, had convoyed my aunt to her big house in one of the gloomy squares in a certain district, and then we had parted. Even afterward it was as if she were still beside me, as if I had only to look round to find her eyes upon me. She remained the propelling force, I a boat thrust out upon a mill-pond, moving more and more slowly. I had been for so long in the shadow of that great house, shut in among the gloom, that all this light, this blazing world — it was a June day in London — seemed impossible, and hateful. Over there, there had been nothing but very slow, fading minutes; now there was a past, a future. It was as if I stood between them in a cleft of unscalable rocks.

I went about mechanically, made arrangements for my housing, moved in and out of rooms in the enormous mausoleum of a club that was all the home I had, in a sort of stupor. Suddenly I remembered that I had been thinking of something; that she had been talking of Churchill. I had had a letter from him on the morning of the day before. When I read it, Churchill and his “Cromwell” had risen in my mind like preposterous phantoms; the one as unreal as the other — as alien. I seemed to have passed an infinity of æons beyond them. The one and the other belonged as absolutely to the past as a past year belongs. The thought of them did not bring with it the tremulously unpleasant sensations that, as a rule, come with the thoughts of a too recent temps jadis, but rather as a vein of rose across a gray evening. I had passed his letter over; had dropped it half-read among the litter of the others. Then there had seemed to be a haven into whose mouth I was drifting.

Now I should have to pick the letters up again, all of them; set to work desolately to pick up the threads of the past; and work it back into life as one does half-drowned things. I set about it listlessly. There remained of that time an errand for my aunt, an errand that would take me to Etchingham; something connected with her land steward. I think the old lady had ideas of inducting me into a position that it had grown tacitly acknowledged I was to fill. I was to go down there; to see about some alterations that were in progress; and to make arrangements for my aunt’s return. I was so tired, so dog tired, and the day still had so many weary hours to run, that I recognised instinctively that if I were to come through it sane I must tire myself more, must keep on going — until I sank. I drifted down to Etchingham that evening, I sent a messenger over to Churchill’s cottage, waited for an answer that told me that Churchill was there, and then slept, and slept.

I woke back in the world again, in a world that contained the land steward and the manor house. I had a sense of recovered power from the sight of them, of the sunlight on the stretches of turf, of the mellow, golden stonework of the long range of buildings, from the sound of a chime of bells that came wonderfully sweetly over the soft swelling of the close turf. The feeling came not from any sense of prospective ownership, but from the acute consciousness of what these things stood for. I did not recognise it then, but later I understood; for the present it was enough to have again the power to set my foot on the ground, heel first. In the streets of the little town there was a sensation of holiday, not pronounced enough to call for flags, but enough to convey the idea of waiting for an event.

The land steward, at the end of a tour amongst cottages, explained there was to be a celebration in the neighbourhood — a “cock-and-hen show with a political annex”; the latter under the auspices of Miss Churchill. Churchill himself was to speak; there was a possibility of a pronouncement. I found London reporters at my inn, men I half knew. They expressed mitigated delight at the view of me, and over a lunch-table let me know what “one said” — what one said of the outside of events I knew too well internally. They most of them had the air of my aunt’s solicitor when he had said, “Even I did not realise….” their positions saving them the necessity of concealing surprise. “One can’t know everything.” They fumbled amusingly about the causes, differed with one another, but were surprisingly unanimous as to effects, as to the panic and the call for purification. It was rather extraordinary, too, how large de Mersch loomed on the horizon over here. It was as if the whole world centred in him, as if he represented the modern spirit that must be purified away by burning before things could return to their normal state. I knew what he represented … but there it was.

It was part of my programme, the attendance at the poultry show; I was to go back to the cottage with Churchill, after he had made his speech. It was rather extraordinary, the sensations of that function. I went in rather late, with the reporter of the Hour, who was anxious to do me the favour of introducing me without payment — it was his way of making himself pleasant, and I had the reputation of knowing celebrities. It was rather extraordinary to be back again in the midst of this sort of thing, to be walking over a crowded, green paddock, hedged in with tall trees and dotted here and there with the gaily striped species of tent that is called marquee. And the type of face, and the style of the costume! They would have seemed impossible the day before yesterday.

There were all Miss Churchill’s gang of great dames, muslin, rustling, marriageable daughters, a continual twitter of voices, and a sprinkling of the peasantry, dun-coloured and struck speechless.

One of the great ladies surveyed me as I stood in the centre of an open space, surveyed me through tortoise-shell glasses on the end of a long handle, and beckoned me to her side.

“You are unattached?” she asked. She had pretensions to voice the county, just as my aunt undoubtedly set the tone of its doings, decided who was visitable, and just as Miss Churchill gave the political tone. “You may wait upon me, then,” she said; “my daughter is with her young man. That is the correct phrase, is it not?”

She was a great lady, who stood nearly six foot high, and whom one would have styled buxom, had one dared. “I have a grievance,” she went on; “I must talk to someone. Come this way. There!” She pointed with the handle of her glasses to a pen of glossy blackbirds. “You see!… Not even commended! — and I assure you the trouble I have taken over them, with the idea of setting an example to the tenantry, is incredible. They give a prize to one of our own tenants … which is as much as telling the man that he is an example to me. Then they wonder that the country is going to the dogs. I assure you that after breakfast I have had the scraps collected from the plates — that was the course recommended by the poultry manuals — and have taken them out with my own hands.”

The sort of thing passed for humour in the county, and, being delivered with an air and a half Irish ruefulness, passed well enough.

“And that reminds me,” she went on, “ — I mean the fact that the country is going to the dogs, as my husband [You haven’t seen him anywhere, have you? He is one of the judges, and I want to have a word with him about my Orpingtons] says every morning after he has looked at his paper — that … oh, that you have been in Paris, haven’t you? with your aunt. Then, of course, you have seen this famous Duc de Mersch?”

She looked at me humourously through her glasses. “I’m going to pump you, you know,” she said, “it is the duty that is expected of me. I have to talk for a countyful of women without a tongue in their heads. So tell me about him. Is it true that he is at the bottom of all this mischief? Is it through him that this man committed suicide? They say so. He was mixed up in that Royalist plot, wasn’t he? — and the people that have been failing all over the place are mixed up with him, aren’t they?”

“I … I really don’t know,” I said; “if you say so….”

“Oh, I assure you I’m sound enough,” she answered, “the Churchills — I know you’re a friend of his — haven’t a stauncher ally than I am, and I should only be too glad to be able to contradict. But it’s so difficult. I assure you I go out of my way; talk to the most outrageous people, deny the very possibility of Mr. Churchill’s being in any way implicated. One knows that it’s impossible, but what can one do? I have said again and again — to people like grocers’ wives; even to the grocers, for that matter — that Mr. Churchill is a statesman, and that if he insists that this odious man’s railway must go through, it is in the interests of the country that it should. I tell them….”

She paused for a minute to take breath and then went on: “I was speaking to a man of that class only this morning, rather an intelligent man and quite nice — I was saying, ‘Don’t you see, my dear Mr. Tull, that it is a question of international politics. If the grand duke does not get the money for his railway, the grand duke will be turned out of his — what is it — principality? And that would be most dangerous — in the present condition of affairs over there, and besides….’ The man listened very respectfully, but I could see that he was not convinced. I buckled to again….”

“‘And besides,’ I said, ‘there is the question of Greenland itself. We English must have Greenland … sooner or later. It touches you, even. You have a son who’s above — who doesn’t care for life in a country town, and you want to send him abroad — with a little capital. Well, Greenland is just the place for him.’ The man looked at me, and almost shook his head in my face.”

“‘If you’ll excuse me, my lady,’ he said, ‘it won’t do. Mr. Churchill is a man above hocus-pocus. Well I know it that have had dealings with him. But … well, the long and the short of it is, my lady, that you can’t touch pitch and not be defiled; or, leastwise, people’ll think you’ve been defiled — those that don’t know you. The foreign nations are all very well, and the grand duchy — and the getting hold of Greenland, but what touches me is this — My neighbour Slingsby had a little money, and he gets a prospectus. It looked very well — very well — and he brings it in to me. I did not have anything to do with it, but Slingsby did. Well, now there’s Slingsby on the rates and his wife a lady born, almost. I might have been taken in the same way but for — for the grace of God, I’m minded to say. Well, Slingsby’s a good man, and used to be a hard-working man — all his life, and now it turns out that that prospectus came about by the man de Mersch’s manoeuvres — ”wild-cat schemes,” they call them in the paper that I read. And there’s any number of them started by de Mersch or his agents. Just for what? That de Mersch may be the richest man in the world and a philanthropist. Well, then, where’s Slingsby, if that’s philanthropy? So Mr. Churchill comes along and says, in a manner of speaking, “That’s all very well, but this same Mr. Mersch is the grand duke of somewhere or other, and we must bolster him up in his kingdom, or else there will be trouble with the powers.” Powers — what’s powers to me? — or Greenland? when there’s Slingsby, a man I’ve smoked a pipe with every market evening of my life, in the workhouse? And there’s hundreds of Slingsbys all over the country.’“