Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (493 page)

FIRST NOTE

The pages which follow have been extracted from a pile of manuscript which was apparently meant for the eye of one woman only.  She seems to have been the writer’s childhood’s friend.  They had parted as children, or very little more than children.  Years passed.  Then something recalled to the woman the companion of her young days and she wrote to him: “I have been hearing of you lately.  I know where life has brought you.  You certainly selected your own road.  But to us, left behind, it always looked as if you had struck out into a pathless desert.  We always regarded you as a person that must be given up for lost.  But you have turned up again; and though we may never see each other, my memory welcomes you and I confess to you I should like to know the incidents on the road which has led you to where you are now.”

And he answers her: “I believe you are the only one now alive who remembers me as a child.  I have heard of you from time to time, but I wonder what sort of person you are now.  Perhaps if I did know I wouldn’t dare put pen to paper.  But I don’t know.  I only remember that we were great chums.  In fact, I chummed with you even more than with your brothers.  But I am like the pigeon that went away in the fable of the Two Pigeons.  If I once start to tell you I would want you to feel that you have been there yourself.  I may overtax your patience with the story of my life so different from yours, not only in all the facts but altogether in spirit.  You may not understand.  You may even be shocked.  I say all this to myself; but I know I shall succumb!  I have a distinct recollection that in the old days, when you were about fifteen, you always could make me do whatever you liked.”

He succumbed.  He begins his story for her with the minute narration of this adventure which took about twelve months to develop.  In the form in which it is presented here it has been pruned of all allusions to their common past, of all asides, disquisitions, and explanations addressed directly to the friend of his childhood.  And even as it is the whole thing is of considerable length.  It seems that he had not only a memory but that he also knew how to remember.  But as to that opinions may differ.

This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in Marseilles.  It ends there, too.  Yet it might have happened anywhere.  This does not mean that the people concerned could have come together in pure space.  The locality had a definite importance.  As to the time, it is easily fixed by the events at about the middle years of the seventies, when Don Carlos de Bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all Europe against the excesses of communistic Republicanism, made his attempt for the throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of Guipuzcoa.  It is perhaps the last instance of a Pretender’s adventure for a Crown that History will have to record with the usual grave moral disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the departing romance.  Historians are very much like other people.

However, History has nothing to do with this tale.  Neither is the moral justification or condemnation of conduct aimed at here.  If anything it is perhaps a little sympathy that the writer expects for his buried youth, as he lives it over again at the end of his insignificant course on this earth.  Strange person — yet perhaps not so very different from ourselves.

A few words as to certain facts may be added.

It may seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long adventure.  But from certain passages (suppressed here because mixed up with irrelevant matter) it appears clearly that at the time of the meeting in the café, Mills had already gathered, in various quarters, a definite view of the eager youth who had been introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon.  What Mills had learned represented him as a young gentleman who had arrived furnished with proper credentials and who apparently was doing his best to waste his life in an eccentric fashion, with a bohemian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it later) on one side, and on the other making friends with the people of the Old Town, pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts.  He pretended rather absurdly to be a seaman himself and was already credited with an ill-defined and vaguely illegal enterprise in the Gulf of Mexico.  At once it occurred to Mills that this eccentric youngster was the very person for what the legitimist sympathizers had very much at heart just then: to organize a supply by sea of arms and ammunition to the Carlist detachments in the South.  It was precisely to confer on that matter with Doña Rita that Captain Blunt had been despatched from Headquarters.

Mills got in touch with Blunt at once and put the suggestion before him.  The Captain thought this the very thing.  As a matter of fact, on that evening of Carnival, those two, Mills and Blunt, had been actually looking everywhere for our man.  They had decided that he should be drawn into the affair if it could be done.  Blunt naturally wanted to see him first.  He must have estimated him a promising person, but, from another point of view, not dangerous.  Thus lightly was the notorious (and at the same time mysterious) Monsieur George brought into the world; out of the contact of two minds which did not give a single thought to his flesh and blood.

Their purpose explains the intimate tone given to their first conversation and the sudden introduction of Doña Rita’s history.  Mills, of course, wanted to hear all about it.  As to Captain Blunt — I suspect that, at the time, he was thinking of nothing else.  In addition it was Doña Rita who would have to do the persuading; for, after all, such an enterprise with its ugly and desperate risks was not a trifle to put before a man — however young.

It cannot be denied that Mills seems to have acted somewhat unscrupulously.  He himself appears to have had some doubt about it, at a given moment, as they were driving to the Prado.  But perhaps Mills, with his penetration, understood very well the nature he was dealing with.  He might even have envied it.  But it’s not my business to excuse Mills.  As to him whom we may regard as Mills’ victim it is obvious that he has never harboured a single reproachful thought.  For him Mills is not to be criticized.  A remarkable instance of the great power of mere individuality over the young.

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens.  One of such streets is the Cannebière, and the jest: “If Paris had a Cannebière it would be a little Marseilles” is the jocular expression of municipal pride.  I, too, I have been under the spell.  For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

There was a part of it where one could see as many as five big cafés in a resplendent row.  That evening I strolled into one of them.  It was by no means full.  It looked deserted, in fact, festal and overlighted, but cheerful.  The wonderful street was distinctly cold (it was an evening of carnival), I was very idle, and I was feeling a little lonely.  So I went in and sat down.

The carnival time was drawing to an end.  Everybody, high and low, was anxious to have the last fling.  Companies of masks with linked arms and whooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gusts of cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach.  There was a touch of bedlam in all this.

Perhaps it was that which made me feel lonely, since I was neither masked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony with the bedlam element of life.  But I was not sad.  I was merely in a state of sobriety.  I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage.  My eyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences, lawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they had startled me a little and had amused me considerably.  But they had left me untouched.  Indeed they were other men’s adventures, not mine.  Except for a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not matured me.  I was as young as before.  Inconceivably young — still beautifully unthinking — infinitely receptive.

You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for a kingdom.  Why should I?  You don’t want to think of things which you meet every day in the newspapers and in conversation.  I had paid some calls since my return and most of my acquaintance were legitimists and intensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, for political, religious, or romantic reasons.  But I was not interested.  Apparently I was not romantic enough.  Or was it that I was even more romantic than all those good people?  The affair seemed to me commonplace.  That man was attending to his business of a Pretender.

On the front page of the illustrated paper I saw lying on a table near me, he looked picturesque enough, seated on a boulder, a big strong man with a square-cut beard, his hands resting on the hilt of a cavalry sabre — and all around him a landscape of savage mountains.  He caught my eye on that spiritedly composed woodcut.  (There were no inane snapshot-reproductions in those days.)  It was the obvious romance for the use of royalists but it arrested my attention.

Just then some masks from outside invaded the café, dancing hand in hand in a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose.  He gambolled in wildly and behind him twenty others perhaps, mostly Pierrots and Pierrettes holding each other by the hand and winding in and out between the chairs and tables: eyes shining in the holes of cardboard faces, breasts panting; but all preserving a mysterious silence.

They were people of the poorer sort (white calico with red spots, costumes), but amongst them there was a girl in a black dress sewn over with gold half moons, very high in the neck and very short in the skirt.  Most of the ordinary clients of the café didn’t even look up from their games or papers.  I, being alone and idle, stared abstractedly.  The girl costumed as Night wore a small black velvet mask, what is called in French a “loup.”  What made her daintiness join that obviously rough lot I can’t imagine.  Her uncovered mouth and chin suggested refined prettiness.

They filed past my table; the Night noticed perhaps my fixed gaze and throwing her body forward out of the wriggling chain shot out at me a slender tongue like a pink dart.  I was not prepared for this, not even to the extent of an appreciative “Très foli,” before she wriggled and hopped away.  But having been thus distinguished I could do no less than follow her with my eyes to the door where the chain of hands being broken all the masks were trying to get out at once.  Two gentlemen coming in out of the street stood arrested in the crush.  The Night (it must have been her idiosyncrasy) put her tongue out at them, too.  The taller of the two (he was in evening clothes under a light wide-open overcoat) with great presence of mind chucked her under the chin, giving me the view at the same time of a flash of white teeth in his dark, lean face.  The other man was very different; fair, with smooth, ruddy cheeks and burly shoulders.  He was wearing a grey suit, obviously bought ready-made, for it seemed too tight for his powerful frame.

That man was not altogether a stranger to me.  For the last week or so I had been rather on the look-out for him in all the public places where in a provincial town men may expect to meet each other.  I saw him for the first time (wearing that same grey ready-made suit) in a legitimist drawing-room where, clearly, he was an object of interest, especially to the women.  I had caught his name as Monsieur Mills.  The lady who had introduced me took the earliest opportunity to murmur into my ear: “A relation of Lord X.”  (Un proche parent de Lord X.)  And then she added, casting up her eyes: “A good friend of the King.”  Meaning Don Carlos of course.

I looked at the proche parent; not on account of the parentage but marvelling at his air of ease in that cumbrous body and in such tight clothes, too.  But presently the same lady informed me further: “He has come here amongst us un naufragé.”

I became then really interested.  I had never seen a shipwrecked person before.  All the boyishness in me was aroused.  I considered a shipwreck as an unavoidable event sooner or later in my future.

Meantime the man thus distinguished in my eyes glanced quietly about and never spoke unless addressed directly by one of the ladies present.  There were more than a dozen people in that drawing-room, mostly women eating fine pastry and talking passionately.  It might have been a Carlist committee meeting of a particularly fatuous character.  Even my youth and inexperience were aware of that.  And I was by a long way the youngest person in the room.  That quiet Monsieur Mills intimidated me a little by his age (I suppose he was thirty-five), his massive tranquillity, his clear, watchful eyes.  But the temptation was too great — and I addressed him impulsively on the subject of that shipwreck.

He turned his big fair face towards me with surprise in his keen glance, which (as though he had seen through me in an instant and found nothing objectionable) changed subtly into friendliness.  On the matter of the shipwreck he did not say much.  He only told me that it had not occurred in the Mediterranean, but on the other side of Southern France — in the Bay of Biscay.  “But this is hardly the place to enter on a story of that kind,” he observed, looking round at the room with a faint smile as attractive as the rest of his rustic but well-bred personality.

I expressed my regret.  I should have liked to hear all about it.  To this he said that it was not a secret and that perhaps next time we met. . .

“But where can we meet?” I cried.  “I don’t come often to this house, you know.”

“Where?  Why on the Cannebière to be sure.  Everybody meets everybody else at least once a day on the pavement opposite the Bourse.”

This was absolutely true.  But though I looked for him on each succeeding day he was nowhere to be seen at the usual times.  The companions of my idle hours (and all my hours were idle just then) noticed my preoccupation and chaffed me about it in a rather obvious way.  They wanted to know whether she, whom I expected to see, was dark or fair; whether that fascination which kept me on tenterhooks of expectation was one of my aristocrats or one of my marine beauties: for they knew I had a footing in both these — shall we say circles?  As to themselves they were the bohemian circle, not very wide — half a dozen of us led by a sculptor whom we called Prax for short.  My own nick-name was “Young Ulysses.”