Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (495 page)

It was rather a small place tacked on in the manner of a lean-to to the garden side of the house.  A large lamp was burning brightly there.  The floor was of mere flag-stones but the few rugs scattered about though extremely worn were very costly.  There was also there a beautiful sofa upholstered in pink figured silk, an enormous divan with many cushions, some splendid arm-chairs of various shapes (but all very shabby), a round table, and in the midst of these fine things a small common iron stove.  Somebody must have been attending it lately, for the fire roared and the warmth of the place was very grateful after the bone-searching cold blasts of mistral outside.

Mills without a word flung himself on the divan and, propped on his arm, gazed thoughtfully at a distant corner where in the shadow of a monumental carved wardrobe an articulated dummy without head or hands but with beautifully shaped limbs composed in a shrinking attitude, seemed to be embarrassed by his stare.

As we sat enjoying the bivouac hospitality (the dish was really excellent and our host in a shabby grey jacket still looked the accomplished man-about-town) my eyes kept on straying towards that corner.  Blunt noticed this and remarked that I seemed to be attracted by the Empress.

“It’s disagreeable,” I said.  “It seems to lurk there like a shy skeleton at the feast.  But why do you give the name of Empress to that dummy?”

“Because it sat for days and days in the robes of a Byzantine Empress to a painter. . . I wonder where he discovered these priceless stuffs. . . You knew him, I believe?”

Mills lowered his head slowly, then tossed down his throat some wine out of a Venetian goblet.

“This house is full of costly objects.  So are all his other houses, so is his place in Paris — that mysterious Pavilion hidden away in Passy somewhere.”

Mills knew the Pavilion.  The wine had, I suppose, loosened his tongue.  Blunt, too, lost something of his reserve.  From their talk I gathered the notion of an eccentric personality, a man of great wealth, not so much solitary as difficult of access, a collector of fine things, a painter known only to very few people and not at all to the public market.  But as meantime I had been emptying my Venetian goblet with a certain regularity (the amount of heat given out by that iron stove was amazing; it parched one’s throat, and the straw-coloured wine didn’t seem much stronger than so much pleasantly flavoured water) the voices and the impressions they conveyed acquired something fantastic to my mind.  Suddenly I perceived that Mills was sitting in his shirt-sleeves.  I had not noticed him taking off his coat.  Blunt had unbuttoned his shabby jacket, exposing a lot of starched shirt-front with the white tie under his dark shaved chin.  He had a strange air of insolence — or so it seemed to me.  I addressed him much louder than I intended really.

“Did you know that extraordinary man?”

“To know him personally one had to be either very distinguished or very lucky.  Mr. Mills here . . .”

“Yes, I have been lucky,” Mills struck in.  “It was my cousin who was distinguished.  That’s how I managed to enter his house in Paris — it was called the Pavilion — twice.”

“And saw Doña Rita twice, too?” asked Blunt with an indefinite smile and a marked emphasis.  Mills was also emphatic in his reply but with a serious face.

“I am not an easy enthusiast where women are concerned, but she was without doubt the most admirable find of his amongst all the priceless items he had accumulated in that house — the most admirable. . . “

“Ah!  But, you see, of all the objects there she was the only one that was alive,” pointed out Blunt with the slightest possible flavour of sarcasm.

“Immensely so,” affirmed Mills.  “Not because she was restless, indeed she hardly ever moved from that couch between the windows — you know.”

“No.  I don’t know.  I’ve never been in there,” announced Blunt with that flash of white teeth so strangely without any character of its own that it was merely disturbing.

“But she radiated life,” continued Mills.  “She had plenty of it, and it had a quality.  My cousin and Henry Allègre had a lot to say to each other and so I was free to talk to her.  At the second visit we were like old friends, which was absurd considering that all the chances were that we would never meet again in this world or in the next.  I am not meddling with theology but it seems to me that in the Elysian fields she’ll have her place in a very special company.”

All this in a sympathetic voice and in his unmoved manner.  Blunt produced another disturbing white flash and muttered:

“I should say mixed.”  Then louder: “As for instance . . . “

“As for instance Cleopatra,” answered Mills quietly.  He added after a pause: “Who was not exactly pretty.”

“I should have thought rather a La Vallière,” Blunt dropped with an indifference of which one did not know what to make.  He may have begun to be bored with the subject.  But it may have been put on, for the whole personality was not clearly definable.  I, however, was not indifferent.  A woman is always an interesting subject and I was thoroughly awake to that interest.  Mills pondered for a while with a sort of dispassionate benevolence, at last:

“Yes, Doña Rita as far as I know her is so varied in her simplicity that even that is possible,” he said.  “Yes.  A romantic resigned La Vallière . . . who had a big mouth.”

I felt moved to make myself heard.

“Did you know La Vallière, too?” I asked impertinently.

Mills only smiled at me.  “No.  I am not quite so old as that,” he said.  “But it’s not very difficult to know facts of that kind about a historical personage.  There were some ribald verses made at the time, and Louis XIV was congratulated on the possession — I really don’t remember how it goes — on the possession of:

“. . . de ce bec amoureux

Qui d’une oreille à l’autre va,

Tra là là.

or something of the sort.  It needn’t be from ear to ear, but it’s a fact that a big mouth is often a sign of a certain generosity of mind and feeling.  Young man, beware of women with small mouths.  Beware of the others, too, of course; but a small mouth is a fatal sign.  Well, the royalist sympathizers can’t charge Doña Rita with any lack of generosity from what I hear.  Why should I judge her?  I have known her for, say, six hours altogether.  It was enough to feel the seduction of her native intelligence and of her splendid physique.  And all that was brought home to me so quickly,” he concluded, “because she had what some Frenchman has called the ‘terrible gift of familiarity’.”

Blunt had been listening moodily.  He nodded assent.

“Yes!”  Mills’ thoughts were still dwelling in the past.  “And when saying good-bye she could put in an instant an immense distance between herself and you.  A slight stiffening of that perfect figure, a change of the physiognomy: it was like being dismissed by a person born in the purple.  Even if she did offer you her hand — as she did to me — it was as if across a broad river.  Trick of manner or a bit of truth peeping out?  Perhaps she’s really one of those inaccessible beings.  What do you think, Blunt?”

It was a direct question which for some reason (as if my range of sensitiveness had been increased already) displeased or rather disturbed me strangely.  Blunt seemed not to have heard it.  But after a while he turned to me.

“That thick man,” he said in a tone of perfect urbanity, “is as fine as a needle.  All these statements about the seduction and then this final doubt expressed after only two visits which could not have included more than six hours altogether and this some three years ago!  But it is Henry Allègre that you should ask this question, Mr. Mills.”

“I haven’t the secret of raising the dead,” answered Mills good humouredly.  “And if I had I would hesitate.  It would seem such a liberty to take with a person one had known so slightly in life.”

“And yet Henry Allègre is the only person to ask about her, after all this uninterrupted companionship of years, ever since he discovered her; all the time, every breathing moment of it, till, literally, his very last breath.  I don’t mean to say she nursed him.  He had his confidential man for that.  He couldn’t bear women about his person.  But then apparently he couldn’t bear this one out of his sight.  She’s the only woman who ever sat to him, for he would never suffer a model inside his house.  That’s why the ‘Girl in the Hat’ and the ‘Byzantine Empress’ have that family air, though neither of them is really a likeness of Doña Rita. . . You know my mother?”

Mills inclined his body slightly and a fugitive smile vanished from his lips.  Blunt’s eyes were fastened on the very centre of his empty plate.

“Then perhaps you know my mother’s artistic and literary associations,” Blunt went on in a subtly changed tone.  “My mother has been writing verse since she was a girl of fifteen.  She’s still writing verse.  She’s still fifteen — a spoiled girl of genius.  So she requested one of her poet friends — no less than Versoy himself — to arrange for a visit to Henry Allègre’s house.  At first he thought he hadn’t heard aright.  You must know that for my mother a man that doesn’t jump out of his skin for any woman’s caprice is not chivalrous.  But perhaps you do know? . . .”

Mills shook his head with an amused air.  Blunt, who had raised his eyes from his plate to look at him, started afresh with great deliberation.

“She gives no peace to herself or her friends.  My mother’s exquisitely absurd.  You understand that all these painters, poets, art collectors (and dealers in bric-à-brac, he interjected through his teeth) of my mother are not in my way; but Versoy lives more like a man of the world.  One day I met him at the fencing school.  He was furious.  He asked me to tell my mother that this was the last effort of his chivalry.  The jobs she gave him to do were too difficult.  But I daresay he had been pleased enough to show the influence he had in that quarter.  He knew my mother would tell the world’s wife all about it.  He’s a spiteful, gingery little wretch.  The top of his head shines like a billiard ball.  I believe he polishes it every morning with a cloth.  Of course they didn’t get further than the big drawing-room on the first floor, an enormous drawing-room with three pairs of columns in the middle.  The double doors on the top of the staircase had been thrown wide open, as if for a visit from royalty.  You can picture to yourself my mother, with her white hair done in some 18th century fashion and her sparkling black eyes, penetrating into those splendours attended by a sort of bald-headed, vexed squirrel — and Henry Allègre coming forward to meet them like a severe prince with the face of a tombstone Crusader, big white hands, muffled silken voice, half-shut eyes, as if looking down at them from a balcony.  You remember that trick of his, Mills?”

Mills emitted an enormous cloud of smoke out of his distended cheeks.

“I daresay he was furious, too,”  Blunt continued dispassionately.  “But he was extremely civil.  He showed her all the ‘treasures’ in the room, ivories, enamels, miniatures, all sorts of monstrosities from Japan, from India, from Timbuctoo . . . for all I know. . . He pushed his condescension so far as to have the ‘Girl in the Hat’ brought down into the drawing-room — half length, unframed.  They put her on a chair for my mother to look at.  The ‘Byzantine Empress’ was already there, hung on the end wall — full length, gold frame weighing half a ton.  My mother first overwhelms the ‘Master’ with thanks, and then absorbs herself in the adoration of the ‘Girl in the Hat.’  Then she sighs out: ‘It should be called Diaphanéité, if there is such a word.  Ah!  This is the last expression of modernity!’  She puts up suddenly her face-à-main and looks towards the end wall.  ‘And that — Byzantium itself!  Who was she, this sullen and beautiful Empress?’

“‘The one I had in my mind was Theodosia!’  Allègre consented to answer.  ‘Originally a slave girl — from somewhere.’

“My mother can be marvellously indiscreet when the whim takes her.  She finds nothing better to do than to ask the ‘Master’ why he took his inspiration for those two faces from the same model.  No doubt she was proud of her discerning eye.  It was really clever of her.  Allègre, however, looked on it as a colossal impertinence; but he answered in his silkiest tones:

“‘Perhaps it is because I saw in that woman something of the women of all time.’

“My mother might have guessed that she was on thin ice there.  She is extremely intelligent.  Moreover, she ought to have known.  But women can be miraculously dense sometimes.  So she exclaims, ‘Then she is a wonder!’  And with some notion of being complimentary goes on to say that only the eyes of the discoverer of so many wonders of art could have discovered something so marvellous in life.  I suppose Allègre lost his temper altogether then; or perhaps he only wanted to pay my mother out, for all these ‘Masters’ she had been throwing at his head for the last two hours.  He insinuates with the utmost politeness:

“‘As you are honouring my poor collection with a visit you may like to judge for yourself as to the inspiration of these two pictures.  She is upstairs changing her dress after our morning ride.  But she wouldn’t be very long.  She might be a little surprised at first to be called down like this, but with a few words of preparation and purely as a matter of art . . .’

“There were never two people more taken aback.  Versoy himself confesses that he dropped his tall hat with a crash.  I am a dutiful son, I hope, but I must say I should have liked to have seen the retreat down the great staircase.  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!”

He laughed most undutifully and then his face twitched grimly.

“That implacable brute Allègre followed them down ceremoniously and put my mother into the fiacre at the door with the greatest deference.  He didn’t open his lips though, and made a great bow as the fiacre drove away.  My mother didn’t recover from her consternation for three days.  I lunch with her almost daily and I couldn’t imagine what was the matter.  Then one day . . .”

He glanced round the table, jumped up and with a word of excuse left the studio by a small door in a corner.  This startled me into the consciousness that I had been as if I had not existed for these two men.  With his elbows propped on the table Mills had his hands in front of his face clasping the pipe from which he extracted now and then a puff of smoke, staring stolidly across the room.