Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (502 page)

“No,” said Mills, a little abruptly, “I have never seen him.”

“No,” she said, surprised, “and yet you . . . “

“I understand,” interrupted Mills.  “All this is purely accidental.  You must know that I am a solitary man of books but with a secret taste for adventure which somehow came out; surprising even me.”

She listened with that enigmatic, still, under the eyelids glance, and a friendly turn of the head.

“I know you for a frank and loyal gentleman. . . Adventure — and books?  Ah, the books!  Haven’t I turned stacks of them over!  Haven’t I? . . .”

“Yes,” murmured Mills.  “That’s what one does.”

She put out her hand and laid it lightly on Mills’ sleeve.

“Listen, I don’t need to justify myself, but if I had known a single woman in the world, if I had only had the opportunity to observe a single one of them, I would have been perhaps on my guard.  But you know I hadn’t.  The only woman I had anything to do with was myself, and they say that one can’t know oneself.  It never entered my head to be on my guard against his warmth and his terrible obviousness.  You and he were the only two, infinitely different, people, who didn’t approach me as if I had been a precious object in a collection, an ivory carving or a piece of Chinese porcelain.  That’s why I have kept you in my memory so well.  Oh! you were not obvious!  As to him — I soon learned to regret I was not some object, some beautiful, carved object of bone or bronze; a rare piece of porcelain, pâte dure, not pâte tendre.  A pretty specimen.”

“Rare, yes.  Even unique,” said Mills, looking at her steadily with a smile.  “But don’t try to depreciate yourself.  You were never pretty.  You are not pretty.  You are worse.”

Her narrow eyes had a mischievous gleam.  “Do you find such sayings in your books?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact I have,” said Mills, with a little laugh, “found this one in a book.  It was a woman who said that of herself.  A woman far from common, who died some few years ago.  She was an actress.  A great artist.”

“A great! . . . Lucky person!  She had that refuge, that garment, while I stand here with nothing to protect me from evil fame; a naked temperament for any wind to blow upon.  Yes, greatness in art is a protection.  I wonder if there would have been anything in me if I had tried?  But Henry Allègre would never let me try.  He told me that whatever I could achieve would never be good enough for what I was.  The perfection of flattery!  Was it that he thought I had not talent of any sort?  It’s possible.  He would know.  I’ve had the idea since that he was jealous.  He wasn’t jealous of mankind any more than he was afraid of thieves for his collection; but he may have been jealous of what he could see in me, of some passion that could be aroused.  But if so he never repented.  I shall never forget his last words.  He saw me standing beside his bed, defenceless, symbolic and forlorn, and all he found to say was, ‘Well, I am like that.’”

I forgot myself in watching her.  I had never seen anybody speak with less play of facial muscles.  In the fullness of its life her face preserved a sort of immobility.  The words seemed to form themselves, fiery or pathetic, in the air, outside her lips.  Their design was hardly disturbed; a design of sweetness, gravity, and force as if born from the inspiration of some artist; for I had never seen anything to come up to it in nature before or since.

All this was part of the enchantment she cast over me; and I seemed to notice that Mills had the aspect of a man under a spell.  If he too was a captive then I had no reason to feel ashamed of my surrender.

“And you know,” she began again abruptly, “that I have been accustomed to all the forms of respect.”

“That’s true,” murmured Mills, as if involuntarily.

“Well, yes,” she reaffirmed.  “My instinct may have told me that my only protection was obscurity, but I didn’t know how and where to find it.  Oh, yes, I had that instinct . . . But there were other instincts and . . . How am I to tell you?  I didn’t know how to be on guard against myself, either.  Not a soul to speak to, or to get a warning from.  Some woman soul that would have known, in which perhaps I could have seen my own reflection.  I assure you the only woman that ever addressed me directly, and that was in writing, was . . . “

She glanced aside, saw Mr. Blunt returning from the hall and added rapidly in a lowered voice,

“His mother.”

The bright, mechanical smile of Mr. Blunt gleamed at us right down the room, but he didn’t, as it were, follow it in his body.  He swerved to the nearest of the two big fireplaces and finding some cigarettes on the mantelpiece remained leaning on his elbow in the warmth of the bright wood fire.  I noticed then a bit of mute play.  The heiress of Henry Allègre, who could secure neither obscurity nor any other alleviation to that invidious position, looked as if she would speak to Blunt from a distance; but in a moment the confident eagerness of her face died out as if killed by a sudden thought.  I didn’t know then her shrinking from all falsehood and evasion; her dread of insincerity and disloyalty of every kind.  But even then I felt that at the very last moment her being had recoiled before some shadow of a suspicion.  And it occurred to me, too, to wonder what sort of business Mr. Blunt could have had to transact with our odious visitor, of a nature so urgent as to make him run out after him into the hall?  Unless to beat him a little with one of the sticks that were to be found there?  White hair so much like an expensive wig could not be considered a serious protection.  But it couldn’t have been that.  The transaction, whatever it was, had been much too quiet.  I must say that none of us had looked out of the window and that I didn’t know when the man did go or if he was gone at all.  As a matter of fact he was already far away; and I may just as well say here that I never saw him again in my life.  His passage across my field of vision was like that of other figures of that time: not to be forgotten, a little fantastic, infinitely enlightening for my contempt, darkening for my memory which struggles still with the clear lights and the ugly shadows of those unforgotten days.

CHAPTER IV

It was past four o’clock before I left the house, together with Mills.  Mr. Blunt, still in his riding costume, escorted us to the very door.  He asked us to send him the first fiacre we met on our way to town.  “It’s impossible to walk in this get-up through the streets,” he remarked, with his brilliant smile.

At this point I propose to transcribe some notes I made at the time in little black books which I have hunted up in the litter of the past; very cheap, common little note-books that by the lapse of years have acquired a touching dimness of aspect, the frayed, worn-out dignity of documents.

Expression on paper has never been my forte.  My life had been a thing of outward manifestations.  I never had been secret or even systematically taciturn about my simple occupations which might have been foolish but had never required either caution or mystery.  But in those four hours since midday a complete change had come over me.  For good or evil I left that house committed to an enterprise that could not be talked about; which would have appeared to many senseless and perhaps ridiculous, but was certainly full of risks, and, apart from that, commanded discretion on the ground of simple loyalty.  It would not only close my lips but it would to a certain extent cut me off from my usual haunts and from the society of my friends; especially of the light-hearted, young, harum-scarum kind.  This was unavoidable.  It was because I felt myself thrown back upon my own thoughts and forbidden to seek relief amongst other lives — it was perhaps only for that reason at first I started an irregular, fragmentary record of my days.

I made these notes not so much to preserve the memory (one cared not for any to-morrow then) but to help me to keep a better hold of the actuality.  I scribbled them on shore and I scribbled them on the sea; and in both cases they are concerned not only with the nature of the facts but with the intensity of my sensations.  It may be, too, that I learned to love the sea for itself only at that time.  Woman and the sea revealed themselves to me together, as it were: two mistresses of life’s values.  The illimitable greatness of the one, the unfathomable seduction of the other working their immemorial spells from generation to generation fell upon my heart at last: a common fortune, an unforgettable memory of the sea’s formless might and of the sovereign charm in that woman’s form wherein there seemed to beat the pulse of divinity rather than blood.

I begin here with the notes written at the end of that very day.

— Parted with Mills on the quay.  We had walked side by side in absolute silence.  The fact is he is too old for me to talk to him freely.  For all his sympathy and seriousness I don’t know what note to strike and I am not at all certain what he thinks of all this.  As we shook hands at parting, I asked him how much longer he expected to stay.  And he answered me that it depended on R.  She was making arrangements for him to cross the frontier.  He wanted to see the very ground on which the Principle of Legitimacy was actually asserting itself arms in hand.  It sounded to my positive mind the most fantastic thing in the world, this elimination of personalities from what seemed but the merest political, dynastic adventure.  So it wasn’t Doña Rita, it wasn’t Blunt, it wasn’t the Pretender with his big infectious laugh, it wasn’t all that lot of politicians, archbishops, and generals, of monks, guerrilleros, and smugglers by sea and land, of dubious agents and shady speculators and undoubted swindlers, who were pushing their fortunes at the risk of their precious skins.  No.  It was the Legitimist Principle asserting itself!  Well, I would accept the view but with one reservation.  All the others might have been merged into the idea, but I, the latest recruit, I would not be merged in the Legitimist Principle.  Mine was an act of independent assertion.  Never before had I felt so intensely aware of my personality.  But I said nothing of that to Mills.  I only told him I thought we had better not be seen very often together in the streets.  He agreed.  Hearty handshake.  Looked affectionately after his broad back.  It never occurred to him to turn his head.  What was I in comparison with the Principle of Legitimacy?

Late that night I went in search of Dominic.  That Mediterranean sailor was just the man I wanted.  He had a great experience of all unlawful things that can be done on the seas and he brought to the practice of them much wisdom and audacity.  That I didn’t know where he lived was nothing since I knew where he loved.  The proprietor of a small, quiet café on the quay, a certain Madame Léonore, a woman of thirty-five with an open Roman face and intelligent black eyes, had captivated his heart years ago.  In that café with our heads close together over a marble table, Dominic and I held an earnest and endless confabulation while Madame Léonore, rustling a black silk skirt, with gold earrings, with her raven hair elaborately dressed and something nonchalant in her movements, would take occasion, in passing to and fro, to rest her hand for a moment on Dominic’s shoulder.  Later when the little café had emptied itself of its habitual customers, mostly people connected with the work of ships and cargoes, she came quietly to sit at our table and looking at me very hard with her black, sparkling eyes asked Dominic familiarly what had happened to his Signorino.  It was her name for me.  I was Dominic’s Signorino.  She knew me by no other; and our connection has always been somewhat of a riddle to her.  She said that I was somehow changed since she saw me last.  In her rich voice she urged Dominic only to look at my eyes.  I must have had some piece of luck come to me either in love or at cards, she bantered.  But Dominic answered half in scorn that I was not of the sort that runs after that kind of luck.  He stated generally that there were some young gentlemen very clever in inventing new ways of getting rid of their time and their money.  However, if they needed a sensible man to help them he had no objection himself to lend a hand.  Dominic’s general scorn for the beliefs, and activities, and abilities of upper-class people covered the Principle of Legitimacy amply; but he could not resist the opportunity to exercise his special faculties in a field he knew of old.  He had been a desperate smuggler in his younger days.  We settled the purchase of a fast sailing craft.  Agreed that it must be a balancelle and something altogether out of the common.  He knew of one suitable but she was in Corsica.  Offered to start for Bastia by mail-boat in the morning.  All the time the handsome and mature Madame Léonore sat by, smiling faintly, amused at her great man joining like this in a frolic of boys.  She said the last words of that evening: “You men never grow up,” touching lightly the grey hair above his temple.

A fortnight later.

. . . In the afternoon to the Prado.  Beautiful day.  At the moment of ringing at the door a strong emotion of an anxious kind.  Why?  Down the length of the dining-room in the rotunda part full of afternoon light Doña R., sitting cross-legged on the divan in the attitude of a very old idol or a very young child and surrounded by many cushions, waves her hand from afar pleasantly surprised, exclaiming: “What!  Back already!”  I give her all the details and we talk for two hours across a large brass bowl containing a little water placed between us, lighting cigarettes and dropping them, innumerable, puffed at, yet untasted in the overwhelming interest of the conversation.  Found her very quick in taking the points and very intelligent in her suggestions.  All formality soon vanished between us and before very long I discovered myself sitting cross-legged, too, while I held forth on the qualities of different Mediterranean sailing craft and on the romantic qualifications of Dominic for the task.  I believe I gave her the whole history of the man, mentioning even the existence of Madame Léonore, since the little café would have to be the headquarters of the marine part of the plot.

She murmured, “Ah! Une belle Romaine,” thoughtfully.  She told me that she liked to hear people of that sort spoken of in terms of our common humanity.  She observed also that she wished to see Dominic some day; to set her eyes for once on a man who could be absolutely depended on.  She wanted to know whether he had engaged himself in this adventure solely for my sake.