Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (504 page)

Presently she continued as if speaking for herself only.

“It’s like taking the lids off boxes and seeing ugly toads staring at you.  In every one.  Every one.  That’s what it is having to do with men more than mere — Good-morning — Good evening.  And if you try to avoid meddling with their lids, some of them will take them off themselves.  And they don’t even know, they don’t even suspect what they are showing you.  Certain confidences — they don’t see it — are the bitterest kind of insult.  I suppose Azzolati imagines himself a noble beast of prey.  Just as some others imagine themselves to be most delicate, noble, and refined gentlemen.  And as likely as not they would trade on a woman’s troubles — and in the end make nothing of that either.  Idiots!”

The utter absence of all anger in this spoken meditation gave it a character of touching simplicity.  And as if it had been truly only a meditation we conducted ourselves as though we had not heard it.  Mills began to speak of his experiences during his visit to the army of the Legitimist King.  And I discovered in his speeches that this man of books could be graphic and picturesque.  His admiration for the devotion and bravery of the army was combined with the greatest distaste for what he had seen of the way its great qualities were misused.  In the conduct of this great enterprise he had seen a deplorable levity of outlook, a fatal lack of decision, an absence of any reasoned plan.

He shook his head.

“I feel that you of all people, Doña Rita, ought to be told the truth.  I don’t know exactly what you have at stake.”

She was rosy like some impassive statue in a desert in the flush of the dawn.

“Not my heart,” she said quietly.  “You must believe that.”

“I do.  Perhaps it would have been better if you. . . “

“No, Monsieur le Philosophe.  It would not have been better.  Don’t make that serious face at me,” she went on with tenderness in a playful note, as if tenderness had been her inheritance of all time and playfulness the very fibre of her being.  “I suppose you think that a woman who has acted as I did and has not staked her heart on it is . . . How do you know to what the heart responds as it beats from day to day?”

“I wouldn’t judge you.  What am I before the knowledge you were born to?  You are as old as the world.”

She accepted this with a smile.  I who was innocently watching them was amazed to discover how much a fleeting thing like that could hold of seduction without the help of any other feature and with that unchanging glance.

“With me it is pun d’onor.  To my first independent friend.”

“You were soon parted,” ventured Mills, while I sat still under a sense of oppression.

“Don’t think for a moment that I have been scared off,” she said.  “It is they who were frightened.  I suppose you heard a lot of Headquarters gossip?”

“Oh, yes,” Mills said meaningly.  “The fair and the dark are succeeding each other like leaves blown in the wind dancing in and out.  I suppose you have noticed that leaves blown in the wind have a look of happiness.”

“Yes,” she said, “that sort of leaf is dead.  Then why shouldn’t it look happy?  And so I suppose there is no uneasiness, no occasion for fears amongst the ‘responsibles.’”

“Upon the whole not.  Now and then a leaf seems as if it would stick.  There is for instance Madame . . .”

“Oh, I don’t want to know, I understand it all, I am as old as the world.”

“Yes,” said Mills thoughtfully, “you are not a leaf, you might have been a tornado yourself.”

“Upon my word,” she said, “there was a time that they thought I could carry him off, away from them all — beyond them all.  Verily, I am not very proud of their fears.  There was nothing reckless there worthy of a great passion.  There was nothing sad there worthy of a great tenderness.”

“And is this the word of the Venetian riddle?” asked Mills, fixing her with his keen eyes.

“If it pleases you to think so, Señor,” she said indifferently.  The movement of her eyes, their veiled gleam became mischievous when she asked, “And Don Juan Blunt, have you seen him over there?”

“I fancy he avoided me.  Moreover, he is always with his regiment at the outposts.  He is a most valorous captain.  I heard some people describe him as foolhardy.”

“Oh, he needn’t seek death,” she said in an indefinable tone.  “I mean as a refuge.  There will be nothing in his life great enough for that.”

“You are angry.  You miss him, I believe, Doña Rita.”

“Angry?  No!  Weary.  But of course it’s very inconvenient.  I can’t very well ride out alone.  A solitary amazon swallowing the dust and the salt spray of the Corniche promenade would attract too much attention.  And then I don’t mind you two knowing that I am afraid of going out alone.”

“Afraid?” we both exclaimed together.

“You men are extraordinary.  Why do you want me to be courageous?  Why shouldn’t I be afraid?  Is it because there is no one in the world to care what would happen to me?”

There was a deep-down vibration in her tone for the first time.  We had not a word to say.  And she added after a long silence:

“There is a very good reason.  There is a danger.”

With wonderful insight Mills affirmed at once:

“Something ugly.”

She nodded slightly several times.  Then Mills said with conviction:

“Ah!  Then it can’t be anything in yourself.  And if so . . . “

I was moved to extravagant advice.

“You should come out with me to sea then.  There may be some danger there but there’s nothing ugly to fear.”

She gave me a startled glance quite unusual with her, more than wonderful to me; and suddenly as though she had seen me for the first time she exclaimed in a tone of compunction:

“Oh!  And there is this one, too!  Why!  Oh, why should he run his head into danger for those things that will all crumble into dust before long?”

I said: “You won’t crumble into dust.”  And Mills chimed in:

“That young enthusiast will always have his sea.”

We were all standing up now.  She kept her eyes on me, and repeated with a sort of whimsical enviousness:

“The sea!  The violet sea — and he is longing to rejoin it! . . . At night!  Under the stars! . . . A lovers’ meeting,” she went on, thrilling me from head to foot with those two words, accompanied by a wistful smile pointed by a suspicion of mockery.  She turned away.

“And you, Monsieur Mills?” she asked.

“I am going back to my books,” he declared with a very serious face.  “My adventure is over.”

“Each one to his love,” she bantered us gently.  “Didn’t I love books, too, at one time!  They seemed to contain all wisdom and hold a magic power, too.  Tell me, Monsieur Mills, have you found amongst them in some black-letter volume the power of foretelling a poor mortal’s destiny, the power to look into the future?  Anybody’s future . . .”  Mills shook his head. . . “What, not even mine?” she coaxed as if she really believed in a magic power to be found in books.

Mills shook his head again.  “No, I have not the power,” he said.  “I am no more a great magician, than you are a poor mortal.  You have your ancient spells.  You are as old as the world.  Of us two it’s you that are more fit to foretell the future of the poor mortals on whom you happen to cast your eyes.”

At these words she cast her eyes down and in the moment of deep silence I watched the slight rising and falling of her breast.  Then Mills pronounced distinctly: “Good-bye, old Enchantress.”

They shook hands cordially.  “Good-bye, poor Magician,” she said.

Mills made as if to speak but seemed to think better of it.  Doña Rita returned my distant bow with a slight, charmingly ceremonious inclination of her body.

“Bon voyage and a happy return,” she said formally.

I was following Mills through the door when I heard her voice behind us raised in recall:

“Oh, a moment . . . I forgot . . .”

I turned round.  The call was for me, and I walked slowly back wondering what she could have forgotten.  She waited in the middle of the room with lowered head, with a mute gleam in her deep blue eyes.  When I was near enough she extended to me without a word her bare white arm and suddenly pressed the back of her hand against my lips.  I was too startled to seize it with rapture.  It detached itself from my lips and fell slowly by her side.  We had made it up and there was nothing to say.  She turned away to the window and I hurried out of the room.

PART THREE

CHAPTER I

It was on our return from that first trip that I took Dominic up to the Villa to be presented to Doña Rita.  If she wanted to look on the embodiment of fidelity, resource, and courage, she could behold it all in that man.  Apparently she was not disappointed.  Neither was Dominic disappointed.  During the half-hour’s interview they got into touch with each other in a wonderful way as if they had some common and secret standpoint in life.  Maybe it was their common lawlessness, and their knowledge of things as old as the world.  Her seduction, his recklessness, were both simple, masterful and, in a sense, worthy of each other.

Dominic was, I won’t say awed by this interview.  No woman could awe Dominic.  But he was, as it were, rendered thoughtful by it, like a man who had not so much an experience as a sort of revelation vouchsafed to him.  Later, at sea, he used to refer to La Señora in a particular tone and I knew that henceforth his devotion was not for me alone.  And I understood the inevitability of it extremely well.  As to Doña Rita she, after Dominic left the room, had turned to me with animation and said: “But he is perfect, this man.”  Afterwards she often asked after him and used to refer to him in conversation.  More than once she said to me: “One would like to put the care of one’s personal safety into the hands of that man.  He looks as if he simply couldn’t fail one.”  I admitted that this was very true, especially at sea.  Dominic couldn’t fail.  But at the same time I rather chaffed Rita on her preoccupation as to personal safety that so often cropped up in her talk.

“One would think you were a crowned head in a revolutionary world,” I used to tell her.

“That would be different.  One would be standing then for something, either worth or not worth dying for.  One could even run away then and be done with it.  But I can’t run away unless I got out of my skin and left that behind.  Don’t you understand?  You are very stupid . . .”  But she had the grace to add, “On purpose.”

I don’t know about the on purpose.  I am not certain about the stupidity.  Her words bewildered one often and bewilderment is a sort of stupidity.  I remedied it by simply disregarding the sense of what she said.  The sound was there and also her poignant heart-gripping presence giving occupation enough to one’s faculties.  In the power of those things over one there was mystery enough.  It was more absorbing than the mere obscurity of her speeches.  But I daresay she couldn’t understand that.

Hence, at times, the amusing outbreaks of temper in word and gesture that only strengthened the natural, the invincible force of the spell.  Sometimes the brass bowl would get upset or the cigarette box would fly up, dropping a shower of cigarettes on the floor.  We would pick them up, re-establish everything, and fall into a long silence, so close that the sound of the first word would come with all the pain of a separation.

It was at that time, too, that she suggested I should take up my quarters in her house in the street of the Consuls.  There were certain advantages in that move.  In my present abode my sudden absences might have been in the long run subject to comment.  On the other hand, the house in the street of Consuls was a known out-post of Legitimacy.  But then it was covered by the occult influence of her who was referred to in confidential talks, secret communications, and discreet whispers of Royalist salons as: “Madame de Lastaola.”

That was the name which the heiress of Henry Allègre had decided to adopt when, according to her own expression, she had found herself precipitated at a moment’s notice into the crowd of mankind.  It is strange how the death of Henry Allègre, which certainly the poor man had not planned, acquired in my view the character of a heartless desertion.  It gave one a glimpse of amazing egoism in a sentiment to which one could hardly give a name, a mysterious appropriation of one human being by another as if in defiance of unexpressed things and for an unheard-of satisfaction of an inconceivable pride.  If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more brutally at her head.  And his unrepentant death seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister like an Olympian’s caprice.

Doña Rita said to me once with humorous resignation: “You know, it appears that one must have a name.  That’s what Henry Allègre’s man of business told me.  He was quite impatient with me about it.  But my name, amigo, Henry Allègre had taken from me like all the rest of what I had been once.  All that is buried with him in his grave.  It wouldn’t have been true.  That is how I felt about it.  So I took that one.”  She whispered to herself: “Lastaola,” not as if to test the sound but as if in a dream.

To this day I am not quite certain whether it was the name of any human habitation, a lonely caserio with a half-effaced carving of a coat of arms over its door, or of some hamlet at the dead end of a ravine with a stony slope at the back.  It might have been a hill for all I know or perhaps a stream.  A wood, or perhaps a combination of all these: just a bit of the earth’s surface.  Once I asked her where exactly it was situated and she answered, waving her hand cavalierly at the dead wall of the room: “Oh, over there.”  I thought that this was all that I was going to hear but she added moodily, “I used to take my goats there, a dozen or so of them, for the day.  From after my uncle had said his Mass till the ringing of the evening bell.”

I saw suddenly the lonely spot, sketched for me some time ago by a few words from Mr. Blunt, populated by the agile, bearded beasts with cynical heads, and a little misty figure dark in the sunlight with a halo of dishevelled rust-coloured hair about its head.