Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (508 page)

In the stupid way people have I stood and meditated on the sight, before it occurred to me that this was the most useless thing to do.  After waiting a little longer to let the others get away from the hall I entered in my turn.  The small gas-jet seemed not to have been touched ever since that distant night when Mills and I trod the black-and-white marble hall for the first time on the heels of Captain Blunt — who lived by his sword.  And in the dimness and solitude which kept no more trace of the three strangers than if they had been the merest ghosts I seemed to hear the ghostly murmur, “Américain, Catholique et gentilhomme.  Amér. . . “  Unseen by human eye I ran up the flight of steps swiftly and on the first floor stepped into my sitting-room of which the door was open . . . “et gentilhomme.”  I tugged at the bell pull and somewhere down below a bell rang as unexpected for Therese as a call from a ghost.

I had no notion whether Therese could hear me.  I seemed to remember that she slept in any bed that happened to be vacant.  For all I knew she might have been asleep in mine.  As I had no matches on me I waited for a while in the dark.  The house was perfectly still.  Suddenly without the slightest preliminary sound light fell into the room and Therese stood in the open door with a candlestick in her hand.

She had on her peasant brown skirt.  The rest of her was concealed in a black shawl which covered her head, her shoulders, arms, and elbows completely, down to her waist.  The hand holding the candle protruded from that envelope which the other invisible hand clasped together under her very chin.  And her face looked like a face in a painting.  She said at once:

“You startled me, my young Monsieur.”

She addressed me most frequently in that way as though she liked the very word “young.”  Her manner was certainly peasant-like with a sort of plaint in the voice, while the face was that of a serving Sister in some small and rustic convent.

“I meant to do it,” I said.  “I am a very bad person.”

“The young are always full of fun,” she said as if she were gloating over the idea.  “It is very pleasant.”

“But you are very brave,” I chaffed her, “for you didn’t expect a ring, and after all it might have been the devil who pulled the bell.”

“It might have been.  But a poor girl like me is not afraid of the devil.  I have a pure heart.  I have been to confession last evening.  No.  But it might have been an assassin that pulled the bell ready to kill a poor harmless woman.  This is a very lonely street.  What could prevent you to kill me now and then walk out again free as air?”

While she was talking like this she had lighted the gas and with the last words she glided through the bedroom door leaving me thunderstruck at the unexpected character of her thoughts.

I couldn’t know that there had been during my absence a case of atrocious murder which had affected the imagination of the whole town; and though Therese did not read the papers (which she imagined to be full of impieties and immoralities invented by godless men) yet if she spoke at all with her kind, which she must have done at least in shops, she could not have helped hearing of it.  It seems that for some days people could talk of nothing else.  She returned gliding from the bedroom hermetically sealed in her black shawl just as she had gone in, with the protruding hand holding the lighted candle and relieved my perplexity as to her morbid turn of mind by telling me something of the murder story in a strange tone of indifference even while referring to its most horrible features.  “That’s what carnal sin (pêché de chair) leads to,” she commented severely and passed her tongue over her thin lips.  “And then the devil furnishes the occasion.”

“I can’t imagine the devil inciting me to murder you, Therese,” I said, “and I didn’t like that ready way you took me for an example, as it were.  I suppose pretty near every lodger might be a potential murderer, but I expected to be made an exception.”

With the candle held a little below her face, with that face of one tone and without relief she looked more than ever as though she had come out of an old, cracked, smoky painting, the subject of which was altogether beyond human conception.  And she only compressed her lips.

“All right,” I said, making myself comfortable on a sofa after pulling off my boots.  “I suppose any one is liable to commit murder all of a sudden.  Well, have you got many murderers in the house?”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s pretty good.  Upstairs and downstairs,” she sighed.  “God sees to it.”

“And by the by, who is that grey-headed murderer in a tall hat whom I saw shepherding two girls into this house?”

She put on a candid air in which one could detect a little of her peasant cunning.

“Oh, yes.  They are two dancing girls at the Opera, sisters, as different from each other as I and our poor Rita.  But they are both virtuous and that gentleman, their father, is very severe with them.  Very severe indeed, poor motherless things.  And it seems to be such a sinful occupation.”

“I bet you make them pay a big rent, Therese.  With an occupation like that . . .”

She looked at me with eyes of invincible innocence and began to glide towards the door, so smoothly that the flame of the candle hardly swayed.  “Good-night,” she murmured.

“Good-night, Mademoiselle.”

Then in the very doorway she turned right round as a marionette would turn.

“Oh, you ought to know, my dear young Monsieur, that Mr. Blunt, the dear handsome man, has arrived from Navarre three days ago or more.  Oh,” she added with a priceless air of compunction, “he is such a charming gentleman.”

And the door shut after her.

CHAPTER IV

That night I passed in a state, mostly open-eyed, I believe, but always on the border between dreams and waking.  The only thing absolutely absent from it was the feeling of rest.  The usual sufferings of a youth in love had nothing to do with it.  I could leave her, go away from her, remain away from her, without an added pang or any augmented consciousness of that torturing sentiment of distance so acute that often it ends by wearing itself out in a few days.  Far or near was all one to me, as if one could never get any further but also never any nearer to her secret: the state like that of some strange wild faiths that get hold of mankind with the cruel mystic grip of unattainable perfection, robbing them of both liberty and felicity on earth.  A faith presents one with some hope, though.  But I had no hope, and not even desire as a thing outside myself, that would come and go, exhaust or excite.  It was in me just like life was in me; that life of which a popular saying affirms that “it is sweet.”  For the general wisdom of mankind will always stop short on the limit of the formidable.

What is best in a state of brimful, equable suffering is that it does away with the gnawings of petty sensations.  Too far gone to be sensible to hope and desire I was spared the inferior pangs of elation and impatience.  Hours with her or hours without her were all alike, all in her possession!  But still there are shades and I will admit that the hours of that morning were perhaps a little more difficult to get through than the others.  I had sent word of my arrival of course.  I had written a note.  I had rung the bell.  Therese had appeared herself in her brown garb and as monachal as ever.  I had said to her:

“Have this sent off at once.”

She had gazed at the addressed envelope, smiled (I was looking up at her from my desk), and at last took it up with an effort of sanctimonious repugnance.  But she remained with it in her hand looking at me as though she were piously gloating over something she could read in my face.

“Oh, that Rita, that Rita,” she murmured.  “And you, too!  Why are you trying, you, too, like the others, to stand between her and the mercy of God?  What’s the good of all this to you?  And you such a nice, dear, young gentleman.  For no earthly good only making all the kind saints in heaven angry, and our mother ashamed in her place amongst the blessed.”

“Mademoiselle Therese,” I said, “vous êtes folle.”

I believed she was crazy.  She was cunning, too.  I added an imperious: “Allez,” and with a strange docility she glided out without another word.  All I had to do then was to get dressed and wait till eleven o’clock.

The hour struck at last.  If I could have plunged into a light wave and been transported instantaneously to Doña Rita’s door it would no doubt have saved me an infinity of pangs too complex for analysis; but as this was impossible I elected to walk from end to end of that long way.  My emotions and sensations were childlike and chaotic inasmuch that they were very intense and primitive, and that I lay very helpless in their unrelaxing grasp.  If one could have kept a record of one’s physical sensations it would have been a fine collection of absurdities and contradictions.  Hardly touching the ground and yet leaden-footed; with a sinking heart and an excited brain; hot and trembling with a secret faintness, and yet as firm as a rock and with a sort of indifference to it all, I did reach the door which was frightfully like any other commonplace door, but at the same time had a fateful character: a few planks put together — and an awful symbol; not to be approached without awe — and yet coming open in the ordinary way to the ring of the bell.

It came open.  Oh, yes, very much as usual.  But in the ordinary course of events the first sight in the hall should have been the back of the ubiquitous, busy, silent maid hurrying off and already distant.  But not at all!  She actually waited for me to enter.  I was extremely taken aback and I believe spoke to her for the first time in my life.

“Bonjour, Rose.”

She dropped her dark eyelids over those eyes that ought to have been lustrous but were not, as if somebody had breathed on them the first thing in the morning.  She was a girl without smiles.  She shut the door after me, and not only did that but in the incredible idleness of that morning she, who had never a moment to spare, started helping me off with my overcoat.  It was positively embarrassing from its novelty.  While busying herself with those trifles she murmured without any marked intention:

“Captain Blunt is with Madame.”

This didn’t exactly surprise me.  I knew he had come up to town; I only happened to have forgotten his existence for the moment.  I looked at the girl also without any particular intention.  But she arrested my movement towards the dining-room door by a low, hurried, if perfectly unemotional appeal:

“Monsieur George!”

That of course was not my name.  It served me then as it will serve for this story.  In all sorts of strange places I was alluded to as “that young gentleman they call Monsieur George.”  Orders came from “Monsieur George” to men who nodded knowingly.  Events pivoted about “Monsieur George.”  I haven’t the slightest doubt that in the dark and tortuous streets of the old Town there were fingers pointed at my back: there goes “Monsieur George.”  I had been introduced discreetly to several considerable persons as “Monsieur George.”  I had learned to answer to the name quite naturally; and to simplify matters I was also “Monsieur George” in the street of the Consuls and in the Villa on the Prado.  I verily believe that at that time I had the feeling that the name of George really belonged to me.  I waited for what the girl had to say.  I had to wait some time, though during that silence she gave no sign of distress or agitation.  It was for her obviously a moment of reflection.  Her lips were compressed a little in a characteristic, capable manner.  I looked at her with a friendliness I really felt towards her slight, unattractive, and dependable person.

“Well,” I said at last, rather amused by this mental hesitation.  I never took it for anything else.  I was sure it was not distrust.  She appreciated men and things and events solely in relation to Doña Rita’s welfare and safety.  And as to that I believed myself above suspicion.  At last she spoke.

“Madame is not happy.”  This information was given to me not emotionally but as it were officially.  It hadn’t even a tone of warning.  A mere statement.  Without waiting to see the effect she opened the dining-room door, not to announce my name in the usual way but to go in and shut it behind her.  In that short moment I heard no voices inside.  Not a sound reached me while the door remained shut; but in a few seconds it came open again and Rose stood aside to let me pass.

Then I heard something: Doña Rita’s voice raised a little on an impatient note (a very, very rare thing) finishing some phrase of protest with the words “ . . . Of no consequence.”

I heard them as I would have heard any other words, for she had that kind of voice which carries a long distance.  But the maid’s statement occupied all my mind.  “Madame n’est pas heureuse.”  It had a dreadful precision . . . “Not happy . . .”  This unhappiness had almost a concrete form — something resembling a horrid bat.  I was tired, excited, and generally overwrought.  My head felt empty.  What were the appearances of unhappiness?  I was still naïve enough to associate them with tears, lamentations, extraordinary attitudes of the body and some sort of facial distortion, all very dreadful to behold.  I didn’t know what I should see; but in what I did see there was nothing startling, at any rate from that nursery point of view which apparently I had not yet outgrown.

With immense relief the apprehensive child within me beheld Captain Blunt warming his back at the more distant of the two fireplaces; and as to Doña Rita there was nothing extraordinary in her attitude either, except perhaps that her hair was all loose about her shoulders.  I hadn’t the slightest doubt they had been riding together that morning, but she, with her impatience of all costume (and yet she could dress herself admirably and wore her dresses triumphantly), had divested herself of her riding habit and sat cross-legged enfolded in that ample blue robe like a young savage chieftain in a blanket.  It covered her very feet.  And before the normal fixity of her enigmatical eyes the smoke of the cigarette ascended ceremonially, straight up, in a slender spiral.

“How are you,” was the greeting of Captain Blunt with the usual smile which would have been more amiable if his teeth hadn’t been, just then, clenched quite so tight.  How he managed to force his voice through that shining barrier I could never understand.  Doña Rita tapped the couch engagingly by her side but I sat down instead in the armchair nearly opposite her, which, I imagine, must have been just vacated by Blunt.  She inquired with that particular gleam of the eyes in which there was something immemorial and gay: