Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (512 page)

“I have heard this name murmured by pretty lips in more than one royalist salon.”

I didn’t say anything to that ingratiating speech.  I had only an odd thought that she could not have had such a figure, nothing like it, when she was seventeen and wore snowy muslin dresses on the family plantation in South Carolina, in pre-abolition days.

“You won’t mind, I am sure, if an old woman whose heart is still young elects to call you by it,” she declared.

“Certainly, Madame.  It will be more romantic,” I assented with a respectful bow.

She dropped a calm: “Yes — there is nothing like romance while one is young.  So I will call you Monsieur George,” she paused and then added, “I could never get old,” in a matter-of-fact final tone as one would remark, “I could never learn to swim,” and I had the presence of mind to say in a tone to match, “C’est évident, Madame.”  It was evident.  She couldn’t get old; and across the table her thirty-year-old son who couldn’t get sleep sat listening with courteous detachment and the narrowest possible line of white underlining his silky black moustache.

“Your services are immensely appreciated,” she said with an amusing touch of importance as of a great official lady.  “Immensely appreciated by people in a position to understand the great significance of the Carlist movement in the South.  There it has to combat anarchism, too.  I who have lived through the Commune . . .”

Therese came in with a dish, and for the rest of the lunch the conversation so well begun drifted amongst the most appalling inanities of the religious-royalist-legitimist order.  The ears of all the Bourbons in the world must have been burning.  Mrs. Blunt seemed to have come into personal contact with a good many of them and the marvellous insipidity of her recollections was astonishing to my inexperience.  I looked at her from time to time thinking: She has seen slavery, she has seen the Commune, she knows two continents, she has seen a civil war, the glory of the Second Empire, the horrors of two sieges; she has been in contact with marked personalities, with great events, she has lived on her wealth, on her personality, and there she is with her plumage unruffled, as glossy as ever, unable to get old: — a sort of Phoenix free from the slightest signs of ashes and dust, all complacent amongst those inanities as if there had been nothing else in the world.  In my youthful haste I asked myself what sort of airy soul she had.

At last Therese put a dish of fruit on the table, a small collection of oranges, raisins, and nuts.  No doubt she had bought that lot very cheap and it did not look at all inviting.  Captain Blunt jumped up.  “My mother can’t stand tobacco smoke.  Will you keep her company, mon cher, while I take a turn with a cigar in that ridiculous garden.  The brougham from the hotel will be here very soon.”

He left us in the white flash of an apologetic grin.  Almost directly he reappeared, visible from head to foot through the glass side of the studio, pacing up and down the central path of that “ridiculous” garden: for its elegance and its air of good breeding the most remarkable figure that I have ever seen before or since.  He had changed his coat.  Madame Blunt mère lowered the long-handled glasses through which she had been contemplating him with an appraising, absorbed expression which had nothing maternal in it.  But what she said to me was:

“You understand my anxieties while he is campaigning with the King.”

She had spoken in French and she had used the expression “mes transes” but for all the rest, intonation, bearing, solemnity, she might have been referring to one of the Bourbons.  I am sure that not a single one of them looked half as aristocratic as her son.

“I understand perfectly, Madame.  But then that life is so romantic.”

“Hundreds of young men belonging to a certain sphere are doing that,” she said very distinctly, “only their case is different.  They have their positions, their families to go back to; but we are different.  We are exiles, except of course for the ideals, the kindred spirit, the friendships of old standing we have in France.  Should my son come out unscathed he has no one but me and I have no one but him.  I have to think of his life.  Mr. Mills (what a distinguished mind that is!) has reassured me as to my son’s health.  But he sleeps very badly, doesn’t he?”

I murmured something affirmative in a doubtful tone and she remarked quaintly, with a certain curtness, “It’s so unnecessary, this worry!  The unfortunate position of an exile has its advantages.  At a certain height of social position (wealth has got nothing to do with it, we have been ruined in a most righteous cause), at a certain established height one can disregard narrow prejudices.  You see examples in the aristocracies of all the countries.  A chivalrous young American may offer his life for a remote ideal which yet may belong to his familial tradition.  We, in our great country, have every sort of tradition.  But a young man of good connections and distinguished relations must settle down some day, dispose of his life.”

“No doubt, Madame,” I said, raising my eyes to the figure outside — ”Américain, Catholique et gentilhomme” — walking up and down the path with a cigar which he was not smoking.  “For myself, I don’t know anything about those necessities.  I have broken away for ever from those things.”

“Yes, Mr. Mills talked to me about you.  What a golden heart that is.  His sympathies are infinite.”

I thought suddenly of Mills pronouncing on Mme. Blunt, whatever his text on me might have been: “She lives by her wits.”  Was she exercising her wits on me for some purpose of her own?  And I observed coldly:

“I really know your son so very little.”

“Oh, voyons,” she protested.  “I am aware that you are very much younger, but the similitudes of opinions, origins and perhaps at bottom, faintly, of character, of chivalrous devotion — no, you must be able to understand him in a measure.  He is infinitely scrupulous and recklessly brave.”

I listened deferentially to the end yet with every nerve in my body tingling in hostile response to the Blunt vibration, which seemed to have got into my very hair.

“I am convinced of it, Madame.  I have even heard of your son’s bravery.  It’s extremely natural in a man who, in his own words, ‘lives by his sword.’”

She suddenly departed from her almost inhuman perfection, betrayed “nerves” like a common mortal, of course very slightly, but in her it meant more than a blaze of fury from a vessel of inferior clay.  Her admirable little foot, marvellously shod in a black shoe, tapped the floor irritably.  But even in that display there was something exquisitely delicate.  The very anger in her voice was silvery, as it were, and more like the petulance of a seventeen-year-old beauty.

“What nonsense!  A Blunt doesn’t hire himself.”

“Some princely families,” I said, “were founded by men who have done that very thing.  The great Condottieri, you know.”

It was in an almost tempestuous tone that she made me observe that we were not living in the fifteenth century.  She gave me also to understand with some spirit that there was no question here of founding a family.  Her son was very far from being the first of the name.  His importance lay rather in being the last of a race which had totally perished, she added in a completely drawing-room tone, “in our Civil War.”

She had mastered her irritation and through the glass side of the room sent a wistful smile to his address, but I noticed the yet unextinguished anger in her eyes full of fire under her beautiful white eyebrows.  For she was growing old!  Oh, yes, she was growing old, and secretly weary, and perhaps desperate.

CHAPTER III

Without caring much about it I was conscious of sudden illumination.  I said to myself confidently that these two people had been quarrelling all the morning.  I had discovered the secret of my invitation to that lunch.  They did not care to face the strain of some obstinate, inconclusive discussion for fear, maybe, of it ending in a serious quarrel.  And so they had agreed that I should be fetched downstairs to create a diversion.  I cannot say I felt annoyed.  I didn’t care.  My perspicacity did not please me either.  I wished they had left me alone — but nothing mattered.  They must have been in their superiority accustomed to make use of people, without compunction.  From necessity, too.  She especially.  She lived by her wits.  The silence had grown so marked that I had at last to raise my eyes; and the first thing I observed was that Captain Blunt was no longer to be seen in the garden.  Must have gone indoors.  Would rejoin us in a moment.  Then I would leave mother and son to themselves.

The next thing I noticed was that a great mellowness had descended upon the mother of the last of his race.  But these terms, irritation, mellowness, appeared gross when applied to her.  It is impossible to give an idea of the refinement and subtlety of all her transformations.  She smiled faintly at me.

“But all this is beside the point.  The real point is that my son, like all fine natures, is a being of strange contradictions which the trials of life have not yet reconciled in him.  With me it is a little different.  The trials fell mainly to my share — and of course I have lived longer.  And then men are much more complex than women, much more difficult, too.  And you, Monsieur George?  Are you complex, with unexpected resistances and difficulties in your être intime — your inner self?  I wonder now . . .”

The Blunt atmosphere seemed to vibrate all over my skin.  I disregarded the symptom.  “Madame,” I said, “I have never tried to find out what sort of being I am.”

“Ah, that’s very wrong.  We ought to reflect on what manner of beings we are.  Of course we are all sinners.  My John is a sinner like the others,” she declared further, with a sort of proud tenderness as though our common lot must have felt honoured and to a certain extent purified by this condescending recognition.

“You are too young perhaps as yet . . . But as to my John,” she broke off, leaning her elbow on the table and supporting her head on her old, impeccably shaped, white fore-arm emerging from a lot of precious, still older, lace trimming the short sleeve.  “The trouble is that he suffers from a profound discord between the necessary reactions to life and even the impulses of nature and the lofty idealism of his feelings; I may say, of his principles.  I assure you that he won’t even let his heart speak uncontradicted.”

I am sure I don’t know what particular devil looks after the associations of memory, and I can’t even imagine the shock which it would have been for Mrs. Blunt to learn that the words issuing from her lips had awakened in me the visual perception of a dark-skinned, hard-driven lady’s maid with tarnished eyes; even of the tireless Rose handing me my hat while breathing out the enigmatic words: “Madame should listen to her heart.”  A wave from the atmosphere of another house rolled in, overwhelming and fiery, seductive and cruel, through the Blunt vibration, bursting through it as through tissue paper and filling my heart with sweet murmurs and distracting images, till it seemed to break, leaving an empty stillness in my breast.

After that for a long time I heard Mme. Blunt mère talking with extreme fluency and I even caught the individual words, but I could not in the revulsion of my feelings get hold of the sense.  She talked apparently of life in general, of its difficulties, moral and physical, of its surprising turns, of its unexpected contacts, of the choice and rare personalities that drift on it as if on the sea; of the distinction that letters and art gave to it, the nobility and consolations there are in aesthetics, of the privileges they confer on individuals and (this was the first connected statement I caught) that Mills agreed with her in the general point of view as to the inner worth of individualities and in the particular instance of it on which she had opened to him her innermost heart.  Mills had a universal mind.  His sympathy was universal, too.  He had that large comprehension — oh, not cynical, not at all cynical, in fact rather tender — which was found in its perfection only in some rare, very rare Englishmen.  The dear creature was romantic, too.  Of course he was reserved in his speech but she understood Mills perfectly.  Mills apparently liked me very much.

It was time for me to say something.  There was a challenge in the reposeful black eyes resting upon my face.  I murmured that I was very glad to hear it.  She waited a little, then uttered meaningly, “Mr. Mills is a little bit uneasy about you.”

“It’s very good of him,” I said.  And indeed I thought that it was very good of him, though I did ask myself vaguely in my dulled brain why he should be uneasy.

Somehow it didn’t occur to me to ask Mrs. Blunt.  Whether she had expected me to do so or not I don’t know but after a while she changed the pose she had kept so long and folded her wonderfully preserved white arms.  She looked a perfect picture in silver and grey, with touches of black here and there.  Still I said nothing more in my dull misery.  She waited a little longer, then she woke me up with a crash.  It was as if the house had fallen, and yet she had only asked me:

“I believe you are received on very friendly terms by Madame de Lastaola on account of your common exertions for the cause.  Very good friends, are you not?”

“You mean Rita,” I said stupidly, but I felt stupid, like a man who wakes up only to be hit on the head.

“Oh, Rita,” she repeated with unexpected acidity, which somehow made me feel guilty of an incredible breach of good manners.  “H’m, Rita. . . . Oh, well, let it be Rita — for the present.  Though why she should be deprived of her name in conversation about her, really I don’t understand.  Unless a very special intimacy . . .”

She was distinctly annoyed.  I said sulkily, “It isn’t her name.”

“It is her choice, I understand, which seems almost a better title to recognition on the part of the world.  It didn’t strike you so before?  Well, it seems to me that choice has got more right to be respected than heredity or law.  Moreover, Mme. de Lastaola,” she continued in an insinuating voice, “that most rare and fascinating young woman is, as a friend like you cannot deny, outside legality altogether.  Even in that she is an exceptional creature.  For she is exceptional — you agree?”