Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (519 page)

“Wait a moment,” I said, and jumped up, upsetting my wine to run upstairs as fast as I could.  I lighted the gas, all the three jets in the middle of the room, the jet by the bedside and two others flanking the dressing-table.  I had been struck by the wild hope of finding a trace of Rita’s passage, a sign or something.  I pulled out all the drawers violently, thinking that perhaps she had hidden there a scrap of paper, a note.  It was perfectly mad.  Of course there was no chance of that.  Therese would have seen to it.  I picked up one after another all the various objects on the dressing-table.  On laying my hands on the brushes I had a profound emotion, and with misty eyes I examined them meticulously with the new hope of finding one of Rita’s tawny hairs entangled amongst the bristles by a miraculous chance.  But Therese would have done away with that chance, too.  There was nothing to be seen, though I held them up to the light with a beating heart.  It was written that not even that trace of her passage on the earth should remain with me; not to help but, as it were, to soothe the memory.  Then I lighted a cigarette and came downstairs slowly.  My unhappiness became dulled, as the grief of those who mourn for the dead gets dulled in the overwhelming sensation that everything is over, that a part of themselves is lost beyond recall taking with it all the savour of life.

I discovered Therese still on the very same spot of the floor, her hands folded over each other and facing my empty chair before which the spilled wine had soaked a large portion of the table-cloth.  She hadn’t moved at all.  She hadn’t even picked up the overturned glass.  But directly I appeared she began to speak in an ingratiating voice.

“If you have missed anything of yours upstairs, my dear young Monsieur, you mustn’t say it’s me.  You don’t know what our Rita is.”

“I wish to goodness,” I said, “that she had taken something.”

And again I became inordinately agitated as though it were my absolute fate to be everlastingly dying and reviving to the tormenting fact of her existence.  Perhaps she had taken something?  Anything.  Some small object.  I thought suddenly of a Rhenish-stone match-box.  Perhaps it was that.  I didn’t remember having seen it when upstairs.  I wanted to make sure at once.  At once.  But I commanded myself to sit still.

“And she so wealthy,” Therese went on.  “Even you with your dear generous little heart can do nothing for our Rita.  No man can do anything for her — except perhaps one, but she is so evilly disposed towards him that she wouldn’t even see him, if in the goodness of his forgiving heart he were to offer his hand to her.  It’s her bad conscience that frightens her.  He loves her more than his life, the dear, charitable man.”

“You mean some rascal in Paris that I believe persecutes Doña Rita.  Listen, Mademoiselle Therese, if you know where he hangs out you had better let him have word to be careful.  I believe he, too, is mixed up in the Carlist intrigue.  Don’t you know that your sister can get him shut up any day or get him expelled by the police?”

Therese sighed deeply and put on a look of pained virtue.

“Oh, the hardness of her heart.  She tried to be tender with me.  She is awful.  I said to her, ‘Rita, have you sold your soul to the Devil?’ and she shouted like a fiend: ‘For happiness!  Ha, ha, ha!’  She threw herself backwards on that couch in your room and laughed and laughed and laughed as if I had been tickling her, and she drummed on the floor with the heels of her shoes.  She is possessed.  Oh, my dear innocent young Monsieur, you have never seen anything like that.  That wicked girl who serves her rushed in with a tiny glass bottle and put it to her nose; but I had a mind to run out and fetch the priest from the church where I go to early mass.  Such a nice, stout, severe man.  But that false, cheating creature (I am sure she is robbing our Rita from morning to night), she talked to our Rita very low and quieted her down.  I am sure I don’t know what she said.  She must be leagued with the devil.  And then she asked me if I would go down and make a cup of chocolate for her Madame.  Madame — that’s our Rita.  Madame!  It seems they were going off directly to Paris and her Madame had had nothing to eat since the morning of the day before.  Fancy me being ordered to make chocolate for our Rita!  However, the poor thing looked so exhausted and white-faced that I went.  Ah! the devil can give you an awful shake up if he likes.”

Therese fetched another deep sigh and raising her eyes looked at me with great attention.  I preserved an inscrutable expression, for I wanted to hear all she had to tell me of Rita.  I watched her with the greatest anxiety composing her face into a cheerful expression.

“So Doña Rita is gone to Paris?” I asked negligently.

“Yes, my dear Monsieur.  I believe she went straight to the railway station from here.  When she first got up from the couch she could hardly stand.  But before, while she was drinking the chocolate which I made for her, I tried to get her to sign a paper giving over the house to me, but she only closed her eyes and begged me to try and be a good sister and leave her alone for half an hour.  And she lying there looking as if she wouldn’t live a day.  But she always hated me.”

I said bitterly, “You needn’t have worried her like this.  If she had not lived for another day you would have had this house and everything else besides; a bigger bit than even your wolfish throat can swallow, Mademoiselle Therese.”

I then said a few more things indicative of my disgust with her rapacity, but they were quite inadequate, as I wasn’t able to find words strong enough to express my real mind.  But it didn’t matter really because I don’t think Therese heard me at all.  She seemed lost in rapt amazement.

“What do you say, my dear Monsieur?  What!  All for me without any sort of paper?”

She appeared distracted by my curt: “Yes.”  Therese believed in my truthfulness.  She believed me implicitly, except when I was telling her the truth about herself, mincing no words, when she used to stand smilingly bashful as if I were overwhelming her with compliments.  I expected her to continue the horrible tale but apparently she had found something to think about which checked the flow.  She fetched another sigh and muttered:

“Then the law can be just, if it does not require any paper.  After all, I am her sister.”

“It’s very difficult to believe that — at sight,” I said roughly.

“Ah, but that I could prove.  There are papers for that.”

After this declaration she began to clear the table, preserving a thoughtful silence.

I was not very surprised at the news of Doña Rita’s departure for Paris.  It was not necessary to ask myself why she had gone.  I didn’t even ask myself whether she had left the leased Villa on the Prado for ever.  Later talking again with Therese, I learned that her sister had given it up for the use of the Carlist cause and that some sort of unofficial Consul, a Carlist agent of some sort, either was going to live there or had already taken possession.  This, Rita herself had told her before her departure on that agitated morning spent in the house — in my rooms.  A close investigation demonstrated to me that there was nothing missing from them.  Even the wretched match-box which I really hoped was gone turned up in a drawer after I had, delightedly, given it up.  It was a great blow.  She might have taken that at least!  She knew I used to carry it about with me constantly while ashore.  She might have taken it!  Apparently she meant that there should be no bond left even of that kind; and yet it was a long time before I gave up visiting and revisiting all the corners of all possible receptacles for something that she might have left behind on purpose.  It was like the mania of those disordered minds who spend their days hunting for a treasure.  I hoped for a forgotten hairpin, for some tiny piece of ribbon.  Sometimes at night I reflected that such hopes were altogether insensate; but I remember once getting up at two in the morning to search for a little cardboard box in the bathroom, into which, I remembered, I had not looked before.  Of course it was empty; and, anyway, Rita could not possibly have known of its existence.  I got back to bed shivering violently, though the night was warm, and with a distinct impression that this thing would end by making me mad.  It was no longer a question of “this sort of thing” killing me.  The moral atmosphere of this torture was different.  It would make me mad.  And at that thought great shudders ran down my prone body, because, once, I had visited a famous lunatic asylum where they had shown me a poor wretch who was mad, apparently, because he thought he had been abominably fooled by a woman.  They told me that his grievance was quite imaginary.  He was a young man with a thin fair beard, huddled up on the edge of his bed, hugging himself forlornly; and his incessant and lamentable wailing filled the long bare corridor, striking a chill into one’s heart long before one came to the door of his cell.

And there was no one from whom I could hear, to whom I could speak, with whom I could evoke the image of Rita.  Of course I could utter that word of four letters to Therese; but Therese for some reason took it into her head to avoid all topics connected with her sister.  I felt as if I could pull out great handfuls of her hair hidden modestly under the black handkerchief of which the ends were sometimes tied under her chin.  But, really, I could not have given her any intelligible excuse for that outrage.  Moreover, she was very busy from the very top to the very bottom of the house, which she persisted in running alone because she couldn’t make up her mind to part with a few francs every month to a servant.  It seemed to me that I was no longer such a favourite with her as I used to be.  That, strange to say, was exasperating, too.  It was as if some idea, some fruitful notion had killed in her all the softer and more humane emotions.  She went about with brooms and dusters wearing an air of sanctimonious thoughtfulness.

The man who to a certain extent took my place in Therese’s favour was the old father of the dancing girls inhabiting the ground floor.  In a tall hat and a well-to-do dark blue overcoat he allowed himself to be button-holed in the hall by Therese who would talk to him interminably with downcast eyes.  He smiled gravely down at her, and meanwhile tried to edge towards the front door.  I imagine he didn’t put a great value on Therese’s favour.  Our stay in harbour was prolonged this time and I kept indoors like an invalid.  One evening I asked that old man to come in and drink and smoke with me in the studio.  He made no difficulties to accept, brought his wooden pipe with him, and was very entertaining in a pleasant voice.  One couldn’t tell whether he was an uncommon person or simply a ruffian, but in any case with his white beard he looked quite venerable.  Naturally he couldn’t give me much of his company as he had to look closely after his girls and their admirers; not that the girls were unduly frivolous, but of course being very young they had no experience.  They were friendly creatures with pleasant, merry voices and he was very much devoted to them.  He was a muscular man with a high colour and silvery locks curling round his bald pate and over his ears, like a barocco apostle.  I had an idea that he had had a lurid past and had seen some fighting in his youth.  The admirers of the two girls stood in great awe of him, from instinct no doubt, because his behaviour to them was friendly and even somewhat obsequious, yet always with a certain truculent glint in his eye that made them pause in everything but their generosity — which was encouraged.  I sometimes wondered whether those two careless, merry hard-working creatures understood the secret moral beauty of the situation.

My real company was the dummy in the studio and I can’t say it was exactly satisfying.  After taking possession of the studio I had raised it tenderly, dusted its mangled limbs and insensible, hard-wood bosom, and then had propped it up in a corner where it seemed to take on, of itself, a shy attitude.  I knew its history.  It was not an ordinary dummy.  One day, talking with Doña Rita about her sister, I had told her that I thought Therese used to knock it down on purpose with a broom, and Doña Rita had laughed very much.  This, she had said, was an instance of dislike from mere instinct.  That dummy had been made to measure years before.  It had to wear for days and days the Imperial Byzantine robes in which Doña Rita sat only once or twice herself; but of course the folds and bends of the stuff had to be preserved as in the first sketch.  Doña Rita described amusingly how she had to stand in the middle of her room while Rose walked around her with a tape measure noting the figures down on a small piece of paper which was then sent to the maker, who presently returned it with an angry letter stating that those proportions were altogether impossible in any woman.  Apparently Rose had muddled them all up; and it was a long time before the figure was finished and sent to the Pavilion in a long basket to take on itself the robes and the hieratic pose of the Empress.  Later, it wore with the same patience the marvellous hat of the “Girl in the Hat.”  But Doña Rita couldn’t understand how the poor thing ever found its way to Marseilles minus its turnip head.  Probably it came down with the robes and a quantity of precious brocades which she herself had sent down from Paris.  The knowledge of its origin, the contempt of Captain Blunt’s references to it, with Therese’s shocked dislike of the dummy, invested that summary reproduction with a sort of charm, gave me a faint and miserable illusion of the original, less artificial than a photograph, less precise, too. . . . But it can’t be explained.  I felt positively friendly to it as if it had been Rita’s trusted personal attendant.  I even went so far as to discover that it had a sort of grace of its own.  But I never went so far as to address set speeches to it where it lurked shyly in its corner, or drag it out from there for contemplation.  I left it in peace.  I wasn’t mad.  I was only convinced that I soon would be.

CHAPTER II

Notwithstanding my misanthropy I had to see a few people on account of all these Royalist affairs which I couldn’t very well drop, and in truth did not wish to drop.  They were my excuse for remaining in Europe, which somehow I had not the strength of mind to leave for the West Indies, or elsewhere.  On the other hand, my adventurous pursuit kept me in contact with the sea where I found occupation, protection, consolation, the mental relief of grappling with concrete problems, the sanity one acquires from close contact with simple mankind, a little self-confidence born from the dealings with the elemental powers of nature.  I couldn’t give all that up.  And besides all this was related to Doña Rita.  I had, as it were, received it all from her own hand, from that hand the clasp of which was as frank as a man’s and yet conveyed a unique sensation.  The very memory of it would go through me like a wave of heat.  It was over that hand that we first got into the habit of quarrelling, with the irritability of sufferers from some obscure pain and yet half unconscious of their disease.  Rita’s own spirit hovered over the troubled waters of Legitimity.  But as to the sound of the four magic letters of her name I was not very likely to hear it fall sweetly on my ear.  For instance, the distinguished personality in the world of finance with whom I had to confer several times, alluded to the irresistible seduction of the power which reigned over my heart and my mind; which had a mysterious and unforgettable face, the brilliance of sunshine together with the unfathomable splendour of the night as — Madame de Lastaola.  That’s how that steel-grey man called the greatest mystery of the universe.  When uttering that assumed name he would make for himself a guardedly solemn and reserved face as though he were afraid lest I should presume to smile, lest he himself should venture to smile, and the sacred formality of our relations should be outraged beyond mending.