Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (521 page)

“I am a very good gun-runner, your Excellency,” I answered quietly.

He bowed his head gravely.  “We are aware.  But I was looking for the motives which ought to have their pure source in religion.”

“I must confess frankly that I have not reflected on my motives,” I said.  “It is enough for me to know that they are not dishonourable and that anybody can see they are not the motives of an adventurer seeking some sordid advantage.”

He had listened patiently and when he saw that there was nothing more to come he ended the discussion.

“Señor, we should reflect upon our motives.  It is salutary for our conscience and is recommended (he crossed himself) by our Holy Mother the Church.  I have here certain letters from Paris on which I would consult your young sagacity which is accredited to us by the most loyal Doña Rita.”

The sound of that name on his lips was simply odious.  I was convinced that this man of forms and ceremonies and fanatical royalism was perfectly heartless.  Perhaps he reflected on his motives; but it seemed to me that his conscience could be nothing else but a monstrous thing which very few actions could disturb appreciably.  Yet for the credit of Doña Rita I did not withhold from him my young sagacity.  What he thought of it I don’t know. The matters we discussed were not of course of high policy, though from the point of view of the war in the south they were important enough.  We agreed on certain things to be done, and finally, always out of regard for Doña Rita’s credit, I put myself generally at his disposition or of any Carlist agent he would appoint in his place; for I did not suppose that he would remain very long in Marseilles.  He got out of the chair laboriously, like a sick child might have done.  The audience was over but he noticed my eyes wandering to the portrait and he said in his measured, breathed-out tones:

“I owe the pleasure of having this admirable work here to the gracious attention of Madame de Lastaola, who, knowing my attachment to the royal person of my Master, has sent it down from Paris to greet me in this house which has been given up for my occupation also through her generosity to the Royal Cause.  Unfortunately she, too, is touched by the infection of this irreverent and unfaithful age.  But she is young yet.  She is young.”

These last words were pronounced in a strange tone of menace as though he were supernaturally aware of some suspended disasters.  With his burning eyes he was the image of an Inquisitor with an unconquerable soul in that frail body.  But suddenly he dropped his eyelids and the conversation finished as characteristically as it had begun: with a slow, dismissing inclination of the head and an “Adios, Señor — may God guard you from sin.”

CHAPTER III

I must say that for the next three months I threw myself into my unlawful trade with a sort of desperation, dogged and hopeless, like a fairly decent fellow who takes deliberately to drink.  The business was getting dangerous.  The bands in the South were not very well organized, worked with no very definite plan, and now were beginning to be pretty closely hunted.  The arrangements for the transport of supplies were going to pieces; our friends ashore were getting scared; and it was no joke to find after a day of skilful dodging that there was no one at the landing place and have to go out again with our compromising cargo, to slink and lurk about the coast for another week or so, unable to trust anybody and looking at every vessel we met with suspicion.  Once we were ambushed by a lot of “rascally Carabineers,” as Dominic called them, who hid themselves among the rocks after disposing a train of mules well in view on the seashore.  Luckily, on evidence which I could never understand, Dominic detected something suspicious.  Perhaps it was by virtue of some sixth sense that men born for unlawful occupations may be gifted with.  “There is a smell of treachery about this,” he remarked suddenly, turning at his oar.  (He and I were pulling alone in a little boat to reconnoitre.)  I couldn’t detect any smell and I regard to this day our escape on that occasion as, properly speaking, miraculous.  Surely some supernatural power must have struck upwards the barrels of the Carabineers’ rifles, for they missed us by yards.  And as the Carabineers have the reputation of shooting straight, Dominic, after swearing most horribly, ascribed our escape to the particular guardian angel that looks after crazy young gentlemen.  Dominic believed in angels in a conventional way, but laid no claim to having one of his own.  Soon afterwards, while sailing quietly at night, we found ourselves suddenly near a small coasting vessel, also without lights, which all at once treated us to a volley of rifle fire.  Dominic’s mighty and inspired yell: “A plat ventre!” and also an unexpected roll to windward saved all our lives.  Nobody got a scratch.  We were past in a moment and in a breeze then blowing we had the heels of anything likely to give us chase.  But an hour afterwards, as we stood side by side peering into the darkness, Dominic was heard to mutter through his teeth: “Le métier se gâte.”  I, too, had the feeling that the trade, if not altogether spoiled, had seen its best days.  But I did not care.  In fact, for my purpose it was rather better, a more potent influence; like the stronger intoxication of raw spirit.  A volley in the dark after all was not such a bad thing.  Only a moment before we had received it, there, in that calm night of the sea full of freshness and soft whispers, I had been looking at an enchanting turn of a head in a faint light of its own, the tawny hair with snared red sparks brushed up from the nape of a white neck and held up on high by an arrow of gold feathered with brilliants and with ruby gleams all along its shaft.  That jewelled ornament, which I remember often telling Rita was of a very Philistinish conception (it was in some way connected with a tortoiseshell comb) occupied an undue place in my memory, tried to come into some sort of significance even in my sleep.  Often I dreamed of her with white limbs shimmering in the gloom like a nymph haunting a riot of foliage, and raising a perfect round arm to take an arrow of gold out of her hair to throw it at me by hand, like a dart.  It came on, a whizzing trail of light, but I always woke up before it struck.  Always.  Invariably.  It never had a chance.  A volley of small arms was much more likely to do the business some day — or night.

At last came the day when everything slipped out of my grasp.  The little vessel, broken and gone like the only toy of a lonely child, the sea itself, which had swallowed it, throwing me on shore after a shipwreck that instead of a fair fight left in me the memory of a suicide.  It took away all that there was in me of independent life, but just failed to take me out of the world, which looked then indeed like Another World fit for no one else but unrepentant sinners.  Even Dominic failed me, his moral entity destroyed by what to him was a most tragic ending of our common enterprise.  The lurid swiftness of it all was like a stunning thunder-clap — and, one evening, I found myself weary, heartsore, my brain still dazed and with awe in my heart entering Marseilles by way of the railway station, after many adventures, one more disagreeable than another, involving privations, great exertions, a lot of difficulties with all sorts of people who looked upon me evidently more as a discreditable vagabond deserving the attentions of gendarmes than a respectable (if crazy) young gentleman attended by a guardian angel of his own.  I must confess that I slunk out of the railway station shunning its many lights as if, invariably, failure made an outcast of a man.  I hadn’t any money in my pocket.  I hadn’t even the bundle and the stick of a destitute wayfarer.  I was unshaven and unwashed, and my heart was faint within me.  My attire was such that I daren’t approach the rank of fiacres, where indeed I could perceive only two pairs of lamps, of which one suddenly drove away while I looked.  The other I gave up to the fortunate of this earth.  I didn’t believe in my power of persuasion.  I had no powers.  I slunk on and on, shivering with cold, through the uproarious streets.  Bedlam was loose in them.  It was the time of Carnival.

Small objects of no value have the secret of sticking to a man in an astonishing way.  I had nearly lost my liberty and even my life, I had lost my ship, a money-belt full of gold, I had lost my companions, had parted from my friend; my occupation, my only link with life, my touch with the sea, my cap and jacket were gone — but a small penknife and a latchkey had never parted company with me.  With the latchkey I opened the door of refuge.  The hall wore its deaf-and-dumb air, its black-and-white stillness.

The sickly gas-jet still struggled bravely with adversity at the end of the raised silver arm of the statuette which had kept to a hair’s breadth its graceful pose on the toes of its left foot; and the staircase lost itself in the shadows above.  Therese was parsimonious with the lights.  To see all this was surprising.  It seemed to me that all the things I had known ought to have come down with a crash at the moment of the final catastrophe on the Spanish coast.  And there was Therese herself descending the stairs, frightened but plucky.  Perhaps she thought that she would be murdered this time for certain.  She had a strange, unemotional conviction that the house was particularly convenient for a crime.  One could never get to the bottom of her wild notions which she held with the stolidity of a peasant allied to the outward serenity of a nun.  She quaked all over as she came down to her doom, but when she recognized me she got such a shock that she sat down suddenly on the lowest step.  She did not expect me for another week at least, and, besides, she explained, the state I was in made her blood take “one turn.”

Indeed my plight seemed either to have called out or else repressed her true nature.  But who had ever fathomed her nature!  There was none of her treacly volubility.  There were none of her “dear young gentlemans” and “poor little hearts” and references to sin.  In breathless silence she ran about the house getting my room ready, lighting fires and gas-jets and even hauling at me to help me up the stairs.  Yes, she did lay hands on me for that charitable purpose.  They trembled.  Her pale eyes hardly left my face.  “What brought you here like this?” she whispered once.

“If I were to tell you, Mademoiselle Therese, you would see there the hand of God.”

She dropped the extra pillow she was carrying and then nearly fell over it.  “Oh, dear heart,” she murmured, and ran off to the kitchen.

I sank into bed as into a cloud and Therese reappeared very misty and offering me something in a cup.  I believe it was hot milk, and after I drank it she took the cup and stood looking at me fixedly.  I managed to say with difficulty: “Go away,” whereupon she vanished as if by magic before the words were fairly out of my mouth.  Immediately afterwards the sunlight forced through the slats of the jalousies its diffused glow, and Therese was there again as if by magic, saying in a distant voice: “It’s midday”. . . Youth will have its rights.  I had slept like a stone for seventeen hours.

I suppose an honourable bankrupt would know such an awakening: the sense of catastrophe, the shrinking from the necessity of beginning life again, the faint feeling that there are misfortunes which must be paid for by a hanging.  In the course of the morning Therese informed me that the apartment usually occupied by Mr. Blunt was vacant and added mysteriously that she intended to keep it vacant for a time, because she had been instructed to do so.  I couldn’t imagine why Blunt should wish to return to Marseilles.  She told me also that the house was empty except for myself and the two dancing girls with their father.  Those people had been away for some time as the girls had engagements in some Italian summer theatres, but apparently they had secured a re-engagement for the winter and were now back.  I let Therese talk because it kept my imagination from going to work on subjects which, I had made up my mind, were no concern of mine.  But I went out early to perform an unpleasant task.  It was only proper that I should let the Carlist agent ensconced in the Prado Villa know of the sudden ending of my activities.  It would be grave enough news for him, and I did not like to be its bearer for reasons which were mainly personal.  I resembled Dominic in so far that I, too, disliked failure.

The Marquis of Villarel had of course gone long before.  The man who was there was another type of Carlist altogether, and his temperament was that of a trader.  He was the chief purveyor of the Legitimist armies, an honest broker of stores, and enjoyed a great reputation for cleverness.  His important task kept him, of course, in France, but his young wife, whose beauty and devotion to her King were well known, represented him worthily at Headquarters, where his own appearances were extremely rare.  The dissimilar but united loyalties of those two people had been rewarded by the title of baron and the ribbon of some order or other.  The gossip of the Legitimist circles appreciated those favours with smiling indulgence.  He was the man who had been so distressed and frightened by Doña Rita’s first visit to Tolosa.  He had an extreme regard for his wife.  And in that sphere of clashing arms and unceasing intrigue nobody would have smiled then at his agitation if the man himself hadn’t been somewhat grotesque.

He must have been startled when I sent in my name, for he didn’t of course expect to see me yet — nobody expected me.  He advanced soft-footed down the room.  With his jutting nose, flat-topped skull and sable garments he recalled an obese raven, and when he heard of the disaster he manifested his astonishment and concern in a most plebeian manner by a low and expressive whistle.  I, of course, could not share his consternation.  My feelings in that connection were of a different order; but I was annoyed at his unintelligent stare.

“I suppose,” I said, “you will take it on yourself to advise Doña Rita, who is greatly interested in this affair.”

“Yes, but I was given to understand that Madame de Lastaola was to leave Paris either yesterday or this morning.”

It was my turn to stare dumbly before I could manage to ask: “For Tolosa?” in a very knowing tone.

Whether it was the droop of his head, play of light, or some other subtle cause, his nose seemed to have grown perceptibly longer.