Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (527 page)

Her gentleness had the effect of evening light.  I was soothed.  Her confidence in her own power touched me profoundly.  I suppose my love was too great for madness to get hold of me.  I can’t say that I passed to a complete calm, but I became slightly ashamed of myself.  I whispered:

“No, it was not from affection, it was for the love of you that I brought him here.  That imbecile H. was going to send him to Tolosa.”

“That Jacobin!” Doña Rita was immensely surprised, as she might well have been.  Then resigned to the incomprehensible: “Yes,” she breathed out, “what did you do with him?”

“I put him to bed in the studio.”

How lovely she was with the effort of close attention depicted in the turn of her head and in her whole face honestly trying to approve.  “And then?” she inquired.

“Then I came in here to face calmly the necessity of doing away with a human life.  I didn’t shirk it for a moment.  That’s what a short twelvemonth has brought me to.  Don’t think I am reproaching you, O blind force!  You are justified because you are.  Whatever had to happen you would not even have heard of it.”

Horror darkened her marvellous radiance.  Then her face became utterly blank with the tremendous effort to understand.  Absolute silence reigned in the house.  It seemed to me that everything had been said now that mattered in the world; and that the world itself had reached its ultimate stage, had reached its appointed end of an eternal, phantom-like silence.  Suddenly Doña Rita raised a warning finger.  I had heard nothing and shook my head; but she nodded hers and murmured excitedly,

“Yes, yes, in the fencing-room, as before.”

In the same way I answered her: “Impossible!  The door is locked and Therese has the key.”  She asked then in the most cautious manner,

“Have you seen Therese to-night?”

“Yes,” I confessed without misgiving.  “I left her making up the fellow’s bed when I came in here.”

“The bed of the Jacobin?” she said in a peculiar tone as if she were humouring a lunatic.

“I think I had better tell you he is a Spaniard — that he seems to know you from early days. . . .”  I glanced at her face, it was extremely tense, apprehensive.  For myself I had no longer any doubt as to the man and I hoped she would reach the correct conclusion herself.  But I believe she was too distracted and worried to think consecutively.  She only seemed to feel some terror in the air.  In very pity I bent down and whispered carefully near her ear, “His name is Ortega.”

I expected some effect from that name but I never expected what happened.  With the sudden, free, spontaneous agility of a young animal she leaped off the sofa, leaving her slippers behind, and in one bound reached almost the middle of the room.  The vigour, the instinctive precision of that spring, were something amazing.  I just escaped being knocked over.  She landed lightly on her bare feet with a perfect balance, without the slightest suspicion of swaying in her instant immobility.  It lasted less than a second, then she spun round distractedly and darted at the first door she could see.  My own agility was just enough to enable me to grip the back of the fur coat and then catch her round the body before she could wriggle herself out of the sleeves.  She was muttering all the time, “No, no, no.”  She abandoned herself to me just for an instant during which I got her back to the middle of the room.  There she attempted to free herself and I let her go at once.  With her face very close to mine, but apparently not knowing what she was looking at she repeated again twice, “No — No,” with an intonation which might well have brought dampness to my eyes but which only made me regret that I didn’t kill the honest Ortega at sight.  Suddenly Doña Rita swung round and seizing her loose hair with both hands started twisting it up before one of the sumptuous mirrors.  The wide fur sleeves slipped down her white arms.  In a brusque movement like a downward stab she transfixed the whole mass of tawny glints and sparks with the arrow of gold which she perceived lying there, before her, on the marble console.  Then she sprang away from the glass muttering feverishly, “Out — out — out of this house,” and trying with an awful, senseless stare to dodge past me who had put myself in her way with open arms.  At last I managed to seize her by the shoulders and in the extremity of my distress I shook her roughly.  If she hadn’t quieted down then I believe my heart would have broken.  I spluttered right into her face: “I won’t let you.  Here you stay.”  She seemed to recognize me at last, and suddenly still, perfectly firm on her white feet, she let her arms fall and, from an abyss of desolation, whispered, “O! George!  No!  No!  Not Ortega.”

There was a passion of mature grief in this tone of appeal.  And yet she remained as touching and helpless as a distressed child.  It had all the simplicity and depth of a child’s emotion.  It tugged at one’s heart-strings in the same direct way.  But what could one do?  How could one soothe her?  It was impossible to pat her on the head, take her on the knee, give her a chocolate or show her a picture-book.  I found myself absolutely without resource.  Completely at a loss.

“Yes, Ortega.  Well, what of it?” I whispered with immense assurance.

CHAPTER VII

My brain was in a whirl.  I am safe to say that at this precise moment there was nobody completely sane in the house.  Setting apart Therese and Ortega, both in the grip of unspeakable passions, all the moral economy of Doña Rita had gone to pieces.  Everything was gone except her strong sense of life with all its implied menaces.  The woman was a mere chaos of sensations and vitality.  I, too, suffered most from inability to get hold of some fundamental thought.  The one on which I could best build some hopes was the thought that, of course, Ortega did not know anything.  I whispered this into the ear of Doña Rita, into her precious, her beautifully shaped ear.

But she shook her head, very much like an inconsolable child and very much with a child’s complete pessimism she murmured, “Therese has told him.”

The words, “Oh, nonsense,” never passed my lips, because I could not cheat myself into denying that there had been a noise; and that the noise was in the fencing-room.  I knew that room.  There was nothing there that by the wildest stretch of imagination could be conceived as falling with that particular sound.  There was a table with a tall strip of looking-glass above it at one end; but since Blunt took away his campaigning kit there was no small object of any sort on the console or anywhere else that could have been jarred off in some mysterious manner.  Along one of the walls there was the whole complicated apparatus of solid brass pipes, and quite close to it an enormous bath sunk into the floor.  The greatest part of the room along its whole length was covered with matting and had nothing else but a long, narrow leather-upholstered bench fixed to the wall.  And that was all.  And the door leading to the studio was locked.  And Therese had the key.  And it flashed on my mind, independently of Doña Rita’s pessimism, by the force of personal conviction, that, of course, Therese would tell him.  I beheld the whole succession of events perfectly connected and tending to that particular conclusion.  Therese would tell him!  I could see the contrasted heads of those two formidable lunatics close together in a dark mist of whispers compounded of greed, piety, and jealousy, plotting in a sense of perfect security as if under the very wing of Providence.  So at least Therese would think.  She could not be but under the impression that (providentially) I had been called out for the rest of the night.

And now there was one sane person in the house, for I had regained complete command of my thoughts.  Working in a logical succession of images they showed me at last as clearly as a picture on a wall, Therese pressing with fervour the key into the fevered palm of the rich, prestigious, virtuous cousin, so that he should go and urge his self-sacrificing offer to Rita, and gain merit before Him whose Eye sees all the actions of men.  And this image of those two with the key in the studio seemed to me a most monstrous conception of fanaticism, of a perfectly horrible aberration.  For who could mistake the state that made José Ortega the figure he was, inspiring both pity and fear?  I could not deny that I understood, not the full extent but the exact nature of his suffering.  Young as I was I had solved for myself that grotesque and sombre personality.  His contact with me, the personal contact with (as he thought) one of the actual lovers of that woman who brought to him as a boy the curse of the gods, had tipped over the trembling scales.  No doubt I was very near death in the “grand salon” of the Maison Dorée, only that his torture had gone too far.  It seemed to me that I ought to have heard his very soul scream while we were seated at supper.  But in a moment he had ceased to care for me.  I was nothing.  To the crazy exaggeration of his jealousy I was but one amongst a hundred thousand.  What was my death?  Nothing.  All mankind had possessed that woman.  I knew what his wooing of her would be: Mine — or Dead.

All this ought to have had the clearness of noon-day, even to the veriest idiot that ever lived; and Therese was, properly speaking, exactly that.  An idiot.  A one-ideaed creature.  Only the idea was complex; therefore it was impossible really to say what she wasn’t capable of.  This was what made her obscure processes so awful.  She had at times the most amazing perceptions.  Who could tell where her simplicity ended and her cunning began?  She had also the faculty of never forgetting any fact bearing upon her one idea; and I remembered now that the conversation with me about the will had produced on her an indelible impression of the Law’s surprising justice.  Recalling her naïve admiration of the “just” law that required no “paper” from a sister, I saw her casting loose the raging fate with a sanctimonious air.  And Therese would naturally give the key of the fencing-room to her dear, virtuous, grateful, disinterested cousin, to that damned soul with delicate whiskers, because she would think it just possible that Rita might have locked the door leading front her room into the hall; whereas there was no earthly reason, not the slightest likelihood, that she would bother about the other.  Righteousness demanded that the erring sister should be taken unawares.

All the above is the analysis of one short moment.  Images are to words like light to sound — incomparably swifter.  And all this was really one flash of light through my mind.  A comforting thought succeeded it: that both doors were locked and that really there was no danger.

However, there had been that noise — the why and the how of it?  Of course in the dark he might have fallen into the bath, but that wouldn’t have been a faint noise.  It wouldn’t have been a rattle.  There was absolutely nothing he could knock over.  He might have dropped a candle-stick if Therese had left him her own.  That was possible, but then those thick mats — and then, anyway, why should he drop it? and, hang it all, why shouldn’t he have gone straight on and tried the door?  I had suddenly a sickening vision of the fellow crouching at the key-hole, listening, listening, listening, for some movement or sigh of the sleeper he was ready to tear away from the world, alive or dead.  I had a conviction that he was still listening.  Why?  Goodness knows!  He may have been only gloating over the assurance that the night was long and that he had all these hours to himself.

I was pretty certain that he could have heard nothing of our whispers, the room was too big for that and the door too solid.  I hadn’t the same confidence in the efficiency of the lock.  Still I . . . Guarding my lips with my hand I urged Doña Rita to go back to the sofa.  She wouldn’t answer me and when I got hold of her arm I discovered that she wouldn’t move.  She had taken root in that thick-pile Aubusson carpet; and she was so rigidly still all over that the brilliant stones in the shaft of the arrow of gold, with the six candles at the head of the sofa blazing full on them, emitted no sparkle.

I was extremely anxious that she shouldn’t betray herself.  I reasoned, save the mark, as a psychologist.  I had no doubt that the man knew of her being there; but he only knew it by hearsay.  And that was bad enough.  I could not help feeling that if he obtained some evidence for his senses by any sort of noise, voice, or movement, his madness would gain strength enough to burst the lock.  I was rather ridiculously worried about the locks.  A horrid mistrust of the whole house possessed me.  I saw it in the light of a deadly trap.  I had no weapon, I couldn’t say whether he had one or not.  I wasn’t afraid of a struggle as far as I, myself, was concerned, but I was afraid of it for Doña Rita.  To be rolling at her feet, locked in a literally tooth-and-nail struggle with Ortega would have been odious.  I wanted to spare her feelings, just as I would have been anxious to save from any contact with mud the feet of that goatherd of the mountains with a symbolic face.  I looked at her face.  For immobility it might have been a carving.  I wished I knew how to deal with that embodied mystery, to influence it, to manage it.  Oh, how I longed for the gift of authority!  In addition, since I had become completely sane, all my scruples against laying hold of her had returned.  I felt shy and embarrassed.  My eyes were fixed on the bronze handle of the fencing-room door as if it were something alive.  I braced myself up against the moment when it would move.  This was what was going to happen next.  It would move very gently.  My heart began to thump.  But I was prepared to keep myself as still as death and I hoped Doña Rita would have sense enough to do the same.  I stole another glance at her face and at that moment I heard the word: “Beloved!” form itself in the still air of the room, weak, distinct, piteous, like the last request of the dying.

With great presence of mind I whispered into Doña Rita’s ear: “Perfect silence!” and was overjoyed to discover that she had heard me, understood me; that she even had command over her rigid lips.  She answered me in a breath (our cheeks were nearly touching): “Take me out of this house.”

I glanced at all her clothing scattered about the room and hissed forcibly the warning “Perfect immobility”; noticing with relief that she didn’t offer to move, though animation was returning to her and her lips had remained parted in an awful, unintended effect of a smile.  And I don’t know whether I was pleased when she, who was not to be touched, gripped my wrist suddenly.  It had the air of being done on purpose because almost instantly another: “Beloved!” louder, more agonized if possible, got into the room and, yes, went home to my heart.  It was followed without any transition, preparation, or warning, by a positively bellowed: “Speak, perjured beast!” which I felt pass in a thrill right through Doña Rita like an electric shock, leaving her as motionless as before.