Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (530 page)

I ought really to have put those blue slippers in my pocket.  One dropped off at the bottom of the stairs as I was stepping over an unpleasant-looking mess on the marble pavement, and the other was lost a little way up the flight when, for some reason (perhaps from a sense of insecurity), she began to struggle.  Though I had an odd sense of being engaged in a sort of nursery adventure she was no child to carry.  I could just do it.  But not if she chose to struggle.  I set her down hastily and only supported her round the waist for the rest of the way.  My room, of course, was perfectly dark but I led her straight to the sofa at once and let her fall on it.  Then as if I had in sober truth rescued her from an Alpine height or an Arctic floe, I busied myself with nothing but lighting the gas and starting the fire.  I didn’t even pause to lock my door.  All the time I was aware of her presence behind me, nay, of something deeper and more my own — of her existence itself — of a small blue flame, blue like her eyes, flickering and clear within her frozen body.  When I turned to her she was sitting very stiff and upright, with her feet posed hieratically on the carpet and her head emerging out of the ample fur collar, such as a gem-like flower above the rim of a dark vase.  I tore the blankets and the pillows off my bed and piled them up in readiness in a great heap on the floor near the couch.  My reason for this was that the room was large, too large for the fireplace, and the couch was nearest to the fire.  She gave no sign but one of her wistful attempts at a smile.  In a most business-like way I took the arrow out of her hair and laid it on the centre table.  The tawny mass fell loose at once about her shoulders and made her look even more desolate than before.  But there was an invincible need of gaiety in her heart.  She said funnily, looking at the arrow sparkling in the gas light:

“Ah!  That poor philistinish ornament!”

An echo of our early days, not more innocent but so much more youthful, was in her tone; and we both, as if touched with poignant regret, looked at each other with enlightened eyes.

“Yes,” I said, “how far away all this is.  And you wouldn’t leave even that object behind when you came last in here.  Perhaps it is for that reason it haunted me — mostly at night.  I dreamed of you sometimes as a huntress nymph gleaming white through the foliage and throwing this arrow like a dart straight at my heart.  But it never reached it.  It always fell at my feet as I woke up.  The huntress never meant to strike down that particular quarry.”

“The huntress was wild but she was not evil.  And she was no nymph, but only a goatherd girl.  Dream of her no more, my dear.”

I had the strength of mind to make a sign of assent and busied myself arranging a couple of pillows at one end of the sofa.  “Upon my soul, goatherd, you are not responsible,” I said.  “You are not!  Lay down that uneasy head,” I continued, forcing a half-playful note into my immense sadness, “that has even dreamed of a crown — but not for itself.”

She lay down quietly.  I covered her up, looked once into her eyes and felt the restlessness of fatigue over-power me so that I wanted to stagger out, walk straight before me, stagger on and on till I dropped.  In the end I lost myself in thought.  I woke with a start to her voice saying positively:

“No.  Not even in this room.  I can’t close my eyes.  Impossible.  I have a horror of myself.  That voice in my ears.  All true.  All true.”

She was sitting up, two masses of tawny hair fell on each side of her tense face.  I threw away the pillows from which she had risen and sat down behind her on the couch.  “Perhaps like this,” I suggested, drawing her head gently on my breast.  She didn’t resist, she didn’t even sigh, she didn’t look at me or attempt to settle herself in any way.  It was I who settled her after taking up a position which I thought I should be able to keep for hours — for ages.  After a time I grew composed enough to become aware of the ticking of the clock, even to take pleasure in it.  The beat recorded the moments of her rest, while I sat, keeping as still as if my life depended upon it with my eyes fixed idly on the arrow of gold gleaming and glittering dimly on the table under the lowered gas-jet.  And presently my breathing fell into the quiet rhythm of the sleep which descended on her at last.  My thought was that now nothing mattered in the world because I had the world safe resting in my arms — or was it in my heart?

Suddenly my heart seemed torn in two within my breast and half of my breath knocked out of me.  It was a tumultuous awakening.  The day had come.  Doña Rita had opened her eyes, found herself in my arms, and instantly had flung herself out of them with one sudden effort.  I saw her already standing in the filtered sunshine of the closed shutters, with all the childlike horror and shame of that night vibrating afresh in the awakened body of the woman.

“Daylight,” she whispered in an appalled voice.  “Don’t look at me, George.  I can’t face daylight.  No — not with you.  Before we set eyes on each other all that past was like nothing.  I had crushed it all in my new pride.  Nothing could touch the Rita whose hand was kissed by you.  But now!  Never in daylight.”

I sat there stupid with surprise and grief.  This was no longer the adventure of venturesome children in a nursery-book.  A grown man’s bitterness, informed, suspicious, resembling hatred, welled out of my heart.

“All this means that you are going to desert me again?” I said with contempt.  “All right.  I won’t throw stones after you . . . Are you going, then?”

She lowered her head slowly with a backward gesture of her arm as if to keep me off, for I had sprung to my feet all at once as if mad.

“Then go quickly,” I said.  “You are afraid of living flesh and blood.  What are you running after?  Honesty, as you say, or some distinguished carcass to feed your vanity on?  I know how cold you can be — and yet live.  What have I done to you?  You go to sleep in my arms, wake up and go away.  Is it to impress me?  Charlatanism of character, my dear.”

She stepped forward on her bare feet as firm on that floor which seemed to heave up and down before my eyes as she had ever been — goatherd child leaping on the rocks of her native hills which she was never to see again.  I snatched the arrow of gold from the table and threw it after her.

“Don’t forget this thing,” I cried, “you would never forgive yourself for leaving it behind.”

It struck the back of the fur coat and fell on the floor behind her.  She never looked round.  She walked to the door, opened it without haste, and on the landing in the diffused light from the ground-glass skylight there appeared, rigid, like an implacable and obscure fate, the awful Therese — waiting for her sister.  The heavy ends of a big black shawl thrown over her head hung massively in biblical folds.  With a faint cry of dismay Doña Rita stopped just within my room.

The two women faced each other for a few moments silently.  Therese spoke first.  There was no austerity in her tone.  Her voice was as usual, pertinacious, unfeeling, with a slight plaint in it; terrible in its unchanged purpose.

“I have been standing here before this door all night,” she said.  “I don’t know how I lived through it.  I thought I would die a hundred times for shame.  So that’s how you are spending your time?  You are worse than shameless.  But God may still forgive you.  You have a soul.  You are my sister.  I will never abandon you — till you die.”

“What is it?” Doña Rita was heard wistfully, “my soul or this house that you won’t abandon.”

“Come out and bow your head in humiliation.  I am your sister and I shall help you to pray to God and all the Saints.  Come away from that poor young gentleman who like all the others can have nothing but contempt and disgust for you in his heart.  Come and hide your head where no one will reproach you — but I, your sister.  Come out and beat your breast: come, poor Sinner, and let me kiss you, for you are my sister!”

While Therese was speaking Doña Rita stepped back a pace and as the other moved forward still extending the hand of sisterly love, she slammed the door in Therese’s face.  “You abominable girl!” she cried fiercely.  Then she turned about and walked towards me who had not moved.  I felt hardly alive but for the cruel pain that possessed my whole being.  On the way she stooped to pick up the arrow of gold and then moved on quicker, holding it out to me in her open palm.

“You thought I wouldn’t give it to you.  Amigo, I wanted nothing so much as to give it to you.  And now, perhaps — you will take it.”

“Not without the woman,” I said sombrely.

“Take it,” she said.  “I haven’t the courage to deliver myself up to Therese.  No.  Not even for your sake.  Don’t you think I have been miserable enough yet?”

I snatched the arrow out of her hand then and ridiculously pressed it to my breast; but as I opened my lips she who knew what was struggling for utterance in my heart cried in a ringing tone:

“Speak no words of love, George!  Not yet.  Not in this house of ill-luck and falsehood.  Not within a hundred miles of this house, where they came clinging to me all profaned from the mouth of that man.  Haven’t you heard them — the horrible things?  And what can words have to do between you and me?”

Her hands were stretched out imploringly, I said, childishly disconcerted:

“But, Rita, how can I help using words of love to you?  They come of themselves on my lips!”

“They come!  Ah!  But I shall seal your lips with the thing itself,” she said.  “Like this. . . “

SECOND NOTE

The narrative of our man goes on for some six months more, from this, the last night of the Carnival season up to and beyond the season of roses.  The tone of it is much less of exultation than might have been expected.  Love as is well known having nothing to do with reason, being insensible to forebodings and even blind to evidence, the surrender of those two beings to a precarious bliss has nothing very astonishing in itself; and its portrayal, as he attempts it, lacks dramatic interest.  The sentimental interest could only have a fascination for readers themselves actually in love.  The response of a reader depends on the mood of the moment, so much so that a book may seem extremely interesting when read late at night, but might appear merely a lot of vapid verbiage in the morning.  My conviction is that the mood in which the continuation of his story would appear sympathetic is very rare.  This consideration has induced me to suppress it — all but the actual facts which round up the previous events and satisfy such curiosity as might have been aroused by the foregoing narrative.

It is to be remarked that this period is characterized more by a deep and joyous tenderness than by sheer passion.  All fierceness of spirit seems to have burnt itself out in their preliminary hesitations and struggles against each other and themselves.  Whether love in its entirety has, speaking generally, the same elementary meaning for women as for men, is very doubtful.  Civilization has been at work there.  But the fact is that those two display, in every phase of discovery and response, an exact accord.  Both show themselves amazingly ingenuous in the practice of sentiment.  I believe that those who know women won’t be surprised to hear me say that she was as new to love as he was.  During their retreat in the region of the Maritime Alps, in a small house built of dry stones and embowered with roses, they appear all through to be less like released lovers than as companions who had found out each other’s fitness in a specially intense way.  Upon the whole, I think that there must be some truth in his insistence of there having always been something childlike in their relation.  In the unreserved and instant sharing of all thoughts, all impressions, all sensations, we see the naïveness of a children’s foolhardy adventure.  This unreserved expressed for him the whole truth of the situation.  With her it may have been different.  It might have been assumed; yet nobody is altogether a comedian; and even comedians themselves have got to believe in the part they play.  Of the two she appears much the more assured and confident.  But if in this she was a comedienne then it was but a great achievement of her ineradicable honesty.  Having once renounced her honourable scruples she took good care that he should taste no flavour of misgivings in the cup.  Being older it was she who imparted its character to the situation.  As to the man if he had any superiority of his own it was simply the superiority of him who loves with the greater self-surrender.

This is what appears from the pages I have discreetly suppressed — partly out of regard for the pages themselves.  In every, even terrestrial, mystery there is as it were a sacred core.  A sustained commentary on love is not fit for every eye.  A universal experience is exactly the sort of thing which is most difficult to appraise justly in a particular instance.

How this particular instance affected Rose, who was the only companion of the two hermits in their rose-embowered hut of stones, I regret not to be able to report; but I will venture to say that for reasons on which I need not enlarge, the girl could not have been very reassured by what she saw.  It seems to me that her devotion could never be appeased; for the conviction must have been growing on her that, no matter what happened, Madame could never have any friends.  It may be that Doña Rita had given her a glimpse of the unavoidable end, and that the girl’s tarnished eyes masked a certain amount of apprehensive, helpless desolation.

What meantime was becoming of the fortune of Henry Allègre is another curious question.  We have been told that it was too big to be tied up in a sack and thrown into the sea.  That part of it represented by the fabulous collections was still being protected by the police.  But for the rest, it may be assumed that its power and significance were lost to an interested world for something like six months.  What is certain is that the late Henry Allègre’s man of affairs found himself comparatively idle.  The holiday must have done much good to his harassed brain.  He had received a note from Doña Rita saying that she had gone into retreat and that she did not mean to send him her address, not being in the humour to be worried with letters on any subject whatever.  “It’s enough for you” — she wrote — ”to know that I am alive.”  Later, at irregular intervals, he received scraps of paper bearing the stamps of various post offices and containing the simple statement: “I am still alive,” signed with an enormous, flourished exuberant R.  I imagine Rose had to travel some distances by rail to post those messages.  A thick veil of secrecy had been lowered between the world and the lovers; yet even this veil turned out not altogether impenetrable.