Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (531 page)

He — it would be convenient to call him Monsieur George to the end — shared with Doña Rita her perfect detachment from all mundane affairs; but he had to make two short visits to Marseilles.  The first was prompted by his loyal affection for Dominic.  He wanted to discover what had happened or was happening to Dominic and to find out whether he could do something for that man.  But Dominic was not the sort of person for whom one can do much.  Monsieur George did not even see him.  It looked uncommonly as if Dominic’s heart were broken.  Monsieur George remained concealed for twenty-four hours in the very house in which Madame Léonore had her café.  He spent most of that time in conversing with Madame Léonore about Dominic.  She was distressed, but her mind was made up.  That bright-eyed, nonchalant, and passionate woman was making arrangements to dispose of her café before departing to join Dominic.  She would not say where.  Having ascertained that his assistance was not required Monsieur George, in his own words, “managed to sneak out of the town without being seen by a single soul that mattered.”

The second occasion was very prosaic and shockingly incongruous with the super-mundane colouring of these days.  He had neither the fortune of Henry Allègre nor a man of affairs of his own.  But some rent had to be paid to somebody for the stone hut and Rose could not go marketing in the tiny hamlet at the foot of the hill without a little money.  There came a time when Monsieur George had to descend from the heights of his love in order, in his own words, “to get a supply of cash.”  As he had disappeared very suddenly and completely for a time from the eyes of mankind it was necessary that he should show himself and sign some papers.  That business was transacted in the office of the banker mentioned in the story.  Monsieur George wished to avoid seeing the man himself but in this he did not succeed.  The interview was short.  The banker naturally asked no questions, made no allusions to persons and events, and didn’t even mention the great Legitimist Principle which presented to him now no interest whatever.  But for the moment all the world was talking of the Carlist enterprise.  It had collapsed utterly, leaving behind, as usual, a large crop of recriminations, charges of incompetency and treachery, and a certain amount of scandalous gossip.  The banker (his wife’s salon had been very Carlist indeed) declared that he had never believed in the success of the cause.  “You are well out of it,” he remarked with a chilly smile to Monsieur George.  The latter merely observed that he had been very little “in it” as a matter of fact, and that he was quite indifferent to the whole affair.

“You left a few of your feathers in it, nevertheless,” the banker concluded with a wooden face and with the curtness of a man who knows.

Monsieur George ought to have taken the very next train out of the town but he yielded to the temptation to discover what had happened to the house in the street of the Consuls after he and Doña Rita had stolen out of it like two scared yet jubilant children.  All he discovered was a strange, fat woman, a sort of virago, who had, apparently, been put in as a caretaker by the man of affairs.  She made some difficulties to admit that she had been in charge for the last four months; ever since the person who was there before had eloped with some Spaniard who had been lying in the house ill with fever for more than six weeks.  No, she never saw the person.  Neither had she seen the Spaniard.  She had only heard the talk of the street.  Of course she didn’t know where these people had gone.  She manifested some impatience to get rid of Monsieur George and even attempted to push him towards the door.  It was, he says, a very funny experience.  He noticed the feeble flame of the gas-jet in the hall still waiting for extinction in the general collapse of the world.

Then he decided to have a bit of dinner at the Restaurant de la Gare where he felt pretty certain he would not meet any of his friends.  He could not have asked Madame Léonore for hospitality because Madame Léonore had gone away already.  His acquaintances were not the sort of people likely to happen casually into a restaurant of that kind and moreover he took the precaution to seat himself at a small table so as to face the wall.  Yet before long he felt a hand laid gently on his shoulder, and, looking up, saw one of his acquaintances, a member of the Royalist club, a young man of a very cheerful disposition but whose face looked down at him with a grave and anxious expression.

Monsieur George was far from delighted.  His surprise was extreme when in the course of the first phrases exchanged with him he learned that this acquaintance had come to the station with the hope of finding him there.

“You haven’t been seen for some time,” he said.  “You were perhaps somewhere where the news from the world couldn’t reach you?  There have been many changes amongst our friends and amongst people one used to hear of so much.  There is Madame de Lastaola for instance, who seems to have vanished from the world which was so much interested in her.  You have no idea where she may be now?”

Monsieur George remarked grumpily that he couldn’t say.

The other tried to appear at ease.  Tongues were wagging about it in Paris.  There was a sort of international financier, a fellow with an Italian name, a shady personality, who had been looking for her all over Europe and talked in clubs — astonishing how such fellows get into the best clubs — oh! Azzolati was his name.  But perhaps what a fellow like that said did not matter.  The funniest thing was that there was no man of any position in the world who had disappeared at the same time.  A friend in Paris wrote to him that a certain well-known journalist had rushed South to investigate the mystery but had returned no wiser than he went.

Monsieur George remarked more unamiably than before that he really could not help all that.

“No,” said the other with extreme gentleness, “only of all the people more or less connected with the Carlist affair you are the only one that had also disappeared before the final collapse.”

“What!” cried Monsieur George.

“Just so,” said the other meaningly.  “You know that all my people like you very much, though they hold various opinions as to your discretion.  Only the other day Jane, you know my married sister, and I were talking about you.  She was extremely distressed.  I assured her that you must be very far away or very deeply buried somewhere not to have given a sign of life under this provocation.”

Naturally Monsieur George wanted to know what it was all about; and the other appeared greatly relieved.

“I was sure you couldn’t have heard.  I don’t want to be indiscreet, I don’t want to ask you where you were.  It came to my ears that you had been seen at the bank to-day and I made a special effort to lay hold of you before you vanished again; for, after all, we have been always good friends and all our lot here liked you very much.  Listen.  You know a certain Captain Blunt, don’t you?”

Monsieur George owned to knowing Captain Blunt but only very slightly.  His friend then informed him that this Captain Blunt was apparently well acquainted with Madame de Lastaola, or, at any rate, pretended to be.  He was an honourable man, a member of a good club, he was very Parisian in a way, and all this, he continued, made all the worse that of which he was under the painful necessity of warning Monsieur George.  This Blunt on three distinct occasions when the name of Madame de Lastaola came up in conversation in a mixed company of men had expressed his regret that she should have become the prey of a young adventurer who was exploiting her shamelessly.  He talked like a man certain of his facts and as he mentioned names . . .

“In fact,” the young man burst out excitedly, “it is your name that he mentions.  And in order to fix the exact personality he always takes care to add that you are that young fellow who was known as Monsieur George all over the South amongst the initiated Carlists.”

How Blunt had got enough information to base that atrocious calumny upon, Monsieur George couldn’t imagine.  But there it was.  He kept silent in his indignation till his friend murmured, “I expect you will want him to know that you are here.”

“Yes,” said Monsieur George, “and I hope you will consent to act for me altogether.  First of all, pray, let him know by wire that I am waiting for him.  This will be enough to fetch him down here, I can assure you.  You may ask him also to bring two friends with him.  I don’t intend this to be an affair for Parisian journalists to write paragraphs about.”

“Yes.  That sort of thing must be stopped at once,” the other admitted.  He assented to Monsieur George’s request that the meeting should be arranged for at his elder brother’s country place where the family stayed very seldom.  There was a most convenient walled garden there.  And then Monsieur George caught his train promising to be back on the fourth day and leaving all further arrangements to his friend.  He prided himself on his impenetrability before Doña Rita; on the happiness without a shadow of those four days.  However, Doña Rita must have had the intuition of there being something in the wind, because on the evening of the very same day on which he left her again on some pretence or other, she was already ensconced in the house in the street of the Consuls, with the trustworthy Rose scouting all over the town to gain information.

Of the proceedings in the walled garden there is no need to speak in detail.  They were conventionally correct, but an earnestness of purpose which could be felt in the very air lifted the business above the common run of affairs of honour.  One bit of byplay unnoticed by the seconds, very busy for the moment with their arrangements, must be mentioned.  Disregarding the severe rules of conduct in such cases Monsieur George approached his adversary and addressed him directly.

“Captain Blunt,” he said, “the result of this meeting may go against me.  In that case you will recognize publicly that you were wrong.  For you are wrong and you know it.  May I trust your honour?”

In answer to that appeal Captain Blunt, always correct, didn’t open his lips but only made a little bow.  For the rest he was perfectly ruthless.  If he was utterly incapable of being carried away by love there was nothing equivocal about his jealousy.  Such psychology is not very rare and really from the point of view of the combat itself one cannot very well blame him.  What happened was this.  Monsieur George fired on the word and, whether luck or skill, managed to hit Captain Blunt in the upper part of the arm which was holding the pistol.  That gentleman’s arm dropped powerless by his side.  But he did not drop his weapon.  There was nothing equivocal about his determination.  With the greatest deliberation he reached with his left hand for his pistol and taking careful aim shot Monsieur George through the left side of his breast.  One may imagine the consternation of the four seconds and the activity of the two surgeons in the confined, drowsy heat of that walled garden.  It was within an easy drive of the town and as Monsieur George was being conveyed there at a walking pace a little brougham coming from the opposite direction pulled up at the side of the road.  A thickly veiled woman’s head looked out of the window, took in the state of affairs at a glance, and called out in a firm voice: “Follow my carriage.”  The brougham turning round took the lead.  Long before this convoy reached the town another carriage containing four gentlemen (of whom one was leaning back languidly with his arm in a sling) whisked past and vanished ahead in a cloud of white, Provençal dust.  And this is the last appearance of Captain Blunt in Monsieur George’s narrative.  Of course he was only told of it later.  At the time he was not in a condition to notice things.  Its interest in his surroundings remained of a hazy and nightmarish kind for many days together.  From time to time he had the impression that he was in a room strangely familiar to him, that he had unsatisfactory visions of Doña Rita, to whom he tried to speak as if nothing had happened, but that she always put her hand on his mouth to prevent him and then spoke to him herself in a very strange voice which sometimes resembled the voice of Rose.  The face, too, sometimes resembled the face of Rose.  There were also one or two men’s faces which he seemed to know well enough though he didn’t recall their names.  He could have done so with a slight effort, but it would have been too much trouble.  Then came a time when the hallucinations of Doña Rita and the faithful Rose left him altogether.  Next came a period, perhaps a year, or perhaps an hour, during which he seemed to dream all through his past life.  He felt no apprehension, he didn’t try to speculate as to the future.  He felt that all possible conclusions were out of his power, and therefore he was indifferent to everything.  He was like that dream’s disinterested spectator who doesn’t know what is going to happen next.  Suddenly for the first time in his life he had the soul-satisfying consciousness of floating off into deep slumber.

When he woke up after an hour, or a day, or a month, there was dusk in the room; but he recognized it perfectly.  It was his apartment in Doña Rita’s house; those were the familiar surroundings in which he had so often told himself that he must either die or go mad.  But now he felt perfectly clear-headed and the full sensation of being alive came all over him, languidly delicious.  The greatest beauty of it was that there was no need to move.  This gave him a sort of moral satisfaction.  Then the first thought independent of personal sensations came into his head.  He wondered when Therese would come in and begin talking.  He saw vaguely a human figure in the room but that was a man.  He was speaking in a deadened voice which had yet a preternatural distinctness.

“This is the second case I have had in this house, and I am sure that directly or indirectly it was connected with that woman.  She will go on like this leaving a track behind her and then some day there will be really a corpse.  This young fellow might have been it.”

“In this case, Doctor,” said another voice, “one can’t blame the woman very much.  I assure you she made a very determined fight.”

“What do you mean?  That she didn’t want to. . . “

“Yes.  A very good fight.  I heard all about it.  It is easy to blame her, but, as she asked me despairingly, could she go through life veiled from head to foot or go out of it altogether into a convent?  No, she isn’t guilty.  She is simply — what she is.”