Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (608 page)

``No, that’s jealousy,’’ said Catherine. ``Maybe he has ceased to care for her in all these years. It is a long time since he has left off worrying me. With a creature like that I thought that if I let him be master here . . . But no! I know that after the lieutenant started coming here his awful fancies have come back. He is not sleeping at night. His republicanism is always there. But don’t you know, Peyrol, that there may be jealousy without love?’’

``You think so,’’ said the rover profoundly. He pondered full of his own experience. ``And he has tasted blood too,’’ he muttered after a pause. ``You may be right.’’

``I may be right,’’ repeated Catherine in a slightly indignant tone. ``Every time I see Arlette near him I tremble lest it should come to words and to a bad blow. And when they are both out of my sight it is still worse. At this moment I am wondering where they are. They may be together and I daren’t raise my voice to call her away for fear of rousing his fury.’’

``But it’s the lieutenant he is after,’’ observed Peyrol in a lowered voice. ``Well, I can’t stop the lieutenant coming back.’’

``Where is she? Where is he?’’ whispered Catherine in a tone betraying her secret anguish.

Peyrol rose quietly and went into the salle, leaving the door open. Catherine heard the latch of the outer door being lifted cautiously. In a few moments Peyrol returned as quietly as he had gone out.

``I stepped out to look at the weather. The moon is about to rise and the clouds have thinned down. One can see a star here and there.’’ He lowered his voice considerably. ``Arlette is sitting on the bench humming a little song to herself. I really wonder whether she knew I was standing within a few feet of her.’’

``She doesn’t want to hear or see anybody except one man,’’ affirmed Catherine, now in complete control of her voice. ``And she was humming a song, did you say? She who would sit for hours without making a sound. And God knows what song it could have been!’’

``Yes, there’s a great change in her,’’ admitted Peyrol with a heavy sigh. ``This lieutenant,’’ he continued after a pause, ``has always behaved coldly to her. I noticed him many times turn his face away when he saw her coming towards us. You know what these epaulette-wearers are, Catherine. And then this one has some worm of his own that is gnawing at him. I doubt whether he has ever forgotten that he was a ci-devant boy. Yet I do believe that she does not want to see and hear anybody but him. Is it because she has been deranged in her head for so long?’’

``No, Peyrol,’’ said the old woman. ``It isn’t that. You want to know how I can tell? For years nothing could make her either laugh or cry. You know that yourself. You have seen her every day. Would you believe that within the last month she has been both crying and laughing on my breast without knowing why?’’

``This I don’t understand,’’ said Peyrol.

``But I do. That lieutenant has got only to whistle to make her run after him. Yes, Peyrol. That is so. She has no fear, no shame, no pride. I myself have been nearly like that.’’ Her fine brown face seemed to grow more impassive before she went on much lower and as if arguing with herself: ``Only I at least was never blood-mad. I was fit for any man’s arms. . . . But then that man is not a priest.’’

The last words made Peyrol start. He had almost forgotten that story. He said to himself: ``She knows, she has had the experience.’’

``Look here, Catherine,’’ he said decisively, ``the lieutenant is coming back. He will be here probably about midnight. But one thing I can tell you: he is not coming back to whistle her away. Oh, no! It is not for her sake that he will come back.’’

``Well, if it isn’t for her that he is coming back then it must be because death has beckoned to him,’’ she announced in a tone of solemn unemotional conviction. ``A man who has received a sign from death — -nothing can stop him!’’

Peyrol, who had seen death face to face many times, looked at Catherine’s fine brown profile curiously.

``It is a fact,’’ he murmured, ``that men who rush out to seek death do not often find it. So one must have a sign? What sort of sign would it be?’’

``How is anybody to know?’’ asked Catherine, staring across the kitchen at the wall. ``Even those to whom it is made do not recognize it for what it is. But they obey all the same. I tell you, Peyrol, nothing can stop them. It may be a glance, or a smile, or a shadow on the water, or a thought that passes through the head. For my poor brother and sister-in-law it was the face of their child.’’

Peyrol folded his arms on his breast and dropped his head. Melancholy was a sentiment to which he was a stranger; for what has melancholy to do with the life of a sea-rover, a Brother of the Coast, a simple, venturesome, precarious life, full of risks and leaving no time for introspection or for that momentary self-forgetfulness which is called gaiety. Sombre fury, fierce merriment, he had known in passing gusts, coming from outside; but never this intimate inward sense of the vanity of all things, that doubt of the power within himself.

``I wonder what the sign for me will be,’’ he thought; and concluded with self-contempt that for him there would be no sign, that he would have to die in his bed like an old yard dog in his kennel. Having reached that depth of despondency, there was nothing more before him but a black gulf into which his consciousness sank like a stone.

The silence which had lasted perhaps a minute after Catherine had finished speaking was traversed suddenly by a clear high voice saying:

``What are you two plotting here?’’

Arlette stood in the doorway of the salle. The gleam of light in the whites of her eyes set off her black and penetrating glance. The surprise was complete. The profile of Catherine, who was standing by the table, became if possible harder; a sharp carving of an old prophetess of some desert tribe. Arlette made three steps forward. In Peyrol even extreme astonishment was deliberate. He had been famous for never looking as though he had been caught unprepared. Age had accentuated that trait of a born leader. He only slipped off the edge of the table and said in his deep voice:

``Why, patronne! We haven’t said a word to each other for ever so long.’’

Arlette moved nearer still. ``I know,’’ she cried. ``It was horrible. I have been watching you two. Scevola came and dumped himself on the bench close to me. He began to talk to me, and so I went away. That man bores me. And here I find you people saying nothing. It’s insupportable. What has come to you both? Say, you, Papa Peyrol — -don’t you like me any more?’’ Her voice filled the kitchen. Peyrol went to the salle door and shut it. While coming back he was staggered by the brilliance of life within her that seemed to pale the flames of the lamp. He said half in jest:

``I don’t know whether I didn’t like you better when you were quieter.’’

``And you would like best to see me still quieter in my grave.’’

She dazzled him. Vitality streamed out of her eyes, her lips, her whole person, enveloped her like a halo and . . . yes, truly, the faintest possible flush had appeared on her cheeks, played on them faintly rosy like the light of a distant flame on the snow. She raised her arms up in the air and let her hands fall from on high on Peyrol’s shoulders, captured his desperately dodging eyes with her black and compelling glance, put out all her instinctive seduction — - while he felt a growing fierceness in the grip of her fingers.

``No! I can’t hold it in! Monsieur Peyrol, Papa Peyrol, old gunner, you horrid sea-wolf, be an angel and tell me where he is.’’

The rover, whom only that morning the powerful grasp of Lieutenant Ral found as unshakable as a rock, felt all his strength vanish under the hands of that woman. He said thickly:

``He has gone to Toulon. He had to go.’’

``What for? Speak the truth to me!’’

``Truth is not for everybody to know,’’ mumbled Peyrol, with a sinking sensation as though the very ground were going soft under his feet. ``On service,’’ he added in a growl.

Her hands slipped suddenly from his big shoulders. ``On service?’’ she repeated. ``What service?’’ Her voice sank and the words ``Oh, yes! His service’’ were hardly heard by Peyrol, who as soon as her hands had left his shoulders felt his strength returning to him and the yielding earth grow firm again under his feet. Right in front of him Arlette, silent, with her arms hanging down before her with entwined fingers, seemed stunned because Lieutenant Ral was not free from all earthly connections, like a visiting angel from heaven depending only on God to whom she had prayed. She had to share him with some service that could order him about. She felt in herself a strength, a power, greater than any service.

``Peyrol,’’ she cried low, ``don’t break my heart, my new heart, that has just begun to beat. Feel how it beats. Who could bear it?’’ She seized the rover’s thick hairy paw and pressed it hard against her breast. ``Tell me when he will be back.’’

``Listen, patronne, you had better go upstairs,’’ began Peyrol with a great effort and snatching his captured hand away. He staggered backwards a little while Arlette shouted at him:

``You can’t order me about as you used to do.’’ In all the changes from entreaty to anger she never struck a false note, so that her emotional outburst had the heart-moving power of inspired art. She turned round with a tempestuous swish to Catherine who had neither stirred nor emitted a sound: ``Nothing you two can do will make any difference now.’’ The next moment she was facing Peyrol again. ``You frighten me with your white hairs. Come! . . . am I to go on my knees to you? . . . There!’’

The rover caught her under the elbows, swung her up clear of the ground, and set her down on her feet as if she had been a child. Directly he had let her go, she stamped her foot at him.

``Are you stupid?’’ she cried. ``Don’t you understand that something has happened to-day?’’

Through all this scene Peyrol had kept his head as creditably as could have been expected, in the manner of a seaman caught by a white squall in the tropics. But at those words a dozen thoughts tried to rush together through his mind, in chase of that startling declaration. Something had happened! Where? How? Whom to? What thing? It couldn’t be anything between her and the lieutenant. He had, it seemed to him, never lost sight of the lieutenant from the first hour when they met in the morning till he had sent him off to Toulon by an actual push on the shoulder; except while he was having his dinner in the next room with the door open, and for the few minutes spent in talking with Michel in the yard. But that was only a very few minutes, and directly afterwards the first sight of the lieutenant sitting gloomily on the bench like a lonely crow did not suggest either elation or excitement or any emotion connected with a woman. In the face of these difficulties Peyrol’s mind became suddenly a blank. ``Voyons, patronne,’’ he began, unable to think of anything else to say. ``What’s all this fuss about? I expect him to be back here about midnight.’’

He was extremely relieved to notice that she believed him. It was the truth. For indeed he did not know what he could have invented on the spur of the moment that would get her out of the way and induce her to go to bed. She treated him to a sinister frown and a terribly menacing, ``If you have lied . . . Oh!’’

He produced an indulgent smile. ``Compose yourself. He will be here soon after midnight. You may go to sleep with an easy mind.’’

She turned her back on him contemptuously, and said curtly, ``Come along, aunt,’’ and went to the door leading to the passage. There she turned for a moment with her hand on the door handle.

``You are changed. I can’t trust either of you. You are not the same people.’’

She went out. Only then did Catherine detach her gaze from the wall to meet Peyrol’s eyes. ``Did you hear what she said? We! Changed! It is she herself . . .’’

Peyrol nodded twice and there was a long pause, during which even the flames of the lamp did not stir.

``Go after her, Mademoiselle Catherine,’’ he said at last with a shade of sympathy in his tone. She did not move. ``Allons — -du courage,’’ he urged her deferentially as it were. ``Try to put her to sleep.’’

CHAPTER XII

Upright and deliberate, Catherine left the kitchen, and in the passage outside found Arlette waiting for her with a lighted candle in her hand. Her heart was filled with sudden desolation by the beauty of that young face enhaloed in the patch of light, with the profound darkness as of a dungeon for a background. At once her niece led the way upstairs muttering savagely through her pretty teeth: ``He thinks I could go to sleep. Old imbecile!’’

Peyrol did not take his eyes off Catherine’s straight back till the door had closed after her. Only then he relieved himself by letting the air escape through his pursed lips and rolling his eyes freely about. He picked up the lamp by the ring on the top of the central rod and went into the salle, closing behind him the door of the dark kitchen. He stood the lamp on the very table on which Lieutenant Ral had had his midday meal. A small white cloth was still spread on it and there was his chair askew as he had pushed it back when he got up. Another of the many chairs in the salle was turned round conspicuously to face the table. These things made Peyrol remark to himself bitterly: ``She sat and stared at him as if he had been gilt all over, with three heads and seven arms on his body’’ — -a comparison reminiscent of certain idols he had seen in an Indian temple. Though not an iconoclast, Peyrol felt positively sick at the recollection, and hastened to step outside. The great cloud had broken up and the mighty fragments were moving to the westward in stately flight before the rising moon. Scevola, who had been lying extended full length on the bench, swung himself up suddenly, very upright.

``Had a little nap in the open?’’ asked Peyrol, letting his eyes roam through the luminous space under the departing rearguard of the clouds jostling each other up there.

``I did not sleep,’’ said the sans-culotte. ``I haven’t closed my eyes-not for one moment.’’

``That must be because you weren’t sleepy,’’ suggested the deliberate Peyrol, whose thoughts were far away with the English ship. His mental eye contemplated her black image against the white beach of the Salins describing a sparkling curve under the moon, and meantime he went on slowly: ``For it could not have been noise that kept you awake.’’ On the level of Escampobar the shadows lay long on the ground while the side of the lookout hill remained yet black but edged with an increasing brightness. And the amenity of the stillness was such that if softened for a moment Peyrol’s hard inward attitude towards all mankind, including even the captain of the English ship. The old rover savoured a moment of serenity in the midst of his cares.