Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (783 page)

CHAPTER I

In the private editorial office of the principal newspaper in a great colonial city two men were talking.  They were both young.  The stouter of the two, fair, and with more of an urban look about him, was the editor and part-owner of the important newspaper.

The other’s name was Renouard.  That he was exercised in his mind about something was evident on his fine bronzed face.  He was a lean, lounging, active man.  The journalist continued the conversation.

“And so you were dining yesterday at old Dunster’s.”

He used the word old not in the endearing sense in which it is sometimes applied to intimates, but as a matter of sober fact.  The Dunster in question was old.  He had been an eminent colonial statesman, but had now retired from active politics after a tour in Europe and a lengthy stay in England, during which he had had a very good press indeed.  The colony was proud of him.

“Yes.  I dined there,” said Renouard.  “Young Dunster asked me just as I was going out of his office.  It seemed to be like a sudden thought.  And yet I can’t help suspecting some purpose behind it.  He was very pressing.  He swore that his uncle would be very pleased to see me.  Said his uncle had mentioned lately that the granting to me of the Malata concession was the last act of his official life.”

“Very touching.  The old boy sentimentalises over the past now and then.”

“I really don’t know why I accepted,” continued the other.  “Sentiment does not move me very easily.  Old Dunster was civil to me of course, but he did not even inquire how I was getting on with my silk plants.  Forgot there was such a thing probably.  I must say there were more people there than I expected to meet.  Quite a big party.”

“I was asked,” remarked the newspaper man.  “Only I couldn’t go.  But when did you arrive from Malata?”

“I arrived yesterday at daylight.  I am anchored out there in the bay — off Garden Point.  I was in Dunster’s office before he had finished reading his letters.  Have you ever seen young Dunster reading his letters?  I had a glimpse of him through the open door.  He holds the paper in both hands, hunches his shoulders up to his ugly ears, and brings his long nose and his thick lips on to it like a sucking apparatus.  A commercial monster.”

“Here we don’t consider him a monster,” said the newspaper man looking at his visitor thoughtfully.

“Probably not.  You are used to see his face and to see other faces.  I don’t know how it is that, when I come to town, the appearance of the people in the street strike me with such force.  They seem so awfully expressive.”

“And not charming.”

“Well — no.  Not as a rule.  The effect is forcible without being clear. . . . I know that you think it’s because of my solitary manner of life away there.”

“Yes.  I do think so.  It is demoralising.  You don’t see any one for months at a stretch.  You’re leading an unhealthy life.”

The other hardly smiled and murmured the admission that true enough it was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.

“You see,” insisted the other.  “Solitude works like a sort of poison.  And then you perceive suggestions in faces — mysterious and forcible, that no sound man would be bothered with.  Of course you do.”

Geoffrey Renouard did not tell his journalist friend that the suggestions of his own face, the face of a friend, bothered him as much as the others.  He detected a degrading quality in the touches of age which every day adds to a human countenance.  They moved and disturbed him, like the signs of a horrible inward travail which was frightfully apparent to the fresh eye he had brought from his isolation in Malata, where he had settled after five strenuous years of adventure and exploration.

“It’s a fact,” he said, “that when I am at home in Malata I see no one consciously.  I take the plantation boys for granted.”

“Well, and we here take the people in the streets for granted.  And that’s sanity.”

The visitor said nothing to this for fear of engaging a discussion.  What he had come to seek in the editorial office was not controversy, but information.  Yet somehow he hesitated to approach the subject.  Solitary life makes a man reticent in respect of anything in the nature of gossip, which those to whom chatting about their kind is an everyday exercise regard as the commonest use of speech.

“You very busy?” he asked.

The Editor making red marks on a long slip of printed paper threw the pencil down.

“No.  I am done.  Social paragraphs.  This office is the place where everything is known about everybody — including even a great deal of nobodies.  Queer fellows drift in and out of this room.  Waifs and strays from home, from up-country, from the Pacific.  And, by the way, last time you were here you picked up one of that sort for your assistant — didn’t you?”

“I engaged an assistant only to stop your preaching about the evils of solitude,” said Renouard hastily; and the pressman laughed at the half-resentful tone.  His laugh was not very loud, but his plump person shook all over.  He was aware that his younger friend’s deference to his advice was based only on an imperfect belief in his wisdom — or his sagacity.  But it was he who had first helped Renouard in his plans of exploration: the five-years’ programme of scientific adventure, of work, of danger and endurance, carried out with such distinction and rewarded modestly with the lease of Malata island by the frugal colonial government.  And this reward, too, had been due to the journalist’s advocacy with word and pen — for he was an influential man in the community.  Doubting very much if Renouard really liked him, he was himself without great sympathy for a certain side of that man which he could not quite make out.  He only felt it obscurely to be his real personality — the true — and, perhaps, the absurd.  As, for instance, in that case of the assistant.  Renouard had given way to the arguments of his friend and backer — the argument against the unwholesome effect of solitude, the argument for the safety of companionship even if quarrelsome.  Very well.  In this docility he was sensible and even likeable.  But what did he do next?  Instead of taking counsel as to the choice with his old backer and friend, and a man, besides, knowing everybody employed and unemployed on the pavements of the town, this extraordinary Renouard suddenly and almost surreptitiously picked up a fellow — God knows who — and sailed away with him back to Malata in a hurry; a proceeding obviously rash and at the same time not quite straight.  That was the sort of thing.  The secretly unforgiving journalist laughed a little longer and then ceased to shake all over.

“Oh, yes.  About that assistant of yours. . . .”

“What about him,” said Renouard, after waiting a while, with a shadow of uneasiness on his face.

“Have you nothing to tell me of him?”

“Nothing except. . . .”  Incipient grimness vanished out of Renouard’s aspect and his voice, while he hesitated as if reflecting seriously before he changed his mind.  “No.  Nothing whatever.”

“You haven’t brought him along with you by chance — for a change.”

The Planter of Malata stared, then shook his head, and finally murmured carelessly: “I think he’s very well where he is.  But I wish you could tell me why young Dunster insisted so much on my dining with his uncle last night.  Everybody knows I am not a society man.”

The Editor exclaimed at so much modesty.  Didn’t his friend know that he was their one and only explorer — that he was the man experimenting with the silk plant. . . .

“Still, that doesn’t tell me why I was invited yesterday.  For young Dunster never thought of this civility before. . . .”

“Our Willie,” said the popular journalist, “never does anything without a purpose, that’s a fact.”

“And to his uncle’s house too!”

“He lives there.”

“Yes.  But he might have given me a feed somewhere else.  The extraordinary part is that the old man did not seem to have anything special to say.  He smiled kindly on me once or twice, and that was all.  It was quite a party, sixteen people.”

The Editor then, after expressing his regret that he had not been able to come, wanted to know if the party had been entertaining.

Renouard regretted that his friend had not been there.  Being a man whose business or at least whose profession was to know everything that went on in this part of the globe, he could probably have told him something of some people lately arrived from home, who were amongst the guests.  Young Dunster (Willie), with his large shirt-front and streaks of white skin shining unpleasantly through the thin black hair plastered over the top of his head, bore down on him and introduced him to that party, as if he had been a trained dog or a child phenomenon.  Decidedly, he said, he disliked Willie — one of these large oppressive men. . . .

A silence fell, and it was as if Renouard were not going to say anything more when, suddenly, he came out with the real object of his visit to the editorial room.

“They looked to me like people under a spell.”

The Editor gazed at him appreciatively, thinking that, whether the effect of solitude or not, this was a proof of a sensitive perception of the expression of faces.

“You omitted to tell me their name, but I can make a guess.  You mean Professor Moorsom, his daughter and sister — don’t you?”

Renouard assented.  Yes, a white-haired lady.  But from his silence, with his eyes fixed, yet avoiding his friend, it was easy to guess that it was not in the white-haired lady that he was interested.

“Upon my word,” he said, recovering his usual bearing.  “It looks to me as if I had been asked there only for the daughter to talk to me.”

He did not conceal that he had been greatly struck by her appearance.  Nobody could have helped being impressed.  She was different from everybody else in that house, and it was not only the effect of her London clothes.  He did not take her down to dinner.  Willie did that.  It was afterwards, on the terrace. . . .

The evening was delightfully calm.  He was sitting apart and alone, and wishing himself somewhere else — on board the schooner for choice, with the dinner-harness off.  He hadn’t exchanged forty words altogether during the evening with the other guests.  He saw her suddenly all by herself coming towards him along the dimly lighted terrace, quite from a distance.

She was tall and supple, carrying nobly on her straight body a head of a character which to him appeared peculiar, something — well — pagan, crowned with a great wealth of hair.  He had been about to rise, but her decided approach caused him to remain on the seat.  He had not looked much at her that evening.  He had not that freedom of gaze acquired by the habit of society and the frequent meetings with strangers.  It was not shyness, but the reserve of a man not used to the world and to the practice of covert staring, with careless curiosity.  All he had captured by his first, keen, instantly lowered, glance was the impression that her hair was magnificently red and her eyes very black.  It was a troubling effect, but it had been evanescent; he had forgotten it almost till very unexpectedly he saw her coming down the terrace slow and eager, as if she were restraining herself, and with a rhythmic upward undulation of her whole figure.  The light from an open window fell across her path, and suddenly all that mass of arranged hair appeared incandescent, chiselled and fluid, with the daring suggestion of a helmet of burnished copper and the flowing lines of molten metal.  It kindled in him an astonished admiration.  But he said nothing of it to his friend the Editor.  Neither did he tell him that her approach woke up in his brain the image of love’s infinite grace and the sense of the inexhaustible joy that lives in beauty.  No!  What he imparted to the Editor were no emotions, but mere facts conveyed in a deliberate voice and in uninspired words.

“That young lady came and sat down by me.  She said: ‘Are you French, Mr. Renouard?’”

He had breathed a whiff of perfume of which he said nothing either — of some perfume he did not know.  Her voice was low and distinct.  Her shoulders and her bare arms gleamed with an extraordinary splendour, and when she advanced her head into the light he saw the admirable contour of the face, the straight fine nose with delicate nostrils, the exquisite crimson brushstroke of the lips on this oval without colour.  The expression of the eyes was lost in a shadowy mysterious play of jet and silver, stirring under the red coppery gold of the hair as though she had been a being made of ivory and precious metals changed into living tissue.

“. . . I told her my people were living in Canada, but that I was brought up in England before coming out here.  I can’t imagine what interest she could have in my history.”

“And you complain of her interest?”

The accent of the all-knowing journalist seemed to jar on the Planter of Malata.

“No!” he said, in a deadened voice that was almost sullen.  But after a short silence he went on.  “Very extraordinary.  I told her I came out to wander at large in the world when I was nineteen, almost directly after I left school.  It seems that her late brother was in the same school a couple of years before me.  She wanted me to tell her what I did at first when I came out here; what other men found to do when they came out — where they went, what was likely to happen to them — as if I could guess and foretell from my experience the fates of men who come out here with a hundred different projects, for hundreds of different reasons — for no reason but restlessness — who come, and go, and disappear!  Preposterous.  She seemed to want to hear their histories.  I told her that most of them were not worth telling.”

The distinguished journalist leaning on his elbow, his head resting against the knuckles of his left hand, listened with great attention, but gave no sign of that surprise which Renouard, pausing, seemed to expect.

“You know something,” the latter said brusquely.  The all-knowing man moved his head slightly and said, “Yes.  But go on.”

“It’s just this.  There is no more to it.  I found myself talking to her of my adventures, of my early days.  It couldn’t possibly have interested her.  Really,” he cried, “this is most extraordinary.  Those people have something on their minds.  We sat in the light of the window, and her father prowled about the terrace, with his hands behind his back and his head drooping.  The white-haired lady came to the dining-room window twice — to look at us I am certain.  The other guests began to go away — and still we sat there.  Apparently these people are staying with the Dunsters.  It was old Mrs. Dunster who put an end to the thing.  The father and the aunt circled about as if they were afraid of interfering with the girl.  Then she got up all at once, gave me her hand, and said she hoped she would see me again.”