Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (786 page)

It was with a sort of apprehension that Renouard looked forward to seeing Miss Moorsom.  And strangely enough it resembled the state of mind of a man who fears disenchantment more than sortilege.  But he need not have been afraid.  Directly he saw her in a distance at the other end of the terrace he shuddered to the roots of his hair.  With her approach the power of speech left him for a time.  Mrs. Dunster and her aunt were accompanying her.  All these people sat down; it was an intimate circle into which Renouard felt himself cordially admitted; and the talk was of the great search which occupied all their minds.  Discretion was expected by these people, but of reticence as to the object of the journey there could be no question.  Nothing but ways and means and arrangements could be talked about.

By fixing his eyes obstinately on the ground, which gave him an air of reflective sadness, Renouard managed to recover his self-possession.  He used it to keep his voice in a low key and to measure his words on the great subject.  And he took care with a great inward effort to make them reasonable without giving them a discouraging complexion.  For he did not want the quest to be given up, since it would mean her going away with her two attendant grey-heads to the other side of the world.

He was asked to come again, to come often and take part in the counsels of all these people captivated by the sentimental enterprise of a declared love.  On taking Miss Moorsom’s hand he looked up, would have liked to say something, but found himself voiceless, with his lips suddenly sealed.  She returned the pressure of his fingers, and he left her with her eyes vaguely staring beyond him, an air of listening for an expected sound, and the faintest possible smile on her lips.  A smile not for him, evidently, but the reflection of some deep and inscrutable thought.

CHAPTER IV

He went on board his schooner.  She lay white, and as if suspended, in the crepuscular atmosphere of sunset mingling with the ashy gleam of the vast anchorage.  He tried to keep his thoughts as sober, as reasonable, as measured as his words had been, lest they should get away from him and cause some sort of moral disaster.  What he was afraid of in the coming night was sleeplessness and the endless strain of that wearisome task.  It had to be faced however.  He lay on his back, sighing profoundly in the dark, and suddenly beheld his very own self, carrying a small bizarre lamp, reflected in a long mirror inside a room in an empty and unfurnished palace.  In this startling image of himself he recognised somebody he had to follow — the frightened guide of his dream.  He traversed endless galleries, no end of lofty halls, innumerable doors.  He lost himself utterly — he found his way again.  Room succeeded room.  At last the lamp went out, and he stumbled against some object which, when he stooped for it, he found to be very cold and heavy to lift.  The sickly white light of dawn showed him the head of a statue.  Its marble hair was done in the bold lines of a helmet, on its lips the chisel had left a faint smile, and it resembled Miss Moorsom.  While he was staring at it fixedly, the head began to grow light in his fingers, to diminish and crumble to pieces, and at last turned into a handful of dust, which was blown away by a puff of wind so chilly that he woke up with a desperate shiver and leaped headlong out of his bed-place.  The day had really come.  He sat down by the cabin table, and taking his head between his hands, did not stir for a very long time.

Very quiet, he set himself to review this dream.  The lamp, of course, he connected with the search for a man.  But on closer examination he perceived that the reflection of himself in the mirror was not really the true Renouard, but somebody else whose face he could not remember.  In the deserted palace he recognised a sinister adaptation by his brain of the long corridors with many doors, in the great building in which his friend’s newspaper was lodged on the first floor.  The marble head with Miss Moorsom’s face!  Well!  What other face could he have dreamed of?  And her complexion was fairer than Parian marble, than the heads of angels.  The wind at the end was the morning breeze entering through the open porthole and touching his face before the schooner could swing to the chilly gust.

Yes!  And all this rational explanation of the fantastic made it only more mysterious and weird.  There was something daemonic in that dream.  It was one of those experiences which throw a man out of conformity with the established order of his kind and make him a creature of obscure suggestions.

Henceforth, without ever trying to resist, he went every afternoon to the house where she lived.  He went there as passively as if in a dream.  He could never make out how he had attained the footing of intimacy in the Dunster mansion above the bay — whether on the ground of personal merit or as the pioneer of the vegetable silk industry.  It must have been the last, because he remembered distinctly, as distinctly as in a dream, hearing old Dunster once telling him that his next public task would be a careful survey of the Northern Districts to discover tracts suitable for the cultivation of the silk plant.  The old man wagged his beard at him sagely.  It was indeed as absurd as a dream.

Willie of course would be there in the evening.  But he was more of a figure out of a nightmare, hovering about the circle of chairs in his dress-clothes like a gigantic, repulsive, and sentimental bat.  “Do away with the beastly cocoons all over the world,” he buzzed in his blurred, water-logged voice.  He affected a great horror of insects of all kinds.  One evening he appeared with a red flower in his button-hole.  Nothing could have been more disgustingly fantastic.  And he would also say to Renouard: “You may yet change the history of our country.  For economic conditions do shape the history of nations.  Eh?  What?”  And he would turn to Miss Moorsom for approval, lowering protectingly his spatulous nose and looking up with feeling from under his absurd eyebrows, which grew thin, in the manner of canebrakes, out of his spongy skin.  For this large, bilious creature was an economist and a sentimentalist, facile to tears, and a member of the Cobden Club.

In order to see as little of him as possible Renouard began coming earlier so as to get away before his arrival, without curtailing too much the hours of secret contemplation for which he lived.  He had given up trying to deceive himself.  His resignation was without bounds.  He accepted the immense misfortune of being in love with a woman who was in search of another man only to throw herself into his arms.  With such desperate precision he defined in his thoughts the situation, the consciousness of which traversed like a sharp arrow the sudden silences of general conversation.  The only thought before which he quailed was the thought that this could not last; that it must come to an end.  He feared it instinctively as a sick man may fear death.  For it seemed to him that it must be the death of him followed by a lightless, bottomless pit.  But his resignation was not spared the torments of jealousy: the cruel, insensate, poignant, and imbecile jealousy, when it seems that a woman betrays us simply by this that she exists, that she breathes — and when the deep movements of her nerves or her soul become a matter of distracting suspicion, of killing doubt, of mortal anxiety.

In the peculiar condition of their sojourn Miss Moorsom went out very little.  She accepted this seclusion at the Dunsters’ mansion as in a hermitage, and lived there, watched over by a group of old people, with the lofty endurance of a condescending and strong-headed goddess.  It was impossible to say if she suffered from anything in the world, and whether this was the insensibility of a great passion concentrated on itself, or a perfect restraint of manner, or the indifference of superiority so complete as to be sufficient to itself.  But it was visible to Renouard that she took some pleasure in talking to him at times.  Was it because he was the only person near her age?  Was this, then, the secret of his admission to the circle?

He admired her voice as well poised as her movements, as her attitudes.  He himself had always been a man of tranquil tones.  But the power of fascination had torn him out of his very nature so completely that to preserve his habitual calmness from going to pieces had become a terrible effort.

He used to go from her on board the schooner exhausted, broken, shaken up, as though he had been put to the most exquisite torture.  When he saw her approaching he always had a moment of hallucination.  She was a misty and fair creature, fitted for invisible music, for the shadows of love, for the murmurs of waters.  After a time (he could not be always staring at the ground) he would summon up all his resolution and look at her.  There was a sparkle in the clear obscurity of her eyes; and when she turned them on him they seemed to give a new meaning to life.  He would say to himself that another man would have found long before the happy release of madness, his wits burnt to cinders in that radiance.  But no such luck for him.  His wits had come unscathed through the furnaces of hot suns, of blazing deserts, of flaming angers against the weaknesses of men and the obstinate cruelties of hostile nature.

Being sane he had to be constantly on his guard against falling into adoring silences or breaking out into wild speeches.  He had to keep watch on his eyes, his limbs, on the muscles of his face.  Their conversations were such as they could be between these two people: she a young lady fresh from the thick twilight of four million people and the artificiality of several London seasons; he the man of definite conquering tasks, the familiar of wide horizons, and in his very repose holding aloof from these agglomerations of units in which one loses one’s importance even to oneself.  They had no common conversational small change.  They had to use the great pieces of general ideas, but they exchanged them trivially.  It was no serious commerce.  Perhaps she had not much of that coin.  Nothing significant came from her.  It could not be said that she had received from the contacts of the external world impressions of a personal kind, different from other women.  What was ravishing in her was her quietness and, in her grave attitudes, the unfailing brilliance of her femininity.  He did not know what there was under that ivory forehead so splendidly shaped, so gloriously crowned.  He could not tell what were her thoughts, her feelings.  Her replies were reflective, always preceded by a short silence, while he hung on her lips anxiously.  He felt himself in the presence of a mysterious being in whom spoke an unknown voice, like the voice of oracles, bringing everlasting unrest to the heart.

He was thankful enough to sit in silence with secretly clenched teeth, devoured by jealousy — and nobody could have guessed that his quiet deferential bearing to all these grey-heads was the supreme effort of stoicism, that the man was engaged in keeping a sinister watch on his tortures lest his strength should fail him.  As before, when grappling with other forces of nature, he could find in himself all sorts of courage except the courage to run away.

It was perhaps from the lack of subjects they could have in common that Miss Moorsom made him so often speak of his own life.  He did not shrink from talking about himself, for he was free from that exacerbated, timid vanity which seals so many vain-glorious lips.  He talked to her in his restrained voice, gazing at the tip of her shoe, and thinking that the time was bound to come soon when her very inattention would get weary of him.  And indeed on stealing a glance he would see her dazzling and perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious, and potent immensity of mankind.

CHAPTER V

One afternoon Renouard stepping out on the terrace found nobody there.  It was for him, at the same time, a melancholy disappointment and a poignant relief.

The heat was great, the air was still, all the long windows of the house stood wide open.  At the further end, grouped round a lady’s work-table, several chairs disposed sociably suggested invisible occupants, a company of conversing shades.  Renouard looked towards them with a sort of dread.  A most elusive, faint sound of ghostly talk issuing from one of the rooms added to the illusion and stopped his already hesitating footsteps.  He leaned over the balustrade of stone near a squat vase holding a tropical plant of a bizarre shape.  Professor Moorsom coming up from the garden with a book under his arm and a white parasol held over his bare head, found him there and, closing the parasol, leaned over by his side with a remark on the increasing heat of the season.  Renouard assented and changed his position a little; the other, after a short silence, administered unexpectedly a question which, like the blow of a club on the head, deprived Renouard of the power of speech and even thought, but, more cruel, left him quivering with apprehension, not of death but of everlasting torment.  Yet the words were extremely simple.

“Something will have to be done soon.  We can’t remain in a state of suspended expectation for ever.  Tell me what do you think of our chances?”

Renouard, speechless, produced a faint smile.  The professor confessed in a jocular tone his impatience to complete the circuit of the globe and be done with it.  It was impossible to remain quartered on the dear excellent Dunsters for an indefinite time.  And then there were the lectures he had arranged to deliver in Paris.  A serious matter.

That lectures by Professor Moorsom were a European event and that brilliant audiences would gather to hear them Renouard did not know.  All he was aware of was the shock of this hint of departure.  The menace of separation fell on his head like a thunderbolt.  And he saw the absurdity of his emotion, for hadn’t he lived all these days under the very cloud?  The professor, his elbows spread out, looked down into the garden and went on unburdening his mind.  Yes.  The department of sentiment was directed by his daughter, and she had plenty of volunteered moral support; but he had to look after the practical side of life without assistance.

“I have the less hesitation in speaking to you about my anxiety, because I feel you are friendly to us and at the same time you are detached from all these sublimities — confound them.”