Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (505 page)

The epithet of rust-coloured comes from her.  It was really tawny.  Once or twice in my hearing she had referred to “my rust-coloured hair” with laughing vexation.  Even then it was unruly, abhorring the restraints of civilization, and often in the heat of a dispute getting into the eyes of Madame de Lastaola, the possessor of coveted art treasures, the heiress of Henry Allègre.  She proceeded in a reminiscent mood, with a faint flash of gaiety all over her face, except her dark blue eyes that moved so seldom out of their fixed scrutiny of things invisible to other human beings.

“The goats were very good.  We clambered amongst the stones together.  They beat me at that game.  I used to catch my hair in the bushes.”

“Your rust-coloured hair,” I whispered.

“Yes, it was always this colour.  And I used to leave bits of my frock on thorns here and there.  It was pretty thin, I can tell you.  There wasn’t much at that time between my skin and the blue of the sky.  My legs were as sunburnt as my face; but really I didn’t tan very much.  I had plenty of freckles though.  There were no looking-glasses in the Presbytery but uncle had a piece not bigger than my two hands for his shaving.  One Sunday I crept into his room and had a peep at myself.  And wasn’t I startled to see my own eyes looking at me!  But it was fascinating, too.  I was about eleven years old then, and I was very friendly with the goats, and I was as shrill as a cicada and as slender as a match.  Heavens!  When I overhear myself speaking sometimes, or look at my limbs, it doesn’t seem to be possible.  And yet it is the same one.  I do remember every single goat.  They were very clever.  Goats are no trouble really; they don’t scatter much.  Mine never did even if I had to hide myself out of their sight for ever so long.”

It was but natural to ask her why she wanted to hide, and she uttered vaguely what was rather a comment on my question:

“It was like fate.”  But I chose to take it otherwise, teasingly, because we were often like a pair of children.

“Oh, really,” I said, “you talk like a pagan.  What could you know of fate at that time?  What was it like?  Did it come down from Heaven?”

“Don’t be stupid.  It used to come along a cart-track that was there and it looked like a boy.  Wasn’t he a little devil though.  You understand, I couldn’t know that.  He was a wealthy cousin of mine.  Round there we are all related, all cousins — as in Brittany.  He wasn’t much bigger than myself but he was older, just a boy in blue breeches and with good shoes on his feet, which of course interested and impressed me.  He yelled to me from below, I screamed to him from above, he came up and sat down near me on a stone, never said a word, let me look at him for half an hour before he condescended to ask me who I was.  And the airs he gave himself!  He quite intimidated me sitting there perfectly dumb.  I remember trying to hide my bare feet under the edge of my skirt as I sat below him on the ground.

“C’est comique, eh!” she interrupted herself to comment in a melancholy tone.  I looked at her sympathetically and she went on:

“He was the only son from a rich farmhouse two miles down the slope.  In winter they used to send him to school at Tolosa.  He had an enormous opinion of himself; he was going to keep a shop in a town by and by and he was about the most dissatisfied creature I have ever seen.  He had an unhappy mouth and unhappy eyes and he was always wretched about something: about the treatment he received, about being kept in the country and chained to work.  He was moaning and complaining and threatening all the world, including his father and mother.  He used to curse God, yes, that boy, sitting there on a piece of rock like a wretched little Prometheus with a sparrow pecking at his miserable little liver.  And the grand scenery of mountains all round, ha, ha, ha!”

She laughed in contralto: a penetrating sound with something generous in it; not infectious, but in others provoking a smile.

“Of course I, poor little animal, I didn’t know what to make of it, and I was even a little frightened.  But at first because of his miserable eyes I was sorry for him, almost as much as if he had been a sick goat.  But, frightened or sorry, I don’t know how it is, I always wanted to laugh at him, too, I mean from the very first day when he let me admire him for half an hour.  Yes, even then I had to put my hand over my mouth more than once for the sake of good manners, you understand.  And yet, you know, I was never a laughing child.

“One day he came up and sat down very dignified a little bit away from me and told me he had been thrashed for wandering in the hills.

“‘To be with me?’ I asked.  And he said: ‘To be with you!  No.  My people don’t know what I do.’  I can’t tell why, but I was annoyed.  So instead of raising a clamour of pity over him, which I suppose he expected me to do, I asked him if the thrashing hurt very much.  He got up, he had a switch in his hand, and walked up to me, saying, ‘I will soon show you.’  I went stiff with fright; but instead of slashing at me he dropped down by my side and kissed me on the cheek.  Then he did it again, and by that time I was gone dead all over and he could have done what he liked with the corpse but he left off suddenly and then I came to life again and I bolted away.  Not very far.  I couldn’t leave the goats altogether.  He chased me round and about the rocks, but of course I was too quick for him in his nice town boots.  When he got tired of that game he started throwing stones.  After that he made my life very lively for me.  Sometimes he used to come on me unawares and then I had to sit still and listen to his miserable ravings, because he would catch me round the waist and hold me very tight.  And yet, I often felt inclined to laugh.  But if I caught sight of him at a distance and tried to dodge out of the way he would start stoning me into a shelter I knew of and then sit outside with a heap of stones at hand so that I daren’t show the end of my nose for hours.  He would sit there and rave and abuse me till I would burst into a crazy laugh in my hole; and then I could see him through the leaves rolling on the ground and biting his fists with rage.  Didn’t he hate me!  At the same time I was often terrified.  I am convinced now that if I had started crying he would have rushed in and perhaps strangled me there.  Then as the sun was about to set he would make me swear that I would marry him when I was grown up.  ‘Swear, you little wretched beggar,’ he would yell to me.  And I would swear.  I was hungry, and I didn’t want to be made black and blue all over with stones.  Oh, I swore ever so many times to be his wife.  Thirty times a month for two months.  I couldn’t help myself.  It was no use complaining to my sister Therese.  When I showed her my bruises and tried to tell her a little about my trouble she was quite scandalized.  She called me a sinful girl, a shameless creature.  I assure you it puzzled my head so that, between Therese my sister and José the boy, I lived in a state of idiocy almost.  But luckily at the end of the two months they sent him away from home for good.  Curious story to happen to a goatherd living all her days out under God’s eye, as my uncle the Cura might have said.  My sister Therese was keeping house in the Presbytery.  She’s a terrible person.”

“I have heard of your sister Therese,” I said.

“Oh, you have!  Of my big sister Therese, six, ten years older than myself perhaps?  She just comes a little above my shoulder, but then I was always a long thing.  I never knew my mother.  I don’t even know how she looked.  There are no paintings or photographs in our farmhouses amongst the hills.  I haven’t even heard her described to me.  I believe I was never good enough to be told these things.  Therese decided that I was a lump of wickedness, and now she believes that I will lose my soul altogether unless I take some steps to save it.  Well, I have no particular taste that way.  I suppose it is annoying to have a sister going fast to eternal perdition, but there are compensations.  The funniest thing is that it’s Therese, I believe, who managed to keep me out of the Presbytery when I went out of my way to look in on them on my return from my visit to the Quartel Real last year.  I couldn’t have stayed much more than half an hour with them anyway, but still I would have liked to get over the old doorstep.  I am certain that Therese persuaded my uncle to go out and meet me at the bottom of the hill.  I saw the old man a long way off and I understood how it was.  I dismounted at once and met him on foot.  We had half an hour together walking up and down the road.  He is a peasant priest, he didn’t know how to treat me.  And of course I was uncomfortable, too.  There wasn’t a single goat about to keep me in countenance.  I ought to have embraced him.  I was always fond of the stern, simple old man.  But he drew himself up when I approached him and actually took off his hat to me.  So simple as that!  I bowed my head and asked for his blessing.  And he said ‘I would never refuse a blessing to a good Legitimist.’  So stern as that!  And when I think that I was perhaps the only girl of the family or in the whole world that he ever in his priest’s life patted on the head!  When I think of that I . . . I believe at that moment I was as wretched as he was himself.  I handed him an envelope with a big red seal which quite startled him.  I had asked the Marquis de Villarel to give me a few words for him, because my uncle has a great influence in his district; and the Marquis penned with his own hand some compliments and an inquiry about the spirit of the population.  My uncle read the letter, looked up at me with an air of mournful awe, and begged me to tell his excellency that the people were all for God, their lawful King and their old privileges.  I said to him then, after he had asked me about the health of His Majesty in an awfully gloomy tone — I said then: ‘There is only one thing that remains for me to do, uncle, and that is to give you two pounds of the very best snuff I have brought here for you.’  What else could I have got for the poor old man?  I had no trunks with me.  I had to leave behind a spare pair of shoes in the hotel to make room in my little bag for that snuff.  And fancy!  That old priest absolutely pushed the parcel away.  I could have thrown it at his head; but I thought suddenly of that hard, prayerful life, knowing nothing of any ease or pleasure in the world, absolutely nothing but a pinch of snuff now and then.  I remembered how wretched he used to be when he lacked a copper or two to get some snuff with.  My face was hot with indignation, but before I could fly out at him I remembered how simple he was.  So I said with great dignity that as the present came from the King and as he wouldn’t receive it from my hand there was nothing else for me to do but to throw it into the brook; and I made as if I were going to do it, too.  He shouted: ‘Stay, unhappy girl!  Is it really from His Majesty, whom God preserve?’  I said contemptuously, ‘Of course.’  He looked at me with great pity in his eyes, sighed deeply, and took the little tin from my hand.  I suppose he imagined me in my abandoned way wheedling the necessary cash out of the King for the purchase of that snuff.  You can’t imagine how simple he is.  Nothing was easier than to deceive him; but don’t imagine I deceived him from the vainglory of a mere sinner.  I lied to the dear man, simply because I couldn’t bear the idea of him being deprived of the only gratification his big, ascetic, gaunt body ever knew on earth.  As I mounted my mule to go away he murmured coldly: ‘God guard you, Señora!’  Señora!  What sternness!  We were off a little way already when his heart softened and he shouted after me in a terrible voice: ‘The road to Heaven is repentance!’  And then, after a silence, again the great shout ‘Repentance!’ thundered after me.  Was that sternness or simplicity, I wonder?  Or a mere unmeaning superstition, a mechanical thing?  If there lives anybody completely honest in this world, surely it must be my uncle.  And yet — who knows?

“Would you guess what was the next thing I did?  Directly I got over the frontier I wrote from Bayonne asking the old man to send me out my sister here.  I said it was for the service of the King.  You see, I had thought suddenly of that house of mine in which you once spent the night talking with Mr. Mills and Don Juan Blunt.  I thought it would do extremely well for Carlist officers coming this way on leave or on a mission.  In hotels they might have been molested, but I knew that I could get protection for my house.  Just a word from the ministry in Paris to the Prefect.  But I wanted a woman to manage it for me.  And where was I to find a trustworthy woman?  How was I to know one when I saw her?  I don’t know how to talk to women.  Of course my Rose would have done for me that or anything else; but what could I have done myself without her?  She has looked after me from the first.  It was Henry Allègre who got her for me eight years ago.  I don’t know whether he meant it for a kindness but she’s the only human being on whom I can lean.  She knows . . . What doesn’t she know about me!  She has never failed to do the right thing for me unasked.  I couldn’t part with her.  And I couldn’t think of anybody else but my sister.

“After all it was somebody belonging to me.  But it seemed the wildest idea.  Yet she came at once.  Of course I took care to send her some money.  She likes money.  As to my uncle there is nothing that he wouldn’t have given up for the service of the King.  Rose went to meet her at the railway station.  She told me afterwards that there had been no need for me to be anxious about her recognizing Mademoiselle Therese.  There was nobody else in the train that could be mistaken for her.  I should think not!  She had made for herself a dress of some brown stuff like a nun’s habit and had a crooked stick and carried all her belongings tied up in a handkerchief.  She looked like a pilgrim to a saint’s shrine.  Rose took her to the house.  She asked when she saw it: ‘And does this big place really belong to our Rita?’  My maid of course said that it was mine.  ‘And how long did our Rita live here?’ — ’Madame has never seen it unless perhaps the outside, as far as I know.  I believe Mr. Allègre lived here for some time when he was a young man.’ — ’The sinner that’s dead?’ — ’Just so,’ says Rose.  You know nothing ever startles Rose.  ‘Well, his sins are gone with him,’ said my sister, and began to make herself at home.

“Rose was going to stop with her for a week but on the third day she was back with me with the remark that Mlle. Therese knew her way about very well already and preferred to be left to herself.  Some little time afterwards I went to see that sister of mine.  The first thing she said to me, ‘I wouldn’t have recognized you, Rita,’ and I said, ‘What a funny dress you have, Therese, more fit for the portress of a convent than for this house.’ — ’Yes,’ she said, ‘and unless you give this house to me, Rita, I will go back to our country.  I will have nothing to do with your life, Rita.  Your life is no secret for me.’