Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (523 page)

“You are a Basque,” I said.

He admitted rather contemptuously that he was a Basque and even then the truth did not dawn upon me.  I suppose that with the hidden egoism of a lover I was thinking of myself, of myself alone in relation to Doña Rita, not of Doña Rita herself.  He, too, obviously.  He said: “I am an educated man, but I know her people, all peasants.  There is a sister, an uncle, a priest, a peasant, too, and perfectly unenlightened.  One can’t expect much from a priest (I am a free-thinker of course), but he is really too bad, more like a brute beast.  As to all her people, mostly dead now, they never were of any account.  There was a little land, but they were always working on other people’s farms, a barefooted gang, a starved lot.  I ought to know because we are distant relations.  Twentieth cousins or something of the sort.  Yes, I am related to that most loyal lady.  And what is she, after all, but a Parisian woman with innumerable lovers, as I have been told.”

“I don’t think your information is very correct,” I said, affecting to yawn slightly.  “This is mere gossip of the gutter and I am surprised at you, who really know nothing about it — ”

But the disgusting animal had fallen into a brown study.  The hair of his very whiskers was perfectly still.  I had now given up all idea of the letter to Rita.  Suddenly he spoke again:

“Women are the origin of all evil.  One should never trust them.  They have no honour.  No honour!” he repeated, striking his breast with his closed fist on which the knuckles stood out very white.  “I left my village many years ago and of course I am perfectly satisfied with my position and I don’t know why I should trouble my head about this loyal lady.  I suppose that’s the way women get on in the world.”

I felt convinced that he was no proper person to be a messenger to headquarters.  He struck me as altogether untrustworthy and perhaps not quite sane.  This was confirmed by him saying suddenly with no visible connection and as if it had been forced from him by some agonizing process: “I was a boy once,” and then stopping dead short with a smile.  He had a smile that frightened one by its association of malice and anguish.

“Will you have anything more to eat?” I asked.

He declined dully.  He had had enough.  But he drained the last of a bottle into his glass and accepted a cigar which I offered him.  While he was lighting it I had a sort of confused impression that he wasn’t such a stranger to me as I had assumed he was; and yet, on the other hand, I was perfectly certain I had never seen him before.  Next moment I felt that I could have knocked him down if he hadn’t looked so amazingly unhappy, while he came out with the astounding question: “Señor, have you ever been a lover in your young days?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.  “How old do you think I am?”

“That’s true,” he said, gazing at me in a way in which the damned gaze out of their cauldrons of boiling pitch at some soul walking scot free in the place of torment.  “It’s true, you don’t seem to have anything on your mind.”  He assumed an air of ease, throwing an arm over the back of his chair and blowing the smoke through the gash of his twisted red mouth.  “Tell me,” he said, “between men, you know, has this — wonderful celebrity — what does she call herself?  How long has she been your mistress?”

I reflected rapidly that if I knocked him over, chair and all, by a sudden blow from the shoulder it would bring about infinite complications beginning with a visit to the Commissaire de Police on night-duty, and ending in God knows what scandal and disclosures of political kind; because there was no telling what, or how much, this outrageous brute might choose to say and how many people he might not involve in a most undesirable publicity.  He was smoking his cigar with a poignantly mocking air and not even looking at me.  One can’t hit like that a man who isn’t even looking at one; and then, just as I was looking at him swinging his leg with a caustic smile and stony eyes, I felt sorry for the creature.  It was only his body that was there in that chair.  It was manifest to me that his soul was absent in some hell of its own.  At that moment I attained the knowledge of who it was I had before me.  This was the man of whom both Doña Rita and Rose were so much afraid.  It remained then for me to look after him for the night and then arrange with Baron H. that he should be sent away the very next day — and anywhere but to Tolosa.  Yes, evidently, I mustn’t lose sight of him.  I proposed in the calmest tone that we should go on where he could get his much-needed rest.  He rose with alacrity, picked up his little hand-bag, and, walking out before me, no doubt looked a very ordinary person to all eyes but mine.  It was then past eleven, not much, because we had not been in that restaurant quite an hour, but the routine of the town’s night-life being upset during the Carnival the usual row of fiacres outside the Maison Dorée was not there; in fact, there were very few carriages about.  Perhaps the coachmen had assumed Pierrot costumes and were rushing about the streets on foot yelling with the rest of the population.  “We will have to walk,” I said after a while. — ”Oh, yes, let us walk,” assented Señor Ortega, “or I will be frozen here.”  It was like a plaint of unutterable wretchedness.  I had a fancy that all his natural heat had abandoned his limbs and gone to his brain.  It was otherwise with me; my head was cool but I didn’t find the night really so very cold.  We stepped out briskly side by side.  My lucid thinking was, as it were, enveloped by the wide shouting of the consecrated Carnival gaiety.  I have heard many noises since, but nothing that gave me such an intimate impression of the savage instincts hidden in the breast of mankind; these yells of festivity suggested agonizing fear, rage of murder, ferocity of lust, and the irremediable joylessness of human condition: yet they were emitted by people who were convinced that they were amusing themselves supremely, traditionally, with the sanction of ages, with the approval of their conscience — and no mistake about it whatever!  Our appearance, the soberness of our gait made us conspicuous.  Once or twice, by common inspiration, masks rushed forward and forming a circle danced round us uttering discordant shouts of derision; for we were an outrage to the peculiar proprieties of the hour, and besides we were obviously lonely and defenceless.  On those occasions there was nothing for it but to stand still till the flurry was over.  My companion, however, would stamp his feet with rage, and I must admit that I myself regretted not having provided for our wearing a couple of false noses, which would have been enough to placate the just resentment of those people.  We might have also joined in the dance, but for some reason or other it didn’t occur to us; and I heard once a high, clear woman’s voice stigmatizing us for a “species of swelled heads” (espèce d’enflés).  We proceeded sedately, my companion muttered with rage, and I was able to resume my thinking.  It was based on the deep persuasion that the man at my side was insane with quite another than Carnivalesque lunacy which comes on at one stated time of the year.  He was fundamentally mad, though not perhaps completely; which of course made him all the greater, I won’t say danger but, nuisance.

I remember once a young doctor expounding the theory that most catastrophes in family circles, surprising episodes in public affairs and disasters in private life, had their origin in the fact that the world was full of half-mad people.  He asserted that they were the real majority.  When asked whether he considered himself as belonging to the majority, he said frankly that he didn’t think so; unless the folly of voicing this view in a company, so utterly unable to appreciate all its horror, could be regarded as the first symptom of his own fate.  We shouted down him and his theory, but there is no doubt that it had thrown a chill on the gaiety of our gathering.

We had now entered a quieter quarter of the town and Señor Ortega had ceased his muttering.  For myself I had not the slightest doubt of my own sanity.  It was proved to me by the way I could apply my intelligence to the problem of what was to be done with Señor Ortega.  Generally, he was unfit to be trusted with any mission whatever.  The unstability of his temper was sure to get him into a scrape.  Of course carrying a letter to Headquarters was not a very complicated matter; and as to that I would have trusted willingly a properly trained dog.  My private letter to Doña Rita, the wonderful, the unique letter of farewell, I had given up for the present.  Naturally I thought of the Ortega problem mainly in the terms of Doña Rita’s safety.  Her image presided at every council, at every conflict of my mind, and dominated every faculty of my senses.  It floated before my eyes, it touched my elbow, it guarded my right side and my left side; my ears seemed to catch the sound of her footsteps behind me, she enveloped me with passing whiffs of warmth and perfume, with filmy touches of the hair on my face.  She penetrated me, my head was full of her . . . And his head, too, I thought suddenly with a side glance at my companion.  He walked quietly with hunched-up shoulders carrying his little hand-bag and he looked the most commonplace figure imaginable.

Yes.  There was between us a most horrible fellowship; the association of his crazy torture with the sublime suffering of my passion.  We hadn’t been a quarter of an hour together when that woman had surged up fatally between us; between this miserable wretch and myself.  We were haunted by the same image.  But I was sane!  I was sane!  Not because I was certain that the fellow must not be allowed to go to Tolosa, but because I was perfectly alive to the difficulty of stopping him from going there, since the decision was absolutely in the hands of Baron H.

If I were to go early in the morning and tell that fat, bilious man: “Look here, your Ortega’s mad,” he would certainly think at once that I was, get very frightened, and . . . one couldn’t tell what course he would take.  He would eliminate me somehow out of the affair.  And yet I could not let the fellow proceed to where Doña Rita was, because, obviously, he had been molesting her, had filled her with uneasiness and even alarm, was an unhappy element and a disturbing influence in her life — incredible as the thing appeared!  I couldn’t let him go on to make himself a worry and a nuisance, drive her out from a town in which she wished to be (for whatever reason) and perhaps start some explosive scandal.  And that girl Rose seemed to fear something graver even than a scandal.  But if I were to explain the matter fully to H. he would simply rejoice in his heart.  Nothing would please him more than to have Doña Rita driven out of Tolosa.  What a relief from his anxieties (and his wife’s, too); and if I were to go further, if I even went so far as to hint at the fears which Rose had not been able to conceal from me, why then — I went on thinking coldly with a stoical rejection of the most elementary faith in mankind’s rectitude — why then, that accommodating husband would simply let the ominous messenger have his chance.  He would see there only his natural anxieties being laid to rest for ever.  Horrible?  Yes.  But I could not take the risk.  In a twelvemonth I had travelled a long way in my mistrust of mankind.

We paced on steadily.  I thought: “How on earth am I going to stop you?”  Had this arisen only a month before, when I had the means at hand and Dominic to confide in, I would have simply kidnapped the fellow.  A little trip to sea would not have done Señor Ortega any harm; though no doubt it would have been abhorrent to his feelings.  But now I had not the means.  I couldn’t even tell where my poor Dominic was hiding his diminished head.

Again I glanced at him sideways.  I was the taller of the two and as it happened I met in the light of the street lamp his own stealthy glance directed up at me with an agonized expression, an expression that made me fancy I could see the man’s very soul writhing in his body like an impaled worm.  In spite of my utter inexperience I had some notion of the images that rushed into his mind at the sight of any man who had approached Doña Rita.  It was enough to awaken in any human being a movement of horrified compassion; but my pity went out not to him but to Doña Rita.  It was for her that I felt sorry; I pitied her for having that damned soul on her track.  I pitied her with tenderness and indignation, as if this had been both a danger and a dishonour.

I don’t mean to say that those thoughts passed through my head consciously.  I had only the resultant, settled feeling.  I had, however, a thought, too.  It came on me suddenly, and I asked myself with rage and astonishment: “Must I then kill that brute?”  There didn’t seem to be any alternative.  Between him and Doña Rita I couldn’t hesitate.  I believe I gave a slight laugh of desperation.  The suddenness of this sinister conclusion had in it something comic and unbelievable.  It loosened my grip on my mental processes.  A Latin tag came into my head about the facile descent into the abyss.  I marvelled at its aptness, and also that it should have come to me so pat.  But I believe now that it was suggested simply by the actual declivity of the street of the Consuls which lies on a gentle slope.  We had just turned the corner.  All the houses were dark and in a perspective of complete solitude our two shadows dodged and wheeled about our feet.

“Here we are,” I said.

He was an extraordinarily chilly devil.  When we stopped I could hear his teeth chattering again.  I don’t know what came over me, I had a sort of nervous fit, was incapable of finding my pockets, let alone the latchkey.  I had the illusion of a narrow streak of light on the wall of the house as if it had been cracked.  “I hope we will be able to get in,” I murmured.

Señor Ortega stood waiting patiently with his handbag, like a rescued wayfarer.  “But you live in this house, don’t you?” he observed.

“No,” I said, without hesitation.  I didn’t know how that man would behave if he were aware that I was staying under the same roof.  He was half mad.  He might want to talk all night, try crazily to invade my privacy.  How could I tell?  Moreover, I wasn’t so sure that I would remain in the house.  I had some notion of going out again and walking up and down the street of the Consuls till daylight.  “No, an absent friend lets me use . . . I had that latchkey this morning . . . Ah! here it is.”