Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (145 page)

I was so moved by one thing and another that I hardly noticed that Gurnard had come into the room. I had not seen him since the night when he had dined with the Duc de Mersch at Churchill’s, but he seemed so part of the emotion, of the frame of mind, that he slid noiselessly into the scene and hardly surprised me. I was called out of the room — someone desired to see me, and I passed, without any transition of feeling, into the presence of an entire stranger — a man who remains a voice to me. He began to talk to me about the state of my aunt’s health. He said she was breaking up; that he begged respectfully to urge that I would use my influence to take her back to London to consult Sir James — I, perhaps, living in the house and not having known my aunt for very long, might not see; but he … He was my aunt’s solicitor. He was quite right; my aunt was breaking up, she had declined visibly in the few hours that I had been away from her. She had been doing business with this man, had altered her will, had seen Mr. Gurnard; and, in some way had received a shock that seemed to have deprived her of all volition. She sat with her head leaning back, her eyes closed, the lines of her face all seeming to run downward.

“It is obvious to me that arrangements ought to be made for your return to England,” the lawyer said, “whatever engagements Miss Granger or Mr. Etchingham Granger or even Mr. Gurnard may have made.”

I wondered vaguely what the devil Mr. Gurnard could have to say in the matter, and then Miss Granger herself came into the room.

“They want me,” my aunt said in a low voice, “they have been persuading me … to go back … to Etchingham, I think you said, Meredith.”

I became conscious that I wanted to return to England, wanted it very much, wanted to be out of this; to get somewhere where there was stability and things that one could understand. Everything here seemed to be in a mist, with the ground trembling underfoot.

“Why …” Miss Granger’s verdict came, “we can go when you like.

To-morrow.”

Things immediately began to shape themselves on these unexpected lines, a sort of bustle of departure to be in the air. I was employed to conduct the lawyer as far as the porter’s lodge, a longish traverse. He beguiled the way by excusing himself for hurrying back to London.

“I might have been of use; in these hurried departures there are generally things. But, you will understand, Mr. — Mr. Etchingham; at a time like this I could hardly spare the hours that it cost me to come over. You would be astonished what a deal of extra work it gives and how far-spreading the evil is. People seem to have gone mad. Even I have been astonished.”

“I had no idea,” I said.

“Of course not, of course not — no one had. But, unless I am much mistaken — much — there will have to be an enquiry, and people will be very lucky who have had nothing to do with it …”

I gathered that things were in a bad way, over there as over here; that there were scandals and a tremendous outcry for purification in the highest places. I saw the man get into his fiacre and took my way back across the court-yard rather slowly, pondering over the part I was to fill in the emigration, wondering how far events had conferred on me a partnership in the family affairs.

I found that my tacitly acknowledged function was that of supervising nurse-tender, the sort of thing that made for personal tenderness in the aridity of profuse hired help. I was expected to arrange a rug just a little more comfortably than the lady’s maid who would travel in the compartment — to give the finishing touches.

It was astonishing how well the thing was engineered; the removal, I mean. It gave me an even better idea of the woman my aunt had been than even the panic of her solicitor. The thing went as smoothly as the disappearance of a caravan of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath beside gorse bushes. We went to the ball that night as if from a household that had its roots deep in the solid rock, and in the morning we had disappeared.

The ball itself was a finishing touch — the finishing touch of my sister’s affairs and the end of my patience. I spent an interminable night, one of those nights that never end and that remain quivering and raw in the memory. I seemed to be in a blaze of light, watching, through a shifting screen of shimmering dresses — her and the Duc de Mersch. I don’t know whether the thing was really noticeable, but it seemed that everyone was — that everyone must be — remarking it. I thought I caught women making smile-punctuated remarks behind fans, men answering inaudibly with eyes discreetly on the ground. It was a mixed assembly, somebody’s liquidation of social obligations, and there was a sprinkling of the kind of people who do make remarks. It was not the noticeability for its own sake that I hated, but the fact that their relations by their noticeability made me impossible, whilst the notice itself confirmed my own fears. I hung, glowering in corners, noticeable enough myself, I suppose.

The thing reached a crisis late in the evening. There was a kind of winter-garden that one strolled in, a place of giant palms stretching up into a darkness of intense shadow. I was prowling about in the shadows of great metallic leaves, cursing under my breath, in a fury of nervous irritation; quivering like a horse martyrised by a stupidly merciless driver. I happened to stand back for a moment in the narrowest of paths, with the touch of spiky leaves on my hand and on my face. In front of me was the glaring perspective of one of the longer alleys, and, stepping into it, a great band of blue ribbon cutting across his chest, came de Mersch with her upon his arm. De Mersch himself hardly counted. He had a way of glowing, but he paled ineffectual fires beside her mænadic glow. There was something overpowering in the sight of her, in the fire of her eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise of her head. She wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it she stepped with the buoyancy — the long steps — of a triumphing Diana.

It was more than terrible for me to stand there longing with a black, baffled longing, with some of the base quality of an eavesdropper and all the baseness of the unsuccessful.

Then Gurnard loomed in the distance, moving insensibly down the long, glaring corridor, a sinister figure, suggesting in the silence of his oncoming the motionless flight of a vulture. Well within my field of sight he overtook them and, with a lack of preliminary greeting that suggested supreme intimacy, walked beside them. I stood for some moments — for some minutes, and then hastened after them. I was going to do something. After a time I found de Mersch and Gurnard standing facing each other in one of the doorways of the place — Gurnard, a small, dark, impassive column; de Mersch, bulky, overwhelming, florid, standing with his legs well apart and speaking vociferously with a good deal of gesture. I approached them from the side, standing rather insistently at his elbow.

“I want,” I said, “I would be extremely glad if you would give me a minute, monsieur.” I was conscious that I spoke with a tremour of the voice, a sort of throaty eagerness. I was unaware of what course I was to pursue, but I was confident of calmness, of self-control — I was equal to that. They had a pause of surprised silence. Gurnard wheeled and fixed me critically with his eye-glass. I took de Mersch a little apart, into a solitude of palm branches, and began to speak before he had asked me my errand.

“You must understand that I would not interfere without a good deal of provocation,” I was saying, when he cut me short, speaking in a thick, jovial voice.

“Oh, we will understand that, my good Granger, and then …”

“It is about my sister,” I said — ”you — you go too far. I must ask you, as a gentleman, to cease persecuting her.”

He answered “The devil!” and then: “If I do not —  — ?”

It was evident in his voice, in his manner, that the man was a little — well, gris. “If you do not,” I said, “I shall forbid her to see you and I shall …”

“Oh, oh!” he interjected with the intonation of a reveller at a farce. “We are at that — we are the excellent brother.” He paused, and then added: “Well, go to the devil, you and your forbidding.” He spoke with the greatest good humour.

“I am in earnest,” I said; “very much in earnest. The thing has gone too far, and even for your own sake, you had better …”

He said “Ah, ah!” in the tone of his “Oh, oh!”

“She is no friend to you,” I struggled on, “she is playing with you for her own purposes; you will …”

He swayed a little on his feet and said: “Bravo … bravissimo. If we can’t forbid him, we will frighten him. Go on, my good fellow …” and then, “Come, go on …”

I looked at his great bulk of a body. It came into my head dimly that I wanted him to strike me, to give me an excuse — anything to end the scene violently, with a crash and exclamations of fury.

“You absolutely refuse to pay any attention?” I said.

“Oh, absolutely,” he answered.

“You know that I can do something, that I can expose you.” I had a vague idea that I could, that the number of small things that I knew to his discredit and the mass of my hatred could be welded into a damning whole. He laughed a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. The dawn was beginning to spread pallidly above us, gleaming mournfully through the glass of the palm-house. People began to pass, muffled up, on their way out of the place.

“You may go …” he was beginning. But the expression of his face altered. Miss Granger, muffled up like all the rest of the world, was coming out of the inner door. “We have been having a charming …” he began to her. She touched me gently on the arm.

“Come, Arthur,” she said, and then to him, “You have heard the news?”

He looked at her rather muzzily.

“Baron Halderschrodt has committed suicide,” she said. “Come, Arthur.”

We passed on slowly, but de Mersch followed.

“You — you aren’t in earnest?” he said, catching at her arm so that we swung round and faced him. There was a sort of mad entreaty in his eyes, as if he hoped that by unsaying she could remedy an irremediable disaster, and there was nothing left of him but those panic-stricken, beseeching eyes.

“Monsieur de Sabran told me,” she answered; “he had just come from making the constatation. Besides, you can hear …”

Half-sentences came to our ears from groups that passed us. A very old man with a nose that almost touched his thick lips, was saying to another of the same type:

“Shot himself … through the left temple … Mon Dieu!”

De Mersch walked slowly down the long corridor away from us. There was an extraordinary stiffness in his gait, as if he were trying to emulate the goose step of his days in the Prussian Guard. My companion looked after him as though she wished to gauge the extent of his despair.

“You would say ‘Habet,’ wouldn’t you?” she asked me.

I thought we had seen the last of him, but as in the twilight of the dawn we waited for the lodge gates to open, a furious clatter of hoofs came down the long street, and a carriage drew level with ours. A moment after, de Mersch was knocking at our window.

“You will … you will …” he stuttered, “speak … to Mr. Gurnard. That is our only chance … now.” His voice came in mingled with the cold air of the morning. I shivered. “You have so much power … with him and….”

“Oh, I …” she answered.

“The thing must go through,” he said again, “or else …” He paused. The great gates in front of us swung noiselessly open, one saw into the court-yard. The light was growing stronger. She did not answer.

“I tell you,” he asseverated insistently, “if the British Government abandons my railway all our plans …”

“Oh, the Government won’t abandon it,” she said, with a little emphasis on the verb. He stepped back out of range of the wheels, and we turned in and left him standing there.

* * * * *

In the great room which was usually given up to the political plotters stood a table covered with eatables and lit by a pair of candles in tall silver sticks. I was conscious of a raging hunger and of a fierce excitement that made the thought of sleep part of a past of phantoms. I began to eat unconsciously, pacing up and down the while. She was standing beside the table in the glow of the transparent light. Pallid blue lines showed in the long windows. It was very cold and hideously late; away in those endless small hours when the pulse drags, when the clock-beat drags, when time is effaced.

“You see?” she said suddenly.

“Oh, I see,” I answered — ”and … and now?”

“Now we are almost done with each other,” she answered.

I felt a sudden mental falling away. I had never looked at things in that way, had never really looked things in the face. I had grown so used to the idea that she was to parcel out the remainder of my life, had grown so used to the feeling that I was the integral portion of her life … “But I — ” I said, “What is to become of me?”

She stood looking down at the ground … for a long time. At last she said in a low monotone:

“Oh, you must try to forget.”

A new idea struck me — luminously, overwhelming. I grew reckless. “You — you are growing considerate,” I taunted. “You are not so sure, not so cold. I notice a change in you. Upon my soul …”

Her eyes dilated suddenly, and as suddenly closed again. She said nothing. I grew conscious of unbearable pain, the pain of returning life. She was going away. I should be alone. The future began to exist again, looming up like a vessel through thick mist, silent, phantasmal, overwhelming — a hideous future of irremediable remorse, of solitude, of craving.

“You are going back to work with Churchill,” she said suddenly.

“How did you know?” I asked breathlessly. My despair of a sort found vent in violent interjecting of an immaterial query.

“You leave your letters about,” she said, “and…. It will be best for you.”

“It will not,” I said bitterly. “It could never be the same. I don’t want to see Churchill. I want….”

“You want?” she asked, in a low monotone.

“You,” I answered.

She spoke at last, very slowly: