Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (500 page)

The victoria stopped in the side alley, bordered by the low walls of private grounds.  We got out before a wrought-iron gateway which stood half open and walked up a circular drive to the door of a large villa of a neglected appearance.  The mistral howled in the sunshine, shaking the bare bushes quite furiously.  And everything was bright and hard, the air was hard, the light was hard, the ground under our feet was hard.

The door at which Mills rang came open almost at once.  The maid who opened it was short, dark, and slightly pockmarked.  For the rest, an obvious “femme-de-chambre,” and very busy.  She said quickly, “Madame has just returned from her ride,” and went up the stairs leaving us to shut the front door ourselves.

The staircase had a crimson carpet.  Mr. Blunt appeared from somewhere in the hall.  He was in riding breeches and a black coat with ample square skirts.  This get-up suited him but it also changed him extremely by doing away with the effect of flexible slimness he produced in his evening clothes.  He looked to me not at all himself but rather like a brother of the man who had been talking to us the night before.  He carried about him a delicate perfume of scented soap.  He gave us a flash of his white teeth and said:

“It’s a perfect nuisance.  We have just dismounted.  I will have to lunch as I am.  A lifelong habit of beginning her day on horseback.  She pretends she is unwell unless she does.  I daresay, when one thinks there has been hardly a day for five or six years that she didn’t begin with a ride.  That’s the reason she is always rushing away from Paris where she can’t go out in the morning alone.  Here, of course, it’s different.  And as I, too, am a stranger here I can go out with her.  Not that I particularly care to do it.”

These last words were addressed to Mills specially, with the addition of a mumbled remark: “It’s a confounded position.”  Then calmly to me with a swift smile: “We have been talking of you this morning.  You are expected with impatience.”

“Thank you very much,” I said, “but I can’t help asking myself what I am doing here.”

The upward cast in the eyes of Mills who was facing the staircase made us both, Blunt and I, turn round.  The woman of whom I had heard so much, in a sort of way in which I had never heard a woman spoken of before, was coming down the stairs, and my first sensation was that of profound astonishment at this evidence that she did really exist.  And even then the visual impression was more of colour in a picture than of the forms of actual life.  She was wearing a wrapper, a sort of dressing-gown of pale blue silk embroidered with black and gold designs round the neck and down the front, lapped round her and held together by a broad belt of the same material.  Her slippers were of the same colour, with black bows at the instep.  The white stairs, the deep crimson of the carpet, and the light blue of the dress made an effective combination of colour to set off the delicate carnation of that face, which, after the first glance given to the whole person, drew irresistibly your gaze to itself by an indefinable quality of charm beyond all analysis and made you think of remote races, of strange generations, of the faces of women sculptured on immemorial monuments and of those lying unsung in their tombs.  While she moved downwards from step to step with slightly lowered eyes there flashed upon me suddenly the recollection of words heard at night, of Allègre’s words about her, of there being in her “something of the women of all time.”

At the last step she raised her eyelids, treated us to an exhibition of teeth as dazzling as Mr. Blunt’s and looking even stronger; and indeed, as she approached us she brought home to our hearts (but after all I am speaking only for myself) a vivid sense of her physical perfection in beauty of limb and balance of nerves, and not so much of grace, probably, as of absolute harmony.

She said to us, “I am sorry I kept you waiting.”  Her voice was low pitched, penetrating, and of the most seductive gentleness.  She offered her hand to Mills very frankly as to an old friend.  Within the extraordinarily wide sleeve, lined with black silk, I could see the arm, very white, with a pearly gleam in the shadow.  But to me she extended her hand with a slight stiffening, as it were a recoil of her person, combined with an extremely straight glance.  It was a finely shaped, capable hand.  I bowed over it, and we just touched fingers.  I did not look then at her face.

Next moment she caught sight of some envelopes lying on the round marble-topped table in the middle of the hall.  She seized one of them with a wonderfully quick, almost feline, movement and tore it open, saying to us, “Excuse me, I must . . . Do go into the dining-room.  Captain Blunt, show the way.”

Her widened eyes stared at the paper.  Mr. Blunt threw one of the doors open, but before we passed through it we heard a petulant exclamation accompanied by childlike stamping with both feet and ending in a laugh which had in it a note of contempt.

The door closed behind us; we had been abandoned by Mr. Blunt.  He had remained on the other side, possibly to soothe.  The room in which we found ourselves was long like a gallery and ended in a rotunda with many windows.  It was long enough for two fireplaces of red polished granite.  A table laid out for four occupied very little space.  The floor inlaid in two kinds of wood in a bizarre pattern was highly waxed, reflecting objects like still water.

Before very long Doña Rita and Blunt rejoined us and we sat down around the table; but before we could begin to talk a dramatically sudden ring at the front door stilled our incipient animation.  Doña Rita looked at us all in turn, with surprise and, as it were, with suspicion.  “How did he know I was here?” she whispered after looking at the card which was brought to her.   She passed it to Blunt, who passed it to Mills, who made a faint grimace, dropped it on the table-cloth, and only whispered to me, “A journalist from Paris.”

“He has run me to earth,” said Doña Rita.  “One would bargain for peace against hard cash if these fellows weren’t always ready to snatch at one’s very soul with the other hand.  It frightens me.”

Her voice floated mysterious and penetrating from her lips, which moved very little.  Mills was watching her with sympathetic curiosity.  Mr. Blunt muttered: “Better not make the brute angry.”  For a moment Doña Rita’s face, with its narrow eyes, its wide brow, and high cheek bones, became very still; then her colour was a little heightened.  “Oh,” she said softly, “let him come in.  He would be really dangerous if he had a mind — you know,” she said to Mills.

The person who had provoked all those remarks and as much hesitation as though he had been some sort of wild beast astonished me on being admitted, first by the beauty of his white head of hair and then by his paternal aspect and the innocent simplicity of his manner.  They laid a cover for him between Mills and Doña Rita, who quite openly removed the envelopes she had brought with her, to the other side of her plate.  As openly the man’s round china-blue eyes followed them in an attempt to make out the handwriting of the addresses.

He seemed to know, at least slightly, both Mills and Blunt.  To me he gave a stare of stupid surprise.  He addressed our hostess.

“Resting?  Rest is a very good thing.  Upon my word, I thought I would find you alone.  But you have too much sense.  Neither man nor woman has been created to live alone. . . .”  After this opening he had all the talk to himself.  It was left to him pointedly, and I verily believe that I was the only one who showed an appearance of interest.  I couldn’t help it.  The others, including Mills, sat like a lot of deaf and dumb people.  No.  It was even something more detached.  They sat rather like a very superior lot of waxworks, with the fixed but indetermined facial expression and with that odd air wax figures have of being aware of their existence being but a sham.

I was the exception; and nothing could have marked better my status of a stranger, the completest possible stranger in the moral region in which those people lived, moved, enjoying or suffering their incomprehensible emotions.  I was as much of a stranger as the most hopeless castaway stumbling in the dark upon a hut of natives and finding them in the grip of some situation appertaining to the mentalities, prejudices, and problems of an undiscovered country — of a country of which he had not even had one single clear glimpse before.

It was even worse in a way.  It ought to have been more disconcerting.  For, pursuing the image of the cast-away blundering upon the complications of an unknown scheme of life, it was I, the castaway, who was the savage, the simple innocent child of nature.  Those people were obviously more civilized than I was.  They had more rites, more ceremonies, more complexity in their sensations, more knowledge of evil, more varied meanings to the subtle phrases of their language.  Naturally!  I was still so young!  And yet I assure you, that just then I lost all sense of inferiority.  And why?  Of course the carelessness and the ignorance of youth had something to do with that.  But there was something else besides.  Looking at Doña Rita, her head leaning on her hand, with her dark lashes lowered on the slightly flushed cheek, I felt no longer alone in my youth.  That woman of whom I had heard these things I have set down with all the exactness of unfailing memory, that woman was revealed to me young, younger than anybody I had ever seen, as young as myself (and my sensation of my youth was then very acute); revealed with something peculiarly intimate in the conviction, as if she were young exactly in the same way in which I felt myself young; and that therefore no misunderstanding between us was possible and there could be nothing more for us to know about each other.  Of course this sensation was momentary, but it was illuminating; it was a light which could not last, but it left no darkness behind.  On the contrary, it seemed to have kindled magically somewhere within me a glow of assurance, of unaccountable confidence in myself: a warm, steady, and eager sensation of my individual life beginning for good there, on that spot, in that sense of solidarity, in that seduction.

CHAPTER II

For this, properly speaking wonderful, reason I was the only one of the company who could listen without constraint to the unbidden guest with that fine head of white hair, so beautifully kept, so magnificently waved, so artistically arranged that respect could not be felt for it any more than for a very expensive wig in the window of a hair-dresser.  In fact, I had an inclination to smile at it.  This proves how unconstrained I felt.  My mind was perfectly at liberty; and so of all the eyes in that room mine was the only pair able to look about in easy freedom.  All the other listeners’ eyes were cast down, including Mills’ eyes, but that I am sure was only because of his perfect and delicate sympathy.  He could not have been concerned otherwise.

The intruder devoured the cutlets — if they were cutlets.  Notwithstanding my perfect liberty of mind I was not aware of what we were eating.  I have a notion that the lunch was a mere show, except of course for the man with the white hair, who was really hungry and who, besides, must have had the pleasant sense of dominating the situation.  He stooped over his plate and worked his jaw deliberately while his blue eyes rolled incessantly; but as a matter of fact he never looked openly at any one of us.  Whenever he laid down his knife and fork he would throw himself back and start retailing in a light tone some Parisian gossip about prominent people.

He talked first about a certain politician of mark.  His “dear Rita” knew him.  His costume dated back to ‘48, he was made of wood and parchment and still swathed his neck in a white cloth; and even his wife had never been seen in a low-necked dress.  Not once in her life.  She was buttoned up to the chin like her husband.  Well, that man had confessed to him that when he was engaged in political controversy, not on a matter of principle but on some special measure in debate, he felt ready to kill everybody.

He interrupted himself for a comment.  “I am something like that myself.  I believe it’s a purely professional feeling.  Carry one’s point whatever it is.  Normally I couldn’t kill a fly.  My sensibility is too acute for that.  My heart is too tender also.  Much too tender.  I am a Republican.  I am a Red.  As to all our present masters and governors, all those people you are trying to turn round your little finger, they are all horrible Royalists in disguise.  They are plotting the ruin of all the institutions to which I am devoted.  But I have never tried to spoil your little game, Rita.  After all, it’s but a little game.  You know very well that two or three fearless articles, something in my style, you know, would soon put a stop to all that underhand backing of your king.  I am calling him king because I want to be polite to you.  He is an adventurer, a blood-thirsty, murderous adventurer, for me, and nothing else.  Look here, my dear child, what are you knocking yourself about for?  For the sake of that bandit?  Allons donc!  A pupil of Henry Allègre can have no illusions of that sort about any man.  And such a pupil, too!  Ah, the good old days in the Pavilion!  Don’t think I claim any particular intimacy.  It was just enough to enable me to offer my services to you, Rita, when our poor friend died.  I found myself handy and so I came.  It so happened that I was the first.  You remember, Rita?  What made it possible for everybody to get on with our poor dear Allègre was his complete, equable, and impartial contempt for all mankind.  There is nothing in that against the purest democratic principles; but that you, Rita, should elect to throw so much of your life away for the sake of a Royal adventurer, it really knocks me over.  For you don’t love him.  You never loved him, you know.”

He made a snatch at her hand, absolutely pulled it away from under her head (it was quite startling) and retaining it in his grasp, proceeded to a paternal patting of the most impudent kind.  She let him go on with apparent insensibility.  Meanwhile his eyes strayed round the table over our faces.  It was very trying.  The stupidity of that wandering stare had a paralysing power.  He talked at large with husky familiarity.

“Here I come, expecting to find a good sensible girl who had seen at last the vanity of all those things; half-light in the rooms; surrounded by the works of her favourite poets, and all that sort of thing.  I say to myself: I must just run in and see the dear wise child, and encourage her in her good resolutions. . . And I fall into the middle of an intime lunch-party.  For I suppose it is intime.  Eh?  Very?  H’m, yes . . . “