Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (503 page)

I said that no doubt it was partly that.  We had been very close associates in the West Indies from where we had returned together, and he had a notion that I could be depended on, too.  But mainly, I suppose, it was from taste.  And there was in him also a fine carelessness as to what he did and a love of venturesome enterprise.

“And you,” she said.  “Is it carelessness, too?”

“In a measure,” I said.  “Within limits.”

“And very soon you will get tired.”

“When I do I will tell you.  But I may also get frightened.  I suppose you know there are risks, I mean apart from the risk of life.”

“As for instance,” she said.

“For instance, being captured, tried, and sentenced to what they call ‘the galleys,’ in Ceuta.”

“And all this from that love for . . .”

“Not for Legitimacy,” I interrupted the inquiry lightly.  “But what’s the use asking such questions?  It’s like asking the veiled figure of fate.  It doesn’t know its own mind nor its own heart.  It has no heart.  But what if I were to start asking you — who have a heart and are not veiled to my sight?”  She dropped her charming adolescent head, so firm in modelling, so gentle in expression.  Her uncovered neck was round like the shaft of a column.  She wore the same wrapper of thick blue silk.  At that time she seemed to live either in her riding habit or in that wrapper folded tightly round her and open low to a point in front.  Because of the absence of all trimming round the neck and from the deep view of her bare arms in the wide sleeve this garment seemed to be put directly on her skin and gave one the impression of one’s nearness to her body which would have been troubling but for the perfect unconsciousness of her manner.  That day she carried no barbarous arrow in her hair.  It was parted on one side, brushed back severely, and tied with a black ribbon, without any bronze mist about her forehead or temple.  This smoothness added to the many varieties of her expression also that of child-like innocence.

Great progress in our intimacy brought about unconsciously by our enthusiastic interest in the matter of our discourse and, in the moments of silence, by the sympathetic current of our thoughts.  And this rapidly growing familiarity (truly, she had a terrible gift for it) had all the varieties of earnestness: serious, excited, ardent, and even gay.  She laughed in contralto; but her laugh was never very long; and when it had ceased, the silence of the room with the light dying in all its many windows seemed to lie about me warmed by its vibration.

As I was preparing to take my leave after a longish pause into which we had fallen as into a vague dream, she came out of it with a start and a quiet sigh.  She said, “I had forgotten myself.”  I took her hand and was raising it naturally, without premeditation, when I felt suddenly the arm to which it belonged become insensible, passive, like a stuffed limb, and the whole woman go inanimate all over!  Brusquely I dropped the hand before it reached my lips; and it was so lifeless that it fell heavily on to the divan.

I remained standing before her.  She raised to me not her eyes but her whole face, inquisitively — perhaps in appeal.

“No!  This isn’t good enough for me,” I said.

The last of the light gleamed in her long enigmatic eyes as if they were precious enamel in that shadowy head which in its immobility suggested a creation of a distant past: immortal art, not transient life.  Her voice had a profound quietness.  She excused herself.

“It’s only habit — or instinct — or what you like.  I have had to practise that in self-defence lest I should be tempted sometimes to cut the arm off.”

I remembered the way she had abandoned this very arm and hand to the white-haired ruffian.  It rendered me gloomy and idiotically obstinate.

“Very ingenious.  But this sort of thing is of no use to me,” I declared.

“Make it up,” suggested her mysterious voice, while her shadowy figure remained unmoved, indifferent amongst the cushions.

I didn’t stir either.  I refused in the same low tone.

“No.  Not before you give it to me yourself some day.”

“Yes — some day,” she repeated in a breath in which there was no irony but rather hesitation, reluctance what did I know?

I walked away from the house in a curious state of gloomy satisfaction with myself.

And this is the last extract.  A month afterwards.

— This afternoon going up to the Villa I was for the first time accompanied in my way by some misgivings.  To-morrow I sail.

First trip and therefore in the nature of a trial trip; and I can’t overcome a certain gnawing emotion, for it is a trip that mustn’t fail.  In that sort of enterprise there is no room for mistakes.  Of all the individuals engaged in it will every one be intelligent enough, faithful enough, bold enough?  Looking upon them as a whole it seems impossible; but as each has got only a limited part to play they may be found sufficient each for his particular trust.  And will they be all punctual, I wonder?  An enterprise that hangs on the punctuality of many people, no matter how well disposed and even heroic, hangs on a thread.  This I have perceived to be also the greatest of Dominic’s concerns.  He, too, wonders.  And when he breathes his doubts the smile lurking under the dark curl of his moustaches is not reassuring.

But there is also something exciting in such speculations and the road to the Villa seemed to me shorter than ever before.

Let in by the silent, ever-active, dark lady’s maid, who is always on the spot and always on the way somewhere else, opening the door with one hand, while she passes on, turning on one for a moment her quick, black eyes, which just miss being lustrous, as if some one had breathed on them lightly.

On entering the long room I perceive Mills established in an armchair which he had dragged in front of the divan.  I do the same to another and there we sit side by side facing R., tenderly amiable yet somehow distant among her cushions, with an immemorial seriousness in her long, shaded eyes and her fugitive smile hovering about but never settling on her lips.  Mills, who is just back from over the frontier, must have been asking R. whether she had been worried again by her devoted friend with the white hair.  At least I concluded so because I found them talking of the heart-broken Azzolati.  And after having answered their greetings I sit and listen to Rita addressing Mills earnestly.

“No, I assure you Azzolati had done nothing to me.  I knew him.  He was a frequent visitor at the Pavilion, though I, personally, never talked with him very much in Henry Allègre’s lifetime.  Other men were more interesting, and he himself was rather reserved in his manner to me.  He was an international politician and financier — a nobody.  He, like many others, was admitted only to feed and amuse Henry Allègre’s scorn of the world, which was insatiable — I tell you.”

“Yes,” said Mills.  “I can imagine.”

“But I know.  Often when we were alone Henry Allègre used to pour it into my ears.  If ever anybody saw mankind stripped of its clothes as the child sees the king in the German fairy tale, it’s I!  Into my ears!  A child’s!  Too young to die of fright.  Certainly not old enough to understand — or even to believe.  But then his arm was about me.  I used to laugh, sometimes.  Laugh!  At this destruction — at these ruins!”

“Yes,” said Mills, very steady before her fire.  “But you have at your service the everlasting charm of life; you are a part of the indestructible.”

“Am I? . . . But there is no arm about me now.  The laugh!  Where is my laugh?  Give me back my laugh. . . .”

And she laughed a little on a low note.  I don’t know about Mills, but the subdued shadowy vibration of it echoed in my breast which felt empty for a moment and like a large space that makes one giddy.

“The laugh is gone out of my heart, which at any rate used to feel protected.  That feeling’s gone, too.  And I myself will have to die some day.”

“Certainly,” said Mills in an unaltered voice.  “As to this body you . . .”

“Oh, yes!  Thanks.  It’s a very poor jest.  Change from body to body as travellers used to change horses at post houses.  I’ve heard of this before. . . .”

“I’ve no doubt you have,” Mills put on a submissive air.  “But are we to hear any more about Azzolati?”

“You shall.  Listen.  I had heard that he was invited to shoot at Rambouillet — a quiet party, not one of these great shoots.  I hear a lot of things.  I wanted to have a certain information, also certain hints conveyed to a diplomatic personage who was to be there, too.  A personage that would never let me get in touch with him though I had tried many times.”

“Incredible!” mocked Mills solemnly.

“The personage mistrusts his own susceptibility.  Born cautious,” explained Doña Rita crisply with the slightest possible quiver of her lips.  “Suddenly I had the inspiration to make use of Azzolati, who had been reminding me by a constant stream of messages that he was an old friend.  I never took any notice of those pathetic appeals before.  But in this emergency I sat down and wrote a note asking him to come and dine with me in my hotel.  I suppose you know I don’t live in the Pavilion.  I can’t bear the Pavilion now.  When I have to go there I begin to feel after an hour or so that it is haunted.  I seem to catch sight of somebody I know behind columns, passing through doorways, vanishing here and there.  I hear light footsteps behind closed doors. . . My own!”

Her eyes, her half-parted lips, remained fixed till Mills suggested softly, “Yes, but Azzolati.”

Her rigidity vanished like a flake of snow in the sunshine.  “Oh! Azzolati.  It was a most solemn affair.  It had occurred to me to make a very elaborate toilet.  It was most successful.  Azzolati looked positively scared for a moment as though he had got into the wrong suite of rooms.  He had never before seen me en toilette, you understand.  In the old days once out of my riding habit I would never dress.  I draped myself, you remember, Monsieur Mills.  To go about like that suited my indolence, my longing to feel free in my body, as at that time when I used to herd goats. . . But never mind.  My aim was to impress Azzolati.  I wanted to talk to him seriously.”

There was something whimsical in the quick beat of her eyelids and in the subtle quiver of her lips.  “And behold! the same notion had occurred to Azzolati.  Imagine that for this tête-à-tête dinner the creature had got himself up as if for a reception at court.  He displayed a brochette of all sorts of decorations on the lapel of his frac and had a broad ribbon of some order across his shirt front.  An orange ribbon.  Bavarian, I should say.  Great Roman Catholic, Azzolati.  It was always his ambition to be the banker of all the Bourbons in the world.  The last remnants of his hair were dyed jet black and the ends of his moustache were like knitting needles.  He was disposed to be as soft as wax in my hands.  Unfortunately I had had some irritating interviews during the day.  I was keeping down sudden impulses to smash a glass, throw a plate on the floor, do something violent to relieve my feelings.  His submissive attitude made me still more nervous.  He was ready to do anything in the world for me providing that I would promise him that he would never find my door shut against him as long as he lived.  You understand the impudence of it, don’t you?  And his tone was positively abject, too.  I snapped back at him that I had no door, that I was a nomad.  He bowed ironically till his nose nearly touched his plate but begged me to remember that to his personal knowledge I had four houses of my own about the world.  And you know this made me feel a homeless outcast more than ever — like a little dog lost in the street — not knowing where to go.  I was ready to cry and there the creature sat in front of me with an imbecile smile as much as to say ‘here is a poser for you. . . .’  I gnashed my teeth at him.  Quietly, you know . . . I suppose you two think that I am stupid.”

She paused as if expecting an answer but we made no sound and she continued with a remark.

“I have days like that.  Often one must listen to false protestations, empty words, strings of lies all day long, so that in the evening one is not fit for anything, not even for truth if it comes in one’s way.  That idiot treated me to a piece of brazen sincerity which I couldn’t stand.  First of all he began to take me into his confidence; he boasted of his great affairs, then started groaning about his overstrained life which left him no time for the amenities of existence, for beauty, or sentiment, or any sort of ease of heart.  His heart!  He wanted me to sympathize with his sorrows.  Of course I ought to have listened.  One must pay for service.  Only I was nervous and tired.  He bored me.  I told him at last that I was surprised that a man of such immense wealth should still keep on going like this reaching for more and more.  I suppose he must have been sipping a good deal of wine while we talked and all at once he let out an atrocity which was too much for me.  He had been moaning and sentimentalizing but then suddenly he showed me his fangs.  ‘No,’ he cries, ‘you can’t imagine what a satisfaction it is to feel all that penniless, beggarly lot of the dear, honest, meritorious poor wriggling and slobbering under one’s boots.’  You may tell me that he is a contemptible animal anyhow, but you should have heard the tone!  I felt my bare arms go cold like ice.  A moment before I had been hot and faint with sheer boredom.  I jumped up from the table, rang for Rose, and told her to bring me my fur cloak.  He remained in his chair leering at me curiously.  When I had the fur on my shoulders and the girl had gone out of the room I gave him the surprise of his life.  ‘Take yourself off instantly,’ I said.  ‘Go trample on the poor if you like but never dare speak to me again.’  At this he leaned his head on his arm and sat so long at the table shading his eyes with his hand that I had to ask, calmly — you know — whether he wanted me to have him turned out into the corridor.  He fetched an enormous sigh.  ‘I have only tried to be honest with you, Rita.’  But by the time he got to the door he had regained some of his impudence.  ‘You know how to trample on a poor fellow, too,’ he said.  ‘But I don’t mind being made to wriggle under your pretty shoes, Rita.  I forgive you.  I thought you were free from all vulgar sentimentalism and that you had a more independent mind.  I was mistaken in you, that’s all.’  With that he pretends to dash a tear from his eye-crocodile! — and goes out, leaving me in my fur by the blazing fire, my teeth going like castanets. . . Did you ever hear of anything so stupid as this affair?” she concluded in a tone of extreme candour and a profound unreadable stare that went far beyond us both.  And the stillness of her lips was so perfect directly she ceased speaking that I wondered whether all this had come through them or only had formed itself in my mind.