Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (522 page)

“That, Señor, is the place where the news has got to be conveyed without undue delay,” he said in an agitated wheeze.  “I could, of course, telegraph to our agent in Bayonne who would find a messenger.  But I don’t like, I don’t like!  The Alphonsists have agents, too, who hang about the telegraph offices.  It’s no use letting the enemy get that news.”

He was obviously very confused, unhappy, and trying to think of two different things at once.

“Sit down, Don George, sit down.”  He absolutely forced a cigar on me.  “I am extremely distressed.  That — I mean Doña Rita is undoubtedly on her way to Tolosa.  This is very frightful.”

I must say, however, that there was in the man some sense of duty.  He mastered his private fears.  After some cogitation he murmured: “There is another way of getting the news to Headquarters.  Suppose you write me a formal letter just stating the facts, the unfortunate facts, which I will be able to forward.  There is an agent of ours, a fellow I have been employing for purchasing supplies, a perfectly honest man.  He is coming here from the north by the ten o’clock train with some papers for me of a confidential nature.  I was rather embarrassed about it.  It wouldn’t do for him to get into any sort of trouble.  He is not very intelligent.  I wonder, Don George, whether you would consent to meet him at the station and take care of him generally till to-morrow.  I don’t like the idea of him going about alone.  Then, to-morrow night, we would send him on to Tolosa by the west coast route, with the news; and then he can also call on Doña Rita who will no doubt be already there. . . .”  He became again distracted all in a moment and actually went so far as to wring his fat hands.  “Oh, yes, she will be there!” he exclaimed in most pathetic accents.

I was not in the humour to smile at anything, and he must have been satisfied with the gravity with which I beheld his extraordinary antics.  My mind was very far away.  I thought: Why not?  Why shouldn’t I also write a letter to Doña Rita, telling her that now nothing stood in the way of my leaving Europe, because, really, the enterprise couldn’t be begun again; that things that come to an end can never be begun again.  The idea — never again — had complete possession of my mind.  I could think of nothing else.  Yes, I would write.  The worthy Commissary General of the Carlist forces was under the impression that I was looking at him; but what I had in my eye was a jumble of butterfly women and winged youths and the soft sheen of Argand lamps gleaming on an arrow of gold in the hair of a head that seemed to evade my outstretched hand.

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I have nothing to do and even nothing to think of just now, I will meet your man as he gets off the train at ten o’clock to-night.  What’s he like?”

“Oh, he has a black moustache and whiskers, and his chin is shaved,” said the newly-fledged baron cordially.  “A very honest fellow.  I always found him very useful.  His name is José Ortega.”

He was perfectly self-possessed now, and walking soft-footed accompanied me to the door of the room.  He shook hands with a melancholy smile.  “This is a very frightful situation.  My poor wife will be quite distracted.  She is such a patriot.  Many thanks, Don George.  You relieve me greatly.  The fellow is rather stupid and rather bad-tempered.  Queer creature, but very honest!  Oh, very honest!”

CHAPTER IV

It was the last evening of Carnival.  The same masks, the same yells, the same mad rushes, the same bedlam of disguised humanity blowing about the streets in the great gusts of mistral that seemed to make them dance like dead leaves on an earth where all joy is watched by death.

It was exactly twelve months since that other carnival evening when I had felt a little weary and a little lonely but at peace with all mankind.  It must have been — to a day or two.  But on this evening it wasn’t merely loneliness that I felt.  I felt bereaved with a sense of a complete and universal loss in which there was perhaps more resentment than mourning; as if the world had not been taken away from me by an august decree but filched from my innocence by an underhand fate at the very moment when it had disclosed to my passion its warm and generous beauty.  This consciousness of universal loss had this advantage that it induced something resembling a state of philosophic indifference.  I walked up to the railway station caring as little for the cold blasts of wind as though I had been going to the scaffold.  The delay of the train did not irritate me in the least.  I had finally made up my mind to write a letter to Doña Rita; and this “honest fellow” for whom I was waiting would take it to her.  He would have no difficulty in Tolosa in finding Madame de Lastaola.  The General Headquarters, which was also a Court, would be buzzing with comments on her presence.  Most likely that “honest fellow” was already known to Doña Rita.  For all I knew he might have been her discovery just as I was.  Probably I, too, was regarded as an “honest fellow” enough; but stupid — since it was clear that my luck was not inexhaustible.  I hoped that while carrying my letter the man would not let himself be caught by some Alphonsist guerilla who would, of course, shoot him.  But why should he?  I, for instance, had escaped with my life from a much more dangerous enterprise than merely passing through the frontier line in charge of some trustworthy guide.  I pictured the fellow to myself trudging over the stony slopes and scrambling down wild ravines with my letter to Doña Rita in his pocket.  It would be such a letter of farewell as no lover had ever written, no woman in the world had ever read, since the beginning of love on earth.  It would be worthy of the woman.  No experience, no memories, no dead traditions of passion or language would inspire it.  She herself would be its sole inspiration.  She would see her own image in it as in a mirror; and perhaps then she would understand what it was I was saying farewell to on the very threshold of my life.  A breath of vanity passed through my brain.  A letter as moving as her mere existence was moving would be something unique.  I regretted I was not a poet.

I woke up to a great noise of feet, a sudden influx of people through the doors of the platform.  I made out my man’s whiskers at once — not that they were enormous, but because I had been warned beforehand of their existence by the excellent Commissary General.  At first I saw nothing of him but his whiskers: they were black and cut somewhat in the shape of a shark’s fin and so very fine that the least breath of air animated them into a sort of playful restlessness.  The man’s shoulders were hunched up and when he had made his way clear of the throng of passengers I perceived him as an unhappy and shivery being.  Obviously he didn’t expect to be met, because when I murmured an enquiring, “Señor Ortega?” into his ear he swerved away from me and nearly dropped a little handbag he was carrying.  His complexion was uniformly pale, his mouth was red, but not engaging.  His social status was not very definite.  He was wearing a dark blue overcoat of no particular cut, his aspect had no relief; yet those restless side-whiskers flanking his red mouth and the suspicious expression of his black eyes made him noticeable.  This I regretted the more because I caught sight of two skulking fellows, looking very much like policemen in plain clothes, watching us from a corner of the great hall.  I hurried my man into a fiacre.  He had been travelling from early morning on cross-country lines and after we got on terms a little confessed to being very hungry and cold.  His red lips trembled and I noted an underhand, cynical curiosity when he had occasion to raise his eyes to my face.  I was in some doubt how to dispose of him but as we rolled on at a jog trot I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be to organize for him a shake-down in the studio.  Obscure lodging houses are precisely the places most looked after by the police, and even the best hotels are bound to keep a register of arrivals.  I was very anxious that nothing should stop his projected mission of courier to headquarters.  As we passed various street corners where the mistral blast struck at us fiercely I could feel him shivering by my side.  However, Therese would have lighted the iron stove in the studio before retiring for the night, and, anyway, I would have to turn her out to make up a bed on the couch.  Service of the King!  I must say that she was amiable and didn’t seem to mind anything one asked her to do.  Thus while the fellow slumbered on the divan I would sit upstairs in my room setting down on paper those great words of passion and sorrow that seethed in my brain and even must have forced themselves in murmurs on to my lips, because the man by my side suddenly asked me: “What did you say?” — ”Nothing,” I answered, very much surprised.  In the shifting light of the street lamps he looked the picture of bodily misery with his chattering teeth and his whiskers blown back flat over his ears.  But somehow he didn’t arouse my compassion.  He was swearing to himself, in French and Spanish, and I tried to soothe him by the assurance that we had not much farther to go.  “I am starving,” he remarked acidly, and I felt a little compunction.  Clearly, the first thing to do was to feed him.  We were then entering the Cannebière and as I didn’t care to show myself with him in the fashionable restaurant where a new face (and such a face, too) would be remarked, I pulled up the fiacre at the door of the Maison Dorée.  That was more of a place of general resort where, in the multitude of casual patrons, he would pass unnoticed.

For this last night of carnival the big house had decorated all its balconies with rows of coloured paper lanterns right up to the roof.  I led the way to the grand salon, for as to private rooms they had been all retained days before.  There was a great crowd of people in costume, but by a piece of good luck we managed to secure a little table in a corner.  The revellers, intent on their pleasure, paid no attention to us.  Señor Ortega trod on my heels and after sitting down opposite me threw an ill-natured glance at the festive scene.  It might have been about half-past ten, then.

Two glasses of wine he drank one after another did not improve his temper.  He only ceased to shiver.  After he had eaten something it must have occurred to him that he had no reason to bear me a grudge and he tried to assume a civil and even friendly manner.  His mouth, however, betrayed an abiding bitterness.  I mean when he smiled.  In repose it was a very expressionless mouth, only it was too red to be altogether ordinary.  The whole of him was like that: the whiskers too black, the hair too shiny, the forehead too white, the eyes too mobile; and he lent you his attention with an air of eagerness which made you uncomfortable.  He seemed to expect you to give yourself away by some unconsidered word that he would snap up with delight.  It was that peculiarity that somehow put me on my guard.  I had no idea who I was facing across the table and as a matter of fact I did not care.  All my impressions were blurred; and even the promptings of my instinct were the haziest thing imaginable.  Now and then I had acute hallucinations of a woman with an arrow of gold in her hair.  This caused alternate moments of exaltation and depression from which I tried to take refuge in conversation; but Señor Ortega was not stimulating.  He was preoccupied with personal matters.  When suddenly he asked me whether I knew why he had been called away from his work (he had been buying supplies from peasants somewhere in Central France), I answered that I didn’t know what the reason was originally, but I had an idea that the present intention was to make of him a courier, bearing certain messages from Baron H. to the Quartel Real in Tolosa.

He glared at me like a basilisk.  “And why have I been met like this?” he enquired with an air of being prepared to hear a lie.

I explained that it was the Baron’s wish, as a matter of prudence and to avoid any possible trouble which might arise from enquiries by the police.

He took it badly.  “What nonsense.”  He was — he said — an employé (for several years) of Hernandez Brothers in Paris, an importing firm, and he was travelling on their business — as he could prove.  He dived into his side pocket and produced a handful of folded papers of all sorts which he plunged back again instantly.

And even then I didn’t know whom I had there, opposite me, busy now devouring a slice of pâté de foie gras.  Not in the least.  It never entered my head.  How could it?  The Rita that haunted me had no history; she was but the principle of life charged with fatality.  Her form was only a mirage of desire decoying one step by step into despair.

Señor Ortega gulped down some more wine and suggested I should tell him who I was.  “It’s only right I should know,” he added.

This could not be gainsaid; and to a man connected with the Carlist organization the shortest way was to introduce myself as that “Monsieur George” of whom he had probably heard.

He leaned far over the table, till his very breast-bone was over the edge, as though his eyes had been stilettos and he wanted to drive them home into my brain.  It was only much later that I understood how near death I had been at that moment.  But the knives on the tablecloth were the usual restaurant knives with rounded ends and about as deadly as pieces of hoop-iron.  Perhaps in the very gust of his fury he remembered what a French restaurant knife is like and something sane within him made him give up the sudden project of cutting my heart out where I sat.  For it could have been nothing but a sudden impulse.  His settled purpose was quite other.  It was not my heart that he was after.  His fingers indeed were groping amongst the knife handles by the side of his plate but what captivated my attention for a moment were his red lips which were formed into an odd, sly, insinuating smile.  Heard!  To be sure he had heard!  The chief of the great arms smuggling organization!

“Oh!” I said, “that’s giving me too much importance.”  The person responsible and whom I looked upon as chief of all the business was, as he might have heard, too, a certain noble and loyal lady.

“I am as noble as she is,” he snapped peevishly, and I put him down at once as a very offensive beast.  “And as to being loyal, what is that?  It is being truthful!  It is being faithful!  I know all about her.”

I managed to preserve an air of perfect unconcern.  He wasn’t a fellow to whom one could talk of Doña Rita.