Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (496 page)

I was moved to ask in a whisper:

“Do you know him well?”

“I don’t know what he is driving at,” he answered drily.  “But as to his mother she is not as volatile as all that.  I suspect it was business.  It may have been a deep plot to get a picture out of Allègre for somebody.  My cousin as likely as not.  Or simply to discover what he had.  The Blunts lost all their property and in Paris there are various ways of making a little money, without actually breaking anything.  Not even the law.  And Mrs. Blunt really had a position once — in the days of the Second Empire — and so. . .”

I listened open-mouthed to these things into which my West-Indian experiences could not have given me an insight.  But Mills checked himself and ended in a changed tone.

“It’s not easy to know what she would be at, either, in any given instance.  For the rest, spotlessly honourable.  A delightful, aristocratic old lady.  Only poor.”

A bump at the door silenced him and immediately Mr. John Blunt, Captain of Cavalry in the Army of Legitimity, first-rate cook (as to one dish at least), and generous host, entered clutching the necks of four more bottles between the fingers of his hand.

“I stumbled and nearly smashed the lot,” he remarked casually.  But even I, with all my innocence, never for a moment believed he had stumbled accidentally.  During the uncorking and the filling up of glasses a profound silence reigned; but neither of us took it seriously — any more than his stumble.

“One day,” he went on again in that curiously flavoured voice of his, “my mother took a heroic decision and made up her mind to get up in the middle of the night.  You must understand my mother’s phraseology.  It meant that she would be up and dressed by nine o’clock.  This time it was not Versoy that was commanded for attendance, but I.  You may imagine how delighted I was. . . .”

It was very plain to me that Blunt was addressing himself exclusively to Mills: Mills the mind, even more than Mills the man.  It was as if Mills represented something initiated and to be reckoned with.  I, of course, could have no such pretensions.  If I represented anything it was a perfect freshness of sensations and a refreshing ignorance, not so much of what life may give one (as to that I had some ideas at least) but of what it really contains.  I knew very well that I was utterly insignificant in these men’s eyes.  Yet my attention was not checked by that knowledge.  It’s true they were talking of a woman, but I was yet at the age when this subject by itself is not of overwhelming interest.  My imagination would have been more stimulated probably by the adventures and fortunes of a man.  What kept my interest from flagging was Mr. Blunt himself.  The play of the white gleams of his smile round the suspicion of grimness of his tone fascinated me like a moral incongruity.

So at the age when one sleeps well indeed but does feel sometimes as if the need of sleep were a mere weakness of a distant old age, I kept easily awake; and in my freshness I was kept amused by the contrast of personalities, of the disclosed facts and moral outlook with the rough initiations of my West-Indian experience.  And all these things were dominated by a feminine figure which to my imagination had only a floating outline, now invested with the grace of girlhood, now with the prestige of a woman; and indistinct in both these characters.  For these two men had seen her, while to me she was only being “presented,” elusively, in vanishing words, in the shifting tones of an unfamiliar voice.

She was being presented to me now in the Bois de Boulogne at the early hour of the ultra-fashionable world (so I understood), on a light bay “bit of blood” attended on the off side by that Henry Allègre mounted on a dark brown powerful weight carrier; and on the other by one of Allègre’s acquaintances (the man had no real friends), distinguished frequenters of that mysterious Pavilion.  And so that side of the frame in which that woman appeared to one down the perspective of the great Allée was not permanent.  That morning when Mr. Blunt had to escort his mother there for the gratification of her irresistible curiosity (of which he highly disapproved) there appeared in succession, at that woman’s or girl’s bridle-hand, a cavalry general in red breeches, on whom she was smiling; a rising politician in a grey suit, who talked to her with great animation but left her side abruptly to join a personage in a red fez and mounted on a white horse; and then, some time afterwards, the vexed Mr. Blunt and his indiscreet mother (though I really couldn’t see where the harm was) had one more chance of a good stare.  The third party that time was the Royal Pretender (Allègre had been painting his portrait lately), whose hearty, sonorous laugh was heard long before the mounted trio came riding very slowly abreast of the Blunts.  There was colour in the girl’s face.  She was not laughing.  Her expression was serious and her eyes thoughtfully downcast.  Blunt admitted that on that occasion the charm, brilliance, and force of her personality was adequately framed between those magnificently mounted, paladin-like attendants, one older than the other but the two composing together admirably in the different stages of their manhood.  Mr. Blunt had never before seen Henry Allègre so close.  Allègre was riding nearest to the path on which Blunt was dutifully giving his arm to his mother (they had got out of their fiacre) and wondering if that confounded fellow would have the impudence to take off his hat.  But he did not.  Perhaps he didn’t notice.  Allègre was not a man of wandering glances.  There were silver hairs in his beard but he looked as solid as a statue.  Less than three months afterwards he was gone.

“What was it?” asked Mills, who had not changed his pose for a very long time.

“Oh, an accident.  But he lingered.  They were on their way to Corsica.  A yearly pilgrimage.  Sentimental perhaps.  It was to Corsica that he carried her off — I mean first of all.”

There was the slightest contraction of Mr. Blunt’s facial muscles.  Very slight; but I, staring at the narrator after the manner of all simple souls, noticed it; the twitch of a pain which surely must have been mental.  There was also a suggestion of effort before he went on: “I suppose you know how he got hold of her?” in a tone of ease which was astonishingly ill-assumed for such a worldly, self-controlled, drawing-room person.

Mills changed his attitude to look at him fixedly for a moment.  Then he leaned back in his chair and with interest — I don’t mean curiosity, I mean interest: “Does anybody know besides the two parties concerned?” he asked, with something as it were renewed (or was it refreshed?) in his unmoved quietness.  “I ask because one has never heard any tales.  I remember one evening in a restaurant seeing a man come in with a lady — a beautiful lady — very particularly beautiful, as though she had been stolen out of Mahomet’s paradise.  With Doña Rita it can’t be anything as definite as that.  But speaking of her in the same strain, I’ve always felt that she looked as though Allègre had caught her in the precincts of some temple . . . in the mountains.”

I was delighted.  I had never heard before a woman spoken about in that way, a real live woman that is, not a woman in a book.  For this was no poetry and yet it seemed to put her in the category of visions.  And I would have lost myself in it if Mr. Blunt had not, most unexpectedly, addressed himself to me.

“I told you that man was as fine as a needle.”

And then to Mills: “Out of a temple?  We know what that means.”  His dark eyes flashed: “And must it be really in the mountains?” he added.

“Or in a desert,” conceded Mills, “if you prefer that.  There have been temples in deserts, you know.”

Blunt had calmed down suddenly and assumed a nonchalant pose.

“As a matter of fact, Henry Allègre caught her very early one morning in his own old garden full of thrushes and other small birds.  She was sitting on a stone, a fragment of some old balustrade, with her feet in the damp grass, and reading a tattered book of some kind.  She had on a short, black, two-penny frock (une petite robe de deux sous) and there was a hole in one of her stockings.  She raised her eyes and saw him looking down at her thoughtfully over that ambrosian beard of his, like Jove at a mortal.  They exchanged a good long stare, for at first she was too startled to move; and then he murmured, “Restez donc.”  She lowered her eyes again on her book and after a while heard him walk away on the path.  Her heart thumped while she listened to the little birds filling the air with their noise.  She was not frightened.  I am telling you this positively because she has told me the tale herself.  What better authority can you have . . .?” Blunt paused.

“That’s true.  She’s not the sort of person to lie about her own sensations,” murmured Mills above his clasped hands.

“Nothing can escape his penetration,” Blunt remarked to me with that equivocal urbanity which made me always feel uncomfortable on Mills’ account.  “Positively nothing.”  He turned to Mills again.  “After some minutes of immobility — she told me — she arose from her stone and walked slowly on the track of that apparition.  Allègre was nowhere to be seen by that time.  Under the gateway of the extremely ugly tenement house, which hides the Pavilion and the garden from the street, the wife of the porter was waiting with her arms akimbo.  At once she cried out to Rita: ‘You were caught by our gentleman.’

“As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita’s aunt, allowed the girl to come into the garden whenever Allègre was away.  But Allègre’s goings and comings were sudden and unannounced; and that morning, Rita, crossing the narrow, thronged street, had slipped in through the gateway in ignorance of Allègre’s return and unseen by the porter’s wife.

“The child, she was but little more than that then, expressed her regret of having perhaps got the kind porter’s wife into trouble.

“The old woman said with a peculiar smile: ‘Your face is not of the sort that gets other people into trouble.  My gentleman wasn’t angry.  He says you may come in any morning you like.’

“Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back again to the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her waking hours.  Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed hours, she calls them.  She crossed the street with a hole in her stocking.  She had a hole in her stocking not because her uncle and aunt were poor (they had around them never less than eight thousand oranges, mostly in cases) but because she was then careless and untidy and totally unconscious of her personal appearance.  She told me herself that she was not even conscious then of her personal existence.  She was a mere adjunct in the twilight life of her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the family, the priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had sent her up at the age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping.  She is of peasant stock, you know.  This is the true origin of the ‘Girl in the Hat’ and of the ‘Byzantine Empress’ which excited my dear mother so much; of the mysterious girl that the privileged personalities great in art, in letters, in politics, or simply in the world, could see on the big sofa during the gatherings in Allègre’s exclusive Pavilion: the Doña Rita of their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of art from some unknown period; the Doña Rita of the initiated Paris.  Doña Rita and nothing more — unique and indefinable.”  He stopped with a disagreeable smile.

“And of peasant stock?” I exclaimed in the strangely conscious silence that fell between Mills and Blunt.

“Oh!  All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche II,” said Captain Blunt moodily.  “You see coats of arms carved over the doorways of the most miserable caserios.  As far as that goes she’s Doña Rita right enough whatever else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of others.  In your eyes, for instance, Mills.  Eh?”

For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.

“Why think about it at all?” he murmured coldly at last.  “A strange bird is hatched sometimes in a nest in an unaccountable way and then the fate of such a bird is bound to be ill-defined, uncertain, questionable.  And so that is how Henry Allègre saw her first?  And what happened next?”

“What happened next?” repeated Mr. Blunt, with an affected surprise in his tone.  “Is it necessary to ask that question?  If you had asked how the next happened. . .  But as you may imagine she hasn’t told me anything about that.  She didn’t,” he continued with polite sarcasm, “enlarge upon the facts.  That confounded Allègre, with his impudent assumption of princely airs, must have (I shouldn’t wonder) made the fact of his notice appear as a sort of favour dropped from Olympus.  I really can’t tell how the minds and the imaginations of such aunts and uncles are affected by such rare visitations.  Mythology may give us a hint.  There is the story of Danae, for instance.”

“There is,” remarked Mills calmly, “but I don’t remember any aunt or uncle in that connection.”

“And there are also certain stories of the discovery and acquisition of some unique objects of art.  The sly approaches, the astute negotiations, the lying and the circumventing . . . for the love of beauty, you know.”

With his dark face and with the perpetual smiles playing about his grimness, Mr. Blunt appeared to me positively satanic.  Mills’ hand was toying absently with an empty glass.  Again they had forgotten my existence altogether.

“I don’t know how an object of art would feel,” went on Blunt, in an unexpectedly grating voice, which, however, recovered its tone immediately.  “I don’t know.  But I do know that Rita herself was not a Danae, never, not at any time of her life.  She didn’t mind the holes in her stockings.  She wouldn’t mind holes in her stockings now. . . That is if she manages to keep any stockings at all,” he added, with a sort of suppressed fury so funnily unexpected that I would have burst into a laugh if I hadn’t been lost in astonishment of the simplest kind.

“No — really!”  There was a flash of interest from the quiet Mills.

“Yes, really,”  Blunt nodded and knitted his brows very devilishly indeed.  “She may yet be left without a single pair of stockings.”

“The world’s a thief,” declared Mills, with the utmost composure.  “It wouldn’t mind robbing a lonely traveller.”