Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (528 page)

Till he shook the door handle, which he did immediately afterwards, I wasn’t certain through which door he had spoken.  The two doors (in different walls) were rather near each other.  It was as I expected.  He was in the fencing-room, thoroughly aroused, his senses on the alert to catch the slightest sound.  A situation not to be trifled with.  Leaving the room was for us out of the question.  It was quite possible for him to dash round into the hall before we could get clear of the front door.  As to making a bolt of it upstairs there was the same objection; and to allow ourselves to be chased all over the empty house by this maniac would have been mere folly.  There was no advantage in locking ourselves up anywhere upstairs where the original doors and locks were much lighter.  No, true safety was in absolute stillness and silence, so that even his rage should be brought to doubt at last and die expended, or choke him before it died; I didn’t care which.

For me to go out and meet him would have been stupid.  Now I was certain that he was armed.  I had remembered the wall in the fencing-room decorated with trophies of cold steel in all the civilized and savage forms; sheaves of assegais, in the guise of columns and grouped between them stars and suns of choppers, swords, knives; from Italy, from Damascus, from Abyssinia, from the ends of the world.  Ortega had only to make his barbarous choice.  I suppose he had got up on the bench, and fumbling about amongst them must have brought one down, which, falling, had produced that rattling noise.  But in any case to go to meet him would have been folly, because, after all, I might have been overpowered (even with bare hands) and then Doña Rita would have been left utterly defenceless.

“He will speak,” came to me the ghostly, terrified murmur of her voice.  “Take me out of the house before he begins to speak.”

“Keep still,” I whispered.  “He will soon get tired of this.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Oh, yes, I do.  Been with him two hours.”

At this she let go my wrist and covered her face with her hands passionately.  When she dropped them she had the look of one morally crushed.

“What did he say to you?”

“He raved.”

“Listen to me.  It was all true!”

“I daresay, but what of that?”

These ghostly words passed between us hardly louder than thoughts; but after my last answer she ceased and gave me a searching stare, then drew in a long breath.  The voice on the other side of the door burst out with an impassioned request for a little pity, just a little, and went on begging for a few words, for two words, for one word — one poor little word.  Then it gave up, then repeated once more, “Say you are there, Rita, Say one word, just one word.  Say ‘yes.’  Come!  Just one little yes.”

“You see,” I said.  She only lowered her eyelids over the anxious glance she had turned on me.

For a minute we could have had the illusion that he had stolen away, unheard, on the thick mats.  But I don’t think that either of us was deceived.  The voice returned, stammering words without connection, pausing and faltering, till suddenly steadied it soared into impassioned entreaty, sank to low, harsh tones, voluble, lofty sometimes and sometimes abject.  When it paused it left us looking profoundly at each other.

“It’s almost comic,” I whispered.

“Yes.  One could laugh,” she assented, with a sort of sinister conviction.  Never had I seen her look exactly like that, for an instant another, an incredible Rita!  “Haven’t I laughed at him innumerable times?” she added in a sombre whisper.

He was muttering to himself out there, and unexpectedly shouted: “What?” as though he had fancied he had heard something.  He waited a while before he started up again with a loud: “Speak up, Queen of the goats, with your goat tricks. . .”  All was still for a time, then came a most awful bang on the door.  He must have stepped back a pace to hurl himself bodily against the panels.  The whole house seemed to shake.  He repeated that performance once more, and then varied it by a prolonged drumming with his fists.  It was comic.  But I felt myself struggling mentally with an invading gloom as though I were no longer sure of myself.

“Take me out,” whispered Doña Rita feverishly, “take me out of this house before it is too late.”

“You will have to stand it,” I answered.

“So be it; but then you must go away yourself.  Go now, before it is too late.”

I didn’t condescend to answer this.  The drumming on the panels stopped and the absurd thunder of it died out in the house.  I don’t know why precisely then I had the acute vision of the red mouth of José Ortega wriggling with rage between his funny whiskers.  He began afresh but in a tired tone:

“Do you expect a fellow to forget your tricks, you wicked little devil?  Haven’t you ever seen me dodging about to get a sight of you amongst those pretty gentlemen, on horseback, like a princess, with pure cheeks like a carved saint?  I wonder I didn’t throw stones at you, I wonder I didn’t run after you shouting the tale — curse my timidity!  But I daresay they knew as much as I did.  More.  All the new tricks — if that were possible.”

While he was making this uproar, Doña Rita put her fingers in her ears and then suddenly changed her mind and clapped her hands over my ears.  Instinctively I disengaged my head but she persisted.  We had a short tussle without moving from the spot, and suddenly I had my head free, and there was complete silence.  He had screamed himself out of breath, but Doña Rita muttering: “Too late, too late,” got her hands away from my grip and slipping altogether out of her fur coat seized some garment lying on a chair near by (I think it was her skirt), with the intention of dressing herself, I imagine, and rushing out of the house.  Determined to prevent this, but indeed without thinking very much what I was doing, I got hold of her arm.  That struggle was silent, too; but I used the least force possible and she managed to give me an unexpected push.  Stepping back to save myself from falling I overturned the little table, bearing the six-branched candlestick.  It hit the floor, rebounded with a dull ring on the carpet, and by the time it came to a rest every single candle was out.  He on the other side of the door naturally heard the noise and greeted it with a triumphant screech: “Aha!  I’ve managed to wake you up,” the very savagery of which had a laughable effect.  I felt the weight of Doña Rita grow on my arm and thought it best to let her sink on the floor, wishing to be free in my movements and really afraid that now he had actually heard a noise he would infallibly burst the door.  But he didn’t even thump it.  He seemed to have exhausted himself in that scream.  There was no other light in the room but the darkened glow of the embers and I could hardly make out amongst the shadows of furniture Doña Rita sunk on her knees in a penitential and despairing attitude.  Before this collapse I, who had been wrestling desperately with her a moment before, felt that I dare not touch her.  This emotion, too, I could not understand; this abandonment of herself, this conscience-stricken humility.  A humbly imploring request to open the door came from the other side.  Ortega kept on repeating: “Open the door, open the door,” in such an amazing variety of intonations, imperative, whining, persuasive, insinuating, and even unexpectedly jocose, that I really stood there smiling to myself, yet with a gloomy and uneasy heart.  Then he remarked, parenthetically as it were, “Oh, you know how to torment a man, you brown-skinned, lean, grinning, dishevelled imp, you.  And mark,” he expounded further, in a curiously doctoral tone — ”you are in all your limbs hateful: your eyes are hateful and your mouth is hateful, and your hair is hateful, and your body is cold and vicious like a snake — and altogether you are perdition.”

This statement was astonishingly deliberate.  He drew a moaning breath after it and uttered in a heart-rending tone, “You know, Rita, that I cannot live without you.  I haven’t lived.  I am not living now.  This isn’t life.  Come, Rita, you can’t take a boy’s soul away and then let him grow up and go about the world, poor devil, while you go amongst the rich from one pair of arms to another, showing all your best tricks.  But I will forgive you if you only open the door,” he ended in an inflated tone: “You remember how you swore time after time to be my wife.  You are more fit to be Satan’s wife but I don’t mind.  You shall be my wife!”

A sound near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern: “Don’t laugh,” for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move a mountain.

Suddenly suspicion seized him out there.  With perfectly farcical unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: “Oh, you deceitful wretch!  You won’t escape me!  I will have you. . . .”

And in a manner of speaking he vanished.  Of course I couldn’t see him but somehow that was the impression.  I had hardly time to receive it when crash! . . . he was already at the other door.  I suppose he thought that his prey was escaping him.  His swiftness was amazing, almost inconceivable, more like the effect of a trick or of a mechanism.  The thump on the door was awful as if he had not been able to stop himself in time.  The shock seemed enough to stun an elephant.  It was really funny.  And after the crash there was a moment of silence as if he were recovering himself.  The next thing was a low grunt, and at once he picked up the thread of his fixed idea.

“You will have to be my wife.  I have no shame.  You swore you would be and so you will have to be.”  Stifled low sounds made me bend down again to the kneeling form, white in the flush of the dark red glow.  “For goodness’ sake don’t,” I whispered down.  She was struggling with an appalling fit of merriment, repeating to herself, “Yes, every day, for two months.  Sixty times at least, sixty times at least.”  Her voice was rising high.  She was struggling against laughter, but when I tried to put my hand over her lips I felt her face wet with tears.  She turned it this way and that, eluding my hand with repressed low, little moans.  I lost my caution and said, “Be quiet,” so sharply as to startle myself (and her, too) into expectant stillness.

Ortega’s voice in the hall asked distinctly: “Eh?  What’s this?” and then he kept still on his side listening, but he must have thought that his ears had deceived him.  He was getting tired, too.  He was keeping quiet out there — resting.  Presently he sighed deeply; then in a harsh melancholy tone he started again.

“My love, my soul, my life, do speak to me.  What am I that you should take so much trouble to pretend that you aren’t there?  Do speak to me,” he repeated tremulously, following this mechanical appeal with a string of extravagantly endearing names, some of them quite childish, which all of a sudden stopped dead; and then after a pause there came a distinct, unutterably weary: “What shall I do now?” as though he were speaking to himself.

I shuddered to hear rising from the floor, by my side, a vibrating, scornful: “Do!  Why, slink off home looking over your shoulder as you used to years ago when I had done with you — all but the laughter.”

“Rita,” I murmured, appalled.  He must have been struck dumb for a moment.  Then, goodness only knows why, in his dismay or rage he was moved to speak in French with a most ridiculous accent.

“So you have found your tongue at last — Catin!  You were that from the cradle.  Don’t you remember how . . .”

Doña Rita sprang to her feet at my side with a loud cry, “No, George, no,” which bewildered me completely.  The suddenness, the loudness of it made the ensuing silence on both sides of the door perfectly awful.  It seemed to me that if I didn’t resist with all my might something in me would die on the instant.  In the straight, falling folds of the night-dress she looked cold like a block of marble; while I, too, was turned into stone by the terrific clamour in the hall.

“Therese, Therese,” yelled Ortega.  “She has got a man in there.”  He ran to the foot of the stairs and screamed again, “Therese, Therese!  There is a man with her.  A man!  Come down, you miserable, starved peasant, come down and see.”

I don’t know where Therese was but I am sure that this voice reached her, terrible, as if clamouring to heaven, and with a shrill over-note which made me certain that if she was in bed the only thing she would think of doing would be to put her head under the bed-clothes.  With a final yell: “Come down and see,” he flew back at the door of the room and started shaking it violently.

It was a double door, very tall, and there must have been a lot of things loose about its fittings, bolts, latches, and all those brass applications with broken screws, because it rattled, it clattered, it jingled; and produced also the sound as of thunder rolling in the big, empty hall.  It was deafening, distressing, and vaguely alarming as if it could bring the house down.  At the same time the futility of it had, it cannot be denied, a comic effect.  The very magnitude of the racket he raised was funny.  But he couldn’t keep up that violent exertion continuously, and when he stopped to rest we could hear him shouting to himself in vengeful tones.  He saw it all!  He had been decoyed there!  (Rattle, rattle, rattle.)  He had been decoyed into that town, he screamed, getting more and more excited by the noise he made himself, in order to be exposed to this!  (Rattle, rattle.)  By this shameless “Catin! Catin! Catin!”

He started at the door again with superhuman vigour.  Behind me I heard Doña Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading glow.  I called out to her quite openly, “Do keep your self-control.”  And she called back to me in a clear voice: “Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak to me after all this?  But don’t ask for the impossible.  He was born to be laughed at.”

“Yes,” I cried.  “But don’t let yourself go.”

I don’t know whether Ortega heard us.  He was exerting then his utmost strength of lung against the infamous plot to expose him to the derision of the fiendish associates of that obscene woman! . . . Then he began another interlude upon the door, so sustained and strong that I had the thought that this was growing absurdly impossible, that either the plaster would begin to fall off the ceiling or he would drop dead next moment, out there.

He stopped, uttered a few curses at the door, and seemed calmer from sheer exhaustion.